This ISSUE is almost totally comprised of the first half of a two part publication series that relates Africanists to the Africa policy of the U.S. government. As a whole, the two parts—in this and the next ISSUE —review the relationship of the opinions and the activities of the Africanist community outside the U.S. government (mainly academics) to the thrust and substance of policy and the process of policy-making inside the U.S. government. The two major articles in the present ISSUE—on Africanists and U.S. foreign and national security policy by Larry Bowman of the University of Connecticut, and on Africanists and U.S. economic assistance policy by Michael Bratton of Michigan State University—represent the first part.

Relationships between U.S. government officials and academic specialists working on national security and foreign policy issues with respect to Africa are many and complex. They can be as informal as a phone call or passing conversation or as formalized as a consulting arrangement or research contract. Many contacts exist and there is no doubt that many in both government and the academy value these ties. There have been, however, ongoing controversies about what settings and what topics are appropriate to the government/academic interchange. National security and foreign policy-making in the U.S. is an extremely diffuse process.

Of all the policy issue areas that concern the U.S. government in its relations with Africa, economic assistance policy has attracted the deepest and widest involvement from U.S. university scholars. University-based analysts have enjoyed numerous avenues of access to officials who define, design, implement and evaluate U.S. foreign aid programs for sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. universities have stronger institutional linkages with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) than with any other Washington institution discussed in this ISSUE, including the U.S. Congress and agencies within the the national security bureaucracy.

The text of an analysis on Burundi presented by Mr. René Lemarchand on September 22, 1988 before the Africa Subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives was published in the 1989 winter number of ISSUE. As noted, more precise research has been published since this date on the Ntega and Marangara events by people who actually went to “revisit” the country, which is not the case of Mr. Lemarchand, since his last visit to Bujumbura was in autumn 1973.

My apologies to Mr. Chrétien and to your readers for “developing some simplistic formulas on Burundi” in my quest for “media success.” No such simplistic formulas enter his criticism of my Congressional testimony. On the one hand, I am taken to task for not conceding that my interpretation of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict as a recent phenomenon is the product of Chrétien’s “patient research work” over the last quarter of a century; on the other hand, “some very similar analysis” had appeared in my “excellent work of 1970,” which came out long before Mr. Chrétien embarked on his patient research! Try to figure that one out if you can.