For many years, it was traditional for the outgoing President of a scholarly association to give a formal address, usually on some aspect of his own scholarly interests. That tradition seems to have died, and I see no good reason to revive it. The newer tendency is for the outgoing President to talk about the affairs of the Association, but we have the Newsletter and the business meeting for that. It seems a good time to look just a little further afield to the affairs of the Africanist community at large, whether members of this Association or not--to try for historical perspective on the question of where African studies has been and is going. (if I concentrate on African studies in North America, I also recognize that the African Studies Association is not merely a national association. Its membership is and always has been international, but most members still belong to a North American community of Africanists; this is the community I happen to know best, though I apologize for the parochialism.)

It goes without saying that any assessment of African studies must be a series of personal judgments, based obscurely on the prejudices and the experiences of the individual who makes it. The moment may be especially opportune for subjective judgments, since they will soon be corrected by the Social Science Research Council's survey of foreign area programs--a survey directed by Professor Richard Lambert of the University of Pennsylvania.

The mandate system may be toothless but it is not bootless.

--Parker T. Moon (Imperialism and World Politics)

Students of comparative politics and international relations generally admit that one of the more outstanding political developments of the post-World War II era has been what Hans J. Morgenthau calls “the Colonial Revolution”--the granting of independence to colonial territories and dependencies in Asia and Africa. “What seemed to be almost inconceivable at the end of the Second World War,” Morgenthau comments, “has become an accomplished fact only twenty years later” (1967, p. 344). To Morgenthau this colonial revolution “is in its essence a triumph of the moral ideas of the West…carried forward under under the banner of two moral principles: national self-determination and social justice.” Organski (1968), on the other hand, sees the attainment of independence by these colonies as part of an inevitable historical movement, not necessarily owing to ideas as such: “…colonialism sows the seeds of its own destruction. No sooner is a colony conquered than its population begins to move, slowly and imperceptibly at first, then quickly and noticeably, toward political independence” (p. 234). F. H. Hinsley (1967) sees the declining strategic importance of these colonies as a partial reason for the colonial revolution. Arguing in this vein, he contends that the “withdrawal [of an imperial power] from territory since the second World War has been due…to the growing recognition that it is not vital to hold it from the strategical point of view and not feasible to hold it in the face of metropolitan opinion” (p. 359).

In Kenya today there are a variety of conflicting views concerning the present performance and the proper societal role of the public bureaucracy--the civil service. Consider the following statements. On March 17, 1971, in the Parliament of Kenya, the Assistant Minister in the Office of the Vice-President, Mr. M. Shikuku, stated that “the foremost enemies of the wananchi (citizens) were the country's senior civil servants” (East African Standard, March 18, 1971, p. 1). Another M. P., Mr. M. J. Seroney, stated that a type of “silent coup” had taken place and that Government (meaning the Cabinet and the very top political leaders) had “silently taken the powers of the National Assembly and given them to the civil service.” Mr. Seroney termed the National Assembly “a rubber stamp of some unseen authority” (p. k).

On March 18 the National Executive Officer for Kanu (the Kenya African National Union, at present the sole legal political party in Kenya) announced:

The National Executive Officer called for a restructuring of the system so that administrators would receive directives from the party.

It is something of an understatement to say that the historiography of Islam in Africa came of age during the period 1960-1970. Looking back on this decade of active scholarship, and contrasting it with a previous era of “darkness” (a sort of jāhiliyya, at least for Western scholars), one cannot help but be astonished by the comparison. Before 1960 there were no university centers devoted to the study of Islam in Africa; there was only a handful of scholars fully engaged in Islamic studies, and of these very few trained in the historical discipline. With such a serious shortage of trained scholars, it is not surprising to note the absence of suitable historical monographs pertaining to the history of Islam in Africa.

The last decade has told a rather different story. Several prominent centers of African studies have been established, and while a serious shortage of Arabist-historians continues, it is encouraging to note that each of these centers has placed high priority upon the acquisition of scholars in African Islamic studies. Importantly, to stand Professor Trevor-Roper's argument on its head, it is no longer possible to speak of the “unrewarding gyrations of barbarous” Islamic peoples “in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.” The good Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford has had to consume much humble pie over this unfortunate statement, and it is not intended here to cram his palate much further. Suffice it to say, however, that the Jāhiliyya has always been an area of rewarding research, and despite Trevor-Roper, even “darkness” is a subject of legitimate historical study.

