Thinking about the African Studies Association – what it could do, ought to be doing, or should have done – brings to mind the suggestion once offered by some prominent academic group that the priority of their university African studies program should be Phonetics.

To make a case for greater American involvement in Africa is to take cognizance of what has gone before — eclectic embrace followed by selective disengagement. The Nixon Administration has opted for a policy of designating certain target countries for bilateral assistance and political cultivation. The itineraries of American public figures from the Vice President and Secretary of State to the astronauts and Mrs. Nixon tell us where the emphases are being placed: on the two long-standing areas of concern, Liberia and Ethiopia; on Africa's most populous state, Nigeria; on one of its larger states, Zaire, and on the home of one of Africa's senior pragmatic statesmen, Kenya. Somewhat more peripheral interest is maintained in Ghana, which has moved into the column of “reasonable” regimes. Most recently the situation in Sudan has dazzled U.S. policymakers with visions of picking up chips from the Soviets and conjuring up the type of Cold War determinant of involvement popular in the 1960s.

Jan Vansina's history of the Nyiginya kingdom joins the long list of works, both essays and novels, that have proliferated since the Rwanda Patriotic Front gained power in 1994. The rigorous application of historical criticism distinguishes this from other works that give voice primarily to passions and speculations. Vansina's work is remarkable for the author's ability to bridge past and present by placing himself downstream rather than upstream in the flow of history. This important emphasis on ancient Rwanda contributes to the understanding of today's events. Vansina was ahead of those whose project it was to reread the history of Rwanda, which began in Butare in December 1998. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that it is up to Rwandan historians themselves to compile, on the basis of the facts accepted by everyone, a history that is as impartial as possible and that might offer some guidelines for the future.

In 1962, when Vansina was writing L'évolution du royaume rwanda des origines à 1900 (The Evolution of the Rwandan Kingdom from Its Origins to 1900), his work was already marked by a rigorous exploration of historical facts. In Le Rwanda ancien (Ancient Rwanda), he proposes a new chronology of the Nyiginya kingdom, whose foundation he places around the middle of the seventeenth century. In so doing, Vansina definitively separates himself from Alexis Kagame—who situates its beginnings six centuries earlier—and thereby puts to rest the argument of historians and anthropologists, and challenges those politicians who, in the pursuit of legitimacy, have based their ideologies of the Rwandan reconquest and territorial revindication on the writings of Kagame.

The literature on political and administrative behavior in sub-Saharan Africa has proliferated at an unprecedented rate in the past decade. But notwithstanding an impressive output, Africanist political scientists of all persuasions—“institutionalists,” “behavioralists,” and so forth--have tended to ignore or treat lightly various methodological problems confronting the social sciences in general and their own discipline in particular. It is appropriate here to distinguish between methodology and preocedure. Methodology refers to the philosophy of science, to problems associated with the logic of systematic social inquiry; among the problems which are essentially methodological are classification, comparison, concept formation, theory construction, and nomothetic vs. idiographic inquiry. (Various methodological probems are examined by Brodbeck 1968, Hempel 1965, Kaplan 1964, Nagel 1961, and Natanson 1963.) Procedure, in contrast, refers to the application of specific techniques in research. While research techniques inform the day-to-day activity of systematic social inquiry, they are extraneous to the logic of that inquiry (Fleron 1968, p. 316).

The extent to which political scientists are attentive to methodology is often reflected in the quality of their research, Not surprisingly, therefore, the quality of research on political and administrative behavior in sub-Saharan Africa has been negatively affected by the tendency to dismiss or de-emphasize methodological considerations. For example, there appears to be little awareness of a cardinal principle of logical classification: that there must be “a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive set of classes for the domain under consideration” (Kalleberg 1966, p. 72; Hempel 1952, p. 51).

Zambia’s contemporary experience of recession without resolution is, alas, quite typical of the majority of African states over the decade; for since the celebration of ten years of independence in 1974, its national income has been in almost continuous decline. But this economic decay has had an uneven impact, between both time periods and social groups: occasional injections of foreign aid or loans have been permissive of relative affluence for elements in the bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy along the line-of-rail. The full impact of negative growth has been felt in the more distant rural areas and among the peasantry and the unemployed.

Public opinion of late has been riveted to Africa’s southwest. The prospects of a settlement are glimmering on the horizon. Although the prospects are not completely clear, we can begin to view concrete steps toward a peaceful settlement in the region.

Two hundred years ago, the Founding Fathers of America’s world-renowned democracy were wealthy, well-educated white males dedicated to throwing off the yoke of British oppression. In Sierra Leone since 1995, the person most associated with democracy is a petite, articulate, beautiful, in-your-face, dynamo of a woman named Dr. Kadi Sesay. Though Dr. Sesay’s job arises from a national emphasis on civic education for the masses, her work bears special scrutiny for its success in concretizing a feminist vision of female power articulated within the context of empowerment for all the country’s citizens.

Your Excellency, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Cabinet ministers, ambassadors and high commissioners, publishers, representatives of Kodansha Ltd., distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It fills me with great pleasure to be here today to receive the 1994 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.

Conjecture on any aspect of future events in Africa is hazardous; applied to politics, it may be altogether unsafe. Yet one cannot avoid looking into the future in some way. In essence our guesswork consists of extrapolations based upon trend analysis. A number of present events and forces display characteristics that suggest persistence. The convergence of the forces and their persistence offer reasonable basis for projections into the future.

Judging by the nature of past superpower involvements in Africa, it is easy to make a case for future interventions by both superpowers and intermediate (European) powers in Africa beyond the year 2000.

Christopher Waterman quotes a Yoruba popular performer: “Our tradition is a very modern tradition.” The Study of Africa in the U.S. is a very modern tradition in several senses. In the great scale of things, it is very recent. During the presentation of a National Academy of Sciences project on The Population Dynamics of Sub-Saharan Africa last year, it was pointed out that only ten years ago the Academy had postponed work on this topic simply because the data were judged insufficient for a scientific synthesis. And it is a modern tradition in the sense of lively expansion and mutation. Most notably, over those same ten years or so the participants in both academic and non-academic study, and in popular culture, have become far more diverse.

There are probably a billion videocassettes in the United States. Yet few, probably under a thousand, are African films. I want to ask why this is and describe a strategy to change it.

How can one of the least known and most under-funded cinemas in the world, African cinema, find a place in the most lavishly promoted and capitalized media marketplaces on earth, the U.S. feature film market?

In the 1950’s a Black sailor from the United States came to Capetown and gave someone there a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son. That single copy traveled around the whole country. Each person would keep it a week or two, read and reread it, and then pass it on. Native Son convinced me that as an African writer I did not have to sound like a carbon copy English boy if I wrote in English.

My statement is not an attempt to convey new information. Indeed, anyone reading simply the record of the Congressional hearings will have all the essential and relevant facts. Why is it that we have been ever searching for but never coming to the truth? Why do we listen but never hear, look but never see, manipulate but never truly feel? Perhaps we express the right facts but the wrong values?