In 1992 vice presidential debate, Ross Perot’s running mate asked, “Who am I? What am I doing here?” Similarly, I wonder why I am speaking here tonight along with a group of highly distinguished Africanists.

This article explores the recent emergence of a new subfield within African Studies: not just the study of sexuality in African contexts, but the study of “homosexuality,” or same-sex erotics and identities. I will outline some of the events that herald this new era of African Studies, and review some of the current research topics and debates. In the end, I hope to convince readers that this research deserves the support of all activist scholars within African Studies.

Contemporary Africa has little to be proud of. Between starvation, political corruption and economic inefficiency on the one hand and political unrest, political delegitimation and increasing refugization of widespread populations on the other, it is little wonder that many are writing off Africa. Some writers have stated emphatically that Africa is “Falling Off the Map.” African problems are many; African solutions seem to be few and far between. In a world where power is being redefined, where the New World Order presents new realities of geopolitic, it is no longer sufficient for Third World nations to play one super-power off against another. Africa is lost.

The central government of Kenya is well known for its use of the legal system, state structures, and the KANU (Kenya African National Union) party apparatus to threaten and thwart those who criticize its undemocratic practices and human rights violations. There are numerous and detailed accounts of attacks on the news media, the denial of permits for opposition public speaking events, the disruption of opposition party meetings, and the arrest and incarceration of reformist political and religious leaders. It is common for the central government to criminalize political activity by charging critics with sedition or holding an illegal meeting, and to use police violence to break up both licensed and unlicensed political events. Government officials and institutions played a major role in inciting and organizing violence in the Rift Valley from 1991 to 1993 that led to the deaths of over 1,500 people. The return to multiparty politics in 1991, after a lapse of 26 years when KANU reigned supreme, has done little to change these practices. Repression of the freedom of assembly, the freedom of association, and the freedom of expression is the modus operandi of the Kenyan nation-state.

Two hundred years ago, the Founding Fathers of America’s world-renowned democracy were wealthy, well-educated white males dedicated to throwing off the yoke of British oppression. In Sierra Leone since 1995, the person most associated with democracy is a petite, articulate, beautiful, in-your-face, dynamo of a woman named Dr. Kadi Sesay. Though Dr. Sesay’s job arises from a national emphasis on civic education for the masses, her work bears special scrutiny for its success in concretizing a feminist vision of female power articulated within the context of empowerment for all the country’s citizens.

Support for academic African language programs (ALPs) in the US began at the national level with the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (renamed the Higher Education Act of 1965). The goal of this legislation was to establish a world-wide language and area studies knowledge base that could be called upon in the event of conflict, but in addition it has provided generations of students a wealth of knowledge about the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) and the communities where they are spoken. Although the Africa region’s share of this support has hovered around 12%, its effect has been substantial. For example, based on a world-wide listing of Africanist linguists, approximately half of these specialists live in Africa, with the remainder being equally divided between the countries of Europe and the US, a remarkable fact given that the US has no colonial legacy in Africa. Title VI of this legislation supports a set of National Resource Centers (NRCs) that promote language and area study of a specific region including Africa.

Robert Bates’ letter entitled “Area Studies and the Discipline” (American Political Science Association, Comparative Politics 1, Winter 1996, pp. 1-2) uses the occasion of the SSRC’s abolishing of area committees to announce that “within the academy, the consensus has formed that area studies has failed to generate scientific knowledge.” As someone who has done some of his most important work on African development issues, Bates deplores declining investment in area studies as a “loss to the social sciences, as well as to the academy,” at an inopportune moment, “just when our [political science] discipline is becoming equipped to handle area knowledge in a rigorous fashion.”

Economic stagnation in most of Sub-Sahara Africa is so persistent that “afro-pessimism” has gone from a term of art to common usage. Africa is entering its second decade of economic reform through neoliberal Stabilization Programs (STABs) and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). There is little evidence that these reforms work. Africa is largely to blame, but so too are the logically flawed structural adjustment programs propagated by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs).

