We have yet to see how this will all work out. For the moment, and all threats to the contrary, funds that create opportunities within African Studies have survived. The Development Fund for Africa, founded in 1987, that earmarks about 800 million dollars, survived the recision bill in 1995. The many small funds that support scholarship and training are all under revision and many will be cut, but I have not yet found a case of total elimination even though most have been gradually notched down over a decade. The current exception is the SSRC fellowships, which are funded by foundations and appear to be in danger of total penury this year.
Particularly remarkable is the continuing support of universities. I was so surprised to find this pattern that I describe it first.
* A Memorandum from CIE shows that a projected number of fellowships of 600 p.a. was turned into 800 by "the universities' willingness to supplement the Title VI funding, through tuition remissions, reduced tuition rates...or other funding sources."
* At Indiana, fee remissions are provided for instructors in African languages and for African Studies departmental teaching assistants by the College of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships were provided by the Office of International Programs (Title VI proposal 1994).
* At Michigan State, the largest African Studies Center in the country with an annual budget of $2.7 million dollars, "Considering all MSU support for Africanist personnel and activities, the ratio of MSU to US/ED support is more than 20:1." This counts faculty salaries, which are questionably a contribution to African Studies per se, but the breadth and complexity of their program is impressive.
* During the recent budget crisis at Berkeley, African Studies sustained reductions of only 13% as against the average level of 22%, and at Illinois-Urbana the administration "exempted the center from several rounds of budget cuts" (Title VI proposals).
* Florida-Gainesville has continued steadily to increase its African Studies faculty from 18 in 1978 to 52 at present, and is currently conducting an external search for a new director (which is always much more expensive than rotating an internal appointee). Illinois-Urbana conducted an external search in 1994-5, resulting in the appointment of Tiyambe Zeleza, and Northwestern in 1993-4 resulting in my own appointment. Since the new conditions and the new rhetoric were already in the public mind by then, these three appointments indicate the continued commitment of both private and public universities to investments in African Studies.
* Three HBCUs organized new undergraduate programs (Central State, Tuskegee and Lincoln), funded by Title VI. The University of Pennsylvania and three liberal arts colleges in the area (Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore and Haverford) created a joint African Studies program and had it funded for the first time in the present Title VI round (1994-7). Columbia was re-admitted to Title VI ranks, with an African-American, George Bond, as director. He joins Ed Keller at UCLA in the ranks of current African-American Title VI directors.
* Universities have to cover full tuition for African students on the AID-funded AFGRAD/ATLAS program, and yet thousands of students have been trained in this country since the start of the project 30 years ago.
Why this willingness to invest in such a small field? Surely the fact that it meets several interests. Some of the Land Grant universities have benefitted from large AID support for development projects. African Studies and African scholars so substantially contribute to the goal of diversification of both faculty and classes that they pay off in the quality of university life. In a few places, African Studies is part of the university's claim to fame, with links to the long-term asset of a multi-disciplinary faculty, a magnificent library or a museum collection. Straight concern cannot be discounted as a motive in some places, for the development era. And due to their longevity and success, the African Studies centers have managed to diversify and adapt their portfolios, with a contribution here and a program there, with so many partners on the campus that they may simply enjoy goodwill and/or a capacity to keep assets away from systematic cuts. In my own work, I keep meeting people such as the representative of the Northwestern Alumnae organization who phoned me recently, who know hardly anything about Africa, but are very enthusiastic that we are here. Within some university communities we clearly stand out and are recognized.
Another explanation is that the universities are looking at student enrollments. According to all responses to my request for information on students, enrollments in undergraduate Africa courses remain high, and in many cases they close out. Enrollments do not seem to change much over time-to the surprise of one respondent. Another suggested that undergraduates respond only to the requirements and individual professors, not the world situation, and on both these counts Africa has retained a high profile. They warned against reading anything to do with a pre-existing and free-floating "interest in Africa" into the students' course choices, since interest is clearly created by the courses themselves. (I have not collected statistics on enrollments because of the well-warranted criticism of the Hamilton-Hodges report, by Jan Vansina, on the grounds that precise numbers are actually misleading. Ed Keller has compiled figures on the numbers of degree and certificate recipients, which may be more accurate). According to faculty reports of class enrollments in relation to their close-out levels, we are almost universally claimed to have remained very stable over the years, with brief peaks around remarkable events in Africa, such as the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Harold Scheub must surely lead us all in this regard; he still teaches The African Storyteller to a closed-out course of 500 students every single semester at Wisconsin-Madison, and marks every paper and bluebook personally.
