With rare and only partial exceptions, research and teaching institutions and individual scholars in these countries welcome the prospect of an increase in the frequency, range, and quality of research by American students of Africa and of greater coordination between them and scholars in Africa. Each government in principle also welcomes researchers who are intellectually, personally, and politically respected and whose projects are thought to be broadly relevant, or at least not antithetical to, the needs of the society. Despite the resemblance among countries in these general respects, each presents a unique cluster of opportunities, research settings, and problems which will be discussed in this report.

The information for this study was collected over a period of six weeks during the summer of 1968. Periods of one week were spent in Khartoum and Addis Ababa and of four weeks in South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Twenty-three interviews were conducted in Khartoum, twenty-two in Addis Ababa, and fifty-five in southern Africa, including thirteen in Lesotho and Swaziland. Eight of the eleven universities and three of the five university colleges in South Africa were visited. 150 people participated in the interviews. Of these eighty percent were in academic occupation such as university teachers/researchers or administrators, and twenty percent were in government posts (including a few officers in American embassies or consulates), international organizations, or private organizations engaged in or concerned with research.

The Comoro Archipelago is situated at the head of the Mozambique Channel, midway between Cape Amber and Cape Delgado. The largest of the four islands, Great Comoro (or Grande Comore), 175 miles from Mozambique, is the northernmost island in the group. Mayotte (or Mayotta), the first of the islands to become a French colony, and the southernmost in the group, is the closest to Madagascar. To the northwest of Mayotte is Anjouan (or Johanna), referred to by authors, both ancient and modern, because of its fertility, as the “Pearl of the Comoro Islands”; immediately to the south of Great Comoro, and almost parallel with Anjouan, is Mohilla (or Moheli), the smallest island in the group.

The population of the islands is a mixture of African, Arab, and Malagasy, numbering over 170,000 people, with the heaviest concentration on Anjouan. The exportation of agricultural products has always been the chief industry of the archipelago. Its location at the head of the Mozambique Channel, and the wide range of food products available, made the Comoro Islands a popular supply stop for ships bound for India and the Far East via the Mozambique Channel; for the ships of the British antislavery squadron; and for whalers fishing in the southern Indian Ocean. European technological progress and the opening of the Suez Canal combined to render this function obsolete. During the last half of the nineteenth century, Mayotte, which became a French colony in 1841, was a moderately successful sugar colony. Plantations were also opened on Anjouan and Mohilla, but it was not until after the establishment of a French protectorate over the other two islands in 1886 that plantation economies and new crops were introduced to the rest of the archipelago. Ylang-Ylang, a perfume essence, is the major export crop; sisal, vanilla, cocoa, and coffee are also exported. Coconuts are the only export commodity which has survived from the precolonial economy.

Because of their location at the head of the Mozambique Channel, the four islands of the Comoro Archipelago, Anjouan (or Johanna), Grande Comore (Great Comoro), Mohilla (Mohély), and Mayotte (Mayotta) have been the subject of a considerable body of literature. European ships in need of supplies for their voyages to the east, or along the eastern coast of Africa, stopped at one or all of the islands, and many travelers and ship captains published their observations on the archipelago. Literature dealing with the period before 1800 has been arranged into collections cited below, but the numerous accounts of nineteenth-century travelers ar e scattered in periodicals and books, and the major bibliographical works on the islands, by and large, cover die same ground. This essay brings together accounts of the Comoro Islands arranged in a geographical and historical, although not necessarily chronological, context; and secondary material particularly related to the events and people is also described.

The National Archives of Tanzania (Idara ya Kumbukumbu za Taifa la Tanzania) were established on 28 August 1965. Since this date energies have been directed toward building an efficient archival service: better storage facilities have been acquired, trained Tanzanian personnel have been hired, and there is now seating space for ten researchers. The most significant development from the historian's point of view has been the recent organization of the German records into a concise and convenient index catalogue.

In June 1967 the West German Government Technical Aid Program sent Mr. Peter Geissler, an Archivinspektor at Hessiches Staatsarchiv, Marburg, on a two-year project to reorganize the German records. Mr. Geissler is already familiar to historians of the American Revolution for his research on the Hessian troop records at Marburg. In Deutsch-Ostafrika the old German Registry System (renewed in 1902 and in effect until 1916) had been utilized in numbering the various files. A still extant two-volume Registry lists all the documents in existence before the First World War, but many of these have since been lost, eaten by white ants, stolen, or destroyed. It is evident that only a few records concerning district political administration have survived, while land, legal, mission, public works, and education files are among the most complete. The files have been divided into two main groupings: (1) the old German Registry and other German Government Administration (G 1 - G 65); and (2) Private Archives (G 66 - G 86). Each file card contains both the new “G” number and the old German Registry designation. In addition Mr. Geissler has performed a painstaking task in listing on each card some of the outstanding names, places, etc. mentioned in the particular file.

This bibliography attempts to list all known theses on sub-Saharan Africa accepted by the University of California at Berkeley, and catalogued by the University Library through January, 1969. The earliest item is dated 1914. The list was compiled from a card file of theses arranged by academic department which is maintained by the Library's General Reference Service.

