I am greatly honored to be giving the first Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola Distinguished Lecture. I am grateful to the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States for giving me this role.

Although the first Abiola Lecture is being given today, the decision to launch such an annual event was taken by the ASA more than a year ago. That was of course before Chief M.K.O. Abiola entered the presidential race in Nigeria from which he seemed to have emerged the victor—but the results were never officially confirmed.

But there is another side to Chief Abiola's concerns. This is the crusade for reparations to be paid to black people for hundreds of years of enslavement, exploitation and degradation.

Africa has experienced a triple heritage of slavery—indigenous, Islamic and Western (Robertson and Klein 1983). The reparations movement seems to have concluded that although the indigenous and Islamic forms of slavery were much older than the trans-Atlantic version, they were much smaller in scale and allowed for greater upward social mobility—from slave to Sultan, from peasant to paramount chief.

Indigenous systems of slavery were uniracial—black masters, black slaves. Islamic forms of slave-systems were multi-racial, both masters and slaves could be of any race or color. Indeed, Egypt and Muslim India evolved slave dynasties. Western slave systems were the most racially polarized in the modern period—white masters, black slaves (biracial) (Winks 1972; Klein 1986; Lewis 1990).

Parallel with and spurred on in part by the emergence of Jamaican reggae onto the international pop music scene in the mid-1970s, the Jamaican Rastafarian movement, whose origins are to be found on the island of Jamaica in the early 1930s, has within the past two decades managed to expand beyond its island homeland and attract a widespread and culturally diverse global following.

Until now, the movement has drawn its largest and most committed following from among those whose indigenous culture has been suppressed, and in certain instances completely supplanted, by Western models imposed during centuries of European and American colonial expansion. For the young unemployed or underemployed Maori in New Zealand, Havasupai Indian living on a reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, West Indian struggling for survival in Brixton and Ghanaian in Accra trying to come to terms with urban living in a multiethnic, post-colonial African society, adherence to Rastafari provides an alternative source of meaning and identity to a life frequently punctuated by hopelessness, alienation and despair in what is often perceived as a hostile, corrupt and hypocritical Eurocentric environment.

If Rastafarianism functions as an ideological corrective to the suffering, exploitation and alienation experienced by young people of color the world over, it holds an especially heightened resonance and appeal for Africans and those of African descent. And while the messages expounded by the Rastafari promote love and respect for all living things and emphasize the paramount importance of human dignity and self-respect, above all else they speak of freedom from spiritual, psychological as well as physical slavery and oppression (things Africans have come to know much about over the course of the last four centuries, be it directly via the holocaust of the Middle Passage or indirectly through the degrading experience of colonization).

In 1976 Nigeria committed itself to the provision of universal primary education (UPE) to its children. A basic, six-year level of education was seen as a means of creating unity between the many disparate groups making up Nigeria's citizenry. It was also seen as a means of working towards the equalization of educational opportunities throughout the nation by providing a minimum level to which all children would be educated (Ozigi and Ocho 1981; Adesina 1982). The national commitment to UPE was endorsed by many, although not all, Nigerians (Casapo 1981, 1983).

A large commitment of money and the endorsement of many Nigerians were not enough to prevent a multitude of problems as UPE was put in place. The program has been a success in that many millions of children have received a primary education. However, a low quality of education was noted as an accompaniment to quantity education (Bray 1981). A survey of inspectors responsible for primary schools completed a decade after the initiation of UPE suggested that conditions in primary education were continuing to be such that quality education was difficult to obtain (Sunal, Osa, Gaba and Saleemi 1989). While some data are available describing primary schooling under the UPE program, little data are available from the teachers involved in it. The experience of primary school teachers as they perceive and report it has not been documented.

Unlike certain area studies disciplines (Russian Studies and Oriental Studies, for example), African Studies has largely attracted scholars whose commitment to their subject transcends mere professionalism. The sensible assumption with regard to African Africanists is, of course, that their orientation would be decidedly pro-African, but within the discipline, the notion is widespread that at least for the most part, even non-African Africanists hold a patronal attitude towards the continent, its peoples and cultures and their future, routinely combining the role of champions with that of students. This paper will argue that very often, Africanist practice, while purporting to be responsive to the best interests of Africa and Africans, in fact has the effect of perpetuating notions of an Africa that never was. It will also call attention to some significant incongruities between the methodology of African Studies and the well known relational principles that inform inter-personal commerce in African cultures. Beyond exposing these discrepancies between the expected and the actual, and the incongruities between methodology and spirit, the discussion will argue for an infusion of the practice of the discipline with the attitudes that characterize African familial discourses.

I will warn at the outset that the ensuing argument adopts the position that one can make valid general statements about Africa, Africans, African cultures, African relational habits and the like, without necessarily suggesting a monolithic uniformity over the entire continent in any of the particulars. Furthermore, descriptions of, and assertions about, aspects of African life in the following pages cannot be construed as implying their eternal fixity and immutability through history.