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November 12, 2003
By KAREN W. ARENSON

PRINCETON, N.J. - After decades of looking the other way,
colleges and universities are beginning to show interest in
Africa.

Adventurous students are studying in Ghana, South Africa
and other sub-Saharan countries. Colleges are adding
courses in Swahili and African filmmaking. Public health
professors are trying to help combat AIDS in Africa, while
political scientists seek to make sense out of the way
national governments there are torn apart and reborn.

At Princeton, faculty members in African studies have
increased to 20 from 12 just six years ago, and the faculty
and alumni created Princeton-in-Africa, a program that
places students and recent graduates in nongovernmental
organizations there.

"The politics are very interesting, not because they are
nice but because they are so consequential," said Jeffrey
Herbst, a political scientist at Princeton. "To say that
the leader of Zimbabwe has driven millions of people into
malnutrition in a country that should be exporting food is
unbelievable. No matter how you feel about George Bush, you
can't say he has affected people like that."

Such issues are drawing in scholars like the economist
Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth
Institute and a United Nations adviser, who said, "From the
point of view of economic development, Africa is the most
challenging place in the world."

And some academics say that Africa challenges their skills
and what they think they know.

"Africa makes us look stupid," said Robert H. Bates, a
political scientist at Harvard. "It makes us realize that
our assumptions require re-examination and reformulation."

But, he said, many college administrators still see the
field as "uninteresting" or "in outer space somewhere" and
make it a low priority. "It never occurred to them that one
reason to have it was that it had a lot to say about
language, literature, arts and social sciences," he said,
and studying Africa can "challenge the fundamentals in a
lot of fields in very productive ways."

Professors say most of the interest in Africa comes from
white students.

"Many of our students were demanding something different,"
said Yaw Nyarko, vice provost for globalization and
multiculturalism at New York University. "They've been to
Europe and want to go somewhere different."

But interest is also growing among black students, some of
whom previously showed ambivalence toward Africa. "As I
went around to entice students to study abroad," Professor
Nyarko said, "some of them asked, `How about a site in the
motherland?' "

More than 4,500 American students went to South Africa,
Kenya, Ghana and other African nations in 2000-2001, up 14
percent from the previous year and nearly five times the
number in 1990, according to the Institute of International
Education's "Open Doors" report. (The 2000-2001 figures are
the most recent available.)

These students represent a small share of the students
going abroad, but one that is growing. In 1990, only 1.3
percent of the 71,000 United States students who studied
abroad went to Africa; by 2001, they represented almost 3
percent of the total, which had grown to 154,000.

"Student interest has been running ahead of institutional
commitment at most universities," said Professor Bates.

"Students see it through all sorts of lenses," he said,
"ecology, humanitarian relief, refugee problems."

For Caroline N. Carter, a Princeton senior from Houston
working toward a certificate in African studies, it was a
book she read the summer before college - "The Power of
One," a novel set in South Africa - that kindled her
interest. That led her to take African politics in her
first year at Princeton and to a semester at the University
of Cape Town during her junior year. Now she is working on
a senior thesis about how the Rwandan government is
handling security for the Tutsis, and hopes to visit Rwanda
for research and to work in Africa after graduation.

"I found everything about the issues and countries that we
studied fascinating," she said, speaking of her African
politics class. "It was a welcome change from all of the
European and American history that I have been studying all
my life."

As a public policy major, she said, she was also struck by
watching a new democracy "working out the kinks and
discovering its own potential."

This is not the first time scholars have turned their
attention to Africa. Forty years ago, American academics
flocked there, caught up in the euphoria of budding
democracies and financed by a cold-war American government
eager to build its influence there. But enthusiasm waned as
nascent democracies gave way to warfare and corruption, and
previously hospitable nations turned dangerous.

"African studies has never had the cachet or support that
either Latin American studies or Asian studies has had,"
said Alison Bernstein, a vice president at the Ford
Foundation, which has long supported work in Africa. "But
now there is a renewed wave of democratization. The
terrible African genocides and AIDS epidemic cannot be
ignored. And the African-American community in the United
States is more willing to probe its African identity."

When Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard's
African-American studies department, made the case to
transform the unit into the Department of African and
African-American Studies at a faculty meeting last May, he
said undergraduate student interest in African studies had
been growing steadily.

Some Africa experts dismissed Harvard's action as a way for
the university to hold onto Dr. Gates after Cornel West and
K. Anthony Appiah, two other prominent professors in his
department, left for Princeton. But Harvard officials said
that Harvard's president, Lawrence S. Summers, had already
been trying to expand African work at the university.

Interviews with African studies professors around the
country found that many colleges and universities have
added classes or programs.

At Princeton, professors and students meet weekly in an
"indaba" (the word means gathering in Ndebele) to discuss
African affairs and research. Although meetings are held at
8 a.m., a recent gathering drew more than two dozen
participants, who talked about the growth of the Princeton
African students group, a forthcoming African film series
and the possibility of sponsoring top students from refugee
camps at American colleges.

Emmanuel Kreike, a history professor who heads the African
Studies program, said the faculty members come from a range
of departments, including history, political science and
ecology and evolutionary biology.

"This is a pretty large group," he said. "But it's by
chance, really, not by plan."

Eve Sandberg, a political scientist at Oberlin, recalls
that when she was working on her Ph.D. in the late 1980's,
several advisers told her not to focus exclusively on
Africa "because the continent was considered low status in
terms of U.S. foreign policy concerns," and her job offers
would reflect that.

Now, however, the end of apartheid and other changes in
South Africa and increasing stability in other sub-Saharan
nations are reopening doors on the continent and making
African studies hot.

Without African studies departments, most hiring of African
experts is coincidental - a new hire in history or
political science may also focus on Africa. But when
colleges do try to add Africa experts, the field is "highly
competitive," said Nancy Dye, the president of Oberlin
College.

Colleges are also wondering how they will pay for new
professors to respond to student interest, since financing
is not growing.

Richard Joseph, director of the African studies program at
Northwestern University, said the United States government
has made little effort to develop what he calls "this
tremendous academic resource," adding, "There is still a
great gap between the policy makers and the academic
community."

But African experts say things are looking up in other
ways. Dr. Sandberg, of Oberlin, said students in her
courses are more sophisticated now than when she started
teaching in the late 1980's and works by African authors
are also more widely available. A class of 35 students, she
said, might include 6 who have spent time in Africa.

"Once students visit Africa, they generally have a less
romantic notion of the continent and want to learn more and
stay connected," Dr. Sandberg said. "They realize that many
of the things they are studying are not intellectual
abstractions but are life and death issues for real
people."

Though long overdue, it's good to see that people are seeing that they can make a difference, a difference in the lives of people that need it most. So, not all people are driven solely by the acquisiton of wealth! :p I have a cousin who went to South Africa and Ghana a number of times while in undergrad; so, that people are seeing their importance is beautiful.

This statement jumped right off the page at me. I guess this political scientist -- read: not an economist -- hasn't studied too many of the countries that have opened their trade borders, yet have also been driven into economic devastation and starvation. I'd sure love for him (or anyone) to show us this long list of developing nations that actually improved their economies by participating in free trade. Cause I sure got a number whose economies have been worsened by free trade.

I'm not defending Mugabe, not by any stretch, but the cause-and-effect conclusion implied is way off.