The concept of outreach has become associated with public service to community, media and business interests, to public and private educational institutions, and to African and Africanist academics at home and abroad lacking access to resources to pursue their studies and research. This paper is concerned chiefly with the role of colleges and universities in African studies outreach, which is not to minimize the importance of other agents of change, private and public, committed to the task of improving the quality and quantity of our understanding and knowledge of African affairs.

“What do you think of America?” No visitor to the United States can escape this question. From the moment he debarks, the foreigner is confronted by a question that will follow him throughout his stay in the U.S. At first he seems bewildered. But he soon gathers from the questioner’s tone that he is expected to respond favorably. “Great! I like it very much,” he answers. Indeed America is great, but the perplexed visitor has had no time to make even the most superficial observation of his own.

According to the guidelines of the United States Office of Education, one aspect of outreach should deal with the community in which a particular area center is located. In asking personnel from other educational institutions with African outreach programs to provide me with information on their outreach activities into their respective communities, I emphasized the following areas: civic organizations, businesses, churches, prisons, radio and television (public and educational), newspapers, senior citizens, public libraries and museums, women’s/men’s clubs, and finally future or ecology-oriented groups. Each was asked to describe the type of outreach done and to evaluate the results.

The question immediately suggests itself: what constitutes a major American city? Subjectively, but with a long side glance at Jane Jacobs, I would define such a metropolitan area by several attributes. One obviously is population density, though the actual number of people that make up the city is less important than the diversity within the population that allows for a great diversity in culture. Major American cities are composed of many cultural, racial, and economic constituencies coexisting in a single polity. Thus, even though Peoria and San Francisco are dense population centers, one is a major farm town, and the other is a major city. This multiplicity of ethnic constituencies is reflected in a city’s educational, economic, religious, political, and cultural institutions which are likewise fragmented, though interdependent. Such cities with enormous and highly diverse constituencies are likely to be more self-sufficient culturally, politically, and economically than other American towns. They supply their own news and publications, stage their own cultural events, concentrate more on their own political processes, and establish autonomous norms of behavior. In fact, what happens in these cities more often creates the news, the culture, the mores, and the politics for the rest of the land. A university operating in such a milieu is not just a light on the hill. It is a constituency within a mosaic of constituencies. It is linked to those other constituencies politically, socially, culturally, and economically, just by being where it is. It must frequently act on an ad hoc basis, responding to requests and solicitations that are sometimes immediate, and sometimes imperative. The parameters of its actions are clearly traceable in the mosaic of relationships which describe the city. It is not as free as the state university in the college town to define its own program, but by its existential commitment to its locale it draws whatever important qualities it will have for itself, for its community, and for the nation.

Africanists experienced in outreach generally agree that in the long run the most effective way to improve the U.S. public’s knowledge of Africa will be to reach the precollegiate school population. And by extension, the most effective means of reaching that student population is through those persons who determine the substance and scope of materials taught on the precollegiate level: teachers, administrators, librarians, and other support personnel.

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.

Preservice teachers, especially those actually engaged in student teaching, face a barrage of daily challenges. In many cases these challenges are new and unique. How does one cope with the needs and wants of thirty-plus students while simultaneously responding to the pervasive school time sequence affectionately known as “the bell”? Further, how does one maintain classroom order and harmony and inspire confidence when teaching a subject for the first time, often an unknown subject?

In most countries ordinary people do not appreciate the sheer guile of their political leaders. Rhodesia is no exception. The dealings between the government and the African National Council confirm it. The government interrupted its dialogue with the ANC by detaining thirty-three senior ANC officials without trial, effectively destroying the cohesion of the only black political organization in the country. To the white voter, who sees no further than the surface of events, the detentions represented a simple exercise of executive power. In fact the government could not act in as sudden and arbitrary a fashion as that. It had to choose the time for its action with care, and to some extent it had to prepare the white electorate to accept what happened without question. The government also had to conceal its true intentions from the ANC without resorting to outright falsehood. Finally, it had to leave itself free to make a flexible response to the sort of unpredictable events which inevitably occur in political life and which often wreck the most carefully drafted plans. Formulating a policy to meet these contradictory objectives without giving the appearance of bad faith required much guile. The outcome, in the short term at least, was success.

