Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee,

As you know, the United Nations Security Council called for an arms embargo against South Africa in 1963. Its objective was to prevent South Africa’s acquiring foreign weapons with which to build a modern military machine. South Africa did not have then, and lacks even now, the capacity to produce sophisticated modern arms economically. The Council reasoned at the time that if South Africa were denied supplies of modern arms it would find it difficult to resist the growing internal demands for dismantling apartheid. Many states saw the arms embargo as the best way to ensure peaceful change in southern Africa. And the call for an embargo was issued with that explicit purpose in mind.

Last year legislators of the Commonwealth of Virginia sent to state college and university faculty a time-study questionnaire on which appeared a question of the following sort: “On a scale of one to five, rank the personal satisfaction you derive from each of the following: 1) teaching; 2) administration; 3) research; 4) sports; 5) your family.” While many of us have decided preferences for one or more of the first three activities, or even the first four, having to rank one’s family along with one’s job may seem somewhat inappropriate. Struggling academics may, in fact, neglect their families in the hopes of churning out sufficient copy to gain them tenure, and many marriages have foundered on less rocky shoals. Even so, American social categories regard the teaching-administration-research syndrome as work, something qualitatively different from one’s spouse or children. To the academic couple, however, the above question may make all too much sense.

Little that happens in Western Sahara is accepted as an indisputable development by all the parties concerned. It is not simply that differing interpretations are advanced. Rather, the facts themselves are in dispute. One such instance is the case of the Djemaa, the tribal assembly established by Spain to serve as a local consultative link with the colonial administration.

Foreign universities are not the cure to the glut on the American job market, for the glut is a world-wide phenomenon, particularly in African studies. Americans already constitute a sizable proportion of academics in Canada, Australia, Britain, and Africa and the backlash against them is already developing in some. But some systems are still expanding, such as those in Nigeria and Australia, and they offer perhaps the best chances for jobs in the immediate future.

In 1977, Congress authorized the expenditure of one million dollars for “the preparation of a comprehensive analysis of development needs of southern Africa to enable the Congress to determine what contribution United States foreign assistance can make.” AID was instructed to present specific proposals on how to spend this one million dollars. AID seems to have approached several groups of scholars heretofore critical of U.S. policy in southern Africa on the possibility of serving as “consultants” to draft this analysis. AID in late November approached the four of us as scholars in contact with persons knowledgeable about the region (and not ostensibly because of our links to the Association of Concerned African Scholars) to meet with them to discuss what kind of work ought to be done, could be done, and might be done by us. We agreed to meet with them in December in Washington.

In recent months, international attention has focused on southern Africa in response to the accelerated guerrilla wars in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Namibia and the intensity of the South African government’s attempts to repress popular unrest by massive bannings of virtually all African political and community organizations. These developments are but a continuation of the long process of decolonization in Africa which began over twenty years ago and which in recent years saw the independence of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Because of the intransigence of Portuguese colonial rule, the struggles for self-determination in the latter three countries took the form of protracted popular guerrilla struggles against colonial rule. The growing success of these struggles over the period of the 1960s and early 1970s brought about significant political changes within Portugal itself and led to the April 1974 coup.

Fueled by oil money and the powerful belief of its people in the transforming power of education, the Nigerian university system may be expanding proportionately faster than any major system in the world. Consisting of only five universities (Ibadan, Nsukka, Ife, Lagos, and Ahmadu Bello in Zaria) during most of the first decade of independence, the 1970s have seen successive additions until the current projected number of universities is thirteen (spread among the twelve states that existed until 1976). The Nigerian government has indicated that it will try to hold the line at thirteen and not go through another round of new university creation so that each of the present nineteen states would have its own university. But even granting the leaders’ success in this resolve, the present commitments themselves mean that the university system will double in size between 1977 and the first years of the 1980s.

It is one of the misfortunes of a graduate education that students are exposed to a narrow range of career and employment models in the university environment. The most common model is that of the specialized university professor, and too many graduate students and Ph.D.’s make the very serious mistake of spending one or two recruitment years trying unsuccessfully to get work exclusively in the college and university professoriate in order to fulfill this single career goal. This perception is born out by the fact that university placement officers are suddenly deluged in August, the last month of the university recruiting year, by dozens upon dozens of unemployed Ph.D.’s in all fields asking, “What else can I do with my advanced degree?” I believe that the candidate who expands career goals and who seeks employment in the four year college and university teaching market and in other professional job markets at the same time can find well-paid and interesting career work. Multiple job searches can take forty hours a week and often have to be added to other commitments like part-time work or dissertation writing. Employment inquiries in non-academic professional fields take planning and a lot of hustle, for applications and job leads take months and months to mature just as they do in the academic market place.

Job hunting in the Federal government can be a frustrating experience to anyone unfamiliar with Federal personnel procedures—both written and unwritten. Therefore, it is particularly useful to proceed systematically when investigating this aspect of the alternative job market for Africanists. Otherwise, it is easy enough to waste time and miss specific opportunities. Upon deciding to venture into the Federal job maze, it is helpful to possess an abundance of patience, persistence, and imagination. Most successful graduate students ought to have mastered this trinity to perfection by the conclusion of their graduate careers. A fourth element might also be added—luck!