The Anthropologists' Frontier: The Last Phase of African Exploitation

Extract

The rapid demise of empires in Africa is paralled by the equally swift retreat of social anthropologists to the wings. While Diedrich Westermann in 1934 could deplore the administrators' rejection of proffered anthropological advice, by 1945, at least where Europeans had settled, one gathers that administrators were slavish devotees of the profession, almost painfully eager to stare with puzzlement at premier chief lists and kinship tables of organisation. A further development was suggested in the middle 1950's, with a report from the Rhodesias of a nationalist boast that Africans relied upon anthropologists for information from the enemy European camp. But, as new states ran up their flags and despatched envoys to the U.N., anthropologists began to speak of alienation. in the future there may be a rupture unless anthropologists become historians or sociologists.