Dans sonétude sur la critique américaine de la littérature française (“the achievements, the shortcomings, the distinguishing features”), Henri Peyre (1966, Introduction), déplorant le silence relatif de cette critique vis-à-vis de la littérature non-métropolitaine, déclarait peut-être prématurément:

Si la critique contemporaine et l'enseignement des littératures d'expression française dans les universités américaines démentent, en partie, la justesse de cette observation, c'est que d'autres événements d'importance non moins considérable ont amené les critiques et les professeurs à se tourner vers l'Afrique noire et à étudier sa littérature, qu'elle soit d'expression française ou d'expression anglaise.

Quoi qu'il en soit il n'est plus permis de douter que la littérature nord-africaine d'expression française a atteint aujourd'hui l'age de raison—tant par la quantité des oeuvres produites que par leur qualité. Il va sans dire que cette littérature ne date pas d'aujourd'hui. L'algérianisme qui se manifeste si brillamment de nos jours remorte à la seconde moitié du XIXe siécle et trouve son origine dans la pénétration de la pensée française en Afrique du Nord à partir de 1830.

Pendant plus de cent ans, ne l'oublions pas, l'Afrique du Nord, et plus particuliérement l'Algérie—a été le prolongement de la France métropolitaine et beaucoup de Français y ont fait carriére comme ils l'auraient fait en France.

In most learned societies, including this one, the president is expected to take the opportunity offered by the annual meeting to deliver himself of some reasonably academic statements--usually of a more or less esoteric nature--on a particular aspect of the field or discipline with which he has an especially close acquaintance from his own research. Under the particular circumstances of this meeting of the African Studies Association, however, I propose to break with past practice and to talk with you this morning about some aspects of the general health of the Association and, perhaps more importantly, of the health of research in African studies.

I would like to begin with a brief summary of the major happenings in the life of the Association which have transpired over the course of the past year. I would then like to comment on some of the topics which are to be discussed in the panels scheduled for later this morning and for tomorrow evening. The purpose of these latter remarks will be chiefly to provide a kind of springboard from which the panel discussions may take off--if only from a position of disagreement with my comments.

It is customary to provide at the beginning of a scholarly volume both a disclaimer and achnowledgements. I will follow this custom, first by emphasizing clearly that what I have to say this morning is to be considered as a purely personal statement.

An impressive feature of modern Africa is the rise of many new towns. The problems of urban unemployment, education, planning, development, and social welfare hold the attention of many Africans and Africanists; there is a wide range of urban topics worthy of study. My purpose here, however, is to speculate on the location, the growth, and the modernization of new African cities. To be brief, and to exclude cities like Cairo and Cape Town which have existed for centuries, I shall deal only with middle Africa.

It is well known that there were only a few urban centers in middle Africa in pre-colonial times: Ibadan and other Yoruba towns in Nigeria, Sudanic centers such as Kano and Timbuktu, Aksum and later Ethiopian towns, East Coast trade centers like Mombasa, and vanished cities like Zimbabwe are examples (Steel 1961).

One result of European contact and colonialism was the establishment of small coastal trading centers. Some were temporary trading posts, others surf ports that flourished for decades or centuries before declining. And a few persisted and grew into modern cities. Often a decision as to which would be an administrative center, a starting point for a railway, or the site for an improved harbor started a process of rapid growth for the favored centers and of eventual decline for the others.

The bulk of research on African political institutions has been conducted by political scientists trained in the precepts of Western culture, and thus an appreciation for the uniqueness of the contributions of African society is lost. Many Western scholars even go so far as to insist that Africa offers no new theoretical problems since human beings are the same and political problems similar the world over. This is false for two reasons. First, man is a direct product of his environment and his problems are defined meaningfully in terms of that environment. Second, environmental and procedural conditions in Africa differ significantly from those in Europe and, by extension, the United States. In Africa social processes do not represent, as they do in Europe, static, readily identifiable forces and interests. They tend rather to defy neat and convenient type-casting and classification.