The interest of African-American students may be increasing. At the undergraduate level the same principles may apply: they are responding to the increased African-American and African faculty. At the graduate level, several letters indicated that the general effort to provide minority scholarships is beginning to show results, even though no such program-as far as I know-specifically targets African Studies. Some do target other disciplines such as the sciences and engineering, but on the whole the students themselves target their own interests.
I believe that continued support is also due to the quality of the work, both in teaching and research. The students of the "basic researchers" of the 1960s are now spread all over the academic scene, which must surely account for high quality work in so many places. It is very encouraging to see such a collective vote of support from our employers and students as a result. We are certainly poorer than in the heyday of basic research, and earning university support on the grounds of undergraduate teaching makes for an extremely time-consuming schedule that borders on incompatibility with research and even deep thought. But the infrastructure of faculty slots, library acquisition funds, student attendance and good will seems intact for the moment.
Fears are pervasive, however, that we are in a brief moment of respite before a blizzard of cuts, particularly at the public universities where I understand that legislatures want training to meet the manpower needs of the state, and are requiring the course loads and student ratios of the faculty to be high. They are actively promoting a constituency-accountability view of the educational mandate, which would probably diminish a focus on Africa except in communities with a large and vocal African and African-American pressure group. At some small private universities Africanists may well not be replaced when they retire, which will take a while, given the tenure system, but will eventually cut into the critical mass of scholars. In 1991 the National Council of Area Studies Associations published a report on faculty in all the area studies. Edna Bay reported that 17% of ASA members over 55 did not expect to be replaced upon retirement and a further 15% did not know what would happen (Bay 1991:18). Many thought that their position was basically the only non-western-society position in their department, and therefore might well go to a Latin-Americanist or a Sinologist.
Universities may also be worried about what are seen as developing trends within grant-making, towards expectations of matching funds from the outset. In the past, outside funds were used to leverage internal resources after the inception of the project, when there was already confidence in its future and resources to devote to the development of linkages. Trying to do this first requires different organization and a higher input by faculty and administration. A report on international studies developed at Wisconsin-Madison particularly notes the new challenges that matching funds put before the universities at a time of financial stress.
Universities change somewhat slowly, for both better and worse,
because they are investing in processes of human capital formation that
are cumulative, take time, and have to be planned in concert with a large
number of other organizations. At the moment, the relatively deliberate
turnaround time is very much in our favor in African Studies because it
affords us a breathing space to do the new thinking necessary. Downsizing
is probably inevitable, and should therefore be looked at as a challenge
for regroupment. Judging by my collegial contacts in government and family
contacts in business, we are in the very favorable position in academia
of having this short grace period. As I have indicated throughout the report,
this is a moment to use for creative reconstruction.
This is a bell-weather program for us in academic African Studies because it has supplied predictable funds (subject to competition for renewal every three years) for over thirty years. The basic structure is mandated; it comprises dependence on departmental faculty appointments for personnel and recourse to Title VI funds primarily for student support and programs, as well as certain elements of both training and programs. Language study is the most important component, and more recently outreach to the community, which now has 15% of the total budget devoted to it.
The following universities are now designated National Resource Centers in African Studies:
Boston University
Central State University (undergraduate only)
Columbia University
Howard University
Indiana University-Bloomington
Lincoln University (undergraduate only)
Tuskegee University (undergraduate only)
Michigan State University
Ohio State University and Ohio University
Stanford University
University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University
University of California-Los Angeles
University of Florida-Gainesville
University of Illinois-Champagne/Urbana
University of Kansas (undergraduate only)
University of Pennsylvania, with Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges (undergraduate)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Yale University (languages only).
