<cavers@ftn.net


I thought I'd send this along from the small-triple-a
list. It will be published in the THES in the next month.
Any thoughts on this may be directed back to the author
through me at <cavers@ftn.net>.


        AFRICAN STUDIES IN BRITAIN

(For The Times Higher Education Supplement  section on
African Studies)


                                                              I

Subsaharan Africa is often taken to be marginal and
unimportant today. Excluding South Africa, it accounts for
only 0.7% of world production, rather less than Indonesia.
Its appearance in the news is usually limited to disasters,
of which the Rwandan genocide has been the most prominent of
late. Yet there are still many reasons for taking Africa
seriously.

Africa is going through a population boom which is rapidly
filling up what was once the least densely occupied
continent on earth. In 1950 it had half the people of
Europe (including the Soviet Union); today the numbers are
about the same; by 2025 Africa will have double the
population of Europe. This represents a tremendous shift in
the composition of the generations making up world society.
Along with this, Africa is in the throes of an urban
revolution compressed in time as no other has been, with
around a third of its people now living in cities where a
hundred years ago there were none. Lagos will soon be
pushing 20 mn.

The collapse of the state in Central Africa has profound
implications for the global political system. The outcome
of South Africa's experiment with non-racial democracy will
affect us all, just as apartheid did. In a world of
staggering inequality, Africa is an extreme symbol of
poverty: Americans each consume 200 times the energy
disposed of by Ugandan citizens, for example. All of which
makes Africa an essential part of any attempt to understand
the world we live in.

Africa has long been central to the development of world
society. The role of the Atlantic slave trade in the rise
of western capitalism is well known. One hundred years ago
the scramble for Africa was the fulcrum of that
imperialist rivalry which culminated in the first world
war. The anti- colonial revolution which transformed the
world after 1945 was led by Asia and Africa in tandem.

Nor is Africa just a territory, a piece of real estate. It
is also a people and an idea. The legacy of plantation
slavery in the New World is an African diaspora whose
struggle with racism remains the single most important
contradiction in American society. And Africa's poor
economic performance has since 1945 spawned a new, more
middle-class diaspora in Europe and North America. Here too
persistent racial discrimination has made this growing
African presence felt at the heart of the western world.

The politics of global inequality rest on the principles
of apartheid: physically separate the rich and poor
(conceived of primarily in terms of colour) and restrict
movement between the two zones. The consequent immigration
policies adopted by western governments to keep out their
poor, darker neighbours recreate divisions which once
fuelled imperialism abroad.

In all this, Africa, the home of the blacks, is crucial to
western claims to cultural superiority. In an age when
Asian capitalism is ascendant, Africans must be seen to be
primitive and backward, proof that whites are still better
off than some. Media representations of Africa endlessly
reproduce images of death -- war, famine, disease -- never
the abundant vitality which a youthful African
civilisation manifests at this time. Nowhere is this issue
of representation more acute than in a Britain still
suffering a post-imperial hangover, pining for a recent
past as top nation and uncertain of its future place in the
world.

                                                                     II

Area studies in Britain took off during the 1960s in the
context of the collapse of empire and the Cold War. The
western powers retained interests in regions they no
longer controlled directly and they were prepared to fund a
limited amount of research there. The main focus was on
political stability and economic development, but there was
room too for more disinterested studies of history, culture
and society.

At the turn of the century, the British public was
informed about Africa by explorers, missionaries,
journalists and novelists (more by Rider Haggard than
Conrad). London's School of Oriental and African Studies
and the Institute of African Studies provided colonial
Britain with more organised intelligence of the dark
continent. Largely as a result of Malinowski's efforts,
social anthropology came to dominate this academic
enterprise between the wars.

A Rockefeller grant to the IAI financed a number of
exemplary studies which its sponsor hoped would illuminate
social change in Africa. But if the Americans were
interested in the end of European empire, these British
studies were notable for the absence of any notion that
the sun might set on structures which they represented as
lying outside modern history. The contrast with C.L.R.
James's History of Negro Revolt  and with his prediction in
The Black Jacobins  (both 1938) that Africa would soon be
free could not have been greater.

After 1945 the anticipation of independence slowly grew
and with it came a spate of studies by anthropologists
(especially Gluckman's Manchester School) and others
addressing the inevitability of change, including the
question of urban Africa. Independence around 1960 was a
boon for historical studies. This was partly driven by
sympathy with the nationalist desire to recover the
precolonial past; but an emphasis on social movements
(rather than structures) meant that historians soon turned
to the twentieth century too.

African Studies over the past three decades has become a
unique site for the collaboration of anthropologists and
historians. Indeed there has been a strong convergence of
method and subject matter between the two disciplines.
Elsewhere, in Oriental Studies for example,
anthropologists have always been considered inferior to the
masters of ancient texts; but in Africa, where the literate
tradition is slighter, they and historians have been
equals, with the balance of numbers tipping in favour of
the latter these days.