Let me cite three examples. The average Western scholar looks for institutions in discussing governments. He normally asks, what type of government is this? Unitary, federal, or confederal? Yet the African government is personal, not institutional. To the African, what matters is not the formal function assigned to an institution by its name, but the phases of the flow of policy to which the institution and its personnel contribute. If we look first for institutions and then ask what functions they perform, we may see a less comprehensive picture of the African world than we would by first identifying the political process and then asking which sub-systems contribute to its various branches.

The purpose of this study is to examine the problems of development in Africa. The word “development” is used here in a much broader sense than in the accustomed meaning assigned to it by an economist seeing it narrowly as economic growth. It is used here to encompass social growth by which I mean not only the development of new social institutions and cultural forms in keeping with modernization and the development of a technological civilization in Africa, but also the development of social attitudes, skills, and, if you will, “mental sets” which will favor modernization in the economic field, in education, in politics, and in religion. In my view, the demands for modernization are such that they will challenge traditional cultural norms, values, and prejudices. I do not assume here that the adoption of modernity will necessarily condemn all traditional values and social forms. I only assume that the challenge of modernity will be so thorough-going that no area of African life will go unchallenged. The values and institutions which will show themselves adaptable will survive while those which fail to pass the test of usefulness and meaningfulness will be discarded. In my view, there is nothing to worry about in this, for, as I have had occasion to poinṭ out before (Vilakazi 1957), there is neither moral nor intellectual excellence in a people's sticking to the past merely because it belongs to their forefathers.

Two good goals are in collision in African Studies in the United States--the fostering of certain black interests and the untrammeled pursuit of scholarship. I think that neither needs to give way before the other, provided a division of labor can be devised which secures the autonomy of scholarship from politics. This is the gist of the remarks that follow. In proceeding with these remarks, I shall refer to the governance of the African Studies Association and the disproportionately small number of black inquirers in a field concerned with an area with which blacks have a special tie, only as these matters seem to me to have implications for the autonomy of scholarship.

The view has been expressed that the conduct of inquiry about Africa needs to be radically revised so that black people will have control over their own history and its interpretation (Clarke 1969, p. 9). Adherents of this view, in elaboration, say they wish to have “the study of African life…undertaken from a Pan-Africanist perspective,” which “defines that all black people are African people and rejects the division of African peoples by geographical locations based on colonial spheres of influence” (Clarke 1969, p. 11). I think this view is representative of thinking sufficiently widespread to warrant considering it with the utmost seriousness in any effort to deal with the future of African studies in the United States.

The Anglo-Ashanti war of 1900, the seventh in a series which began in 1806, is a classic example of a war which was not wanted by the combatants but which was bound to occur if the question of the power struggle between Great Britain and Ashanti, in the Gold Coast, was to be settled once and for all. At the outbreak of the conflict the Ashanti confederacy was a mere shadow of its former self. The Asantehene who should have given the lead to his people was in exile. Thanks to the policy of British colonial officials, the confederacy had been broken up and many of its component parts persuaded to sign separate treaties by which they placed themselves under the protection of the British government. Militarily this was significant for it made any concerted action against the colonial government very difficult, if not impossible, and ensured that any dissident state could more easily be isolated and dealt with by the little military force at the disposal of the governor.

Further evidence of the unpreparedness of the Ashantis for this major conflict was given by F.M. Hodgson, the governor of the Gold Coast, who stated that up to the time of his departure from Accra (on his illfated journey to Kumasi) there was nothing to suggest that the Ashantis were planning a revolt. This attitude was also shared by the local government officials in Kumasi, who maintained a vast intelligence network in the area.

The international system is becoming increasingly characterized by the evolutionary development of integrated subordinate regional systems (see Masters 1961; Haas 1949, 1965; Miller 1967; Segal 1967; Herz 1959; Yalen 1965). The leading scholars in the field have responded to this change by formulating new analytical concepts. Indeed, several preliminary studies have already been published on the developing subordinate regional systems of the Middle East, southern Asia and Africa (Binder 1958, Brecher 1963ab, Zartman 1967, Saenz 1968bc).