There seems to me to be some misunderstanding of how area studies centers work within the university, which determines how the leadership in the field functions, why programs may go through cycles of activity and quietude, and the nature of the engagement with the disciplines. These are all phenomena that-in crisis-we tend to lay at the door of the field itself or even the region itself. Unlike departments, the Title VI centers as they were set up in the universities are not in control of the profile of their faculty. Every retirement or removal opens a space in a discipline; the replacement has to be recruited through departmental politics. The directors of the centers therefore have little power to plan to create clusters of scholars with common interests across disciplines. The best they can usually do is broaden the range of disciplines where African Studies is represented, or protect the status quo. A director hardly ever is in a position to attempt to recruit strategically, and can easily lose a star faculty member to a non-Title VI university because their discipline is stronger elsewhere. And where the directorship rotates, the programmatic strength changes over time.
Our relationship to the disciplines has meant that collaborative faculty in African Studies expect their operative networks to be somewhat dispersed, and to work on intellectual agendas through "invisible colleges." Thanks to our lack of emphasis on a foreign relations agenda during the Cold War period, we are not as extremely dispersed as a colleague in East European studies described their own situation to be; apparently not a single senior anthropologist of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe has been based at an area studies center. But we are not entirely concentrated either.
With respect to the current situation, then, African Studies faculties would not necessarily become more or less dispersed if Title VI were threatened, but they would stand to lose some of the institutional assets that have been leveraged from the sheer predictability of Title VI funding, at specific universities, in addition to the student fellowships, the language faculty (many of whom are not on tenure), and the community outreach. We all, as a community, would lose the centrality that the centers have been in the fostering of networks, which are the major form of intellectual organization: facilities for meetings, staff support for community outreach, the updating of libraries and databanks, etc. The University of Pennsylvania supports the World Wide Web database on Africa that was used by 84,000 people in the previous year. Indiana keeps a fine folklore archive. The Land Tenure Center at Madison preserves resources on land. Gainesville has specialist resources in tropical ecology. Columbia links into the international context of New York and the United Nations. Northwestern, a former Title VI center, has what is considered to be the finest Africana library in North America, if not the world. Michigan State, in addition to its intellectual strengths, has "loaned" the director, David Wiley, to compose position statements for public stands on behalf of the African Studies Association at various critical junctures. At this moment when assets are in short supply, we should be enhancing the capacity of centers to do the things they can do best with an eye to further fostering the links to international and other area studies.
We do not know what will happen to Title VI. The present cycle is funded through 1997, but the current government is expected to resort to recisions to cut federal fiscal commitments. There have been suggestions that the entire Department of Education should be closed down, since it is a recent creation from the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Administration of Title VI moved to Education in 1980, so there is no reason why it should not move again, in case of closure of the agency. Undoubtedly there will be vigorous lobbying for the preservation of a program which Lambert described as "taken for granted" but "if it did not exist we would be trying desperately to create it and at a cost that would be almost unimaginable" (1986:54). One alternative, however, might well be seen as a transfer of some of its functions to the Department of Defense, where a new program to support research and foreign travel was inaugurated in 1991 under the National Security Education Act (The Boren Act) of the same year.
The content and purpose of the NSEP is uncannily similar to Title VI: "to lead in developing the national capacity to educate citizens to understand foreign cultures, strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness, and enhance international cooperation and security." "Backed by as much as $150-million in a self-perpetuating trust fund, the program is the largest new federal higher education project of its kind since the National Defense Education Act of 1958." It supports undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships and institutional grants (Desruisseaux 1993). The only innovations over Title VI appear to be links to business and engineering; business now has its own Title VI program. NSEP students are also required to work for the government in pay-back time for "not less than one and not more than three times the period for which the fellowship assistance was provided." The first grants under this program were slated to be awarded in 1994, for a total expenditure of $7.5 million.
