U.S. policy engagement in Africa has entered a phase of dramatic enlargement, begun during President Bill Clinton’s tenure and expanded—unexpectedly—under the administration of George W. Bush. In the last five years, several Africa-centered U.S. policy initiatives have been launched—in some instances backed by substantial funding increases—in trade and investment, security, development assistance, counterterrorism, and HIV/AIDS. By contrast with the Cold War era, recent initiatives—the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, a counterterrorism task force in Djibouti, President Bush’s $15 billion HTV/AIDS proposal, and the $5 billion Millennium Challenge Account (MCA)—have been largely free of partisan rancor or controversy.

During the past three decades Ethiopia has been noted for political turmoil, drought, and famine. The country’s 63 million people, the second largest population in Africa, have a per capita income of $110, one-fourth the average for the continent. At all levels, it has the lowest school attendance rate in the world: 30 percent at primary, 13 percent at secondary, and less than 1 percent at the tertiary level. The country’s health sector, too, is in no better condition: health expenditure between 1990 and 1995 was 1.7 percent of GDP. Life expectancy at birth is 49 years. The country also has one of the highest HIV-AIDS infection rates in the world (9.3 per 100 adults).

Relations between the U.S. Africanist community and Africa are marked by complex connections, contestation, and challenges engendered by the intellectual, institutional, and ideological diversity of scholarly cultures, capacities, and commitments both in the United States and on the African continent. As we enter the new century, the scholarly enterprise on both sides of the Atlantic faces many perils and possibilities, both old and new, requiring innovative forms of engagement. Historically, as I have argued elsewhere, the patterns of academic exchange between the United States and Africa have been unbalanced. They are patterns that contemporary processes of globalization have helped reinforce and recast.

Since the late 1970s, scholars, organizations, pressure groups, conferences, and governments have examined the brain drain phenomenon in Africa. More recently, brain gain, the antithesis of brain drain, has also attracted considerable attention. The focal point of the brain gain across the continent has been postapartheid South Africa, which has witnessed a large influx of professionals from other regions. Considering Africa as a whole, except for South Africa, the extant literature has overemphasized the debit side of the brain drain.

The sample frame was constructed over several months through the combined efforts of three graduate students and Prof. Larry W. Bowman. Using the Internet whenever possible, and backed by the assistance of colleagues from many institutions, we constructed a sample frame of 1,793 U.S.-based Africanists. Our sample frame includes 46 percent more Africanists than the 1,229 individual U.S. members of the African Studies Association (ASA) in 2001 (1,112 individual members and 117 lifetime members). In all cases we allowed institutions to self-define who they considered their African studies faculty to be. By assembling this broad sample frame of African studies faculty, we probe more deeply into the national world of African studies than can be done even through a membership survey of our largest and most established national African studies organization. The sample frame for this study approximates a full enumeration of the Africanist population in the United States. Therefore, data collected from samples drawn from this frame can with some confidence be generalized to all Africanists in the United States, with minimal coverage error.

Often, for many analysts theorizing the brain drain, producing macrolevel statistics is considered enough to demonstrate the significance of the concept. Furthermore, nationalist and internationalist theories and perspectives have shaped the discussion of the brain drain, each seeking to determine whether the brain drain generates an economic loss for the country of origin or a gain for the welcoming country.

In an article titled “Paris on My Mind,” writer Abdourahman Waberi, born in Djibouti and a resident of France, maps the path of his protagonist’s migrations: “Of course, he will leave Paris with all his family. His wanderings will widen forever. The migration will continue. Let us follow his itinerary, year after year: Lusaka, Lagos, Nairobi, London, Denver, Philadelphia ... “ The migration pattern of Waberi’s protagonist is all too common and real. After short returns to African soil, many Africans make their final move to the United States.

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of Africans in America, he was reflecting on the complex identities of the “talented tenth,” the educated minority of a minority like himself who felt alienated because of their awareness that their qualifications meant little in a racist society. Though written in reference to the African American intellectual, this duality, this sense of “two-ness,” is even more acute for African exiles today because they have fewer social and cultural ties to the West than African Europeans and African Americans. The exiles are much closer to the African “soul” Du Bois referred to and are less prepared for the pervasive racism and second-class status that they have to overcome in the West.

Brain drain is a global phenomenon and has always been so. It is a problem confronting and threatening development in Africa and other developing world regions. A study by Carrington and Detragiache concluded that there is an overall tendency for migration rates to be higher for highly educated individuals. Brain drain can therefore be seen as one of the more detrimental implications of organizational decline and crisis. Skilled migration, taking the form of brain drain and movements of professionals and job transfers, has become an important component of contemporary migration.3 Typically, in a historical context highly skilled migration involved the forced movement of professionals as a result of political conflicts, followed by the emergence of the “brain drain” in the 1960s. In the current situation highly skilled migration represents an increasingly large component of global migration streams.

Common wisdom suggests that the migration of people with a high level of human capital is detrimental for the country of emigration. In other words, the loss of skilled human resources will ultimately have a grave effect on the economy and jeopardize development programs of the country experiencing brain drain, as the brain drain is a negative externality on the population left in the source country. However, as Mountford has shown, when educational decisions are endogenous and if successful emigration is not a certainty, a brain drain may increase the productivity of a developing country. There is also sufficient evidence to show that the migration of talent from the South to the North does not always mean that developing countries lose out.

I began this essay after an energizing meeting with a bright young scholar on starting a new journal for africaresource.com. The journal, we agreed, would address the knowledge concerns of a politically conscious generation engaged in transformatory critical scholarship. Its distinguishing feature would be the New Afrikan perspective that would offer radical readings of texts and cultural phenomena. Just as our discussion drew to a close the critical question came: So what exactly does africaresource.com stand for? The question was clearly prompted by histories of subversions of progressive initiatives that have made members of marginal communities wary of ventures that seem to owe their existence to shadowy financiers.

The aftermath of September 11, 2001, may certainly be on its way toward affecting the “brain drain” from Africa. The 19 dead Arabs who were accused of having blown up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and of hijacking the fourth plane were all cases of the brain drain from their own countries in one way or another. The effect of September 11 on immigration policies in the Western world appears to be greater scrutiny and reduced Western hospitality. There was a time when high scientific and technological qualifications were regarded as attractive credentials for immigration into the West.