Political science and development economics acquired a new
importance in the postcolonial period. The emphasis has
shifted over time towards economics, as the failure of
African states gave an opening to the rigid disciplines
imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. In any case,
British political scientists have taken a back seat to
American and French theorists in Africa; and economics has
reverted to an inflexible liberal orthodoxy which
illuminates little of social conditions anywhere.

Geographers, modernising their Victorian discipline since
the second world war, have made substantial contributions
to the study of rural development and the environment. We
should not forget either the vast army of natural
scientists and engineers abroad in Africa, few if any of
them under the umbrella of African Studies, engaged in the
study of land and water use, nutrition, disease and all the
branches of biology. And, last but not least, a hardy band
of archaeologists continues to revolutionise our
understanding of Africa's place in the human story; and
that place, as is now well known, is a very significant one
indeed.

African Studies offered an interdisciplinary space which
attracted creative minds repelled by an increasingly
specialised academic division of labour. But that impulse
now seems exhausted. Africanists these days more often
resemble peasants digging holes unrelated to any wider
vision of the terrain. Their tidbits of research do not
add up to a collaborative intellectual project equal to the
task of grasping Africa's predicament.

It is true that major works of synthesis are still
produced: J.- F. Bayart's The State in Africa: Politics of
the Belly and John Iliffe's Africans: the History of a
Continent come immediately to mind. But African Studies has
not coalesced into a field capable of justifying an
independent place within the universities. Africanists must
take shelter in the separate disciplines which dominate
competition for academic resources; and this centrifugal
tendency stands ready to dismember whatever is left of the
area studies initiative of the 1960s.

For decades now, Britain has been withdrawing into itself
and everywhere today African Studies is up against it,
underfunded and demoralised, clinging to an insecure tenure
within a handful of universities. As a loose association of
interested disciplines, it once drew strength from an
imperialist vision which flowered briefly in the face of
independence and has now almost been laid to rest.

                                                                    III

What future, if any, does African Studies have in Britain?
Africanists have to some extent challenged prevailing
stereotypes, but they have continued to reproduce the idea
of Africa as somewhere exotic, separate, over there. They
have emphasised particularity over the ties that have bound
Europe and Africa together for 500 years. We know far more
about the ethnic diversity of rural areas than we do about
the forces reshaping Africa today.

There is, therefore, an intellectual agenda which is still
waiting to be addressed by this country's specialists.
What are the new social forms being thrown up by Africa's
demographic explosion, by its youthful cities, by the
cultural revolution which has made African music and
literature, its visual and performing arts such a creative
force in late twentieth century civilisation? What is the
political trajectory of West and Central Africa, as much as
the South? Problems concerning food, violence, debt and
migration demand urgent solutions. Africa's plight goes to
the heart of questions concerning the justice of the global
economic order. In sum, what is Africa's relationship to
the modern project of science and democracy? Has it merely
been left behind or can its societies help point the way to
new human arrangements?

There is an education crisis at all levels of African
society. The postcolonial recipe has served only to fuel
emigration; and this raises the issue of relations between
British universities and their African counterparts. It is
intolerable that conditions for studying Africa should be
so much better outside than within the continent itself. So
any renewal of African Studies in Britain must include
programmes designed to improve matters there. In any case,
a growing body of western scholars of Africa are themselves
African in origin and their proportion is bound to
increase.

The African diaspora, both old and new, occupies a
mediating position between the West and Africa which has
hardly been tapped so far. The energy, commitment and
imagination of these Africans are desperately needed if we
are to dent the tired reproduction of negative ideas about
Africa's place in the history of world civilisation.
Africans at home and abroad still await those political
forms capable of delivering them from centuries of western
domination. Their drive, as well as their distinctive
traditions, are indispensable to our common hopes for a
better world.

What is being proposed here is a new partnership between
African and British scholars. The rest of the world
recognises the Africanist expertise stored in Britain's
universities; and racial conflict is less polarised here
than in the United States. Many diaspora intellectuals live
between America, Europe and Africa and could be persuaded
to participate in programmes developed with Africa's own
needs and interests in mind.

The approach adopted should be interdisciplinary and
constructive, stressing the history of international
collaboration which once characterised movements opposed to
slavery, colonialism and apartheid and which underpins the
struggle for human rights today. Nor should we be
indifferent to the potential of the new communications
technologies. Africa will be wired before long; and
exchange of knowledge at distance will be greatly enhanced
in the process.

Africa's place in the world is unique, being at once
exceptional in so many ways, yet also an integral part of
an emergent world society, exhibiting all the
contradictions of that emergence in an extreme form.
African Studies cannot be conducted in isolation from world
history as a whole. To paraphrase Kipling on England (and
James on cricket), What do they know of Africa who only
Africa know?

We have long passed the time when Africa's problems could
plausibly be addressed piecemeal by digging a hole in some
remote rural spot. Africa provides a suitable point of
departure for asking how we all contrived a global society
so unviable, so unequal, so thoroughly permeated by racist
ideas. The ultimate justification for African Studies in
Britain is that relations between ourselves and Africans
are pivotal to any rethinking of our place in the complex
evolution of human interdependence.

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