The organized African Studies community has opposed this program from the beginning, for the straightforward reason that it is located in Defense and there is a definitive presence of Defense and Intelligence employees on the Board. The motion of the Association of African Studies Programs urges simply that the program be transferred to Education (motion December 6th 1993, reconfirmed November 4th 1994). During the 1980s, Africanist scholars who supported U.S. policy (for example, in Angola, Zaire and South Africa) more or less withdrew from the African Studies community, which further solidified the divergence between policy-relevant and basic research. There has been considerable rapprochement, as I have argued already, but the NSEP may represent a new litmus test for the fissures in political commitment. According to NSEP officials, and the broader right-of-center community, African Studies maintains a greater distance from political engagement with our government than any other area studies community. It is hard to know, from the outside, where a dynamic such as this continues to be reproduced, or even whether it is true for government activities across the board as distinct from specific programs connected to intelligence.
The next stage in this drama will be played out over the coming months,
and its resolution may have a definitive effect on the organizational infrastructures
in area studies, including African Studies. For the moment, it is the future
of NSEP that seems in doubt, rather than the programs run from Education.
On the table for discussion in the last round for which I have the documentation (May 1994) were cuts in the senior scholar program and the development of institutional grants. Binationalism was reaffirmed, as distinct from "a universal, worldwide program model;" that is, projects would be tailored to local agreements. The contentious provision here is a concern to combine the old criteria of competition and openness in the selection of senior scholars with new "standards" that would avoid making awards "which, to the layman, appear to support research that is purely for the academic and professional advancement of the individual researcher" (Fulbright Review Committee Second Draft, page 5). The theme of greater accountability for receipt of funds for scholarship, whether from government or other agencies, is a recurrent one.
This year Fulbright (Office of International Exchange) will fund 60-65
American students going to Africa (at about 12% of the total program budget,
supported at the level of $18,000 each), 50 U.S. lecturers, and 23 researchers.
The Institute for International Education will bring 376 African PhD candidates
to the U.S. This constitutes about level-funding for the moment, but the
expectation is for more drastic cuts by the current Congress than were
envisaged with "reinventing government."
Rumors about the future organization of AID are coming out about once a week. The "reinventing government" initiative has already combined and re-sorted offices in ways that I ran across as I tried to collect documentation on the funding of training. Databanks have not altogether caught up with the titles of offices. On the other hand, a great deal is still going on. The AFGRAD/ATLAS program has been continuously funded for thirty years; a colleague in nutrition has been able to do absolutely seminal work in medical research under a cooperative agreement that has been in place since 1980; projects in Nigeria pushed on at least until December 1995, working through NGOs, under a partial waiver of the U.S. presidential decision to withdraw support for the Nigerian government.
In the immediate future the issues for us in the universities that will be more important than the total level of the AID budget for Africa are likely to be procedural. First, my discussions of training with AID officers revealed an increasing dissatisfaction with the academic PhD in this country. It takes too long, is too expensive, indeterminate in outcome and only contingently related to in-country needs. Whatever one thinks of this judgement, it adds another voice to the growing chorus of concern about the PhD course of study. Many AID-funded trainees now take other kinds of courses of study, some of them outside the university system altogether.
Secondly, the conditions of the EAGER project contain even stronger
accountability standards than are proposed for the Fulbright program. The
strictures with respect to publication could not be followed by an academic
without modification because they affect freedom to publish. One understands
that such modifications are managed. But again, the principle and its implementation
have to be faced with respect to the agencies who would become African
Studies' most important clients in a constituency-oriented model of research
and training.
Between 1982 and 1994, the University Affiliations project funded
20 exchanges, with budgets ranging from $50,000 to $124,000. This year
the program received 46 applications, of which "about half were very presentable,"
but only 2 or 3 will be funded. I don't know whether this represents a
reduction from times past. Nor have I had time to explore the full range
of exchange programs run by USIA. But as an indicator of demand and supply
it suggests that in the area of exchange we may be funding about 10% of
the quality-level interest at this point.
