This paper is concerned with the role and responsibilities of Americans who go to African universities to profess, and with the rationale of such undertakings.

In some ways, this may seem to be a threadbare topic. The values to be achieved from such transcultural experiences have long been assumed. At least since World War II and Senator Fulbright’s great initiatives, teaching abroad has been a favored activity. Yet recently we have taken a more skeptical view. The Fulbright and other programs are in some disarray in Africa today, and there is no longer much enthusiasm, in official “development circles,” for exporting university teachers.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) currently has no direct involvement in Africa. The last trip to Africa made by a HUD official was Deputy Assistant Secretary Sam Jackson’s visit in 1972. Twenty-three Africans attended HUD training programs in 1976; they came from the following countries: Ghana—3; Kenya—2; Nigeria—7; Senegal—1; South Africa—5; Tanzania—3; and Zambia—2. HUD has no bilateral agreements with African nations.

One of the most perplexing features of the welter of events that led to the slaughter of 1972 has to do with the emergence, or the resurgence, of intra-Tutsi rivalries. These were particularly noticeable in the months immediately preceding the holocaust and involved among other things a struggle for power between the so-called Tutsi-Hima and the Tutsi-Banyaruguru. The following passage is excerpted from Father Rodegem’s article “Burundi: La Face Cachée de la Rébellion” (Intermédiaire, 15 June 1973) in which the author emphasizes the historical dimensions of the Hima-Banyaruguru conflict. One may or may not agree with the facts and interpretations presented by the author; however, the article suggests at least one possible explanation for the scale of the massacre: by systematically killing all educated Hutu elements, the Hima elites also destroyed the basis for a potential alliance between Hutu intellectuals and Tutsi-Banyaruguru.

Father Rodegem spent many years in Burundi and is intimately acquainted with the traditional aspects of Rundi culture. He is the author of Sagesse Kirundi (Tervueren: 1961) and “Ainsi Parlait Samandari: Analyse ethnolinguistique d’un phénomène de déviance dans une société à caractère empirique” (Anthropos, Vol. 69, 1974). The latter is a pioneering effort to penetrate the political culture of Burundi through techniques of analysis borrowed from ethnolinguistics.

Opinion is now universally agreed among all people of conscience, that the so-called Tanzanian experiment is a complete and dismal failure. Reviews critical of this ‘experiment’ and warning about the impending catastrophe, which began to appear in the international press in the middle of 1980 as a whisper, had become an uproar by late 1982 as the hopes and optimism that accompanied the apparent and aberrant recovery of 1976-79 were dashed and shattered by the return of the food crisis in 1980 and the perseverance and intensification of the general economic crisis. The pace of deterioration of the economy has accelerated since 1980.

In late 1966 and early 1967 this writer spent four months in Angola doing research into the development of education there during the period 1878-1914. The following report is meant to give an indication of the contents of the archives there and the procedure for gaining access to them. It supplements the information available in C. R. Boxer's Portuguese Society in the Tropics (Madison, 1965), pp. 220-224.

There are indications that historians will encounter less difficulty than scholars of other disciplines in acquiring visas for Angola. Though such visas may be obtained in the United States, they are more easily acquired directly from the Portuguese International Police (PIDE) in Lisbon. While in Lisbon it would be helpful to make contact with some of the professors at the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Política Ultramarina (Rua da Junqueira, 86). Besides providing information about any current regulations and research, they will no doubt provide letters of introduction which may prove invaluable in Angola.

The best source for historical information in Angola is the Angola Historical Archive (AHA), located in the Museum of Luanda. Permission to use it is granted by the director of the Instituto de Investigaçao Científica de Angola (IICA) located in the University (Estudos Gerais) building. The IICA, in charge of most research in the province, has been cooperative with properly identified foreign scholars.

Three films serve to explore the metamorphosis involved in translating written fiction onto the screen. Text and screen have different requirements, but there is often also a change in intended audience between written fiction and film—as demonstrated here in the cases of Xala and Kongi's Harvest. Neither such change in intended audience nor the level of funding bears a relationship to the striking difference in the quality and the success of the three films examined in this essay. The comparison among these films instead raises issues that affect all film making: the director's training and experience, and the relationship between the director and the producers. The comparison furthermore suggests two issues that are specific to the transformation of a novel or play to the screen. There is first of all the relative ease or difficulty of transforming very different texts. And there is the risk that the text may come to dominate the picture because of its stature or because of the relationship between author and director.

“Development” has become a magic word throughout Africa in this decade. And, in a great rush disturbingly reminiscent of the early days of European colonialism, national and foreign agencies are scrambling for a role in this or that project. “Consultant” and “management” offices are appearing in former storefronts in many of the larger cities; these, for a fee, will magically produce plans for any conceivable development scheme. (In 1976 I saw one thick and lavishly bound and illustrated plan for a new industrial town produced by one such firm for a project in a rural area in Nigeria; the volume envisioned in minute detail a plan for living, and for dying—several pages were devoted to plans for the town cemetery, even listing the projected costs of variously located and appointed burial plots!) A great many are playing the development game. The overall result is something like a Hydra, but the heads of the Development serpent often seem to grow randomly and independently of each other. “Development” has become a magic word, but like all things magical, no one is quite certain how it works.

