With rare and only partial exceptions, research and teaching institutions and individual scholars in these countries welcome the prospect of an increase in the frequency, range, and quality of research by American students of Africa and of greater coordination between them and scholars in Africa. Each government in principle also welcomes researchers who are intellectually, personally, and politically respected and whose projects are thought to be broadly relevant, or at least not antithetical to, the needs of the society. Despite the resemblance among countries in these general respects, each presents a unique cluster of opportunities, research settings, and problems which will be discussed in this report.

The information for this study was collected over a period of six weeks during the summer of 1968. Periods of one week were spent in Khartoum and Addis Ababa and of four weeks in South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Twenty-three interviews were conducted in Khartoum, twenty-two in Addis Ababa, and fifty-five in southern Africa, including thirteen in Lesotho and Swaziland. Eight of the eleven universities and three of the five university colleges in South Africa were visited. 150 people participated in the interviews. Of these eighty percent were in academic occupation such as university teachers/researchers or administrators, and twenty percent were in government posts (including a few officers in American embassies or consulates), international organizations, or private organizations engaged in or concerned with research.

Although the quantity of children's literature about Africa has been increasing rapidly in recent years--probably more has been published since 1960 than in the preceding three decades--the total volume is small and mediocre. Children's literature in this discussion refers to books written especially for children up to twelve or thirteen years of age. Somewhat over half the books which have been written for this age group are geographies, animal stories, and factual compendia with titles likeFirst Book of Liberia, Getting to Know Tanganyika, Land and People of South Africa, and so on. Young persons are likely to use such books in connection with school assignments or purely for pleasure (in the case of animal stories), but they will gain little understanding of African peoples and cultures from them.

The smaller segment of children's books about Africa is comprised of storybooks and factual presentations of African history and contemporary African life. Some of these books are sufficiently attractive to catch the attention of library users and of children whose parents are affluent enough to buy books for them. But do these books help create an understanding of the peoples and cultures of Africa? This question is especially pertinent since school curricula still devote relatively little attention to Africa, despite its increased importance on the world scene, and television, radio, movies, and other mass media to which children have access often do little or nothing to promote an understanding of Africa and its people.

The Boston University African Studies Program inaugurated a program for the United States Government in June 1959 when an orientation and training course for International Cooperation Administration (the predecessor of the Agency for International Development) career personnel to be assigned to African posts was undertaken. A special staff was appointed to administer the program under the direction of the Director of the African Studies Program. In 1961 the Development Research Center was formally established within the African Studies Program with responsibility for administering contract activities. John D. Montgomery, who was in charge of contract activities from 1960 to 1963, was succeeded as Director of the Development Research Center by John L. Fletcher, Jr., Professor of Government at Boston University. Other members of the Center's staff have included Edouard Bustin, Associate Research Professor of Government; Wilbert J. LeMelle, Assistant Research Professor of Government; John W. Sommer, Research Assistant; and Claudia W. Moyne, Research Associate. Regular staff members of the African Studies Program also participate in the work of the Development Research Center by delivering lectures and giving informal instruction.

During the period of the first contract, 140 career employees studied at Boston University. The program for the first group of employees included seven months of study, part of which was at Boston University and part in Europe and Africa. For the second group of employees, trained in 1960, a shorter period of study included work in Boston as well as a European phase at Oxford, London, Brussels, and Paris. For the third group there was a seven-week's program conducted entirely in Boston. Subsequent groups received four weeks of instruction in Boston. In addition to the lectures and published written materials, the course also included the study and discussion of special case studies in technical assistance and group exercises in the design and analysis of foreign aid programs for selected countries.

Students interested in the history of Liberia have been hampered by the dearth of serious studies on Africa's first republic. With few noteworthy exceptions, published works on Liberia can be grouped into two rather broad categories. The first consists of works which tend to be too journalistic in concept and execution to satisfy the demands of serious scholarship. The second includes a variety of memoir-like collections of reminiscences and observations recorded by individuals stationed at one time or another in Liberia while engaged in educational, missionary, or developmental programs. Much of the published material in both categories is useful, and indeed quite valuable, for it provides a good deal of information not readily found elsewhere. Yet, while informative, these books do not constitute a body of scholarly work which the serious student of West Africa would wish to have available.

One work which must have a place on the relatively brief list of trust-worthy books of reference relating to Liberia is the exhaustive compilation of basic documents prepared by the distinguished international jurist, C. H. Huberich. Paradoxically, it appears that it was this important work which discouraged many historians from searching further for basic source materials, for Huberich noted that most official Liberian documents were destroyed during a violent storm in Monrovia. Writers on Liberian affairs who accepted Huberich's statement as the final word on the subject seem not to have attempted to utilize unpublished Liberian government papers in their research. Even those researchers who have, in recent years, had sufficient interest to probe into this alleged disappearance of the Liberian archives, or who were desirous of determining the extent of archival materials which might have survived the disaster, were undoubtedly discouraged by ambiguous replies from Monrovia in response to their inquiries.

The conference, sponsored by the African Research Committee and the African Studies Group of the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, was held June 2-4, 1966, at the Kenwood Conference Center, Milwaukee. Conferees were as follows: D. W. Griffin (University of California, Los Angeles); Peter C. W. Gutkind (McGill University): Ruth Simms Hamilton (Iowa State University); George Jenkins (University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee); G. Wesley Johnson (Stanford University); John Paden (Northwestern University); Michael Safier (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee); Henry J. Schmandt (University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee); W. M. Swanson (Yale University); and Alvin Wolfe (Washington University).

African urban studies are on the verge of escape from scarcity into bulky unintelligibility. At least sixteen books are being prepared by Americans for publication; most of them are single-instance studies by junior scholars, although six of them will present comparable materials gathered according to the “Bohannan plan.” (See African Urban Notes, I [April 1966], 1). In addition, some thirty Americans and Africans are presently in Africa or writing dissertations based on field research, and at least twenty more Americans are planning field research. Furthermore, the ARC conferences on unemployment, the West Indian Ocean area, geography, and migration have recommended still more urban research. Although this does not mean that a surfeit is threatened in any sector of urban studies, African urban research will probably be marked for some time by increasing descriptive affluence and continuing theoretical poverty. The essential need in this area of African studies is to provide for more meaningful development of a sizable movement whose momentum seems assured for the immediate future.

American scholars doing research in African literature sometimes have trouble locating the books they need. It is easy enough to get one's hands on African literary works published in England or America, but how does one get hold of material published in Africa -- e.g., Onitsha market chapbooks, early Lovedale or Morija press publications, or works in vernacular languages published by literature bureaus and small mission presses? Fortunately, for the older titles once can search through several published library catalogs -- Library of Congress (1942-1952), UCLA (1963), Berkeley (1963), the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library (1962), the African collection in the Moorland Foundation at Howard University (1958), Northwestern University's African collection (1962) -- and for the newer titles one can consult the National Union Catalog or the Joint Acquisitions List of Africana issued since 1961 by the Northwestern University Library. However, because these reference works do not list the older titles which libraries have acquired in recent years, one can never be certain that a particular African literary work is unavailable in the United States.