African studies has gone through three well-known phases as a field of study. Up until 1950 or thereabouts, those studying Africa — they were not yet called Africanists — tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the capturing (or recapturing) of a description of Africa eternal: Launcelot the ethnographer in search of a holy grail of the past that was written in the present tense and was undefiled by contact and uncorrupted by civilization. What was once a myth is now a fairy tale and it would be silly to waste time tellling each other the obvious truth that fairy tales are modes of the social control and the education of children.

When I became Assistant Secretary for Africa nearly four and a half years ago it was my hope that, if I could do nothing else, I could help to sustain and increase America's effort in the development of Africa. We cannot be meaningful to Africa unless we respond to its great needs for economic development. That hope has not been fully realized. I have had to say “no” to African requests far more than I have been able to say “yes”. I want to explore with you today why I think this has been so and to suggest some approaches to reverse the present trend.

Two great changes have been brought by twenty-five years of apartheid rule in South Africa. Its internal contradictions have been sharpened by the simultaneous attempts to divide the country along even more rigid color lines and to stimulate more rapid economic growth; and its external relations have declined to the point where the Republic today has become the “polecat of the world.” These two developments are inextricably linked so that it makes little sense to try and describe the South African situation without focussing on their interrelationship.

The current era of man's history is characterized by the struggle of peoples for their full emancipation from colonialism, imperialism, racism and all other forms of domination and oppression hampering human development and dignity, peace and progress.

In 1976 we will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the formal birth of our country. In our protracted war for independence, the freedom loving people of the United States were engaged in a bitter struggle against the greatest world power of that time. The war was not over at the time of independence. But that declaration symbolized both the beginning of the end of colonialism in America and the coming into the world community of a new state, the United States of America. The British neither recognized our right to self-determination, nor the declaration of independence, nor did they voluntarily hand over power to us. We seized it because it was our inalienable right.