This article is intended to serve as a preview of a detailed study of the two administrations of Governor Louis Léon César Faidherbe (1854-1861 and 1863-1865) which has been in preparation for some years. For despite his recognized importance as one of the founders of French rule in west Africa, he has remained surprisingly unstudied but nevertheless the subject of several myths. Although an article of this length obviously cannot pretend to be comprehensive, it will stress those general aspects of Faidherbe's two administrations—personal, military, political, and administrative—which have been most prone to misinterpretation and exaggeration.

The core of Faidherbe's achievement in Senegal was his realization of the so-called plan of 1854, the synthesis of a series of ministerial instructions (SOM: Sénégal I, 37-40: MMC to Protet, 1/4, 1/5, 11/, and 12/14/53; and 1/21, 5/18, 7/27, and 12/18/54) which had been given first to his predecessor, Captain Protet, and then to Faidherbe himself. These instructions recapitulated a plan which had been put forth in two petitions addressed to Protet which Marc Maurel of the Maurel and Prom Company of Saint-Louis and Bordeaux had written and had had signed by the major wholesalers, merchants, and other notables of Saint-Louis, the first in December 1851 (SOM: Sénégal XIII, 1a) and the second in February 1854.

This plan, parts of which went back to the 1820s, called for the French, based in small enclaves on the Atlantic coast at Saint-Louis and at a few other posts along the Senegal River, to become the dominant power in the area rather than one among many, some of whom were stronger than they.

The newly independent nations of the Maghrib inherited many political problems from their former imperial ruler. Of these, the question of frontiers was potentially the most explosive. The Algerian-Moroccan hostilities in the fall of 1963 provided clear evidence of this fact. Another territorial dispute pitted Tunisia against Algeria in a diplomatic crisis. In each case, the government in Algiers disputed claims based on the historic rights of Morocco and Tunisia. In contradiction to the ancient claims of its neighbors, the Algerian thesis was that it now owned all territories that had been controlled by the French administration of colonial Algeria (“Algerian-Moroccan Border Conflict…” 1963). In order to judge these contradictory allegations, it is thus necessary to look back to French colonial policies. Such a study inevitably leads to the conclusion that France was largely responsible for this great divisive question in North Africa. The blame might well be mitigated, however, for beyond selfish French colonial interests lay varying concepts of statehood and long-standing historical problems.

When the French conquered Algiers, they had no plan to take all of Algeria. Nor was there an Algerian state in the European sense, or an Algerian consciousness. Nationalism was apparently born out of opposition to French rule. When, about 1837, France decided to take all of the “Regency of Algiers,” no one knew exactly what the term included. French expansion in North Africa, however, quickly brought the colonialists into direct conflict with the ill-defined empires of Morocco and of the Beylik of Tunis as well as with so-called Algerian dissidents.

On its fortieth anniversary, the African Studies Association faces the task of forging mutuality between itself and others in the study of Africa and in relationships with Africa. This task involves three distinct challenges. The first is to overcome the historical hierarchies based on race and nationality that attended the creation and early history of the ASA. These hierarchies pushed many Africanists of color to the margins of our organization. The second challenge is to address the need for mutuality in internal policy relationships regarding Africa, particularly at a time when many American international affairs experts have said diat there are no U.S. national interests that link us to Africa and that any such assertions are divisive. However, the third and perhaps most time-sensitive challenge is that of creating mutuality in intra-ASA relationships. We must grow comfortable with the increasing diversity of ASA members. We cannot cede African studies to either black or white Africanists, but we must insist that our association, our newly trained professionals, and our ASA leadership mirror the cultural and ethnic diversity that is America.

Max Yergan was one of the most controversial foreign-born leaders ever associated with modern South Africa. From 1921 to 1936 he was the only black representative of the North American branch of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) permitted to work in the South African field. Yergan's South African service radicalized the young missionary, culminating in his resignation from the YMCA in 1936. The next decade of Yergan's life was devoted to left-wing activism. In 1948 however, ostensibly disillusioned by the onset of the Cold War, Yergan abandoned leftist activism in favor of ultraconservativism.

South Africa loomed large in each of these transformations. This article is concerned with Yergan's shift from evangelical Protestantism to revolutionary socialism, highlighting the critical role that residence in South Africa played in his early political evolution. It also brings into focus the broader subject of Afro-American linkages with Black South Africans, making special reference to the advent and larger significance of Black American YMCA work among Africans.

Max Yergan was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1892, one of several sons of a literate black seamstress named Lizzie Yeargan. While much of his early life is obscure, he seems to have been influenced by the philosophical trends of African Redemption and Ethiopianism which swept many religious communities within the African Diaspora during the last quarter of the 19th century.