The advocates of regionalism and integration theory generally agree that developing subordinate regional systems have basic characteristics in common. These systems are considered to be autonomous, but not entirely independent of the overall international system. The subordinate systems are usually limited to a general geographical identification area. The nature of the system is reflected in a regional organization designed to foster mutual coordination and cooperation on matters of common interest to its members. As is usually the case in the development of new analytical concepts, however, there are several issues of contention concerning the utility of the subordinate regional systems concept (Hanson 1969, Rye 1968, Saenz 1969).

This article will not attempt to deal with all the unanswered questions relating to regional integration. It will, however, attempt to formulate some tentative and exploratory conclusions about those issues that relate specifically to the role of the Organization of African Unity in the developing subordinate African regional system.

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.

My real interest in Fanon dates from a night in August 1967 when, together with a couple hundred West Indian students in London, we converged on our Students' Center to listen to a lecture delivered by Stokely Carmichael. One or two of us in the audience had even been at primary school with him in Trinidad, though he probably didn't suspect it. “Can't you remember him?” asked an old classmate of mine, trying to jolt my memory. “He was always fighting!”

My recollections from that night are several--the white agent provocateur who entered the building and tried unsuccessfully to incite us to violence against him; the contingent of policemen who, transported in an assortment of vehicles, swooped down on the building from all directions as we stood talking to Stokely after the lecture; the haste with which Stokely was spirited away from the scene by his friends wishing to avoid an “incident”; the anguish with which I watched some of my friends come to within an inch of blowing their cool in the face of the police provocations--yet a riot was avoided, and though the British government still banned Stokely from the country shortly afterwards, their arguments would have looked much more plausible if we had succumbed to the provocations of that night.

The first and perhaps the liveliest and most controversial political debate on Nigerian foreign policy arose over the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Agreement. Both the publication and the ratification of the agreement were followed by severe outbursts of public indignation all over the country, particularly in the South. Despite these widespread criticisms and mass protest, the agreement was not without ardent supporters and sympathizers. The purpose of this paper is to examine not only the main lines of division that existed between those organized groups and individuals that supported the Defence Pact and those that opposed it and relentlessly fought for its rejection, but also the rationale behind the various positions taken by these individuals and groups in that foreign policy debate. Some of the ramifications and implications of the Defence Agreement as well as the accuracy and relevance of various opinions held or expressed will also be discussed. Such an overall treatment of the articulate opinion that formed around the issue of the Defence Pact, it is believed, will help us to understand which of the basic factors of Nigerian foreign policy—personality, organizational, societal, political, and environmental—played an important role in the definition and implementation of the post-independence Nigerian foreign policy.

Until Nigeria's independence in 1960, the federal powers over defence and foreign affairs were exercised by the British government. During the Nigerian Constitutional Conference of 1957, however, it was decided that British control over Nigeria's military forces should cease after April 1958.

One of the most attractive and stimulating features about research in African history has been its eclecticism. Grounded particularly in the extensive and fertile field of social anthropology, Africanists have explored the implications of cultural relativism and the techniques of structural-functional analysis. Now, when some of the basic assumptions which have undergirded social sciences are being questioned, historians might re-examine their own orientations toward the men and societies about which they write.

Claude Lévi-Strauss has suggested that Westerners have been taught to identify subjectively with the “we” of the West, in subconscious opposition to the “other” of the rest of the world. European historians have often encompassed basic contradictions within the Western heritage by opposing that heritage, as a package, to historical experience elsewhere (Lévi-Strauss 1967, p. 258 f.n.). Intensive studies in local history throughout the world, on the other hand, can contribute immensely to reaching a fuller understanding of various ways in which men have related to one another. According to Lévi-Strauss,

That research by expatriates in Africa should henceforth more obviously point toward the solution of African problems hardly needs restatement. Indeed, merely to restate it may damage further the already strained credibility of American Africanists' desires to conduct research in Africa that is responsive simultaneously to theoretical concerns and to Africa's real needs.

Moreover, even a genuine demonstration of dedication to problem-oriented research is not guaranteed to silence the critics. Real accomplishments may, in the present climate, have no more impact than pious declarations of intent. African studies as conducted by American scholars is presently under such impassioned attack from so many quarters and for so many reasons that even tangible accomplishments may not be given much weight by those who feel only anger and indignation when they consider African studies. Whatever the record may show, critics of both the left and the right in recent months have interpreted African studies in the United States as biased either in one or another direction and as lacking the essential, if ill-defined, quality called “relevance.”

