When Carl Rosberg, the chairman of our program committee, asked me to deliver a presidential address at tonight's banquet, I agreed to do so only if I could not find a better speaker for the occasion. Happily for you, I found him. Moreover, if you'll forgive a commercial, you can read all my potential presidential addresses anyway — in my book Africa in World Politics which Harper's is publishing next month. So you can have the best of both worlds.

Governor Williams has shown in many ways that he is a good friend of our association. In introducing him to you, therefore, I want to take a few minutes to pay him a special tribute by giving you my assessment of his achievements during the nearly two years he has been in charge of African affairs.

When President-elect Kennedy began to select his advisers late in 1960, many of us were surprised to find him putting the cart before the horse. That is to say, he appointed the Governor to be Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, even before he designated Dean Rusk as Secretary of State. The Williams appointment suggested to me, however, that the President considered African problems second to none in importance. He chose a man of stature, already baptized in the fire of Michigan politics on political, racial and social issues — a man with direct access to the President and a seasoned politician and administrator who is more than a match for the Assistant Secretaries for Europe and other areas in the State Department. At this point, I hasten to add that my remarks have not been cleared either by the State Department, or by the Fellows of the African Studies Association!

It is a high honor to be with the distinguished Africanists who form the African Studies Association.

Five years ago, you had the vision to recognize that what most people then thought was esoteric learning about a dark continent was, in fact, the essential understanding which would permit the people of America to live fruitfully with one of the most dynamic movements in world history.

This unique position in the intellectual world gives you not only an unusual opportunity to influence the events of your time, but a heavy responsibility to make certain that the fruit of your labors is of the very highest quality. Though I am but a neophyte in the field, I know many of you well enough to appreciate your recognition of and devotion to this awesome trust.

The opening session was devoted to a discussion of the UNESCO Conference on the Development of Higher Education in Africa held in Tananarive, September 3-12, 1962, and its implications for the United States. Speakers on the panel were Dr. de Kiewiet; Karl Bigelow, Teachers College of Colum-gia University; Robert Van Duyn, Agency for International Development; and Kenneth Snyder, Bureau of International Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Dr. de Kiewiet, introducing the panel, paid a tribute to Dr. Ras Johnson of AID, a member of the official delegation, who lost his life while returning to the United States.

Dr. de Kiewiet remarked that, having assumed official delegations went out with highly specific instructions, he had made the reassuring discovery this was not the case. The delegation had largely determined for itself what the issues were and had developed responses to them; this flexibility had been important in establishing a successful relationship between the conference as a whole and the public and private sectors of American higher education.

The first of a series of meetings at which material concerning the current status of social research in Africa was considered, was opened by the chairman, the editor of the African Studies Association's forthcoming volume on this topic. At this plenary session John Fage, of the University of London, spoke on recent developments and trends in African history, Arthur Schiller of Columbia University on law, and Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University on linguistics.

Taking historical studies on Africa from their beginning, Dr. Fage indicated that there had been a continuous output of historical material relating to Africa from the time of Herodotus up to the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the writing of African history ceased to be respectable. One reason for this was a change in the character of historical research, with great emphasis being placed on written sources. By comparison with the western world, Africa was deficient in written history and records, and the attitude that Africa therefore had no history came to prevail. This attitude was not unconnected with the supremacy of Europe, with the feeling that Europe would have to civilize Africa, and it was considered that the study of Africa was the job of the ethnographer rather than the historian. Secondly, there emerged a new branch of historical enquiry, that of colonial history in Africa, with its emphasis on European rather than African activities. The result was that academic historians had no contact with Africa. In fact, however, historical materials on Africa did exist, and in ignoring them the historian had simply left the field to anthropologists, or to amateurs. Anthropologists established a close association with Africa but were little concerned with the past and suspicious of “conjectural history.” Their concentration on simple societies and the relative lack of attention given to political structures kept the social anthropologists from developing too close an interest in African history.