The availability of theses on interlibrary loan is indicated by symbols following the number of leaves (L) in the thesis. An asterisk indicates that the Library has catalogued more than one copy of a title, and that the second copy may be borrowed on interlibrary loan. The symbol # indicates that the Library's Graduate Social Science branch has an uncatalogued copy of the thesis which may be borrowed. Absence of these symbols indicates that the title is not available on interlibrary loan. Photocopies of all M.A. and those Ph.D. these completed before September, 1962 may be purchased from the Library's Photographic Service; those Ph.D. theses from September, 1962 on, from University Microfilms, Inc.

The bibliography is in two parts. The first part contains those items which cover more than one country, and is divided into General, Central Africa, East Africa, and West Africa; the second part, arranged by country (present name), lists those titles dealing with only one political unit.

Chronicles of the African Studies Association and of the development of African studies programs give clear evidence that both have achieved substantive progress after a rather late arrival on the academic scene. At the same time, however, mapping of both programs and Africaniste equally clearly indicates their quite restricted distribution. Consequently the impact of African studies programs and scholarship on our academies and on the wider society of which we are a part has been far more limited than is desirable.

The distribution of Africanists is largely related to the location and size of African studies programs, and the distribution of both of these in turn is influenced by population distribution in the United States. Although large parts of the United States are devoid of African studies programs and of dedicated African scholars, they certainly are not unpopulated. Thus, awareness and understanding of African phenomena bypass large portions of the student and general population, and at least some of the responsibility for ignorance about Africa results from the spotty distribution of programs and scholars. It may be argued that little or nothing can be done to remedy this maldistribution of programs and scholars, but such an argument can logically be offered only after an attempt has been made.

Scientific research of African societies and cultures in Czechoslovakia has developed only in the last two decades. Nevertheless, to precede the research there was a relatively extensive background shaped by the tradition of travelers whose interest was centered especially on geography, biology, and descriptive and collective ethnography. The most important of these travelers were Dr. Emil Holub (1847-1902), who crossed South Africa as far as the Zambezi River and published several books, most of which are now available in English, about his experiences; Remedius Prutký, a missionary who visited Ethiopia in 1751-1753 and not only described his travels but even compiled a vocabulary of the Amharic language; and Dr. Stecker and Čeněk Paclt, who traveled in the nineteenth century through Ethiopia and South Africa, respectively. In the twentieth century there was a considerable number of Czechoslovak travelers who acquainted their compatriots with the “Dark Continent.”

Before World War II, three professor of Semitology at Charles University, Prague -- R. Dvořák, R. Ru̇žička, and A. Musil -- started to study Ethiopian languages and history. The well-known Austrian scholar of Czech origin, Dr. Pavel Šebesta (Schebesta) became one of the best specialists in the anthropology and ethnography of the Pygmies.

There has been considerable discussion recently in recognition of the need to develop African studies in this country on a far wider basis than at present, where it is concentrated too narrowly in a few major centers of great academic strength. Such discussion has been exacerbated by the demands of Afro-Americans whose concern for African studies is not less significant for the debatable academic basis upon which it is posited.

The problem with all previous programs to inaugurate new African programs has been that they focused totally upon the training of faculty. There have been a series of summer courses, many of which have in themselves been of high quality and substantially imaginative. Yet they did little to innovate new programs on the campus, owing to the sluggishness of the administrative machinery or the relative indifference to the new faculty interest. The program which the African Studies Center at the University of California at Los Angeles planned for the summers of 1968 and 1969 attempted to remedy this deficiency. The project was financed by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare under National Defense Education Act funds and was organized and administered by Michael F. Lofchie and John F. Povey, themselves joint assistant directors of the UCLA African Studies Center.

Since its establishment in 1966, the Research Liaison Committee has been charged by the members of the African Studies Association with the responsibility of finding ways to strengthen collaboration among African scholars and scholars from North America engaged in African research. The R.L.C, has been the principal instrument of the African Studies Association for informing and advising its members about research projects conducted in Africa by African, American, and other scholars; about the programs and facilities of research centers and institutes located in Africa; about the policies and procedures of governments and universities in Africa with respect to research and the activities of foreign research workers; and about the special needs and priority concerns of the governmental and academic research communities in Africa. The obverse of these responsibilities has been the effort by the R.L.C, to improve the means of communication with African research centers and to increase their familiarity with the capabilities and interests of American scholars concerned with Africa, particularly in the social sciences, the humanities, and in the broad field of development research.

The R.L.C. has found two principal means of carrying out these responsibilities. First, it has entered into cooperation with groups of research centers in Africa, and with councils of scholars and directors of research institutes, to enlarge the exchange of information between the scholarly communities of Africa and North America; a notable example is the collaboration with the Council of Directors of Economic and Social Research Institutes in Africa (CODESRIA), whose chairman, Dr. H. M. A. Onitiri of the University of Ibadan, visited major centers of African studies in the United States in the spring of 1969 as a guest of the African Studies Association.