It is both a pleasure and an honor for me to address you tonight, just a few hours after one of our nation’s most important elections and at a time when we are at the threshold of fundamental new choices of policies for the African continent.

I must tell you quite honestly that I’m very pleased that the voters have mandated a change in the administration in America and a new direction for our country. My pleasure goes beyond the fact that I am a Democrat and that a Democrat was elected to the presidency. In fact, it has nothing to do with partisan politics.

Friday, November 4, 1977, I am sure, is just another day for most of you gathered here to deal with some important business concerning this honorable association of scholars, professionals and other genuinely interested men and women.

This Association is after all basically a membership organization and it exists primarily through, and for its constituent members. Characteristically the first line of our By-Laws (as revised in April 1970) states that ‘The Corporation shall consist of not less than 100 members.”

This paper is concerned with the role and responsibilities of Americans who go to African universities to profess, and with the rationale of such undertakings.

In some ways, this may seem to be a threadbare topic. The values to be achieved from such transcultural experiences have long been assumed. At least since World War II and Senator Fulbright’s great initiatives, teaching abroad has been a favored activity. Yet recently we have taken a more skeptical view. The Fulbright and other programs are in some disarray in Africa today, and there is no longer much enthusiasm, in official “development circles,” for exporting university teachers.

Employment prospects in academia are the bleakest for new Ph.D.’s since the early 1950s, and there is little evidence that the situation will change in the 1980s. Between now and the end of the next decade it is estimated that tens of thousands of Ph.D.’s will be produced in the humanities and social sciences, and that the nation’s colleges and universities will be able to absorb only a fraction of the total. Employment prospects for students of third world areas like Africa are particularly dim. During the 1975-6 recruitment year only five or six tenure-track positions for African history graduate majors were nationally advertised for an active candidate pool of approximately 40-50 Ph.D.’s and ABD’s (All But Dissertation). This job market has substantially reduced the morale of graduate faculty and students since the halcyon days of full employment in the mid-1960s.

The academic career has its great obligations. It also has its privileges. It is a particularly gratifying honor to have the opportunity to address this distinguished audience of Africanists drawn from many nations. As your retiring President, this honor is compounded by the great privilege to address you on a subject of my own choosing—apparently simple and innocent enough until one thinks about what an intimidating experience it really is.

I doubt that there are many groups in America which would have so many members who want to discuss foreign policy on a Saturday night. I am impressed with your seriousness and look forward to an interesting discussion after my remarks. I will not reveal whether / would give up a Saturday evening to hear what I am about to say. But I am glad to be here to listen to your comments and discuss your questions.

The insights and advice presented here are not offered dogmatically. Rather, they are the best I can muster from my ten years’ experience with the professional job market, first as an African history job-seeker and later as a graduate placement officer. Despite the doom and gloom about employment that pervades the professional schools churning out M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s in the social sciences and humanities, it has been my experience that many advanced degree holders can still obtain meaningful and rewarding teaching careers. I have found that successful job candidates are often the people who seek work with the same drive, determination, and thoroughness with which they did their research in Africa.

The setting was comfortable, and the social atmosphere relaxed. By all measures, he was a distinguished colleague. He had received a good degree from a Western university; he was respected in his own country (Nigeria); he belonged to those citizens who are often referred to as “our leaders of thought”; he had published widely; and he had been asked to speak at many professional meetings in both the Western and non-Western world. By local standards he was well paid, and his home and his family revealed all the features of his “elite” status. As a visiting researcher I had gone to see him to exchange views, to learn about the state of affairs in the country. He was polite, he was helpful; we joked about this and that, exchanged memories of events which had taken place at this or that conference. Academic chit-chat blended with that kind of casual conversation which makes life pleasant.

“Academic freedom,” Ashby asserts, is “an internationally recognized and unambiguous privilege of university teachers.” Is this proposition confirmed by experience to date as regards the academic freedom of the foreign scholar in African universities? This is the central empirical question. Or is it merely a culture-bound affirmation of a normative ideal which it is hoped might be instituted as a universal right of university teachers, irrespective of citizenship status, tenure of appointments, and the political and university systems in which they serve? Indeed, is it an ideal which can be realized, however imperfectly, or in any event, ought to be categorically affirmed as a privilege of foreign scholars serving in universities anywhere? These are among the questions Ashby’s proposition provokes, and which require, at the outset, some disaggregation of the meanings and interpretations of such a highly normative and emotion-ridden concept, whose genesis and sustenance are undeniably sui generis to a particular cultural and historical experience.

The job market is very bad for academics, especially for those of us just out of graduate school. I wish I could tell you some guaranteed way to land a job or even to get an interview, but I cannot. As an anthropologist recently on the job market, though, I do have some very basic, common sense advice which I believe can help.

For the last ten years the issue of U.S. bank loans to South Africa has been a clear focus for many U.S. church bodies. Documents provided for the record of this hearing include resolutions from the late 1960s from the Conventions, Synods, and Assemblies of several major Protestant denominations. These resolutions clearly call for an end to U.S. financial support to the land of apartheid. The vigorous campaign of the 1960s for an end to bank loans to South Africa resulted in a victory when a $40 million floating credit by ten U.S. banks was not renewed. Dozens of discussions were held with bank officials and millions of dollars in accounts were withdrawn in protest in that campaign.

