Hopefully there has been enough contact between humanists and social scientists in recent years and enough attempt at creating a common concern with common problems so that the one no longer entirely distrusts the cold and myopic eye of science peering into the literary intricacies of folklore and the other no longer thinks of folklore as a kind of folk entertainment, “a floating segment of culture,” which is marginal to his main concerns. I cannot speak for the humanist, though I should imagine he has learned to put up with the sometimes heavy hand of the anthropologist or political scientist for the sake of the wealth of contextual crosscultural data he gets from him. But speaking for the anthropologist, I would be surprised if there are any of us left today who would not collect what oral narrative we could, exploiting to the fullest the potentialities of such data in arriving at explanations for the workings of society and culture. We recognize well enough that folklore functions within a social and cultural context whose cultural content and social integration it both reflects and determines; We should therefore find some agreement in regarding folklore as having efficacy in human affairs - as being an agent.

That folklore is an agent of particular vitality and potential in Africa is something that can hardly be denied by those who have been there. We have evidence for this in the many extensive collections of traditional verbal art from the different quarters of that continent, and most recently we have only to mention the Herskovits collection inDahomean Narrative. But folklore is not to be seen only as a manifestation of tribal tradition now on the wane. It must be seen as an aspect of African culture that willenjoy and suffer the greatest exploitation for the sake of the African future. This should surprise neither humanist nor social scientist for they both know well “how inviting, from its very nature the field of folklore is for those who wish to exalt national character and a national destiny.” (Herskovits, 1959: 219). We have watched it being used to these ends in countries as far removed as Ireland and Argentina, and now we see the same thing in Africa. We see, for example, how the concepts and the circumnambient mythologies of “African personality” and “negritude” depend in their expression upon authentic or reinterpreted African folklore. In the matter of migration legends alone one has only to read the work of one of the early African intellectuals to articulate these notions-Cheik Anta Diop's Nations Negres et Culture (1948)-to realize how crucial to the arguments of these cultural pan-Africanists are the migration legends of the various African peoples.

The opening session was devoted to a discussion of the UNESCO Conference on the Development of Higher Education in Africa held in Tananarive, September 3-12, 1962, and its implications for the United States. Speakers on the panel were Dr. de Kiewiet; Karl Bigelow, Teachers College of Colum-gia University; Robert Van Duyn, Agency for International Development; and Kenneth Snyder, Bureau of International Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Dr. de Kiewiet, introducing the panel, paid a tribute to Dr. Ras Johnson of AID, a member of the official delegation, who lost his life while returning to the United States.

Dr. de Kiewiet remarked that, having assumed official delegations went out with highly specific instructions, he had made the reassuring discovery this was not the case. The delegation had largely determined for itself what the issues were and had developed responses to them; this flexibility had been important in establishing a successful relationship between the conference as a whole and the public and private sectors of American higher education.

Northwestern University's interest in Africa South of the Sahara dates back to 1927 and was originally centered in the field of Anthropology. By 1948 the need for greater knowledge of Africa and its inhabitants had become so increasingly apparent that the Anthropology Department announced the establishment of an African research program to be guided by an interdisciplinary committee. At approximately the same time, the University Library acquired a large collection of African newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and monographs as a gift from the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. The report in the Northwestern Library News for December 17, 1948describing the gift concluded with these words: