This Association was founded in 1958 as a meeting point for all American scholars seriously interested in African affairs, and it is now one of the most active organisations in the field. African study in the United States started much earlier, with the pioneering field work of Melville Herskovits, the interest of Lincoln University in the education of young Africans, and the first steps by W. E. B. Du Bois to create a Pan-African movement. During World War II, there were attempts to organise an international conference on Africa. Most academic interest, however, dates from the late 1940's, when the Carnegie Corporation of New York extended its programme of grants to universities for area studies to include the African field, gave funds for fellowships and sent groups of mature scholars to Africa for ‘look-see’ tours. In the 1950's, the Ford Foundation made major grants to Northwestern, Boston, and Howard Universities, and established a field training fellowship programme under which a majority of the younger Africanists now active in the United States have been trained. Other university programmes have followed; there are now more than 20.

Nearly thirty-five years have gone by since the signing of the Treaty of Versailles brought into existence a new international entity, the territory under mandate or trusteeship. Histories of the peace negotiation, depending on the prejudices or the personalities of their authors, represented the system as the creation of a group of impractical idealists or as the ultimate Surrender to militant colonialism. Only recently has it proved feasible to examine much of the evidence, to discover the effects of the system on the territories themselves, and to draw a few conclusions.