Thus, in Montreal in October 1969 a coalition of African and Afro-American critics dismissed the totality of African studies in the United Sates as irrelevant to Africa. Virtually the entire enterprise was labeled the willing tool of capitalist, neo-colonialist, white racist ideology. Presumably, the record of American Africanists elicited this attack.

It is commonplace to refer to southern Africa as an area of confrontation and strife — an area where conflict between white and black could engulf the southern half of the continent in total warfare. President Kaunda's warning that “warfare in southern Africa would make Vietnam look like a child's picnic” characterizes the opinion of a large number of concerned lookers-on.

Adding to the severity of the situation is the possibility of big-power involvement. With the outbreak of open hostilities in southern Africa, it is possible that the major powers would be seized by a crisis of brinkmanship. Even while failing to lead to war, such a crisis would threaten the modus Vivendi which enables the big powers to regulate their conflicts and to forestall armed hostilities.

Motivated in part by these concerns, the arms control project of the Center for International Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology simulated the conduct of American and foreign leaders under conditions of conflict in southern Africa. In this article, I will report on some aspects of CONEX III, as this simulation was called. I will leave it largely to the reader to assess the validity of the findings and will furnish materials to enable such assessments. Questions of validity aside, the study is an important one. It brings to light the options possibly available to the leaders of black Africa for preserving the peace of the continent while advancing the goals of self-determination and majority rule.

Recently it was my privilege to examine the minutes of the Legislative Council, or LEGCO, of the East African Protectorate. This council began its deliberations in August 1907 and after a long series of historical developments eventually evolved into the present legislature of the Republic of Kenya. When I first approached the minutes for the earliest years of LEGCO'S existence, it was with many questions in my mind as well as something of the excitement with which one might open a new mystery story. Granted that this first council was entirely appointed or nominated; granted there were only Europeans sitting on it; granted the official majority prevented the unofficial members from determining policy. Granting all that, this LEGCO was a small step forward from rule by the Governor and Executive Council only. With the addition of elected members after World War I, a gradual expansion of the institution could take place until Mr. Kenyatta could take his seat as Prime Minister. What did those first members want in the way of legislation? What did the LEGCO, the proto-ancestor of the present-day Kenya National Assembly, regard as important business in 1907?

With these and other questions in my mind, I read with some surprise that one of the first bills proposed and eventually passed in the LEGCO was an ordinance to provide licensing for ostrich farmers. I was not prepared for anything so exotic as this and read this bill and its subsequent amendments with keen interest.

There is no consensus among students and politicals, particularly in Africa, on the importance of efforts to obtain political and organizational unity in Africa and the role of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). (See Duffy and Manners 1961.) Some scholars follow K. Nkrumah's (1963) views that the continent will he unable not only to rid itself of backwardness, but it will not even be able to live in freedom and peacefully coexist with other nations without unity, considered by them to be a precondition to putting an end to colonialism and imperialism on its territory. Others stress that as in other parts of the world the conditions are not ripe for the realization of this end, and even not for larger cooperation and coordination, and that in Africa, above all, there is only room for limited frameworks between the different sovereign states. However, the latter—according to this approach—may contribute with time to greater partnership and, in spite of differing interests, develop into an important subsystem in international relations (Dekkers 1964, McKay 1963) free from subordination (compare Zartman 1967, P. 545 and Rivkin 1963). Some consider the OAU as absolutely helpless, stressing its failure even to prevent the United Kingdom's open decision of July 1970 on arms supplies to South Africa. Others stress that this decision is, above all, a result of U.N. weakness. Accordingly this has nothing to do with the prospect of the OAU's becoming an important factor in the international arena (Burke 1964).

The major services afforded by local authorities in Kenya are primary education, health, housing, roads and water supplies. Local authorities finance these services from taxes (graduated personal tax, land rates and cesses), school fees, other fees and charges, and government grants. Significant variation in per capita government services in urban and rural areas and the difference in the relative importance of revenue sources of Municipal and County Councils are the dominant features of the expenditure and revenue systems of local authorities in Kenya.

