The networks of connection with Africa are the foundation of African Studies. However much armchair thought goes on, or analysis of data sets, it is travel to Africa that recruits and commits students, fieldwork in Africa that generates the best work, frequent exchanges with African colleagues that creates intellectual communities, and constant contact that reconfirms the sense of relevance without which the work would lack inspiration. Opportunities to "be there" and to bring Africans here also helps to create a constituency for Africa in this country.
Africa is unique in the American ethnic world in that, until the most recent wave of immigrants, its American descendants have been unable to retain and recreate the multitude of personal connections that links other ethnic populations to their places of origin. Private travel, and probably even communication, is much lower than the size of the population could support. This is a major impoverishment, and means that linkage programs have to be organized and funded, even when their greatest benefit is largely the kind of exposure that would normally arise from visiting the family, taking a vacation or pursuing a passionate hobby. Americans go to Africa for specific reasons. The reasons that directly affect academic African Studies are a) the general exposure that brings in committed students, b) research opportunities, c) exchanges that enliven and strengthen university communities, and d) scholarly networks for specific collective scientific goals. Because it is so expensive in time and money, and has to make up for so much, the creation of effective linkages with Africa depends on careful assessment of what it is they are trying to achieve.
The possibility of linkage has waxed and waned over the history of African Studies, and so have the models for creating it. Because of the heterogeneity and sudden changes it has been difficult for me to be systematic about this topic. Aili Mari Tripp did a useful review of international exchanges in 1991, and shows how suddenly and drastically the numbers of exchanges to Africa that were financed under U.S. Government International Academic Exchanges fell between 1986 and 1990 alone: from 535 to 206. The numbers of students funded through federal international exchange programs have fallen disproportionately to others; according to the J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board, student awards have decreased by 50% since 1953, while faculty awards increased over the same period by close to 70%. She writes "The overwhelming majority of U.S. students abroad study in Europe (75%), while only 9.2% study in Latin America....and 1.2% in Africa" (1991:75).
It is not easy to counter such massive shifts. The sheer numbers, the experience of programs folding when African governments have changed or the universities went on strike, create the impression that the whole enterprise is for all practical purposes in receivership. I doubt that this is the case, although the combined effect of the medical risks, insecurity, the rising cost of air travel to the continent and the appalling state of communications all make it a very great challenge. Last year (1994) was a particularly dreadful year for creating the kind of positive image of Africa that would invite Americans to devote resources to building linkages. The Hot Zone, Kaplan's article on "The Coming Anarchy," the coverage of the Rwanda genocide, and the T.V. special on corruption in Nigeria would surely sow panic about Africa into the hearts of protective American parents and safety-conscious American professionals. Famous and wealthy advocates for Africa have never been there, never learned to greet in an African language.
On the other side of the ocean, the sudden collapse of professional salaries in Africa that resulted from devaluation in the mid-1980s, makes foreign travel, the library phase of writing and research, and the learning of new techniques impossible for African colleagues. Civil war and political domination add their own effects. A spiral has been set up: limited libraries means limited linkage of African scholarship to disciplinary literature, which in turn reduces the possibility of publication and thereby reinforces the centrality of western scholarship and the potential for mutual insularity. Some people have worked extremely hard to avoid the obvious downward logic, but the fate of the universities in Africa remains a source of visible grief to our African colleagues.
I think, on the other hand, that members of the American university community have become much more mobile in recent years, and visit a great many places for relatively short periods of time, between a couple of weeks and six months. Certain specific places in Africa may well attract this kind of visitor. For example, a group of thirty Northwestern business school students have just organized and self-financed a three week visit to South Africa. Last year a comparable group went to Ghana. I heard that an African-American sorority sponsors an Africa visit for students. Several of our applicants to the graduate program this year have been to Africa more than once as undergraduates: to study, work and do research. One-an African-American-studied prisoners! Even anthropological research is beginning to be done in multiple shorter stints, rather than the two year total immersion of the Malinowski model. Forty six universities applied to USIA this year for activities in Africa under its Affiliations program. Every Title VI center has several affiliations for various purposes. In other words, at least some subsection of the potential constituents for exchanges with Africa has not given up, even if it means mobilizing private funds. There must be a distinctive group that is energized by adversity rather than intimidated by it. A cohort of my own graduate students carried out their research with great success under desperately difficult personal conditions that must vie with anything taken on by earlier generations of researchers.
