The African Studies Association of the United Kingdom held its first Conference at the University of Birmingham from 14 to 17 September, 1964, when about a hundred members came together with a number of guests and observers, including representatives of the African Studies Association of the United States, the Africa-Studiecentrum of the Netherlands, the Scandinavian African Institute, and the German Afrika Gesellschaft. Most of those attending the Conference were accommodated at University House.

The Conference opened on the evening of 14 September with a speech of welcome by the Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University, Sir Robert Aitken, and a Presidential Address by Dr. Margery Perham, C.B.E., President of the Association.

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.

This article offers an ecofeminist interpretation of female pastoral expression in Kate Bush’s song cycle A Sky of Honey (2005). By identifying points of overlap between the re-visionary strategies of female pastoral and the ecofeminist ethics of care, I examine how A Sky of Honey’s sound world interrogates and restructures the primacy of dualist thinking common in pastoral convention. Exploring the creative background of A Sky of Honey, including the accompanying artwork, I first establish points of convergence with and divergence from pastoral tradition. I then analyse musical motifs to trace the development of character voices, before considering how the interactions of human voice and birdsong articulate a pastoral space that dissolves dualist structures in favour of collaboration. Reflecting on how this space demonstrates an ecofeminist ethics of care, I frame A Sky of Honey as an expression of female pastoral that reconfigures pastoral mythologies to envision an alternate vision of empathy and relationality.

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.