In most learned societies, including this one, the president is expected to take the opportunity offered by the annual meeting to deliver himself of some reasonably academic statements--usually of a more or less esoteric nature--on a particular aspect of the field or discipline with which he has an especially close acquaintance from his own research. Under the particular circumstances of this meeting of the African Studies Association, however, I propose to break with past practice and to talk with you this morning about some aspects of the general health of the Association and, perhaps more importantly, of the health of research in African studies.

I would like to begin with a brief summary of the major happenings in the life of the Association which have transpired over the course of the past year. I would then like to comment on some of the topics which are to be discussed in the panels scheduled for later this morning and for tomorrow evening. The purpose of these latter remarks will be chiefly to provide a kind of springboard from which the panel discussions may take off--if only from a position of disagreement with my comments.

It is customary to provide at the beginning of a scholarly volume both a disclaimer and achnowledgements. I will follow this custom, first by emphasizing clearly that what I have to say this morning is to be considered as a purely personal statement.

Two good goals are in collision in African Studies in the United States--the fostering of certain black interests and the untrammeled pursuit of scholarship. I think that neither needs to give way before the other, provided a division of labor can be devised which secures the autonomy of scholarship from politics. This is the gist of the remarks that follow. In proceeding with these remarks, I shall refer to the governance of the African Studies Association and the disproportionately small number of black inquirers in a field concerned with an area with which blacks have a special tie, only as these matters seem to me to have implications for the autonomy of scholarship.

The view has been expressed that the conduct of inquiry about Africa needs to be radically revised so that black people will have control over their own history and its interpretation (Clarke 1969, p. 9). Adherents of this view, in elaboration, say they wish to have “the study of African life…undertaken from a Pan-Africanist perspective,” which “defines that all black people are African people and rejects the division of African peoples by geographical locations based on colonial spheres of influence” (Clarke 1969, p. 11). I think this view is representative of thinking sufficiently widespread to warrant considering it with the utmost seriousness in any effort to deal with the future of African studies in the United States.

The Anglo-Ashanti war of 1900, the seventh in a series which began in 1806, is a classic example of a war which was not wanted by the combatants but which was bound to occur if the question of the power struggle between Great Britain and Ashanti, in the Gold Coast, was to be settled once and for all. At the outbreak of the conflict the Ashanti confederacy was a mere shadow of its former self. The Asantehene who should have given the lead to his people was in exile. Thanks to the policy of British colonial officials, the confederacy had been broken up and many of its component parts persuaded to sign separate treaties by which they placed themselves under the protection of the British government. Militarily this was significant for it made any concerted action against the colonial government very difficult, if not impossible, and ensured that any dissident state could more easily be isolated and dealt with by the little military force at the disposal of the governor.

Further evidence of the unpreparedness of the Ashantis for this major conflict was given by F.M. Hodgson, the governor of the Gold Coast, who stated that up to the time of his departure from Accra (on his illfated journey to Kumasi) there was nothing to suggest that the Ashantis were planning a revolt. This attitude was also shared by the local government officials in Kumasi, who maintained a vast intelligence network in the area.

My real interest in Fanon dates from a night in August 1967 when, together with a couple hundred West Indian students in London, we converged on our Students' Center to listen to a lecture delivered by Stokely Carmichael. One or two of us in the audience had even been at primary school with him in Trinidad, though he probably didn't suspect it. “Can't you remember him?” asked an old classmate of mine, trying to jolt my memory. “He was always fighting!”

My recollections from that night are several--the white agent provocateur who entered the building and tried unsuccessfully to incite us to violence against him; the contingent of policemen who, transported in an assortment of vehicles, swooped down on the building from all directions as we stood talking to Stokely after the lecture; the haste with which Stokely was spirited away from the scene by his friends wishing to avoid an “incident”; the anguish with which I watched some of my friends come to within an inch of blowing their cool in the face of the police provocations--yet a riot was avoided, and though the British government still banned Stokely from the country shortly afterwards, their arguments would have looked much more plausible if we had succumbed to the provocations of that night.

Recently it was my privilege to examine the minutes of the Legislative Council, or LEGCO, of the East African Protectorate. This council began its deliberations in August 1907 and after a long series of historical developments eventually evolved into the present legislature of the Republic of Kenya. When I first approached the minutes for the earliest years of LEGCO'S existence, it was with many questions in my mind as well as something of the excitement with which one might open a new mystery story. Granted that this first council was entirely appointed or nominated; granted there were only Europeans sitting on it; granted the official majority prevented the unofficial members from determining policy. Granting all that, this LEGCO was a small step forward from rule by the Governor and Executive Council only. With the addition of elected members after World War I, a gradual expansion of the institution could take place until Mr. Kenyatta could take his seat as Prime Minister. What did those first members want in the way of legislation? What did the LEGCO, the proto-ancestor of the present-day Kenya National Assembly, regard as important business in 1907?

With these and other questions in my mind, I read with some surprise that one of the first bills proposed and eventually passed in the LEGCO was an ordinance to provide licensing for ostrich farmers. I was not prepared for anything so exotic as this and read this bill and its subsequent amendments with keen interest.

