Parker’s Piece

Extract

The government cuts of the early 1980s have dealt harshly with Oriental and African area and language studies in Britain’s univerisites. Between 1981 and 1985 London University's School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), the major world institution in these fields, lost 37% of its budget and 25% of its teaching staff - those from its Department of Africa’s language teaching establishment dropped from thirty to nine. The continent of Africa boasts more than 1,000 languages: SOAS can now offer teaching in only nine. In other universities staff losses in African studies number some fifty posts of which only fourteen have been replaced. African studies in general have been reduced from inter-disciplinary programmes of area studies to a subordinate status within subject disciplines.