Municipalities spent L8.8 million in 1966 as compared to Lll million spent by County Councils in Kenya. However, more than 90 percent of Kenya's population live in rural areas. The per capita expenditures of Municipalities are more than ten times higher than the per capita expenditures of County Councils. It would be expected that per capita local government expenditures would be higher in Municipalities because per capita government expenditures are directly related to population density and Municipalities have a greater variety of services to provide. The wide variations that exist in per capita expenditures of Municipalities and County Councils in Kenya may reflect also the difference in the fiscal abilities of these major local authorities.

County Councils in Kenya have only one major tax source, the graduated personal tax, and derive only 29 per cent of their revenue from taxes. Municipalities, on the other hand, collect 55 per cent of their revenue from taxes and have two major tax sources, graduated personal tax and land rates (taxes levied on the site value of land).

Israel's relations with the developed world--both West and East--are well documented. Yet there is a dearth of material about its relations with the underdeveloped states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This gap in documentation partly reflects Israel's own dilemma in the international system. Geographically it's a part of the Afro-Asian group, yet by inspiration and methods and technological sophistication it is different from that regional system, if not alien to it. This essay will attempt, through the usage of such standard empirical indicators as trade and diplomatic interaction, to shed some light upon Israel's relations with the states of sub-Saharan Africa.

Another indicator, and one which this study relies heavily upon, is the African reaction to the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. To assess the position of an African nation on that conflict, we have used its official reaction--if any--as well as the votes cast in the United Nations General Assembly on the various resolutions that were proposed during the Fifth Emergency Special Session assembled in the aftermath of the June War.

Israel's attention to the African states yields an interesting insight into the nature of the international system and the change it has undergone since the end of World War II. Proclaimed as a state in 1948, Israel was mainly concerned in its foreign policy to secure the help and the good will of the Great Powers that were dominant in world affairs.

We see the failure of Pan-Africanism all across the continent in the face of crude nationalism. We see wide division between the mass of the poor and the high-consumption elites who are in control everywhere (Dumont 1969, pp. 80-83; Hunter 1967, p. 33). We see the continually expanding administrative structures. And we see the desperate passion for education at every level and in every country throughout sub-Saharan Africa (Ostheimer 1970, p. 103). Are these conditions not intimately linked in a single system which determines the common pattern? In this study we will suggest that they are, and we will set forth the chain of causality which leads inevitably from the last condition to the first.

In present-day Africa wealth consists primarily in the holding of the results of human investment. Those who have benefited from the largest amount of human investment, through the education system, for example, are the ones who derive the highest returns. The fact that we call their returns “salaries and perquisites” instead of something else is quite beside the point. The new elites who rule in Africa are usually identifiable as having had the largest amount of formal education in society. This high return on educational investment amounts to a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a system where education is state-financed on the basis of a regressive tax system.

The current interest in the production and use of educational films by Africanists emphasizes the need for a methodology by which films on Africa may be critically analyzed and evaluated. Until recently most academics have been overly cautious in their attitudes toward educational films. They have been quick to criticize factual and interpretative weaknesses, but at the same time they have felt it professionally declassé to be directly involved in writing scripts or in film production. Furthermore, the need to recover production costs has only too frequently meant a lowering of standards and a popularization of content. As a result, subject specialists have been reluctant to participate in film-making ventures. As for film usage, limited opportunities for preview, leading to random projection of bad or irrelevant material, and difficulties in obtaining films have discouraged many instructors. In short, for whatever reason, academics have had low audio-visual “literacy.”

Ideally, a film should be used in a particular teaching situation because of its ability to convey an idea or a series of ideas better than any other means at the instructor's disposal. Every film is a synthesis of “all the sensory data presented visually, aurally (or emotionally?) by the film and its accompanying sound-track” (Columbia University 1951, p. 2). The anticipated effect of this, the film's unique identity or content, on students at defined levels of understanding should determine whether it is a “good” or “bad” film.