Alongside this growth has gone a reinstatement of controversy and multiple constituencies after a long period of retreat from engagement. In Montreal in 1969 there was a serious confrontation between the executive board and the Black Caucus, centering on the representation of African and African-American scholars in the organization and on the engagement of the Association with issues of crucial relevance to them. A detailed review of this critical event is provided in Challenor (1969). Three years later the following statement was made to the Board by the executive secretary: "the Association is not engaged, as it was formerly, in discussions and exchanges with foundations, agencies, institutions, and other associations, nor is it engaged seriously with the African Studies programs in the United States." (Executive Secretary Duffy, quoted in Bay 1991:4). Only by the mid-1980s was the ASA led away from the insularity of the past almost-20 years. A key turning point was the invitation to return made to important members of the African Heritage Studies Association (formerly the ASA Black Caucus) when Robert Cummings was ASA President in 1985.
One has the impression that like all elective bodies the Board is comprised of members who have a range of commitments and levels of work. Institutional memory and sustainability of effort are always at issue when the turnover in board membership is three years, and in the leadership, two years (shorter than the SSRC committee). Initiatives can be hard to maintain if the Queen Mary has to be turned round every couple of years. Race recurs as an issue at the meetings, although there is now a much wider range of opinion within all constituencies, as well as between the racial categories. Disagreements have recently been vociferous, for example, between those in favor and those against reparations for slavery, and between those who speak from Africa and those who speak from African-America (see Taiwo 1995, for example, for a critique of Gates and Appiah). The annual forum of the conference offers the usual mix of any academic meeting. Everyone expects it to be part performance, part marketplace, and above all (as Clifford Geertz wrote of markets in general) a focus for the communication of all manner of information.
As an elected membership organization, the ASA can only be what its bylaws and the vigor of its board, president, and executive secretary allow it to be. All but the executives are non-paid volunteers. Its legal status precludes lobbying, so all political pressures for professional causes or African issues have to be organized through networks. More activist work is organized through three affiliated mechanisms: a board committee on current affairs, the Association of Concerned African Scholars which has been oriented primarily to South Africa, and ISSUE: A Journal of Opinion. Many members organize their own networks for civic causes.
Most members are pretty realistic about what an organization such
as the ASA can be, and it certainly has fulfilled critically important
mandates as our largest membership organization within these limitations.
Current revitalization includes an endowment campaign.
The importance of the JCAS is that it represents not centers or card-carrying members but networks; and networks are our most creative form of social organization. The committee consists of about eight or ten scholars, usually at the associate or full professor level, who are chosen to serve terms of about five years. The criteria include the need to represent the full breadth of the field in both disciplinary and social/ethnic terms. Unlike the Executive Board of the ASA, which is elected, the JCAS maintains a continual balance, in spite of the turnover in membership. Each member accesses their own networks for input, and the relationships amongst the committee members can form critically important interdisciplinary networks for the future. Give and take certain moments, then, I would say that the JCAS accesses the breadth of good thinking in African Studies, and is highly respected.
Over the years there have been strong criticisms about the composition and inclusiveness of the committee. But to the degree that these come from real constituencies in the field, they have been a force for modification of committee practise. During my own term on the committee (1981-86), a major challenge was launched regarding the inclusion of African-American networks in committee projects. After the confrontation at Montreal in 1969 the new scholars joining the ranks of the Africanist professorate straightforwardly expected to take part in all activities, regardless of "identity" criteria of any kind. There was some agony at the time that this issue should need to be addressed yet again, but it was addressed, since the mutual withdrawal of the 1970s must surely have been very much worse. Friction is an inevitable concomitant of intimacy: abrasive, unpredictable with respect to target, timing and reason, but inescapable. And there were other sources of friction as well, including philosophy towards current intellectual and political issues and approaches to feminism, not to mention personality factors. As a member of JCAS, however, I learned something about the interpersonal politics and enormous intellectual potential of area and international studies in a uniquely stimulating way, and created working relationships with co-members and others that continue to shape my professional life. I assume that service on the committee has had the same effect for others. Since then, the committee has changed as well. After a series of extremely good "white male" chairs from the social sciences, the past chair was an African from the humanities (Anthony Appiah) and the current chair is an African-American woman, currently serving as a director of international studies (Pearl Robinson).
