Like any respectable modern organization, the Ford Foundation has computer printouts showing in fat volumes of lists and tables what it has done. Some of these compilations trace the record from the beginning of the Foundation’s national and international programs in 1950. An international interest was there from the start, because the study group that in the late forties advised the Foundation’s trustees on what they ought to do successfully urged that they should devote major attention to world problems of peace and international understanding. The first specific attention to Africa south of the Sahara came in 1954 with a half-dozen grants and a series of what were then called “foreign study and research fellowships.” Fellowships for Asian and Near Eastern studies had started earlier, in 1952, and some of them went to young scholars working on the Maghreb, Egypt, and places down as far as Sudan and Ethiopia.

Of the rising tide of refugees in the world, the greatest number originate from Ethiopia. The largest continent consists of those from the Ogaden who have fled to Somalia, followed by Eritreans who have sought refuge in the Sudan. Out of a total of 520,000 refugees in the Sudan at the end of 1981, approximately 425,000 are Ethiopians or Eritreans, with the much larger number being Eritreans. The Eritreans have fled their homes to escape the prolonged warfare between the Ethiopian forces and the Eritrean liberation movements, a conflict which dates back to 1962.

A confluence of three sorts of factors has made the past eightteen months a particularly appropriate period for the Ford Foundation to reconsider the magnitude and character of its support for research and training in the United States on the Middle East and Africa. The first of these is that dramatic developments during the past two years involving the Middle East and Africa have heightened public awareness of the critical impact events in these regions will have on the world. The second factor is that the Foundation’s program of general support to meet the core operating costs of African studies centers and Middle East studies centers has drawn to a close. Third, faced with the prospect of drastically reduced budgetary resources, the Foundation staff has had to confront the question of which of its activities should survive or be reshaped in the face of competing claims on scarcer resources. Transcending these three factors and less directly tied to the exigencies of the time is the conviction on the part of the Foundation that there is creative and important work to be done in this sphere and that the Foundation’s staff needs to think hard about past activities and future possibilities so that valuable opportunities do not pass us by.

The basic features of the political processes among the Ibo of Eastern Nigeria are well documented. The most striking element of the system is its decentralization. Margery Perham wrote thirty years ago that ‘it is almost impossible to imagine a wider diffusion of authority’ than one finds in Ibo society (Perham, 1937, p. 234). When a decision affecting an Ibo community is to be made, several groups and organizations concern themselves with the issue and within each organization near unanimity must be reached before discussion can be closed. Participation is on such a broad scale that most traditional meetings have no chairman or central direction, take no votes, permit more than one person to speak at a time, have no agenda, and continue for long periods. A decision reached by one organization within a community that is not acceptable to another organization can usually not be implemented. Margaret Green writes: ‘Ibo democracy works through a number of juxtaposed groups and a system of checks and balances rather than on a unitary or hierarchical principle’ (Green, 1947, p. 145).