Israel's relations with the developed world--both West and East--are well documented. Yet there is a dearth of material about its relations with the underdeveloped states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This gap in documentation partly reflects Israel's own dilemma in the international system. Geographically it's a part of the Afro-Asian group, yet by inspiration and methods and technological sophistication it is different from that regional system, if not alien to it. This essay will attempt, through the usage of such standard empirical indicators as trade and diplomatic interaction, to shed some light upon Israel's relations with the states of sub-Saharan Africa.

Another indicator, and one which this study relies heavily upon, is the African reaction to the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. To assess the position of an African nation on that conflict, we have used its official reaction--if any--as well as the votes cast in the United Nations General Assembly on the various resolutions that were proposed during the Fifth Emergency Special Session assembled in the aftermath of the June War.

Israel's attention to the African states yields an interesting insight into the nature of the international system and the change it has undergone since the end of World War II. Proclaimed as a state in 1948, Israel was mainly concerned in its foreign policy to secure the help and the good will of the Great Powers that were dominant in world affairs.

We see the failure of Pan-Africanism all across the continent in the face of crude nationalism. We see wide division between the mass of the poor and the high-consumption elites who are in control everywhere (Dumont 1969, pp. 80-83; Hunter 1967, p. 33). We see the continually expanding administrative structures. And we see the desperate passion for education at every level and in every country throughout sub-Saharan Africa (Ostheimer 1970, p. 103). Are these conditions not intimately linked in a single system which determines the common pattern? In this study we will suggest that they are, and we will set forth the chain of causality which leads inevitably from the last condition to the first.

In present-day Africa wealth consists primarily in the holding of the results of human investment. Those who have benefited from the largest amount of human investment, through the education system, for example, are the ones who derive the highest returns. The fact that we call their returns “salaries and perquisites” instead of something else is quite beside the point. The new elites who rule in Africa are usually identifiable as having had the largest amount of formal education in society. This high return on educational investment amounts to a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a system where education is state-financed on the basis of a regressive tax system.

In the scramble for Africa the French and the British often worked at cross purposes. Many times approaching a state of war, both colonial powers were determined to gain more territory and prestige than their rival. During the closing decade of the nineteenth century this imperial conflict became very evident in Madagascar and Zanzibar. These islands off the east coast of Africa became an arena for bitter and dangerous competition, and the clash of the imperial powers over these two islands reflected the entire race for the unclaimed portions of the non-European world. The lines of colonialism were sharply drawn there, and both powers overtly tried to cancel out the gains of the other. The French, smarting from their diplomatic defeat in Egypt over the Suez Canal in 1882, were certain that they could win a foothold in Eastern Africa, close to the Nile. The British, just as resolved to protect the Nile and the Arabian Peninsula, knew that they had to hold as much East African territory as possible. In a land where the white colonialists were in a minority, in regions where native resistance was determined, England and France waged an imperialist-diplomatic war. Madagascar and Zanzibar, then, serve as a classic case study in African colonial friction.

Zanzibar, long a center of the East African slave trade, became in the late 1880's a focal point of British and, to a lesser extent, German expansion. In the last year of the decade the two powers came to an agreement over spheres of influence.

On May 7, 1970 the Fourth Dahomean Republic was inaugurated following a series of developments that snatched political stability from the jaws of civil anarchy, turned back the clock ten years, and gained the small West African state two questionable distinctions: the continent's first collegiate presidency and Africa's first head of state to bounce back to power after being toppled by the military.

As secession and civil war threatened the country following the aborted March 1970 elections, Dahomey had just completed a tortuous tenyear cycle of acute instability, during which every possible combination of political forces had tried and failed to govern the country. The political triumvirate of Dahomey--Ahomadegbe, Maga, and Apity--maintained a tight electoral stranglehold over their respective tribal fiefs in Abomey, the North, and Porto Novo, buttressed by their traditional claims to legitimacy. Intense regionalism and ethnic exclusiveness, dating to the precolonial era and perpetuated by the French administration, mitigated against the emergence of durable interregional political alliances. The period 1958-1965 was characterized by shifting coalitions between the three leaders that collapsed almost as soon as they were created as a result of continuous intrigues, plots, and jockeying for sole power (for a detailed analysis of this period, see Thompson 1963, Decalo 1968).

In the last five years as Americans have continued to discover Africa and have increased their efforts to include African perspectives in school curricula, the publication of children's literature about Africa has increased in quantity and to some degree in quality as compared with the years before 1965. Publishers now seem as anxious to publish anything pertaining to Africa for children, which they think will sell, as they are to publish such books for adults. The writer of children's books need no longer search for small publishers such as Fideler, Meredith, Beckley-Cardy, or Hale, but can apparently have books accepted by most of the major publishers.

There are now special series about Africa, or Afro-America to which authors can contribute, for example, the Zenith history series and the Watts first book series. The former includes paperbacks for older children, and the latter, hardcover books for children in the lower elementary grades. In the Zenith series, history is presented in outline form in Basil Davidson's A Guide to African History (1966), as culture history in AGlorious Age in Africa (1965) by Daniel Chu and Elliott Skinner, and through biography in Great Rulers of the African Past (1966) by Lavinia Dobler and William A. Brown. These history books are factually accurate, illustrated, and, in the case of the latter two, interesting to read. All the books in the Zenith series are more substantive than those in the Watts series, which are simplified for younger readers and shorter, even though they often try to cover more material than do the Zenith books.