This ISSUE is almost totally comprised of the first half of a two part publication series that relates Africanists to the Africa policy of the U.S. government. As a whole, the two parts—in this and the next ISSUE —review the relationship of the opinions and the activities of the Africanist community outside the U.S. government (mainly academics) to the thrust and substance of policy and the process of policy-making inside the U.S. government. The two major articles in the present ISSUE—on Africanists and U.S. foreign and national security policy by Larry Bowman of the University of Connecticut, and on Africanists and U.S. economic assistance policy by Michael Bratton of Michigan State University—represent the first part.

Relationships between U.S. government officials and academic specialists working on national security and foreign policy issues with respect to Africa are many and complex. They can be as informal as a phone call or passing conversation or as formalized as a consulting arrangement or research contract. Many contacts exist and there is no doubt that many in both government and the academy value these ties. There have been, however, ongoing controversies about what settings and what topics are appropriate to the government/academic interchange. National security and foreign policy-making in the U.S. is an extremely diffuse process.

Linking scholars to the Congress is difficult primarily because of the weakness of Congressional interest in Africa, but also due to the low levels of interest among academics in both Congress and its Africa foreign policy and the poor resources of African studies in the U.S. to build a foundation of knowledge useful to the Congress.

Two articles in the last Issue (Winter 1990) and an accompanying article in this Issue examine the relationships between U.S. Africanists and U.S. policy-makers from the perspective of “players” in the policy process. All these articles are based mainly upon interviews with current and former U.S. government officials and with experienced scholars who regularly participate in policy affairs.

Of all the policy issue areas that concern the U.S. government in its relations with Africa, economic assistance policy has attracted the deepest and widest involvement from U.S. university scholars. University-based analysts have enjoyed numerous avenues of access to officials who define, design, implement and evaluate U.S. foreign aid programs for sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. universities have stronger institutional linkages with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) than with any other Washington institution discussed in this ISSUE, including the U.S. Congress and agencies within the the national security bureaucracy.

The text of an analysis on Burundi presented by Mr. René Lemarchand on September 22, 1988 before the Africa Subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives was published in the 1989 winter number of ISSUE. As noted, more precise research has been published since this date on the Ntega and Marangara events by people who actually went to “revisit” the country, which is not the case of Mr. Lemarchand, since his last visit to Bujumbura was in autumn 1973.

Late in the 1980s, several major U.S. private foundations concluded that the concern for Africa in the country was weak. This weakness was reflected in the faint focus on U.S. foreign policy toward Africa in all three branches of government, in the halting voice for Africa or for U.S. interests there in the non-governmental organizations (think-tanks, religious organizations, lobbies), and in the small concern for U.S. policy or for affecting it in the African studies scholarly community. Indeed, the voice for Africa in the United States was neither strong nor effective.

My apologies to Mr. Chrétien and to your readers for “developing some simplistic formulas on Burundi” in my quest for “media success.” No such simplistic formulas enter his criticism of my Congressional testimony. On the one hand, I am taken to task for not conceding that my interpretation of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict as a recent phenomenon is the product of Chrétien’s “patient research work” over the last quarter of a century; on the other hand, “some very similar analysis” had appeared in my “excellent work of 1970,” which came out long before Mr. Chrétien embarked on his patient research! Try to figure that one out if you can.

Over 300,000 Sudanese perished primarily from hunger during 1988-89 in one of the most avoidable human tragedies in recent history. Mostly from the war-torn southern part of the country, these civilians were deliberately starved by central government, and to a lesser extent the insurgent Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which used the deprivation of food as a tactic of war. The threat of further genocidal actions by the Islamic fundamentalist junta in Khartoum and the private militias allied with the government continue to daily threaten the lives of millions of internally displaced people. Due to these man-made causes and nature’s lack of rain, up to ten million Sudanese are at risk of malnutrition, hunger and starvation in 1991.

Sudan today is confronting the possibility of preventable human death on a massive scale. The framework for responding has dramatically deteriorated in the last year. The scope of the disaster is essentially nationwide with 9 to 11 million people in jeopardy of starvation. About half of the at-risk population is war-related, and half drought-related— but the two forces are interacting to produce the level of vulnerability. This contrasts somewhat with the at-risk population in 1988, which was made up primarily of war affected southerners, of whom a quarter-of-a-million died.

The conflict in the Gulf has understandably overshadowed events in sub-Saharan Africa. But we believe the crisis overtaking many countries on that continent warrants our meeting here today.