An overview of African Studies composed at the present moment necessarily represents the perspective of the author, and for two reasons. The study of Africa has become widespread and varied, and therefore may look quite different from different vantage points. And like much else in the present political and intellectual world, it stands at the watershed created by the simultaneous fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of communications technology. The nature of the vistas beyond is still a matter of intense debate and experimentation. As I moved further into the work for this report, and discovered unforeseen fields of endeavor and ever-ramifying complexities in their achievements, it seemed increasingly preferable to take up the challenge of a necessarily personal view in an explicit fashion, rather than to agonize over or try to neutralize it.
We are at the beginning of a new era in African Studies in this country. There have been two more-or-less marked previous eras, each of which produced a characteristic scholarship that grew out of its own configuration of conditions and concerns. The first was led by a basic research agenda, and grew out of the post-World War II concern with internationalism and the need to have U.S. knowledge about, and a U.S. presence in, the context of the Cold War. In the public view, the struggles for independence and growth were in the foreground. The second joined and changed the first, but did not displace it. It was oriented towards a development agenda, growing most strongly after the Sahelian and Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the changed international economic conditions after the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement (1973) and the rise in world oil prices (1976). Debt and disaster suddenly dominated the public view of Africa.
A radically changed international and domestic world brings us to the brink of a third post-war era, when the emerging image of Africa is one of marginality, if not total collapse. As scholarship re-orients to the domestic and international agendas we need to re-examine the intellectual and social legacies of the past two eras, and to apply experience and imagination to the redeployment of the very great assets they leave us with: from the tangible wealth of extraordinary libraries to the no-less valuable reservoirs of collegial networks and long-term theoretical orientations. These need to be reshaped and reconfigured, not intransigently defended or recklessly abandoned. An informed assessment of what these assets are and how they should be redeployed should start from people in the field itself, in the form of a self-study. The passages of this report that are written in the first person represent my own partisan contributions towards what should ultimately be a collective effort.
Chapter 1 presents my own view of how we are positioned on this new watershed, and Chapter 5 is a reconnaissance of three key issues that have already arisen in our debates: a) the contest and accommodation between area studies, international studies, and the disciplines; b) the social composition of our community and the intellectual influences this brings to bear; and c) the emerging assessments of our core intellectual commitments. These two Chapters can be read separately, along with the conclusions to the descriptive Chapters, as an interpretive essay. My suggestions about ways forward are contained in the conclusions to the descriptive Chapters, which have been regrouped, with an introduction, as Chapter 6.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are an attempt to be as comprehensive as possible about substantive components of African studies within the time frame for research. Since its foundation as a formally organized component of American academia almost fifty years ago African Studies has become an extraordinarily broad enterprise. Africa courses are taught at hundreds of universities and colleges; dozens offer certificates, minors and degrees; untold numbers of graduates work in NGOs, USAID and other development agencies. And each educational institution has its own particularities. I discovered, for example, that some of the most highly regarded semester abroad programs in Africa are run from colleges (St. Lawrence University and Kalamazoo College); the Berkeley program benefits from an endowment; Ohio State University has educated 250 Ugandans since 1965 under AID programs that have been budgeted at 16 million dollars (primarily for agricultural and economic research); innovative ecological and economic anthropological research has been fostered at SUNY-Binghamton under an AID cooperative agreement; Jack Parson in Charleston, South Carolina, and colleagues at Howard University have run a model OAU for undergraduates from between thirty and forty schools, annually for the past thirteen years; and only four universities (Iowa, Howard, Indiana and Northwestern) graduate as many as one third of their Africanist PhDs in the humanities. It no longer surprises me that the authors of the Hamilton-Hodges Report of 1987 concluded that the field was "fragmented.... None of the individuals interviewed had (or even claimed to have) a broad working knowledge of the field as a whole" and "almost without exception wanted to know what other institutions were doing" (1987:3). This kind of "fragmentation" represents an American success story, much as Lambert wrote about International Studies: "characteristically profuse, multicentric, and immensely inventive" (1986:2).
In presenting this complexity, as well as my own "take" on it, the image that I think best evokes its basic qualities is that of a micro-ecology. The study of Africa is a small and very modestly funded component of academic life in this country, but it has flourished successfully in the terrain between the disciplines. It was founded and sustained in the beginning by foundations and government, which were concerned with the failure of the disciplines in American universities to promote international study. The parameters of area studies were defined by scholars who were based in the disciplines but worked on their borders, both theoretically and empirically. African Studies has been intermittently nourished, challenged and reshaped by infusions from new quarters and the interests of new participants: the development agencies in the 1970s and 1980s, and African-American constituencies and a stronger African presence by the early 1980s.
Like any micro-ecology, the study of Africa looks from time to time as if it could be washed away and reabsorbed into its component disciplines (or now into International Studies). But in the longer run that scenario turns out to have been the product of a passing phase or a particular vantage point. For example, an employment crisis was envisaged in African history as early as 1972 and PhD production started to stabilize, whereas interest in Africa continued to rise in other disciplines. An analysis of the Foreign Language and Area Studies Awards (FLAS) for the mid-1980s suggested that "political science might be approaching 'endangered species' status" (CIE 1995:5), whereas only a few years later government funding for study of the democratization movements has breathed new life into it. When crises have passed by, the endeavor is still there albeit often suffering painful losses and gaining new topics.
Survival has largely been due to the enduring originality of Africa, the intellectual power and commitment of the practitioners of African Studies, persisting links into the disciplines and funding agencies, and the adaptability that multiplicity ensures. Hence my effort to represent both a broad interpretation of "where we are" and some indication of old and new innovations. The ultimate focus is on the innovations that will have a disproportionate effect on the future, most importantly through the effect on recruitment of talent amongst the students and junior faculty. We, the current cohort of senior faculty, were educated in the basic research era, competed for careers and critiqued our disciplines during the development era, but are educating students and leading institutions under quite different conditions when the ecology has become much more intensely competitive. Competition produces excellence only up to a point; beyond that point, the hurdles become too high and the rewards too insecure for talented people to take the inevitable career risks. The question then is: what strategic resources at what key points can have a multiplier effect on the quality of work and the spirit of engagement amongst the African Studies community, and particularly its more junior cohorts? The summaries of Chapters 2 through 4, presented in Chapter 6, offer some first suggestions that come out of the analyses of the rest of the report.
The reader is reminded that I am an economic
anthropologist. Given the challenge of reviewing such a broad topic I have
implicit recourse to my own discipline. I write from the assumption that
resources are a basic component of any explanation, even where they do
not explain everything. My division of our history into phases according
to resource criteria and their corresponding orientations is clearly both
partial and overdrawn. But it helps to develop a coherent framework for
addressing the great complexity of this transitional moment.
Jane I. Guyer, Copyright 1996