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Photo of Professor Andrew Apter

New Chair Maps Plans for African Studies

Kirsten Bording Collins

Historian/anthropologist Andrew Apter discusses UCLA's interdepartmental degree program and looks at the future of the African continent.

Andrew Apter, Professor, History, was recently named chair of the UCLA International Institute interdepartmental degree program in African Studies. This is a one-year program and offers an MA degree. It allows students to study Africa and African culture from a variety of perspectives.

Andrew Apter comes to UCLA from the University of Chicago where he was a professor in the Anthropology Department. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1987. Apter's field of expertise is in Yoruban culture in Southwest Nigeria and the relationship of indigenous forms of knowledge, power, and ritual practice to the modern state.

Apter has a clear vision for the MA program and was generous enough to share with me his goals for the program and how it is currently organized, his background in Africa, and some thoughts about where Africa may be headed in the future.

Apter told me that the MA program in African Studies has several intellectual and programmatic goals. Intellectually, the African Studies program has an area component that unites many different methodologies by a common interest in Africa. Apter added that at the same time, students in the African Studies program carry an obligation to bring a critical approach to inherited theories and works about Africa, because, as he stated, "No other part of the world is so ideologically loaded as Africa, given the historical importance of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Africa has always occupied an extreme position in the imperial and global imagination as being the most exotic. The imperial taxonomies of the 19th century placed Africans at the bottom of the evolutionary hierarchy. The traces of these images are with us today in ways that inform the most technocratic development discourses."

Apter said that he thinks that there are "implicit evolutionary hierarchies that are racially inflected and are important for us to understand and try to minimize." Apter sees a tradition of critical theory, which looks at the stereotypes and images of Africa that have prevailed so that they are not reproduced. Apter also sees a certain body of expertise that needs to be sustained, including language, which if lost, leads to "looking at another country from another lens," he said. It will also be important to Apter that students learn the map, and the changing national boundaries and topography of Africa because students entering college have an extremely poor background in Africa.

Programmatically, Apter will seek to increase enrollment in the program. There are a number of students who want to work with development companies and nongovernmental organizations. "You don't work in Africa to make money," Apter said. There is not a lot of money coming out of Africa to foster research, unlike Germany, France, or Japan, for example. Therefore it will be important to raise awareness that there is important work to be done intellectually as well as politically in Africa, Apter said.

Synergy with the African Diaspora

Andrew Apter also has as a goal to develop links with the African-American Studies program because he thinks that there is tremendous opportunity here. There are many parallels between the two programs. Apter would like to help develop an understanding of Africa that goes beyond the continent's boundaries. He has worked in the black Atlantic with the African diaspora, primarily in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, where the Yoruba influence has been very strong. He said that he always gets excited when he learns of students in African Studies who are working in, for example, Martinique, Cuba, Haiti, or Brazil, because "the history of Africa has been so important in the rise of Western modernity, in terms of the economics of slave trade and in terms of establishing centers and peripheries coming out of Europe, that there is a need to re-think Africa globally going all the way back to the 15th and 16th centuries." Apter added that this is why the synergy with African-American Studies is good.

A hallmark of UCLA's African Studies program is that students are required to study an African language. According to Apter "there is no substitute for this." UCLA offers a total of 7 African languages. Four are accredited for Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships (FLAS). These are Hausa, Swahili, Wolof, and Zulu. Others include Yoruba, Bambara, and Afrikaans. The level of proficiency that students need to obtain depends on the language and area under study, because some languages are much more demanding than others.

Students in the African Studies interdepartmental degree program come from a variety of fields including linguistics, political science, history, economics, public health, and anthropology. Apter told me that the challenge is how to join these different backgrounds and "converge on a common enough set of issues so that you can debate productively together, rather than everyone coming in and doing their own separate thing." This has always been a challenge in area studies programs, he added.

Why We Still Need Area Studies

There is no substitute for area studies, however, Apter said. There was considerable talk in the 1990s, especially through the Social Sciences Research Council, of dismantling area studies as a funding arrangement because of the way it had echoed a cold war politics that we do area studies for defense purposes and that is bad. "Sure, that part is bad, but the fact is that when you sacrifice the expertise that people develop over time, investing in a language and local history and knowledge, you lose a substantial commitment to a kind of scholarship, and I think that is a big mistake. So I certainly see a long future in area studies that is not just linked to the politics of terrorism and Defense Department funding, but is intellectually linked to improving our understanding of the world," Apter said.