The JCAS has only ever given out a few doctoral fellowships a year, as described in the previous Chapter. Its importance far outweighs the numbers. First of all, the fellowships have been very competitive and therefore highly prestigious within academia. The stress on field research helps to institutionalize this, our most important, methodological foundation. And the interdisciplinarity has done a great deal to alter the narrowness of training at the graduate level.
Since its other activities are shaped by the visions of committee members about where we should be going, the committee has also produced very inventive and viable ideas. The research overview papers that were commissioned throughout the 1980s cost about $1,000 each in honoraria but they produced a set of resources that truly attempted interdisciplinary thinking, and that have been used far outside African Studies. Several of them opened up whole new topics, and a few have been turned into books. One-Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa-became a classic. The series was ended after ten years. One of its wholly unintended consequences had been to reinforce the library-based tendency of the 1980s, and the relative delegitimation of experience-based knowledge. The new series of commissioned Explorations papers will avoid this trap, and at the same time address the new issues arising out of globalization. Several other very valuable activities have arisen out of members' particular interests: a project supporting the infrastructures of African museums, workshops in Africa on agricultural research, a conference on material culture, a series of activities on fertility, and so on.
The quality that all these projects have in common is the endorsement, at relatively low cost, of the vision of committee members of the "creative next step," around which they mobilize their own networks. In the view of one participant and commentator we did much less well when we tried to create thematic competitive fellowship projects, in response to the current interests of funding agencies. The themes ended up over-directing the research agendas of individual scholars. Applications were lower quality, returns were less satisfying, projects needed shaping but nevertheless proved recalcitrant, and so on. In a program for individual research, choice of topic was better left to applicants, so that judgment about funding could rest straightforwardly on criteria of quality.
The thematic interdisciplinary research of the present stage of area studies work was really trailblazed by the JCAS, but with mixed results. A further shift towards constituency-orientation will have to be thought through even more carefully. It is not always possible, for reasons to do with criteria for disciplinary judgement, to get the best research by setting the topic from the outside. Research is our coinage, and it doesn't do well in the authenticity/originality stakes when mixed with too much else. Given an over-focused research topic, a good scholar will always move to master its limits, not stay within them. The finest scholarship will gravitate to the NSF and other remaining non-directive peer-review contexts. There should be no reason, however, why a chosen topic should not bring out very high quality work if the activity is a workshop series, an overview paper, an exchange or a training program, as long as the specific composition remains substantially at the organizer's discretion. Funders' use of the competition system would presumably then be the means of matching their own agendas with those of the grantee, as has always been done.
The current SSRC international programs have become financially problematic. A new policy will not be fully articulated until the new president's policies are chosen. Under David Featherman, and in line with the universal cost-cutting efforts, a plan was developed for reorganization of the area studies programs that would be both cost-effective and ensure that global issues would not fall between the cracks of the "areas." It was suggested that committee composition should reflect "the ability of individuals to contribute to scholarship on issues of particular relevance" (Heginbotham Memorandum 1994:15), which represents an attempt to come to terms with thematics by reorientating the agendas represented by the area committees as they presently exist. This plan was not implemented but the issues it addressed are still relevant.
The most damaging development would be the limitation of dissertation fellowships below the critical number that keeps the students hopeful and working. At a certain point the odds must seem to them too long to bother. Far more is lost at this critical threshold than the dollars saved can ever measure. In the early 1980s the committee members worked in every spare moment to try to augment the numbers above a handful, including developing the first thematic project: on African Agriculture, Crisis and Transformation (of which I was an organizer, along with Michael Watts, Pauline Peters and Sara Berry). Now they seem to be back in the same situation.
