This conference was held at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, December 8 to 10, 1966, under the cochairmanship of Professor Frank Willett (Northwestern University) and Dr. Brian M. Fagan (University of Illinois). Thirteen persons in some way associated with Iron Age archaeology were official participants, and there were six observers who also contributed to the discussions. The names of these participants are listed at the end of this article. Their primary concern was with the archaeology of Africa since the origins of food production, with special reference to the Iron Age.

As a guideline the participants were given brief reports on four recent conferences which had touched on the problems of African Iron Age archaeology. Terminology and research needs, primarily for the Stone Age, were topics at the Wenner Gren Symposium on the African Quaternary held at Burg Wartenstein, Austria, in July, 1965. The results of this symposium were reviewed at the meeting of West African archaeologists in Sierra Leone during June, 1966. This meeting also expressed concern at the shortage of manpower and resources in West African archaeology, especially in the French-speaking territories, and training facilities and other terminological problems were also discussed. The difficulties of communication and training, especially in related disciplines, were discussed by a group attending an ARC meeting on the African Arts in March, 1966.

There is an increasing need of the government to know more about Africa. Trying to look ahead, many of us can see, for example, continued instability on the continent, with weak, fragile states grappling with the problems of achieving national cohesion. As we confront the problems arising from this instability, the gaps in our knowledge and understanding are vast and our need to know will probably continue to be much greater than our capacity to find the answers.

The African Studies Association's forthcoming bookThe African World: A Survey of Social Research has symbolic as well as substantive value for FAR insofar as it demonstrates how a group with widely diversified disciplines, interests, and missions can devise effective channels of communication to share a clearer understanding of each participant's special problems and objectives. The ASA asked the specialists in each of the 18 disciplines represented in this book to discuss, in relatively simple language and for the benefit of those in other disciplines, the problems they study in Africa, their methods, successes, and major failures.

The American University offers courses in the study of Africa among different disciplines and also Africa area studies on an interdisciplinary basis.

It is recognized that there is a need for people who have a specialized discipline in one aspect of Africa, such as anthropology, linguistics, history, economics, or political science. There is also a need for a “general practitioner” (interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary) approach. Students are given the opportunity to pursue either procedure, or a combination of these procedures.

A student may study for an M.A. in African area studies, or for an M.A. or Ph.D. in international relations, government and public administration, business administration, or in one of the other disciplines in The American University, with an emphasis on Africa. A student may also study for an M.I.S. (Master of International Service), with an emphasis on Africa.

The larger proportion of the graduate students in African studies have already had some professional experience in Africa and come here for either strengthening special needs or for more general breadth for their future work related to Africa. The American University provides an opportunity for a flexible program to meet particular needs as well as general interests of students.

The African Studies Program at The American University in Washington, D.C. has the special advantages of close association with African embassies, U.S. government departments, and the United Nations, in addition to research facilities of the Library of Congress. Students here also have the opportunity for contact with scholars who are specializing in other ares of the world which are having increasing relationships with Africa - - including Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The Africa collections at Stanford University are housed largely in the University Library, the library of the Food Research Institute, and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. Although the major portion of the material is found in the Hoover Institution, the other two libraries constitute important resources. Special collections are located in the Branner Library (Geology), the Cubberley Library (Education), the Lane Medical Library, and the Law Library. The curator of the Hoover Africa Collection assists all university libraries by recommending titles of old and new items so that the various collections develop in all fields.

The University Library buys widely in the African field but accepts primary responsibility for all African material before 18 70 and in the areas of art, ethnography, geography, linguistics, literature, religion, sociology, statistics, and technical documents. The Government Documents Division receives general statistical annuals and bulletins from all African countries and statistical reports of foreign trade from most countries. An effort is made to acquire all census and development-planning material. Most departmental reports are also received. The Documents Division was long an official depository for British government documents and thus contains an outstanding collection of parliamentary debates, blue books, command papers, Foreign Office papers, and annual reports of the Colonial Office from the early nineteenth century. For France the debates of the Assemblée Nationale are held from 18 71 and the Journal Officiel from 1914; for Germany the Reichstag debates are complete from 1867. These together with the depository publications of the United Nations make a substantial collection of material relevant to Africa.