More than five decades after independence, Africa still struggles with the legacies of colonial partition. On the territorial frontiers between the postcolonial inheritors of the two major colonial powers, Great Britain and France, the continuing impact of European colonialism remains most acute. On the one hand, the splitting of erstwhile homogeneous ethnic groups into British and French camps gave rise to new national identities; on the other hand, it circumvented any possibility of sovereignty via ethnic solidarity. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the ethnic groups that were divided between English- and French-speaking states in West Africa, let alone the African continent writ large. This article joins postcolonial ethnography to the emerging field of comparative borderland studies. It argues that, although norms of state-based identity have been internalized in the Anglophone–Francophone borderlands, indigenous bases of association and behavior continue to define life along the West African frontier in ways that undermine state sovereignty. Although social scientists tend to focus on national- and sub-national-level analyses, and increasingly on the effects of globalization on institutional change, study of the African borderlands highlights the continuing importance of colonial legacies and grassroots-derived research.

English and French attitudes toward Africans in the Senegambia developed and became well-defined during the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century. These attitudes were influenced by three main factors: European ethnocentrism, the commercial relations which governed European-African intercourse, and the growth of the slave trade. During this period, Europeans expressed increasingly negative characterizations of Africans and their way of life. An ideology of African inferiority served, in part, to validate the Atlantic slave trade. It was easier to justify the enslavement of people who were considered less civilized or even a lower form of humanity. The formation of this ideology was facilitated by ethnocentric perceptions which led to a bias in favor of more westernized peoples. One important parameter by which Senegambians came to be judged inferior to their European counterparts was in the area of religious beliefs and practices.

In the Senegambia, French and English observers gradually established a sliding scale with Christians at the top, Muslims somewhere in the middle, and followers of local African religions at the bottom. The fact that Senegambians were not Christians eventually came to be cited as evidence of their cultural, intellectual, and moral inferiority. By the late eighteenth century, this approach would lead to the development of pseudo-scientific attitudes about European racial superiority.

The Senegambia is of particular interest to the study of the growth of ethnocentric attitudes. It was the region of earliest established seaborne contact between Europe and West Africa, as well as an early locus of French and English participation in the slave trade. In addition, the various ethnic groups in the region included both Muslims and non-Muslims. European responses to the different religions are well documented in the letters and narratives of traders and explorers, a fact which facilitates the study of comparative images of the different groups.

Secrecy and its performative display have been privileged perspectives in the study of poro and similar power associations in West Africa. I develop an alternative understanding of the Senufo poro as an institution that fosters and sustains bodily experience, establishing an all-embracing sensory regime for members as well as non-members in their villages. Participation in nighttime funerary rites creates the image of an invisible social body, and shared bodily experience informs collective intentionality towards the social. Serving as a stable nodal point in everyday discourse, this function contributes to the recent revitalization of poro associations in Côte d’Ivoire’s post-conflict society.

The Nigeria-Biafra war contributed to the rise of post-colonial moral interventionism, ushering in a new form of human rights politics. During the war, relief agencies evacuated 4,000 children from the conflict zones to Gabon and Côte d’Ivoire to protect them from the conflict. This was part of a broader international humanitarian airlift operation that brought relief supplies to the besieged Biafra territory. At the end of the war, most of the children were returned to their homes in Nigeria through an international humanitarian repatriation effort. Ibhawoh examines how state interests and the politics of international humanitarian interventionism manifested in debates about classifying and protecting displaced children, the most vulnerable victims of the conflict.

One major consequence of black African independence has been the redirection of the continent's historians. Since the 1960s, researchers have sought not only to rediscover but revise Africa's pre-colonial image. On one hand, efforts have been made to recover those aspects of history and tradition that had been suppressed or destroyed by colonial power. On the other, attempts continue to restore other areas which were merely distorted by European rule. Too often it was the European distortion rather than the African tradition that was passed on to the younger generations by colonial educators. As a result, youngsters throughout the continent were deprived of those portions of their heritage of which Europeans disapproved.

This is nowhere more true than in the sphere of the African supernatural. The entire network of relationships between the gods, ancestral spirits and the living, which formed so great a portion of the latters' daily lives, was initially greeted by colonial hostility and contempt. Trapped within their own religious framework, Europe's missionaries and administrators—with a few striking exceptions—were unwilling to examine what they saw. They placed every form of supernatural practitioner and practice under the labels of “witchcraft” and “witchdoctor,” while attempting to replace them with values of their own.

A few European and African scholars have opposed the general trend. Their works have probed deeply into supernatural tradition at a regional or tribal level. In West Africa, Bohannen, Debrunner, Basen and Field, in studies of Nigerian and Ghanaian societies, have investigated the relations between West African gods and their human servants.

This article, which derives from the wisdom of my Koranic teachers in Kankan, Guinea, as well as the dedication of the Africanist community, discusses the question of the representation of Africa in general, and especially the claim made by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that Africans committed a Holocaust-type crime by selling other blacks to whites. To refute this allegation, I rely on my familiarity with the literature on the quasi-universality of slavery in human history and on the Atlantic slave trade. This leads me to assert that, though painful to acknowledge, some Africans of the slave trade era did participate as pivotal middlemen in the brutal, ignominious, and peculiar trade that drastically changed the image of the black in the white mind. But the wars and raiding that resulted in the enslavement of millions of Africans were not fought according to any theory of racial or ethnic purity such as the one that would emerge as a key Nazi ideology. Furthermore, sound historical evidence points to the European and American origins of the slave trade. Far from being an accident, the slave trade was a significant part of modern European expansion. The white businessmen, ship owners, mariners, and plantation owners played the dominant role in this business, a point to which Gates—unlike W.E.B. Du Bois, in whose grand tradition he aspires to follow—pays only lip service. Therefore, the notion of a black “Holocaust” perpetrated by Africans in the era of the slave trade is a flawed and objectionable analogy which tends to “relativize” the Holocaust and to sow discord in the relationship between Africans and black people of the diaspora.

