Home > Letter from the Director

Letter from the Director

Andrew Apter, Director of the UCLA African Studies Center

The UCLA African Studies Center was established by James S. Coleman in 1959, as the new nations of Africa began to emerge after years of struggle against colonial overrule.  Those were unpredictable and exciting times, when a momentous sense of historic destiny animated modernist models of national development and self-determination.  Coleman himself played a significant role in promoting education and development in postcolonial Africa—as a scholar of Nigerian nationalism, as an educator in Kenya and (then) Zaire, and as an institution builder.  Naming the Center in his honor after he died in 1986, UCLA continues to recognize the substance and spirit of his remarkable achievements.

Much has changed since 1959.  On the plus side, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa prevailed; the civil wars in Mozambique and Angola finally ended, as did the Cold War with its proxies on the continent; the military regimes of the 1970s and ‘80s ceded to shifting tides of democratization; new Pan-African organizations like NEPAD (New Partnerships for Africa’s Development) and the AU (African Union) are adapting to the imperatives of globalization and neoliberal reform;  women’s economic and political organizations are on the rise; the African brain-drain abroad is reconnecting with the continent—digitally as well as socially and economically; indeed, as China today so aggressively demonstrates, "Africa is open for business."  On the down side, the AIDS pandemic has precipitated an inconceivable crisis of social dislocation and reproduction; regional conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the DRC, as well as the horrific genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, have destroyed communities, traumatized populations, and produced  new generations of refugees; the infrastructures of democracy remain fragile and precarious, evidenced most recently by the elections in Nigeria, Kenya and Zimbabwe; economic development proceeds unevenly at best; higher education has declined; and the ravages of global warming pose a precipitous threat to water supplies and agricultural production.  From the comfortable heights of the ivory tower—materialized in the 10th floor office of Bunche Hall at UCLA, where our center is located—we might well ask, "What is to be done?"  Indeed, what is the role, function, politics and purpose of African Studies in global perspective?

First and foremost, we are a research institution, an "ORU" (Organized Research Unit) in the language of the University of California system.  UCLA is home to a large and dynamic community of Africanists that spans a broad range of disciplines and schools, including Arts and Sciences, Theatre, Film and Television, Medicine and Public Health, Law, Business, Education, Public Affairs, Library Science, Art and Architecture, and the Fowler Museum, renowned for its Africanist curators, collections and exhibits. We also house the Marcus Garvey Papers Project, the Globalization Research Center-Africa, and produce the flagship journal African Arts. As a Center, we tap into this expansive expertise, coordinating diverse research initiatives into productive synergies while shaping our collective efforts within a shared commitment to Africa.  Such bridge-building initiatives include "Living in Limbo: the African Refugees Documentation Project," "Local Markets, Global Trends: Joint Research Partnerships on African Entrepreneurship," "Sex, Blood and the Social Body: Sociocultural Frameworks of HIV/AIDS in Africa," "The Indian Ocean World Research Initiative," "The Trans-Saharan Research Initiative" and the "Black Atlantic Research Initiative."

Secondly, we recognize that our specialized research engages the politics of representation at every step.  Africa remains notoriously distorted in the Western (and indeed Eastern) imagination, deeply embedded in racist stereotypes that were forged during the Atlantic slave trade, reshaped under European colonization, and unwittingly revalued in the oppositional discourses of Négritude, Pan-Africanism, and Afrocentrism. This is not a problem to be politely ignored or swept under the table, but rather one that we engage from informed critical perspectives.  Real knowledge of Africa requires training in African languages, not only for purposes of fieldwork and archival research, but to explore cultural horizons that are grammatically framed.  Our commitment to African language instruction has long been a hallmark of African Studies at UCLA, one for which we seek renewed resources and course development at undergraduate and graduate levels, including three levels of Yoruba, Swahili and Zulu offered each year.  Real knowledge of Africa also requires a rethinking of the continent, not as the negative space of "primitive tribes" (of a "blackness" not-civilized, not-white, and not-rational) but as a substantive space of historic bridges and ethnic interactions.  We do not see the Sahara Desert as a "natural" divide between "Arabs" and "Black Africans," but rather as a historic regional network of long-distance trade, Islamic learning, and multiple levels of Arabic literacy.  Nor is Africa limited to the confines of a continent in our vision, but extends through the Atlantic Diaspora to Europe and the Americas; eastward through the Indian Ocean Diaspora, and across the Sahara to the Mediterranean world.

Finally, our commitment to programming and outreach takes our knowledge and expertise into the greater Los Angeles community and its public schools, and extends to Africans in Africa.  As one of our emeritus elders put it, the African Studies Center should be a portal or gateway that brings Africa to Los Angeles and Los Angeles to Africa.  This month, we sent three LA district high school teachers and students to Uganda, where they met with local counterparts to exchange ideas about curriculum development.  Thanks to our partnership with the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa, we are filming this exchange with the Discovery Channel and with financial support from USAID.  We also host African scholars on various exchange programs such as Fulbright and WARA (West African Research Association), and recognize the need to increase the numbers of African students and colleagues on our campus.  Currently we are benefiting from a new Fulbright initiative that brings African graduate students to American campuses for one year, where they audit classes and teach an African language.  We are also building relationships with NGOs such as the Coalition for Sustainable Africa (CSAfrica), which is recruiting our most motivated undergraduates to work on a variety of community-based projects. Our undergraduates also participate in our education abroad programs in Ghana, Egypt and South Africa.

After fifty years as an area studies center, we have much to build on, and much more to learn.  Information technology is revolutionizing distance learning and access to library resources in Africa while enabling innovative multimedia formats.  The World Bank is localizing its development initiatives as NGO’s pick up where failed states left off.  At the same time, violence, witchcraft accusations, and intolerant forms of Christianity and Islam are on the rise, variably correlated with the contradictions of globalization and neoliberal reform.  Understanding Africa, however, is never limited to technological innovations, policy shifts, or even the changing economic contexts of religious beliefs. It requires a sustained examination of the discourses and categories through which knowledge about Africa is produced and represented.  African Studies at UCLA remains critical, not only to a growing body of scholarship, but above all, as a form of reflexive engagement. 

Date Posted: 10/13/2008