In September and October of 1964, I visited the various centers once forming links in the archival system of French West Africa. Contrary to what occurred in Equatorial Africa, the French left these archival holdings in place, except for current material which was shipped to the rue Oudinot (Ministry of Colonies) in Paris. The center of the West African system was the Archives of the Government-General in Dakar (later the High Commission). Based originally on the Senegalese holdings, this archive became an independent agency of the federal government and was the parent organization of subsidiary archives for Senegal, Mauritania, Soudan, Upper Volta, Niger, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. It was parallel in structure to the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), which also had its headquarters in Dakar and maintained subsidiary centers for each territory. In some cases, the archives and IFAN centers were amalgamated (during World War II) and the history of the two organizations is often inseparable. This survey is an attempt to describe the establishment and development of these archival centers, how their material was organized and can be used for research, and their current status in the independent countries.

The following documents are part of a collection of ephemeral materials published by nationalist movements of Portuguese Africa. During the past five years I have been gathering these materials in order to have them microfilmed and placed on deposit in the library of the Hoover Institution on War, Peace, and Revolution, Stanford University, where they will be available for use by interested scholars. A related objective is to translate to English the most important of these documents, edit them, and add relevant notes along with a full bibliography on each Portuguese African territory; this project is nearing completion and should be published in book form in 1967. I am grateful to the many African specialists who have assisted me on the documents collection, and it is my hope that other specialists who have documents not included in the listings below will send me photocopies or duplicates, for which I can pay expenses incurred.

The appointment in March 1966 of Kwame Nkrumah as honorary president of Guinea was ostensibly made on the basis of an agreement signed by Nkrumah and Sékou Touré in 1958 which founded the Union of Independent African States (UIAS, Ghana-Guinea, 1958-1960). The UIAS, subsequently the Union of African States (UAS, Ghana-Guinea-Mali, 1960-1963), has not been of great importance in the development of Pan-Africanism. Nkrumah's recent appointment probably caused more publicity for the UIAS-UAS than any other event in its history, with the exception of its founding in 1958. Because of the quiet functioning of this organization, declared as no longer in existence by Touré in 1963, very little has been written about it. Thus a student of Africa is reduced to dependence upon short newspaper accounts of the various meetings of the leaders of the states involved, to brief references in more general works on African unity, and to conjecture.

Yet there are several bibliographic sources which are useful. Among these is Peter Duignan, “Pan-Africanism: A Bibliographic Essay,” African Forum, I, No. 1 (Summer 1965), 105-107, a brief survey of the most important works on Pan-Africanism. The subject is divided into three phases--the American reaction to racism, the drive for African independence, and the dream of continental unity. For materials concerning Ghana, the best reference is Albert F. Johnson, A Bibliography of Ghana, 1930-1961 (Evanston, Ill., Published for the Ghana Library Board by the Northwestern University Press, 1964). Of a more general nature are W. J. Hanna and J. L. Hanna, Politics in Black Africa (East Lansing, African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1964); the annual United States and Canadian Publications on Africa, for years from 1960 (Washington, Library of Congress, 1962; Stanford, Calif., Hoover Institution, 1963-), an excellent source for references to periodical materials; and International Committee for Social Sciences Documentation, The International Bibliography of Political Science (Chicago, Aldine Publishing Co., 1952-).

U.S. assistance to the Republic of the Sudan began in April 1958 when an economic aid office was established in Khartoum, following a bilateral agreement for economic, technical and related assistance. In the six-year period ending with fiscal year 1963 (June 30, 1963), the United States has committed $75.6 million in assistance. The two governments are cooperating in a program to assist in achieving the objectives of Sudan's ten-year Development Plan. Projects are concentrated in portions of four sectors of the economy with an additional underlying emphasis on technical and professional training: 1) educational assistance is channeled toward the goal of expanding and strengthening academic, teacher training and technical education through the secondary level; 2) agricultural extension and research programs are focused on diversification to reduce the dependence of the economy on cotton; 3) infrastructure assistance is concentrated on highway demonstration and training although AID does finance some feasibility studies and provides development loans for selected transportation and public utility projects; 4) industrial development in the private sector is promoted through assistance in establishing an Industrial Bank, selected feasibility studies to encourage formation of small and medium industries and loans to private enterprise.