Judging by public tone, style, and ideological emphasis alone, the casual observer of U.S. foreign policy is impressed by the novelty of the Carter Administration’s approach toward Southern Africa. Kissinger had stressed America’s tangible interests, sought alliances with ideological “enemies” to advance or at least to protect those interests, and operated a clever, manipulative and secretive diplomacy with calculated ambiguity. The Carter Administration now seems to espouse once more American ideals and principles, open diplomacy for announced clearly-stated objectives, and decision-making by consent. But what is really involved is a reversion to the active use of ideology and salesmanship to manage its political and economic interests. It is of a piece with “helping our little brown brothers” in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, making the world “safe for democracy” and saving Vietnam from Communism.

“From a tiny stream grows a mighty flood ...”

At the end of 1966 U.S. direct investment in South Africa was $490 million. Ten years later the dollar value of U.S. direct investment had more than trebled, reaching a figure of at least $1.67 billion by 1976.

People seeking academic positions will find themselves dealing with a small, mysterious body which will either end their hopes or bring their candidacy to the brink of final success. Few applicants will ever be in a position to influence a department to hire them unless they first pass the scrutiny of a committee which screens credentials, arranges short interviews at major professional meetings, and decides which candidate or candidates will be invited to campus for inspection by their colleagues. Since the activities of a recruitment committee are generally puzzling to job seekers, who are likely to receive only short, formal, and perhaps tardy communications at irregular intervals, this description may be interesting, even if it does not reduce the anxiety level of prospective academics.

[Note: This interview was conducted on September 22, 1976 by the Mozambican Information Agency. Mr. Machingura is a political commissar in the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA) and provides the first major statement for the Western public of the goals and policies of ZIPA. The failure of the Western press to provide information about ZIPA has left the field to the propaganda efforts of the Rhodesián Smith regime, which defines the ZIPA soldiers as “terrs” (terrorists). An opposing understanding of the ZIPA movement has been proffered by the frontline African presidents. In their first public response to the Smith announcement of agreement with the Kissinger terms of settlement, the five presidents began with a statement of congratulation to the Zimbabwean soldiers who had brought the white regime to the point of seeking a settlement publically, even though this too may have been another Smith ploy to gain time by avoiding substantive changes.

Soweto, Rhodesia, and Umtata in 1976 are poignant and pointed symbols of change and continuity in Southern Africa. Regional politics here as in other international subsystems are characterized by the tension between order and continuity on the one hand and opposition and change on the other. This trinity of symbols consists, in part, of a revival of the violence of Sharpeville, earlier diplomacy over Zimbabwe and Afrikanerdom’s continued ambivalence towards the demands of African nationalism. But clearly it also embodies new features, especially the apparent inexhaustibility of black anger, the greater imperative of a settlement, and the unacceptability of “separate freedoms” respectively. Moreover, both the regional and global environments have evolved significantly in the last decade so that apparently similar events in Southern Africa may now have new meanings, implications, and results.

The newly independent nations of Africa have, without exception, proclaimed their desire to industrialize in order to create increasingly productive employment opportunities and higher living standards for all their inhabitants. Historically, colonial development was oriented to producing the raw material exports required by the factories of Europe, and importing the manufactured goods those factories produced. Colonial government expenditures were devoted to building the infrastructure—railroads, roads, ports—required to facilitate the export of raw materials. Colonial policies discouraged local manufacturing to preserve African markets for goods produced in European factories. Most of the investable surpluses created by raw materials production in Africa were siphoned out of the country in the form of profits, interest, and dividends of the oligopolistic colonial firms that owned the mines and estates, and dominated the foreign trade. Little capital was left for investment in new industries. At the time of independence, less than 10% of the national product in the typical African country consisted of manufactured output—among the lowest level of industrialization in the world.

More and more frequently the Africanist who wins a tenure track position (hereafter termed a “real job”) is the one who offers something besides an impressive area expertise. Prestige universities are rarely hiring, and the few jobs opening up nowadays are usually at four-year colleges and two-year institutions which cannot, or firmly believe they cannot, accomodate full-time Africanists however much they may want African offerings in their programs. Faced with declining numbers of majors and insistent administrative demands for high body counts, or Full-Time-Equivalent (FTE) students, humanities and social science departments and divisions are looking for versatility in the personnel they hire. Teachers must be able to handle both general education courses attractive to underclassmen and a wide range of electives which will simultaneously challenge majors and attract non-majors looking for courses to fill out their schedules. Successful candidates to such positions have often overcome an academic Catch 22 publicized in many job advertisements—applicants seeking their first real job “must have one or two years prior full-time teaching experience”—by playing the part-time game, which has in recent years taken on many of the attributes of formal internship programs in other professions. For all the game’s drawbacks, the candidate for a real job who has played the part-time circuit well enjoys a major advantage over competitors who have not played it at all or who have played it badly, for a few very strong recommendations from superiors at places where a person has taught part-time can put that candidate in the running even for real jobs advertised as demanding prior full-time experience.