Despite the increasing effort of Africanist scholars, and particularly historians, to decolonize African history by focusing greater attention on the role of Africans than Europeans in the unfolding of African history, historical interest in the influence of Europeans in Africa remains. This is perhaps reflected in the continuing appearance of studies devoted to European activities in Africa. However, there are those who, perhaps justifiably, question the need or value for such studies, given the trend in African studies today to de-emphasize imperial history and to accent “real” African history (Ranger, 1979; Bennett, 1981). Yet there are others who argue, rather persuasively, that studies of European activities in Africa should still be encouraged either because we do not as yet know all that we need to know about Europeans in Africa (Ranger and Weller, 1975), or because we now have ample data with which to reconsider aspects of European presence in Africa (Hopkins, 1976). Indeed, seen from this perspective of revisionist historiography, some of the recent studies of Europeans in Africa not only enhance our knowledge of the dynamics of African and European interaction but also enable us to either reject or modify many of the familiar assumptions and theories about Europeans in Africa (Hopkins, 1976; Ranger, 1979; Igbafe, 1979; Newbury, 1978).

It is indeed against this background of revisionist historiography that this present essay is attempted. It seeks, on the one hand, to reconsider the popular image of European colonial administrators as men who were characteristically genial, kindhearted, and unselfishly dedicated to the welfare of their African wards (Burns, 1949; Heussler, 1963; Bradley, 1966; Gann and Duignan, 1978).

Africa’s receptiveness to Western fashionable concepts and theories appears to have suffered little from repeated demonstration of inappropriateness. The list of inapt imports is long and quite familiar to the older generation of Africanist academics who had a hand in fashioning and disseminating them. It began with the imperative of the “nation-state” that was to be forged in the process of national integration and institution building. Economic development was to come via industrialization, “import substitution” and diversification of exports, and social modernization would follow the passing of traditional society. Political development had a complex formula: “constitutionalism” and “rational legitimacy,” “interest articulation, aggregation and representation,” “functionally specific” bureaucratic institutions, and “prescriptive” as opposed to “ascriptive” recruitment.

Higher education in Africa has gone from favored focus to disparaged wastrel to development engine in two decades.

—Joel Samoff and Bidemi Carroll

First and foremost, this is an impressive piece of scholarship. It provides an invaluable framework for the study of the ever-evolving relationship between universities in Africa and the diverse, not to say motley, set of external institutions (academic and financial) that have worked with them from the time of independence to the present. As a comprehensive and largely descriptive account it covers rather fully the variety of issues that have emerged in the course of these relationships and pulls together much important information and many of the sources from which future scholarship can depart. It represents in itself a major and impressive piece of research and compilation and goes far to fulfilling its expressed aim: “to provide the foundation for frank debates about the merits, modes, and pitfalls of partnerships” (p. 72).

The report is analytical in the sense of identifying issues, but judicious in seeking balanced comment, and because it is careful to avoid judgments, it steers clear of provocation. For this reader, and no doubt for others who lived and worked throughout much of the period being described, it also has an inevitable biographical quality. For that reason I had expected to be taking issue with some, if not a great deal, of its content. Not so! Because of the circumspection, the balanced perspective, and the careful restraint with which issues are presented, it is hard to disagree fundamentally with much of the account.

Most of the Fellows of the African Studies Association have participated in at least one Peace Corps training program, so that they have an interest in, and opinions on, this subject. The present article summarizes the major factors of training programs, outlines the main characteristics of the projects in Africa and of the volunteers, and then considers some aspects of the relationship between the Peace Corps and the universities. Finally, there is a detailed summary of all Peace Corps training programs for Africa, from the first one in June 1961 through the summer of 1965. Forty-four different universities, colleges, or other organizations have produced 132 programs for 19 different African countries, and some 6,000 volunteers have successfully completed the training and gone to serve with the Peace Corps in Africa (the usual service period spent in Africa is two years).

The first step in the establishment of a training program is a discussion between an interested university and the Training Division of the Peace Corps, followed by a series of negotiations which culminate in a formal contract. The contract specifies the duration of the program, the number and educational background of trainees, the faculty who will participate, the details of phases of training, and the country and project for which the trainees are being prepared. An important part of the contract is the budget, the cost generally being a little more than $200 per trainee per week.

Traditional African art for the most part was more closely integrated with other aspects of life than those which might be described as purely esthetic. Art for art's sake — as a governing esthetic concept—seems not to have existed in Africa. Indeed, the more closely an art form is related to a major non-esthetic aspect of culture such as religion, the more distant it is from such separatist philosophical concepts.

