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.

Ask any teacher of Africa about outreach programs. Ask any teacher of Africa what they try to do! Ask any teacher of Africa about their past performance. Ask any teacher of Africa what they ought to do in the 1980s.

In evaluating the consequences of the $1.7 billion currently invested by U.S. corporations in South Africa, the issue is distinctly not whether or not the U.S. firms involved have adopted the Sullivan Principles. Those principles, purportedly designed to ensure upgrading and equal pay for blacks, are in reality little more than a smokescreen. Behind their rhetoric, U.S. transnational corporations continue to help South Africa build up its military-industry machinery to perpetuate oppression of the majority of black workers.

Outreach. The term was first made known to many Africanists by the U.S. Office of Education (USOE) as a mandated responsibility of Title VI Language and Area Studies Centers and seemed to represent something Africanists at many institutions had probably been doing all along anyway without any specific person or any additional funds. Outreach in the mid-1970s seemed so appealing and harmless enough to the directors who submitted applications for their programs to be named Title VI centers that they deemed to insert the required 15 percent minimum budget for outreach activities and usually a request for the hiring of an outreach coordinator as a line item supported through soft money. By 1979 outreach had become so integral a part of center activities and outreach coordinators that the one African program not re-funded as a center was nevertheless able to continue its outreach program through university funds. By late 1979, however, some center directors were also expressing the view that outreach risked becoming the tail that wagged the dog, while others were beginning to realize that they might have lost control of these coordinators who were calling themselves directors! By late 1979, too, both the personae in USOE committed to outreach and the evaluation review sheets used by the expert panels for center and fellowship funding had been dramatically reduced, indicating a decline in O.E. emphasis on outreach but, in the African field, probably also an implicit recognition of the substantial commitment and achievements of the Africanist group.

The task of conducting outreach through NDEA centers has not been restricted to African centers. From the mid-seventies all such area study programs funded through Title VI were called upon by the federal government to undertake some sort of outreach activities. The Office of Education in its guidelines identified four areas to which such programs should direct themselves: the business community, the general public, precollegiate educational institutions, and other universities and junior colleges that had no NDEA-funded centers.

Librarians have always served a wider clientele than those we are expected to serve. In part this is due to our reluctance to question the status of individuals who come before us and in part it is due to the public service orientation of most librarians. In college and university libraries this wider clientele includes people of all ages from the community, former students, visiting scholars who come to the library and, through interlibrary loan, many others long distances away. Some librarians would say that “outreach” is what every good librarian does.

Since 1960 the United States has been emerging from a period of neglect of Africa and unsystematic collection of information about the continent to a period of increasing interest in Africa and an expanding collection of information about the continent. When the total range of information about Africa available to the average American citizen is taken into account, however, it must be recognized that the majority is biased, impressionistic, and inaccurate by the standards of Africans, scholars, and Africanists.

It is no secret that funding for African studies has been on the decline since the 1960s, and there is a well of pessimism in the Africanist community regarding future support, which has swelled in proportion to this decline. Among area specialists today, words such as proposal or funding are frequently heard in sharp cynical tones or in subdued voices of disappointment. Recently a colleague shared with me his visual interpretation of the funding situation for African studies, which he laughingly referred to as “the intravenous connection”—an emaciated body kept alive by a small but steady flow of nourishment directly into the bloodstream. The analogy is not inappropriate.

The year 1976 marked more than the U. S. Bicentennial for those interested in global studies in America. It represented an auspicious moment in the evolution of the government’s “predisposition” toward support of language, area, and international studies in the United States. In that year Phase III of the NDEA Title VI Centers Program took on a revised USOE outlook upon the concept of outreach and an intensified federal commitment to the promotion of outreach activities as an integral part of the programs of the four-score Foreign Area and International Studies Centers around the nation. The Bicentennial Year was also important for the Congressional passage of the Education Amendments of 1976, which provided for the Citizen Education for Cultural Understanding (Section 603) Program. This program, which would hold promise for the development and/or expansion of global studies particularly in the elementary and secondary school classrooms of the nation, commenced in 1979 the award of federal assistance to projects that sought to “increase the availability to students in the United States of information about the cultures, actions, and policies of other nations so that these students might make more informed judgments with respect to the international policies and actions of the United States.”

The Education Amendments of 1976 authorized the Citizen Education for Cultural Understanding Program under Section 603 of Title VI of the National Defense Education Act, as amended. Not until the fall of 1978, however, did there appear to be any significant support for the funding of the program; but by the time an appropriation was visible in early spring 1979, the interest level across the country appeared exceptionally high. Then in response to publicity of the program and the wide dissemination of over 10,000 application booklets in April and May 1979, the Office of Education (Division of International Education of the Bureau of Higher and Continuing Education) received 473 applications for grant awards in June 1979, from every state but Alaska, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wyoming. In September 1979 public announcement was made of 39 grant awards in this the first year of the program commencing October 1, 1979 and funded for one year. For the second cycle, 466 applications were submitted in February 1980. There are likely to be 36 grant awards for 1980, totaling $2 million, bringing the total number of projects for the first two years to 75 and the total federal outlay to $4 million.