Projects are being undertaken and completed, to be sure, and many of them successfully. But nearly all of them are executed quite rapidly, if not precipitously; time, after all, is money. And in the process, people are being affected.

Development problems, to paraphrase Lerner (1958: viii), are people problems, and this is the level at which social scientists should be able to play a role. From our training in social and cultural systems we think we are uniquely equipped to assess the social impact and implications of projects which seem likely to precipitate rapid social change. But social scientists, even those with extensive African field experience, most often play minor roles in African development. Why?

The underlying logic of the African struggle for independence from European rule and subsequently from neo-colonialism in all its manifestations was (and is) that the European intrusion into African life was inhumane and disruptive. European enslavement of Africans bespoke a denial of African humanity, and European colonization of the continent denied Africans the right to follow the developmental course charted by their past experiences as the most consistent with their values and aspirations; it pointed them instead along courses dictated by European self-interest. The same logic indicates that the successful struggle for African self-determination would lead to a resumption, as much as consistent with new realities, of the march halted by the European incursion, and that it would be supremely ironic if self-determination was followed by an acceptance of the new, European-imposed orientation (mental, social, or political) as unimpeachable.

The African claim to self-determination is not predicated on a supposed intrinsic superiority of African ways to European ways, but on the principle that for good or ill every people must be free to exercise ultimate control over its destiny. At the height of the campaign for independence, Nigerian politicians, for example, defiantly demanded from Britain “the right to govern or misgovern ourselves.” In that formulation was a denial of any right to any people to intrude into the private lives of any other people under any pretext and an affirmation of the rights of any people to freely conduct its own affairs and the requisite internal (even internecine) debates without the sort of outside interference that colonization represented.

The United States and Africa are in deep trouble when the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities disowns its sponsorship of the Ali Mazrui series The Africans on the grounds that it is an “anti-Western diatribe…and politically tendentious.” It bodes ill for the U.S. because it marks a return to the “know nothing” approach to Africa which has dominated American thinking about the African continent throughout most of our history. And it lends respectability to a cold war view of that continent which can only lead to greater misunderstanding, confrontation, and bloodshed for African peoples. What is so disturbing about the reaction of the NEH and a number of the series' reviewers is their exclusive focus on Mazrui's view of the West. Of the many important themes running through the series, did they not see or hear anything else? This self-indulgent preoccupation with the occasional opinion about “the West” is all too indicative of our times.

That criticism of colonialism can somehow be interpreted as “anti-American” points not only to a profound lack of comprehension of the nature of colonialism, but to the proclivity in U.S. policy toward Africa to identify with the wrong side. “Colonization should not be attacked,” claim many on the American right, “because that era was not only the apex of African development but a time when there was no communist threat on the continent.”

The right wing, however, has no monopoly on such myopia and misperception. America and Africa are also in deep trouble when specialists attribute all of Africa's maladies to colonialism or neo-colonialism.

No doubt, social problems cannot be fully understood by a mere comparison between any present situation and that prevailing in the past, say even sixty or seventy years ago. Nevertheless, there seems to be no little justification for the tendency, frequently seen in important research works on Africa, to make a parallel between the status and fight of the working classes in Europe at the end of the last century and those of the emancipating nations in general and in the African continent in particular.

It is pointed out in these works that in both cases the revendicatiohs made by the working classes in the first instance, and by whole nations in the second, were prompted by the desire for a fuller democratization of the society, an amelioration of their economic situation and legal status. Such changes were and are being achieved, amongst others, by the abolition or through reform of discriminatory legal, political, and socioeconomic systems which had previously been imposed by privileged ruling classes to the detriment of the other classes, on a national scale, where poor classes of the population were concerned in countries that now rank among the most developed ones, and on an international scale, where it is a question of peoples who have only recently passed from a state of slavehood to national independence.

Thanks to a political and social legislation containing elements of social compromise, most Western countries have become modern, democratic, affluent welfare states, with at least a minimum of social justice and no expropriation of the means of production. But in those countries where the ruling classes were uncompromising, refused to make concessions, and caused revolutions, they were completely chased from the political scene, as was the case in Eastern Europe, which gave birth to an altogether new regime (Roling 1960, p. 56).

This bibliography is a revision of a mimeographed copy which I compiled several years ago and which has been circulated privately on request. Continued interest has now prompted me to revise and publish it here. It deals mainly with the Pastoral or “Rift Valley” Masai of both Kenya and Tanzania. But it also includes many important references to other Maa-speaking peoples--such as the Samburu and Njemps (Tiamus) of Kenya and the Arusha and Baraguyu of Tanzania--who are referred to variously in the early literature as the Wakwavi, Wahumba, or Iloikop or simply as the Agricultural Masai.

Although by no means exhaustive, the bibliography is designed to include all the major works dealing with the history, language, and traditional social, political, and economic life of the Pastoral Masai. Other important items, not included here, may be found in the following:

(1) Colonial Office Files, Public Record Office, London; (2) Secretariat Archives, Nairobi, Mombasa, and Dar es Salaam; and (3) Regional and Area Administrative Office Files, Kenya and Tanzania.