The problem in determining what areas of research should be discussed under the rubric of African economic history lies less in the definition of the term “economic” than in that of “African” and of “history.” For a subfield like this historians must lean to some extent upon the work of other Africanist social scientists. There does exist a considerable body of writing by economists and anthropologists about economic activities in Africa. However, the economists have concentrated their efforts upon those sectors of the contemporary African economy which, at least historically, are identified with alien enterprises. Anthropologists do write about economic systems rooted in the indigenous African past, but their focus has been almost entirely upon the arrival of “primitive”--that is, subsistence-oriented--levels of production and exchange within these systems, thus offering little insight into the dynamics of historical development.

Historians can, of course, learn a great deal from these studies and must consider the Impact of European enterprise and the role of subsistence sectors in their own work. But if economic history is to make a major contribution to African studies, it must attempt to explore the continuities between past and present; this requires attention to what one important recent contribution has called “an intermediate category” located “midway between subsistence and a fully-fledged market economy” (Gray and Birmingham 1970, pp. 4, 1). The only serious attempt to investigate such developments has been in the further subfield of precolonial trading history, which will be discussed first in this paper.

Of all the “subfields” of African history, religion is in the most preliminary condition. It is also, in all probability, the most difficult to treat in an orderly fashion, owing to the constant spillover into other areas generally regarded to be more preemptive in modern historiography. Our task in isolating religion as a subfield entails in part an operation of retrieval from political, social, and intellectual sectors of the discipline. Problems of definition must also be tackled. Are we primarily concerned with religion in history or the history of religion? Where is the cutoff mark in considering myth, ritual, and other phenomena that are related, but not at all times central, to religion?

The following frame of reference is necessarily sketchy but is offered as a foundation for ensuing historiographical remarks. References to the major types of religion, whether “traditional,” Christian, or Muslim, will be minimized for the present.

Religions have secular and spiritual aspects, the secular being most frequently observed and reported in connection with political and social institutions or behavior. The spiritual aspect and the internal development of a belief system are comparatively inaccessible, but highly significant. Popular beliefs, as well as more formal ideological and theological tenets, fall into this category. Owing to the role of religion in supporting a style of life and/or a political system, the survival of certain religious values may offer clues about a former epoch and the process of historical change in a society.

The Anglo-French agreement of August 10, 1889, which among other things defined the Lagos-Porto Novo boundary up to the ninth parallel of latitude, and that of August 5, 1890, which delimited the French and British spheres of influence north and south of the Say-Barruwa line, respectively, made no specific mention of how the area, north of Ashan and around Borgu was to he partitioned, with the result that this territory remained to be settled by means of “effective occupation.” Until the Anglo-French Convention of June 14, 1898, which settled the Niger disputes, the area around Borgu witnessed the protracted military confrontation which brought both nations to the brink of war. This paper seeks to review this rivalry as a study in military imperialism in which the role of the military in the acquisition of empire in this area will be assessed. Although the final settlement was the result of political considerations and diplomatic moves in Paris and London, a great deal depended on the military exertions of either party which sought to strengthen the hands of its negotiators at the conference table.

In this connection the French showed great drive and initiative. The French colonial forces in West Africa during this period did not suffer from some of the disabilities of governmental control which hindered the freedom of action of their British counterpart. Consequently they were often able to take independent action, which at times ran counter to the directives they received from Paris, but which, as in the case of the Anglo-French rivalry in West Africa, had far-reaching consequences.

This paper examines some strategies employed by a power elite in dealing with the disjunction between official commitments and everyday practises. Data were gathered on women's protest in Kenya. It attacked the normative-existential discrepancy demanding that the political elites bring the institutional system and their private behaviour more into keeping with the beliefs they had professed in fighting colonialism and which are now enshrined in documents that lay the foundation for a democratic-egalitarian state. The male-dominated power elite, socialized in a traditional system that gives males prerogatives in the spheres of power, authority, and status, operating in a system of many demands and scarce resources, and not wanting to lose face with women who form a potentially powerful pressure group, are caught in a situation of cross pressures. The women, on the other hand, while also socialized in this traditional system, have been the proteges of colonial women and Western institutions and have internalized Western values about women's roles. Though their view of what their roles should be conforms to the power elites' ideal values, its response has been a far cry from these ideals. In addition to exploring the normative-existential discrepancy, this paper focuses on male, and in particular, female images of what the situation is and ought to be and some tactics used by each to attain their goals.

Material was collected in Kenya from 1964 to 1966. I returned in 1969 and collected more data. The data consist of interviews with women leaders, participation in women's activities, and various documents from writings of women leaders to letters-to-the-editor.