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The Changing Face of African Studies in Britain, 1962-2002
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2022
Extract
Leaving to one side the sui generis Royal African Society, which in 2000 marked its centenary with a special history (Rimmer and Kirk-Greene, 2000), the formalised study of Africa in British academia may be said to be approaching its 80th year. For it was in 1926 that the International African Institute, originally the Institute of African Languages and Cultures, was founded in London, followed two years later by the maiden issue of its journal for practising Africanists, Africa, still among the flagship journals in the African field. Indeed, the 1920s were alive with new institutions promoting an interest in African affairs, whether it be the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1924); the Phelps-Stokes Commission reports on education in British Africa (1920-24), culminating in the Colonial Office Memorandum on Education Policy (1925); the major contribution to public awareness made by the Empire Exhibition at Wembley, however politically incorrect some of its idiom seems today; or the attention generated by the League of Nations’ Mandates Commission, the bulk of whose remit was focused on Africa and whose British representative was no less than Lord Lugard, the biggest “Africanist” of his day.
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Footnotes
Paper given at the concluding session of SCOLMA's 40th Anniversary Conference, Oxford 25/26 June 2002.
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