One of the most critical paradoxes of the last quarter of the twentieth century is the declining support for area studies, especially at this time when the global community has entered such a notable phase of interdependence. The continent of Africa and its people are as important in this interdependency as any others of the world community. Indeed, no other continent in the world’s history has provided to the international community so many new and independent nations. Concomitantly, this world area has among its assets unknown quantities of potential wealth in natural resources.

Portugal’s occupation of Africa began with violence, it was maintained by violence, and after five hundred years it is coming to an end through violence.

The story of Inhaminga, the bloody events of resistance and reprisal in the war in Mozambique, is the last chapter of the longest and most useless colonial ordeal in Africa’s history. It is one more measurement of the lives which were lost, the bodies which were sold, and the destruction which was wrought in the course of Portugal’s pursuit of gain and imperial dignity in Guinea, Angola, Mozambique.

Educators teaching about Africa and other foreign areas cannot ignore the demands in American education for the basics—reading, writing, and arithmetic. These are important societal skills not merely because they result in writing grammatical sentences, spelling correctly, multiplying, and adding but more importantly because they play a central role, or should play a central role, in developing critical thinking abilities. In this respect, the critical thinking that is fostered by reading, writing, and arithmetic is essential for any relevant study about Africa today. Both African methods in education and content about Africa can be utilized in the K-12 curriculum to enhance these basic skills.

There are few parallels to the human holocaust that took place in Burundi in 1972 in the wake of a tortuous competitive struggle between the country’s two major ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Scarcely noticed (let alone understood) by public opinion anywhere, the killings are conservatively estimated to have caused between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths. Approximately 3.5 percent of the country’s total population (3.5 million) were physically wiped out in a period of a few weeks. In comparative terms this is as if England had suffered a loss of 2 million or the United States about 8 million people. To speak of “selective genocide” in describing the outcome of such large-scale political violence seems scarcely an exaggeration.

“No, No, No! I won’t marry that ugly little spider! He’s gross!” shouted Christie, waving her hands dramatically. The rest of the fourth graders listened, spellbound. Christie’s version of an “Ananse” story she had seen another class dramatize kept the original story line, but it was clearly her own creation, with fanciful detours here and there. Face and body totally Involved, she was a true storyteller in the best African tradition. A few days later Christie produced an entirely original “Ananse” story, this time bringing the famous Ghana trickster to America to buy roller skates. Her story, accompanied by a picture of the spider on roller skates, involves a contest between Ananse and a kente cloth weaver. In the end, Ananse’s legs, all eight of them, become entangled and weave a “kente cloth.” The story ends with the traditional moral, “Sometimes when you brag about being better than anyone else, you come out the loser!”

When I took on the job as local arrangements chairman (what we would now call chairperson) for the 1969 annual meeting of our association, held in Montreal, I did not expect to cater for the largest meeting in our history. Nor was I really prepared for the historic occasion that it was. Of course there had been rumblings the previous year, for after all that was the time when we were still involved with various confrontations. Today the excitement has gone, we are now all very inward looking, and it is rather difficult to tell what, if anything, lingers from those days. But historic occasion it was, of that there is no doubt. Almost eighteen hundred people registered, and the program we published for the occasion is now a collector’s item. I was recently offered twenty-five dollars for a copy!

In August 1936, 4,069 athletes from forty-nine countries participated in the Olympic Games in Berlin, hosted by the Nazi Fuehrer. It is true that the full bestiality of the Third Reich was not yet manifest in 1936; the gas ovens, the slave labor camps, and the rape of Europe were yet to come. However, by that year, Nazi ideology had already been articulated: blacks, Jews and gypsies had been declared sub-human; Hitler had issed his Nuremburg Laws depriving Jews of their citizenship and civil rights; German rearmament was well underway; and the National Socialists had brutally consolidated a racist despotism.

How do we learn? How do we develop opinions, form impressions, and conceive images of peoples, places, and events? Once having developed these, how are they changed? Although the whole learning process may not yet be fully understood, it is clear that our cognition of things outside ourselves derives from information received through sensory sources. The major ones are tactile, aural, and visual, with smell and taste being less important.