In fact traditional Africati sculpture might best be described as based on a concept of art-for-life's sake. It was, in most cases, closely allied to those cultural mechanisms dedicated to the maintenance of order and well being. In short, sculpture was oriented to those social values upon which depended the sense of individual and tribal security.

These values were often formalized in exceedingly practical and commonsense terms, as is demonstrated in this Bambara prayer addressed to the ancestors:

I sacrifice this hen to you in the name of my children and myself. Protect us from all evil. Give us rain at the time the rains begin; give us a good harvest, a happy old age, women, children and the health to cultivate our fields. Do not be angry with us. We love you, we honor you. Be happy during your sojourn in Lehara, the realm of the invisible. (Kjersmeier 1935: 15).

On the afternoon of 15 September 1864 John Hanning Speke, discoverer of the Source of the Nile, accidentally shot himself in a field at Neston Park, near Box, Wiltshire. In the hundred years since there have been numerous biographies of other explorers of Africa—shelves of books record the achievements of Livingstone, Stanley and Burton—but Speke has been accorded nothing longer than periodical articles or sections in books. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that any extensive papers exist, but there is a good deal of scattered information in print, and this note is an attempt to relate this to an outline of his life.

In October 1986, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, a series of panels was convened to commemorate the founding of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin twenty-five years previously. By many criteria this had been a successful program in promoting African studies as an academic field in the United States, in part because from the earliest years the program had looked to the future development of the discipline. It was fitting, therefore, that this “commemoration” not simply be an exercise in recalling the “glorious past” but instead be given to reviewing the development of the field over that period, and to looking ahead to likely trends in the academic understanding of Africa in the coming years.

The articles included in this symposium were first presented at panels organized as part of this commemoration. As befitting the occasion, they were intended to be reflective rather than critical, exploratory rather than definitive, ranging freely over the themes and features that have characterized the study of African history at the University of Wisconsin over that period. But it was also felt that despite the occasion that engendered them, these papers all had the potential of a wider audience, in part because they addressed issues characteristic of African historical studies in this country in general, with both their strengths and drawbacks.

These papers were presented at two panels of very different orientation, and that organization has been maintained here. One category, consisting of articles by Ewald, Spear, and Harms, dealt with “The Craft of the Historian.” These papers examined three related dimensions to historical inquiry in Africa: historians' relations to their sources, the analytic skills needed to assess the data, and the conceptual issues involved in historical understanding. Another panel dealt with the theme “Future Trends and Perspectives in African History.” This set of papers addressed the recent development of certain fields of inquiry and projected the likely trends of such studies over the coming years.

The Kwilu rebellion of 1964 belongs within a little studied species of political violence: the aborted rural revolution.

Political change in Africa marked by violence seems endemic—historically, revolts and resistance to colonial intrusion; international conflict during the two world wars and along borders since independence; civil strife in many countries; a plethora of military coups d'état; anomic violence of several forms, including urban riots, hut burnings, and women's uprisings. Yet one form of political violence appears conspicuous by its absence. Political revolution has been rare in recent African history. To be certain, events in Algeria, Rwanda, and Zanzibar entailed profound social and political transformations, making them revolutionary in import (Humbaraci, 1966; Wolf, 1969; Lemarchand, 1968 and 1970; Lofchie, 1965). These are exceptions. Even a society as polarized as that of the Republic of South Africa appears to negate the standard explanations of revolution (Adam, 1971; Daniel, 1975; Van den Berghe, 1965). Understanding the aborted rural revolution in Kwilu thus will enable us better to grasp the obstacles to sweeping political change in Africa south of the Sahara.

For much of 1964, young maquisards controlled an area nearly the size of Belgium in the Western Congolese province of Kwilu. Leader of the uprising was Pierre Mulele, briefly a cabinet minister under Patrice Lumumba, and later an official of the breakaway Gizengist government. The rapid initial success of the partisan fighters testified to widespread political and social frustration among many Kwilu residents, to popular support for Mulele's efforts at violent and extensive change, to the coercive inadequacies of the national armed forces, and to the mobilizing effects of an ideology that interwove indigenous and Marxist threads. Only with the major reorganization of the Congolese military (including the recruitment of foreign mercenaries) was the uprising quelled and Mulele forced into exile. How the Mulelist fighters gained their popular support and initial military success are questions of great concern to analysts of African politics.