By October 1994 the population of refugees from Rwanda and Burundi registered with the UN High Commission of Refugees in Tanzania was about 570,000. (Personal communication: Yukiko Hameda, UNHCR-Nairobi.) And from the point of view of the international and Tanzanian authorities responsible for refugees, the crisis continues to grow. On December 23, 1994, Patrick Chokala, Press Secretary to the Tanzanian President, claimed that 300-400 refugees enter Tanzania every day; the total number then was 591,000. (Daily News, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 24 December 1994.)

The human tragedy, the genocide which began after President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994 and which in the space of a few short months left one-half million people dead and precipitated the flight of two and one-half million people to refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania, cannot be undone, although expeditious and fair judicial procedures are a necessary step to a secure future.

Three years ago I presented a paper on the canonical status of African literature at a conference on canonicity sponsored by Binghamton University. As the only paper on African literature at the conference, my paper, like an orphan, was placed in the care of a panel on German literature. Although my paper was the last to be given in the last session on the last day of the conference, its reading was well attended and enthusiastically received by colleagues, all non-Africanists, who have a real interest in learning and disseminating more information about a body of literature outside the scope of their own research.

French policy in Africa is at a crossroads. Forced to consider among choices that appeared entrenched in the past, France now hesitates to implement essential reforms. The reluctance to carve out a new conception of French-African relations is in part tied to the magnitude of the changes which have affected African states south of the Sahara since 1989, but it is also tied to the generalized failure of French aid policies since the Second World War. The result has been a conceptual vacuum in French policy towards Africa, reflected in the oscillation between the old practices, including very controversial ones, and the structural adjustments in which France is little more than an interested observer.

I returned to the United States in 1988 in order to get a graduate education in the social sciences. Three years in rural Kasulu, Tanzania, had taught me that how western social science framed development problems was inadequate. I had some hopes that good social science could address how relief and development workers viewed the African society that surrounded them. To me the close relationships that should exist between the two seemed obvious. I had seen enough PhD. students and consultants to know that their Swahili skills and bush savvy were lacking. But I had also seen enough savvy field workers whose inability to generalize beyond their own project, or systematically frame a problem within a broader context meant that their knowledge would never contribute to a broader understanding of anything outside their small corner of the world.

When I received the July/September issue of ASA News, I had just returned from a visit to Zaire (June/July 1994), and was struggling against the current that kept me from finding the best ways to bear witness to what had happened in Burundi and Rwanda. Everything around me conspired to draw me back into the business as usual mode. With such preoccupations in my mind, my first walk through a local mall almost made me sick. I am slowly learning to understand that in the Age of the Ephemeral, attempting to interface with Memory can be as lethal as fantasizing that one could get, unscathed, through a society which puts a premium on conformity.

We start with a fundamental duality in the paradigm of Pan-Africanism, the distinction between Pan-Africanism of liberation and Pan-Africanism of integration. Under both headings the name of Ghana's founder-president, Kwame Nkrumah, is immortalized.

In recent times Africa has been a favourite quarry of American social scientists and humanities scholars. It has served Africanist scholars, mostly white, as a springboard for their eminently successful careers, as objects of study, and as cartographic points to which some of them could lay claim as theirs, trespass on which is often the equivalent of a capital offence in African Studies. Many of us have often been lectured, harangued, sometimes nearly insulted, because we dared to suggest that a subject on which a particular Africanist is “expert,” or one that happens to excite her or him has little relevance to the scholarly concerns of African scholars or the lives of Africans! There are variations on this theme: it wasn't so long ago that feminists of different persuasions kept looking to Africa for primal, originary matriarchies.