Southern Africa earns little press coverage in the United States. Issues which relate to this part of the world are, newsmen feel, of minimal interest to the American news consumer. But the lack of coverage reflects another phenomenon: the nature of the activities of Southern African agents and allies in the U.S. These pressure groups, unlike those of the splashier (domestic) labor, medical and legal lobbies, do not concern themselves with grassroots activity or extensive media attention. Like the Nixon Administration at least until the Watergate debacle the Southern Africa-oriented pressure groups foster and consciously maintain a low profile.

Health care services in South Africa are in decline. Inadequate resources, the fragmentation of services along racial lines, their division between a confused jumble of authorities together with a growing privatization of medical care are among the many factors having grave effects on an already poorly constructed health service. The persistence of high levels of infant mortality and the widespread nature of preventable disease provide clear measures indicating that existing health services have failed to meet the needs of the majority of the population for basic medical care. The changes that are currently underway in health services are making it less likely that they can adequately contribute to providing health for all.

There can be little doubt that the African refugee problem is a severe one that should command a good deal more attention than it has received over the past few years in the public’s eye. But if the African refugee crisis has received less than its deserved attention, the role of private voluntary organizations (PVOs) in responding to that crisis has received less. It is the purpose of this brief inquiry to assess the role of PVCs in the African refugee situation. Before doing so it is essential that the dimensions of Africa’s refugee problem be briefly outlined.

When I was asked to share some of my reflections on the evolution of African Diaspora studies in the United States, I recalled that a colleague and I mused about the appearance of recent advertisements in scholarly journals for African Diaspora specialists. We also observed that several colleges and universities have courses with African Diaspora in the title. Indeed, Diaspora as a description of the dispersion and settlement of Africans abroad is fairly common in academic parlance today and increasingly so in popular discussions; however, such has not always been the case.

For decades, American scholars have been studying one aspect or another of the African experience. From 1927 on, Professor Melville J. Herskovits used his field research and scholarly insights to fashion courses on Africa offered as part of the regular curriculum at Northwestern University. Northwestern and Indiana graduate students, and possibly others, were already completing distinguished Ph.D. dissertations in the late 1930s that were based on field research in Africa or other types of original data. What we generally mean by African studies developed at a later stage, when the scholarly interaction of specialists on Africa drawn from a number of disciplines is formalized through a structure established by their institution.

As we all know, the historic African diaspora in the United States is the result of the European slave trade, which resulted in millions of people being taken from Africa. Dei and Asgharzadeh correctly point out in this issue that this population and its descendents constitute a portion of the original African brain drain. Often, consideration of the causes of, problems of, and solutions to the African brain drain ignore this population and place most of the emphasis and research on the contemporary African diaspora. This may have to do with conclusions in some of the research contending that this historic diaspora lost all linkages to Africa. However, there is a vast body of literature that supports the claim that the institution of slavery did not totally sever social, cultural, economic, and political linkages.

That there is a strong historical intellectual tradition of African Americans studying Africa is news to some. That there remains a demand among African Americans in the United States to study Africa is also a surprise. That these ideas are challenging to some is ludicrous to others. For many African Americans in African studies, affirming our engagement with Africa over and over is not only a nuisance but also a waste of precious time and intellectual energy. After countless efforts, many African Americans have simply disengaged, refusing to have these futile conversations. Others bear witness in perpetuity to the defense of Black nationality and global Pan-Africanism for themselves, the race, and the enlightenment of disbelievers. Both groups act with calculated rationality, yet denials of African Americans’ interest in, engagement with, and effect on African studies abound. The denial within the community of scholars comes mostly from White Americans but also from continental Africans and other African Americans.

Africa and Africans do not get along well with the United States press, radio and television—and vice versa. Most Africans (whether students, individuals, or government officials) who have had some exposure believe it offers of Africa. Most directors of the U.S. media are leery of Africa and would prefer major news events to occur elsewhere. Fraternization and sympathy are mostly limited to African journalists who have lived or traveled in the United States (a considerable number on various exchange grants) and American journalists who have done an African stint. Alcoholically cursing their respective bosses, these two groups usually get on quite well.

The decolonization process set in motion by the spectacular change of government in Lisbon in April 1974 produced a geopolitical earthquake across all of southern Africa. Its repercussions were deeply felt in the Republic of South Africa, where the government was forced to undertake a fundamental reassessment of South African relations with Mozambique, with Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and with Namibia (South West Africa).