This is all very discouraging and provokes defensive thinking
rather than innovation. I would argue that one of the best investments
in African Studies would be to have the present committee draw up a multi-year
plan of transformation for itself, towards a particular set of goals and
in light of the internationalization agendas, negotiate a budget and fund
it. It should not be a fund simply to sustain the same kind of activities
as in the past, successful as these have been, because in the near future
we will not be living under the same conditions. The present chair is the
right person to mediate it, and there is no other organization that has
so consistently enjoyed the confidence of the community.
There are a few organizational duties that the AASP takes on, such as the collaborative distribution of resources and students for the summer language programs in African languages, to avoid duplication. The membership passes motions on political issues that directly affect the relationship between the federal government and program resources. For example, the meeting passed a motion requesting the removal of the NSEP program to the Department of Education. This year the membership explored the possibilities for encouraging linkages with the HBCUs. Where African Studies programs do not exist in those institutions, deans were invited to our last meeting in Washington.
The directors of programs meet in Washington in the spring, to
catch up with the federal programs that fund exchanges, research, internship
opportunities for students, and so on. In 1995 there were presentations
by staff for both political parties and for the Congressional Black Caucus.
George Moose, the Under-Secretary of State for Africa, attended for about
an hour and a half. The Association does not organize political or civic
engagement around Africa issues, but it does maintain an active Washington
connection.
With respect to Africa, the most obvious sign is regional demarcation for funding. Of the seven foundations that explicitly list Africa as a priority in the Foundation Directory, four mention only Southern Africa (The International Foundation, Kellogg, Mott and the Rockefeller Brothers), Carnegie mentions both Africa and Southern Africa, and the remaining two are the familiar Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. Obviously many others do support Africa initiatives under thematic programs. But the impression is clearly conveyed that there is no specific funding constituency for Africa, as there is for Japan, China, Western Europe, Eastern Europe (Soros) and probably others. The wealthy of Africa do not support scholarship very much, and the business community in this country is not committed deeply enough to earmark endowment funds. The oil companies have funded exhibits on Africa, but we may never have been aggressive enough with them to extract a commitment to scholarship.
The financial weakness of Africa and African interests puts scholarship
in a weak situation if the watershed in intellectual life is leading towards
constituency-oriented work, a topic to which I now turn briefly.
Before leaping one way or the other, we need to look at the issue historically and broadly. After all, many of our own people have argued in favor of relevance; Mamdani's (1990) critique of U.S. scholarship was based on a commitment to engagement with the struggles of African people for a decent way of political and economic life. In her rejoinder Pearl Robinson (1990) suggests a search-both analytically and socially-for a position that is neither silent nor consensual. While the independence of scholarship is a basic credo, the "ivory-tower" quality of some academic work of the 1980s was not necessarily produced by conviction so much as by the reprise of the disciplines in a very tight job and resource market. At one extreme lies total self-direction and at the other a completely unacceptable capitulation to frankly interested work. There are other viable positions in between.
How a constituency-orientation model might work depends entirely on who is defining what kinds of work, and how that relates to the maintenance in one form or another of the inherited asset of guild standards. The saying about pipers and tunes to the contrary, in the life of artistic and professional expertise the nature of the tune is at least deeply influenced by the vision of the artist. Many great artists would prefer to work in penury, or give up altogether, than play something that is simply dictated to them. There is going to be no easy answer to this dilemma, and all kinds of parties will have input before rubrics emerge. A small field like African Studies, that will be dependent on a few sources if it is to function on anything more than the considerable commitment of its members, should be a place to engage in the conversation and to experiment with solutions. In my own view there should be productive new possibilities in the match of expertise to issue and constituency, but it's a departure and should never upstage the kind of work that only academics do: extended empirical projects on the long-term process of social and cultural life, with a view to analytical critique and the creation of new interpretations and new visions.
In this short moment for reflection before the forces I have outlined
in Chapter 2 set in with greater strength in African Studies, we should
take the time to look at the possibilities and contribute creatively to
the setting of some key agendas for the immediate future. As I will discuss
at the end of Chapter 4, I'm not sure that we have the right kinds of organization
to achieve this debate, just as we seem to be lacking a group that can
lobby on our behalf in the political arenas.
Jane I. Guyer, Copyright 1996