The slow-but-sure development of e-mail and the Internet will greatly improve communications. There are already people in the health field who are working on the potentials of distance learning modules as well as general networking of ideas, plans, research results, drafts of papers and so on. The possibilities are very wide and a lot of experimentation will go on in the near future. A colleague with much experience in USAID claims that her African support staff have always shown extraordinary facility with computer learning, with mid-levels of formal education. In theory then, electronic communications could eventually be the complete answer to the book drought and the lack of access to journals. It's a long road, however, requiring reliable electrical and phone systems, up-to-date computers, and so on.
There are dangers in fostering short visits. They can never make up for the long immersion that has produced the seminal work of the past, but they do seem to be a workable solution to the multiple challenges, none of which is going away. The question then is: what optimal forms can shorter- term visits take, for students and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic? How can some long-term immersion be preserved for Americans, and some long-term library and training update opportunities for Africans?
All three professional levels are important. According to the responses to my request for information from college and university programs, early and intense exposure seems to be the single most important factor in creating the kind of life-long commitment that animates later scholarly creativity. The Peace Corps and other NGO service probably constitute the greatest contribution to general knowledge about, and commitment to, Africa in the U.S. population. (I tried to generate figures on numbers of volunteers, by country, but apparently the data are not compiled in that way.) Peace Corps returnees constitute a significant proportion of the academic African Studies community. Non-academic returnees are highly represented among the supporters of NGOs and of all activities around their area.
If there is a single point at which long immersion should be preserved at all costs it is at the dissertation stage. This period is not only intellectually formative and productive of the essential professional qualification; it sets in place the assets of knowledge, language and collegial networks that last a professional lifetime. These, in turn, make possible fruitful shorter visits at later stages. It can hardly be stated forcefully enough to those outside our field that all the seminal work has been done by scholars who have been forced by long stay and consistent exposure to take on the originality of Africa in a profound and analytically critical way. Only in certain limited disciplines, such as literature, is this possible without fieldwork. Senior scholars have the relative flexibility and resources to figure out for themselves how to incorporate the need to do long-term field research. At that level the most pressing needs in the area of exchange are visits that maintain and extend networks so that important research topics can be defined and addressed collaboratively, and so that African colleagues are able to get a period of peace and quiet so that they can think, study and write.
I am very hopeful about one kind of initiative for each level: a) opportunities for undergraduates that involve an element of work, whether that be research or service (as distinct from the classic "semester abroad" model); b) the maintenance of the fieldwork basis of dissertation study in its present form (although better supported by prior methodological training and experience, as discussed in the following Chapter); and c) faculty collaborations for defined purposes, if possible allowing three-way linkages between institutions or the activation of wider networks (as distinct from the classic two-party, generalized long term commitment).
Before giving examples I should provide a sense of the kind of exchange
already in place at each level.
My most complete source is on the St. Lawrence program, which takes two groups of up to 30 students a year to Kenya, and provides 2 full scholarships a year for Kenyan students to attend the university. Two particular professors have worked on the program continuously for thirteen years, which must undoubtedly account for its continuing refinement.
In the interests of brevity I want to draw three points out of their self-study. First, by far the largest group to go on the program became interested in African Studies through another student, far more than through a course, instructor or prior interest. Personal networks, through which the intangible quality of passionate enthusiasm is conveyed, still play a decisive role. Undergraduate projects have to be explicitly geared towards creating such networks, above all for students who might not automatically be linked into them, such as students at HBCUs. Students are clearly not motivated to take action by identity alone; neither can they easily facilitate their own links. While the content of programs needs to be substantial, their capacity to create relationships for the undergraduates is a goal that should not be occluded.
