For decades, American scholars have been studying one aspect or another of the African experience. From 1927 on, Professor Melville J. Herskovits used his field research and scholarly insights to fashion courses on Africa offered as part of the regular curriculum at Northwestern University. Northwestern and Indiana graduate students, and possibly others, were already completing distinguished Ph.D. dissertations in the late 1930s that were based on field research in Africa or other types of original data. What we generally mean by African studies developed at a later stage, when the scholarly interaction of specialists on Africa drawn from a number of disciplines is formalized through a structure established by their institution.

What is called the “conflict” seems to be very old right now, in view of all that has happened between 1968, when the conflict began to surface at the Eleventh Annual Convention of the African Studies Association in Los Angeles, and the present. The conflict is older than its formal beginning, and we are no closer to a solution now than we were in 1968. The conflict is over who will interpret African history. White scholars, more than blacks, have always understood the importance of controlling history and social thought. The best way to control a people is to control what they think about themselves.

When I took on the job as local arrangements chairman (what we would now call chairperson) for the 1969 annual meeting of our association, held in Montreal, I did not expect to cater for the largest meeting in our history. Nor was I really prepared for the historic occasion that it was. Of course there had been rumblings the previous year, for after all that was the time when we were still involved with various confrontations. Today the excitement has gone, we are now all very inward looking, and it is rather difficult to tell what, if anything, lingers from those days. But historic occasion it was, of that there is no doubt. Almost eighteen hundred people registered, and the program we published for the occasion is now a collector’s item. I was recently offered twenty-five dollars for a copy!

In the early 1950s when the American Committee on Africa was formed, American interest in and knowledge about Africa was something of a joke. There was a Tarzan mentality in the US about the continent. Few books about Africa were known even by the reading public. Gunther’s Inside Africa, when it came out in 1956, served as a reference book for years for those Americans who wanted to get a perspective on the continent. I remember listening to Chester Bowles, who served as under secretary of state briefly in the Kennedy administration, speak about his own attempt to find relevant material about Africa in a Connecticut town. He told about his visit to the town public library, where he culled through the card catalogue. To find books on the Congo he said he had to search under “B” for “Belgium.” In searching for material on Ghana (then the Gold Coast) or Nigeria, he had to look under “Great Britain.” He found books about Liberia and Ethiopia under “Miscellaneous.” Knowledge of Africa was minimal, and the continent was on the whole looked upon as an extension of Europe.

In his address to the First Congress of Africanists in Accra on 12 December 1962, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah reminded his audience that they were united by the fact that they wanted to find out the truth about Africa, and when they had found out, they would proclaim it to the world. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah thus underscored the duality of the role of the Africanists in the second half of the twentieth century. Those engaged in African studies were charged to search for the truth about Africa with scientific and academic rigor. They were also exhorted to make known and to share the results of their research and discoveries with the world at large. African studies, according to Dr. Nkrumah, should help to create the launching pad for progressive and dynamic social policy.

The letter above capsules the problems and opportunities of African studies in the mid-1970s. It suggests that American education about Africa is pitifully inadequate, and that it has a long way to go to achieve the objective of a citizenry informed about Africa and one which accepts and appreciates Africa as well as the range of cultures which comprise our modern global society.

I blame it all on the CIA.

The Africa Research Group was formed as an outgrowth of an investigation which I, as a Ramparts magazine reporter, had undertaken to flush out some tentacles of covert US intervention south of the Sahara. It turned out that identifying CIA involvement was simpler than evaluating its underlying political thrust or gauging its impact. That sort of assessment required a fairly sophisticated understanding of African political economy as well as US foreign policy. It was clear that a group effort could be a more productive way of studying this phenomenon than any individual enterprise.

Africa and Africans do not get along well with the United States press, radio and television—and vice versa. Most Africans (whether students, individuals, or government officials) who have had some exposure believe it offers of Africa. Most directors of the U.S. media are leery of Africa and would prefer major news events to occur elsewhere. Fraternization and sympathy are mostly limited to African journalists who have lived or traveled in the United States (a considerable number on various exchange grants) and American journalists who have done an African stint. Alcoholically cursing their respective bosses, these two groups usually get on quite well.

Afro-Americans have always had more than academic interest in the study of Africa; it was inevitable therefore that they would come into conflict with Euro-Americans who (through myopia or cunning) insisted that they had no unique relationship to Africa. Viewed in historical perspective, it is quite understandable why in the 1960s blacks would challenge those whites who had arrogated to themselves the control of African Studies in the United States. For blacks, parity (if not dominance), in the study of Africa is inextricably part of their struggle for full equality in America. The reasons for this are quite simple: the whites who conquered and settled America decided quite early that the people of African descent who were brought to these shores as captives could not and (later) should not be permitted to live on a plane of equality with them.

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.

The modern Black Studies movement, in its present form, appeared in the 1960s as an emergent academic field and a self-conscious component part of the larger social and political movement for Black liberation. In contrast to the 1950s, which had been labeled “the silent generation” by some scholars, the 1960s were times of widespread political unrest and social movements. These currents were enlivened and precipitated by the Black liberation movement in its current stage of struggle for democratic rights, commonly referred to during that period as the “civil rights movement.” The Black college campuses were the source of leadership for this movement by young (though not exclusively) activist-intellectuals. The general social climate of self-assertion and political protest released an intellectual ferment that stimulated some Black students and Black scholars in their demand for “Black Studies” as a vanguard opposition to an entrenched intellectualism in American society.