When one contemplates the remarkable expansion in research interest in African phenomena among social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, the need for an up-to-date inventory of completed, continuing and projected research becomes increasingly apparent. Field research is costly; knowledge should be cumulative; reproduction ought to be systematic; and effective rapport with the human actors concerned should be scrupulously preserved. These and many other considerations dictate closer liaison among scholars everywhere in the organization and planning of future research on African subjects.

The purpose of this report is to provide a brief analytical survey of the character of research on Africa recently completed, or currently being pursued, by social scientists associated with European centers. There is, of course, a certain arbitrariness in focusing upon the state of research in European centers only, particularly in view of the very close organizational links between metropolitan institutions and associated research centers and institutes in the African territories. Moreover, as an increasingly greater proportion of the total research activity is being carried on by agencies established in Africa, a survey of the European centers provides us with only a partial picture of the overall dimensions of research sponsored and supported by the European countries concerned. In this report, however, space considerations unfortunately dictate this narrower focus upon the European side only.

The study of Africa has helped to further several healthy trends in the development of the discipline of political science. Confrontation with the rich variety of structural forms and modes of human expression of contemporary Africa has compelled the political analyst to look beyond the narrow “political” realm and conventional “political” structures for a more complete understanding and explanation of political phenomena. This African impact upon the discipline has come at a most propitious time—a time of intensive self-criticism from which at least three new emphases in research are beginning to emerge. One is the holistic approach reflected in efforts to classify and to compare political systems as wholes. A second approach, obviously related to the first but independently pursued by its proponents, is an ever-increasing explicit concern with non-political factors (e. g., the family, voluntary associations, the economic system, the social stratification system, cultural values, and so forth) as they may be related to and effect the political system and political behavior. Here, the impact of other disciplines, and particularly sociology, anthropology and psychology, is clearly manifest not only in the type of data gathered but in such neologisms as “political socialization” and “political acculturation.”

It is a real pleasure to introduce the impressive articles specially prepared for this issue of the Bulletin by members of the Libraries Committee of the African Studies Association. They reveal a fact already discovered by the book dealers of Europe and Africa, namely, the remarkable demand for Africana by American libraries during the past decade.

In its meetings thus far the Libraries Committee has endeavored to identify African library resources and needs in the United States. Certain of the needs we have considered are outlined on pp. 15-16 of the November, 1958 issue (Vol. I, No. II) of the Bulletin. Since that date the Committee has completed, in collaboration wiih Library of Congress officials, a detailed proposal and budget to establish an African Studies Unit in the Library of Congress which, among other duties, would produce a monthly accessions list of publications on Africa acquired by American libraries. This proposal has now been approved by the Board of Directors of the Association which is seeking the funds necessary to implement it.

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.