Secondly, many of the students come from particular disciplines. In a letter the coordinator, Celia Nyamweru, suggested that environmental studies and anthropology/sociology seem to be most important in their own program. Ideally, then, one would match student interest with targeted work. Certainly one or two programs I know of do specialize; for example, there is one that studies dance in Senegal, and another from Rhode Island School of Design that studies weaving in West Africa. Possibly there are obvious and important topics that are not covered, that could be beneficial to both African and American students, where the class and work standards were pitched at a high level. I don't know, for example, whether there are programs in music, performative arts, film/media or pre-med. What about, for example, a visit to Ghana for performance majors that involved working on arrangements for Panafest and culminated in attending the festival? Or a visit to Ouagadougou about film, that culminated in being at the film festival? Or pre-med programs in health projects? I would also think that some topics would attract more African-American interest than others, to get around the problem that the general "study abroad" package, with home stay etc., has been more attractive to (and affordable by) the classic liberal arts major from a white middle class background. A specialist experience adds to work skills and future professional networks.
Thirdly, whether matched or not, "Many alumni felt that the most important learning experiences offered by the program can only be found when students venture out on their own...[for] internships...." Again, the work/living experience seems to make a difference. In the Boston University Niger project, the internship component makes a big impression.
Clearly undergraduate study/work abroad pays off many times over because it feeds information and enthusiasm into the vast networks of youth. By comparison, the graduate and professional networks are quite narrow. There is a fairly vast fund of experience in these programs, which I have hardly tapped here; compiling the views of several experts about their "dream" exchange program would create a very worthwhile resource.
Dissertation work
A lot of planning has already gone into improving conditions for
research, including pre-dissertation visits financed through the Social
Science Research Council and the persisting encouragement of the interdisciplinary
African Studies faculty to plan to undertake research trips of a year or
more. We have to keep reiterating the same message, and supporting it.
Other institutional exchanges are mainly for short courses: Ohio State has a link for 6-week courses with the College of Law and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies of the University of Lagos. As I will mention later, the revisions of the USIA programs in Africa propose to strengthen institutional exchanges. The commentaries make it clear that most faculty feel that this kind of link is neither adequate nor in line with current realities in the universities. Relations can be cumbersome, expensive and frustrating.
The growing forms of organization for scholars in Africa are the network and the association. Several are formalized: CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa), based in Dakar, is the largest, with about 800 individual members; there is a relatively new Association of African Anthropologists; OSSREA (Organization for Social Science Research in East Africa) brings in scholars from Ethiopia to Tanzania, and perhaps further south; WARC (the West African Research Center) in Dakar is new, and largely devoted to the humanities.
On our own side, we have yet to develop comparable organizations to interface successfully. Our own professional groups are extremely large, and do not manage funding, research and study to the same degree that the African organizations do. We search for rubrics under which to connect: the important topic for debate that could generate a joint conference; the fellowship program that could bring a small group with related interests together for a period of joint residence, after the model of the Institutes for Advanced Study in Palo Alto and Princeton, or to match individuals with resources, after the model of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. Our own resources are localized, even though our connections with one another are far-flung.
I have co-organized and struggled to fund several conferences involving both African and American researchers: two in Africa, two in the U.S. and one coming up in Europe. It is very hard work. We do have to localize in order to benefit from existing assets. Under present conditions of budget cuts it is unlikely that new assets will be created. Spreading of the linkages may demand strategic work through particular nodes that are already in place, possibly along some thematic lines, so that collective intellectual pressure can be sustained on urgent topics. In many contexts we are already managing to achieve this, but by the sweat of everyone's brow and not to maximal advantage to bring in the younger African scholars.
Scholars in their thirties in Africa must be the most neglected group of all. Their immediate seniors have been able to get jobs elsewhere (including in South Africa) or can tap into international funding. Something as modest as extra funding for two or three junior scholars to attend meetings or spend 6 weeks abroad, through nodes of linkage that could hook them up to larger networks, could pay off very well. Again, there are examples: a Beninois sociologist who spent three months at Northwestern last fall, through a WARC fellowship; a Cameroonian B.Sc.-level botanist, who may be linked into an agriculture project. If we were better able to place people appropriately and in a timely manner, and to draw on the knowledge in the CODESRIA, OSSREA, WARC, etc. networks, the multiplier effects would be greater.
These challenges are particularly acute in the basic research disciplines. By comparison, relatively vast networks and opportunities have been afforded to students and faculty through the development wing, although my research for the report did not go so far as to explore their effectivity for junior scholars in career academic appointments.
Jane I. Guyer, Copyright 1996