Sociolinguistics is a recently developed subject of interdisciplinary study in the social sciences. Joseph H. Greenberg has indicated the scope of this field and its relevance to African studies in general in his contribution to Robert A. Lystad's The African World: A Survey of Social Research (New York, Praeger, 1965; p. 427). He includes in sociolinguistics such topics as “the relation of language differences to social class; the differential social roles of different languages co-existing in the same society; the development and spread of lingua francas as auxiliary languages in multilingual situations; the factors involved in the differential prestige ratings of languages; the role of language as a sign of ethnic identification; language in relation to nationalism; and problems of language policy, e.g., in education.” Africa, with its emerging nations, is an ideal area for such research, since the development of new nations entails problems which sociolinguistic studies are particularly fit to solve. Much of the linguistic work done in the colonial era and even in more recent years is inadequate, because of lack of reference to the relevant social context. With regard to this situation, the Committee on Sociolinguistic Research in Africa of the ARC considered it advisable to include in the January conference some topics which are usually handled under the headings of ethnolinguistics and psycholinguistics, e.g., the changes induced in one language by contact with another in the context of the general culture-contact situation, including its nonlinguistic aspects, and the problems of attitudes and behavior toward language.

The conference was sponsored by the African Research Committee and was held at the Minnowbrook Conference Center of Syracuse University from October 30 to November 2, 1965. The disciplines represented were social and cultural anthropology, musicology, sociology, social psychology, political science, and history. Participants included Philip Allen (Department of State); Frederick Burke (Syracuse University); Remi Clignet (Northwestern University); L. Gray Cowan (Columbia University); Norma McCloud (Tulane University); John Middleton (Northwestern University); Allen Rawick (Library of Congress); Aidan Southall, Chairman (Syracuse University); and Peter Wilson (Yale University).

The conference concentrated its efforts on seeking and sharing a common understanding of the social background of the diverse ocean and island region that includes Madagascar, the Comoros, Mauritius, Réunion, and the Seychelles and on exploring precisely the extent to which linked interdisciplinary and comparative studies would be fruitful. The conference came to a strong and unanimous conclusion that the Western Indian Ocean Region offers the challenging possiblity of a real breakthrough in a number of dissimilar but closely interlocking research interests.

The main recommendations of the conference are as follows:

1. That a rather informal clearinghouse should be established which would institute and maintain contact between social scientists interested in the region and keep them up to date on all relevant plans and work in progress.

2. That a careful and detailed application should be drawn up to obtain funds for carrying out a series of well-balanced and integrated studies, attracting graduate students and training them for further work, securing library resources, and forming appropriate ties with interested scholars and academic institutions overseas.

The Research Liaison Committee was established under the auspices of the African Studies Association. It is supported by a Ford Foundation grant following the Ford-sponsored ASA exploratory mission to Africa. This mission examined opportunities for new ways in which to increase cooperation between U.S. scholars concerned with Africa and individuals and academic institutions based in Africa.

Scholars from the United States constitute the largest single national group engaged in African research. In the past the responsibility for establishing friendly relations with our colleagues in Africa has been assumed by the individual scholar. However, it becomes increasingly apparent that cooperation with Africanists in Africa itself will be of the greatest importance to future research, and that the Association can play a useful liaison role in establishing this cooperation.

To facilitate communication, the Research Liaison Committee is collecting information and identifying sources of information for scholars and students proposing research in African Studies. The Committee has established an office in New York at the same address as the Association's offices and under the direction of William O. Brown, with Shirley K. Fischer as Administrative Secretary. Its objectives are first, to develop and strengthen relations among scholars concerned with Africa; and second, to maintain liaison with research institutions in Africa through visits to Africa by members of the Committee.

Africana at Howard University, Washington, D.C., developed as records on the African background of the American Negro were required to supplement the Library's collection of works written by and about persons of African descent.

Among the first books acquired by the Library soon after Howard University was incorporated on March 2, 1867, were titles on Africa. Some of the founders of the University interested in foreign missions donated to the Library their files on periodicals, books of travel and description, histories of Africa, and biographies of missionaries. Among these was the first edition of Churchill'sCollection of Voyages and Travels issued in four volumes in 1704; seven editions of the works of Hiob Ludolf, the Elder ( …Historia Aethiopica, 1681; …Aethiopicam … commentarius, 1691; …Lexicon Amharico, 1698; …Grammatica Aethiopica, 1702;A New History of Ethiopia, 1682 and 1684); Barbot'sDescription of the Coasts of North and South Guinea (1732); the 1639 reissue of the 1632 edition ofAfricae descriptio of Leo Africanus; and works of travel by Bosman, Proyart, Kolbe, Bruce, Smith, Vaillant, and Sparrman. Some of the serial files presented were theMissionary Herald (1821-1882);Africa's Luminary (1839-1840);African Repository (1825-1900);Mouvement Antiesclavagiste (1889-1906);Liberia (1892-1908);Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (1833-1849);Afrique Explorée et Civilisée (1879-1882); andBulletin du Comité de l'Afrique Française (1891-1919).