With few exceptions, economic development in the African states has generally been elusive and the people in sub-Saharan Africa remain among the poorest in the world. From 1970 to 1990, GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa grew in real terms by only US$80 and the region’s aggregate GNP per capita was only US$340 in 1990. In terms of annual percentage change, the region registered a 1.8 percent annual growth from 1970-77, an annual decline of 3.0 percent from 1978-84, and an annual increase of 2.4 percent from 1985-90. However, for the entire period of 1970-90, growth was statistically insignificant. During the period 1980-92 the annual growth rate of GNP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa was recorded as -1.83.

This paper represents an essay into Africanist social history and experimental biography. Thirteen years ago the pages of this journal carried a debate between Ali Mazrui and Hailu Habtu concerning Western and Semitic (Arab and Jewish) cultural influences in subsaharan Africa. In response to Professor Mazrui’s argument on the Jewish religious, metaphorical, economic, and political impact on Black Africa (foreshadowing Greco-Roman and Islamic influences), Professor Habtu vigorously rejected the “hidden premise...of an African cultural vacuum, or near-vacuum, destined to be filled by ‘universalistic’ civilizations.”

It is with the continued advances in the discipline of African American (Black) Studies that this essay comes to life. Recent articles by Bunzel and Grossman take dubious aim at Black Studies, its instructors, and its organizing principles. Grossman is even so obtuse as to use Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa, a book with virtually no grounding in reality as it relates to African Studies, to help prove her misguided thoughts. The authors are not concerned with Black Studies so much as they are with the fear of losing the privileged position White studies maintains. They use their articles as a poor attempt to discredit or otherwise slander a discipline that they simply do not understand or even attempt to understand. Articles such as “Tales from the Black Studies Ghetto” and “Black Studies Revisited” are clear evidence of the fear and ignorance Eurocentric thinkers are gripped by when dealing with an Afrocentric paradigm.

Administration, Staff, Students, and Workers,

It gives me great pleasure to be with you tonight.

I thank you for inviting me to give this annual memorial lecture.

African countries, like many other developing countries, suffer the problems associated with poverty—malnutrition, poor health services, high infant mortality rates, low life expectancy, high illiteracy rates, poor infrastructure, and inadequate technology. These problems are especially severe in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Alice Walker and former Democratic Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado have something in common. Both advocate the cessation of female circumcision in African countries, and both tout themselves as feminists, though Walker, borrowing from African American culture, prefers to be labeled as a womanist. What the elders had in mind when they described young African American women as “womanish,” or as “omanish,” the eclipsed form of that same word, was that such girls were too fast, or that they obtruded upon areas that were not their business. While Schroeder cannot properly be called a womanist (to do so would be to misapply the term), one can say that, similar to Alice Walker, Schroeder is putting herself into other people’s business, specifically the business of female circumcision in African communities.

The scholarly studies on political corruption in Africa are not conclusive, given the lack of knowledge of how neopatrimonialism contributes to state corruption. This is an important omission. There are obvious relationships between regime types and the likelihood, nature, and extent of political corruption. The analysis of political corruption in Sierra Leone has important implications for our understanding of the relationship between neopatrimonialism and state corruption.

The concept, ‘discipline’ has two broad meanings, namely, discipline as a field of knowledge, and discipline as order. The latter is the focus of this paper. Discipline as order has several sub-categorizations. These include the order by conduct and action which results from training, instruction, and education; the order maintained and observed by persons under control or command; a system of rules of conduct. Discipline is also used to denote control gained by enforcing obedience or compliance especially by use of punishment. In sum, discipline implies controlled and orderly behavior. By contrast, indiscipline means absence or lack of order. Simplistically defined, it implies unruly, wild, undomesticated and uncontrolled behavior. But when defined moralistically, indiscipline encompasses more serious violations such as crimes. Therefore, indiscipline refers to deviation from prescribed norms whether such norms are mere folkways, matters of etiquette or serious crimes.