Andrew Apter also looks forward to the opportunity to shape the core class that all students in the African Studies degree program have to take. To date there has been a pro-seminar core course called "Africa in the Disciplines," which brings critical perspectives together to examine how different disciplines have approached Africa. Apter has concluded by talking to current and former students that there has not been enough core background provided in the course on, for example, the language and ethnic distributions, the basic colonial and postcolonial map and how this was developed, and the cold war divisions.

The goal of the core class is also to expose incoming students to different scholars on campus so that they can work with them, presumably in their own fields of specialization. Apter anticipates that his challenge will be how to combine all these imperatives and he thinks that he may need to expand the core class to two quarters.

The MA in African Studies prepares students for a variety of professions and for further studies in the field. It is a good preparation for civil service and is ideal for development work, because culture is often the stumbling block for the success of much development work in Africa, Apter said. It is also a great background for social work, public health, and medicine because you are dealing with different notions of the body, of health, and healing.

Apter grew up with Africa his whole life. His father was one of the first American political scientists to study the transition from colonialism to independence working in Ghana and Uganda. After taking a course in college on Yoruba Art History, Apter became fascinated with Yoruban culture and decided he wanted to become an anthropologist. He has spent much time in Nigeria where the majority of Yoruba live, including over two years in the "bush," which he mentioned can be quite sophisticated. Here he learned the Yoruban language, which was essential to gaining the in-depth knowledge of the culture that was required. His best known book is Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Apter is also interested in local state relationships and how the rise of the postcolonial state transforms local conditions and markets and how local politics to a lesser extent has an impact on national politics and how these dynamics go back and forth. In 1983 Apter experienced some very violent local riots that reversed the state vote for the governorship in Nigeria. Apter has experienced two military coups d'etat in Nigeria, one in 1983 and one in 1993. This fueled his interest in how perceptions of power operate at the local level and how these perceptions can feed back into a national consciousness.

Apter added that in the current era of globalization, neoliberal reform, and democratization, "the theme that any africanist has to pursue is local-global articulations as mediated by the state." This comes down to three major analytical levels: (1) transformations of the global economy; (2) changes in the nature of the postcolonial state; and (3) ethnic relations within and between postcolonial states. In addition, Apter referred to another category of regionalization that has not only become important in West Africa, but also recently in East and Central Africa with the Rwanda and Zaire/Congo crises, where "regional powers are getting involved in every one else's business."

The Future of Africa

I asked Professor Apter to tell me some good news about Africa and where it is going in the future and was pleased to hear his positive outlook on the continent:

"I think there are a number of encouraging things about Africa. In the last tumultuous decade, the 1990s, there was a sea change in terms of political consciousness, and the movements for democratization are now fueled by a more sophisticated mass public than even 10 years ago." Apter described how, when he was working in Nigeria in the 1980s, people at the grassroots level did not understand that they were entitled to vote for whom they wanted and figured that they had to vote for whoever their patron told them to vote for or they would be punished. This had already started to change, however, and by the 1990s, "there was genuine outrage and a more sophisticated sense among what is called the 'new political class' of younger politicians in their thirties that the generation before them blew it. They took the resources and messed everything up. There was too much corruption and ethnic competition, and I do have a sense that the internet has had a big impact too. For example, a lot of places that don't even have local sustainable phone lines have transmission stations for the internet. I think that is one of the more interesting developments that we need to look at in the future." He added that due to the above developments, there is a more sophisticated political culture developing at the grassroots that will make a functioning democratic infrastructure more common.

In addition, the era of statism -- state sponsored and directed development -- is over according to Apter. "This is a good thing because the problem has been that the state became the instrument of dispensing development funds and, of course, given the politics of allocation in postcolonial Africa, the money got converted into payoffs and political capital and it never trickled down to where it was supposed to."

Apter thinks that there is now more emphasis on local initiative and this is where the NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) bypass the state and go right to the local level. Apter also thinks that there is more recognition now of the vitality of local markets, which have historically been the source of tremendous economic vitality and need to be stimulated. This is done through extending microcredit (small loans given to the poor for income generating projects) and not through expensive capital intensive programs because they don't pay off Apter said. There has also been growing recognition, largely through women's rights organizations, of the importance of giving more national representation to women's business associations and political organizations. "The combination of microcredit, largely female dominated markets, and democratization is going to bring women even more into the national limelight of postcolonial society." That is indeed another piece of good news.