Foundations of the American Century
Page 22
It is clear, given the character of American interest in Africa, that Africans’ role in “development” would be subordinated to the higher strategic goals of American and Western power. This is further evidenced by the very careful way in which British colonial sensitivities were dealt with by Carnegie officials. Not only were British experts preferred for advice on African development, but they were even sympathized with in regard to the “burdens” of colonial responsibility: “No longer must London be expected to produce all the ideas for these areas,”24 even if Africa was “a British sphere of influence.”25
Tellingly, Africans were rarely, if ever, in the 1950s consulted on development options for their own continent. For example, at the most significant conference on African development—which laid out the blueprint for the development of higher education and related issues in West Africa for a decade or more—organized by Carnegie in 1958 but involving Melvin Fox and John Howard of the Ford Foundation, representatives of the British colonial authorities and American government agencies, and several Africanists including Vernon McKay (Johns Hopkins University, prior to which he was at the Africa desk at the State Department), there was not a single African invited or involved. Indeed, the participants did not even have to hand any information on African assessments of African needs and priorities. Murphy, a sympathetic authorized chronicler of Carnegie in Africa, notes that such a state of affairs was “not unusual for the time,” because it was “commonly felt in American and British circles that Africans had not yet become sophisticated in this area, that they were inexperienced, and that their identification of needs might be either uninformed or politically biased, or both.”26 In other words, Africans were not yet adequately trained experts on their own societies and thus likely to be politically prejudiced, in contrast to objective colonial authorities, corporate investors, philanthropists, and modernizers of U.S. aid agencies. This would change in the 1960s when, as Murphy notes, Africans had been adequately trained and gained appropriate “experience and judgement.”27 As Rupert Emerson noted above, Americans had definitely lost some of their anticolonial vigor by the 1950s, though at the same time they lamented their own ignorance of Africa and planned to tackle the problem through massive investment in African studies in the United States.
BUILDING AN AFRICAN STUDIES NETWORK
Foundation and state elites lacked expertise in or significant experience of Africa. It is instructive to observe, therefore, the strategies pursued by foundations to construct such expertise, because it tells us a great deal about their underlying elitist and racial assumptions. Despite the existence of a number of African American scholars of Africa in several historically black colleges and the severe lack of expertise in the vast majority of mainly white elite universities, the foundations elected to begin constructing African studies at the latter institutions, largely marginalizing extant programs of research and teaching. In part, at least, this stemmed from the foundation leaders’ own backgrounds in elite universities and in part from their ideas about “excellence” and the sort of men and institutions that could be expected to produce it. In part, too, this stemmed from an underlying suspicion of the political views of many scholars at historically black colleges who had long been critics of America’s racial order and supporters of African nationalism. This point is driven home further by the financial support given to some black American scholars who either expressed opposition to African independence movements or were relatively well connected, and therefore trusted, by state and other elites. That said, it is also the case that racialized foundation funding was partly the effective result of their focus of attention on university graduate programs in building expertise on Africa, at a time when historically black colleges focused on undergraduate education. Nevertheless, even in this matter, foundations did support undergraduate programs at some mainly white elite universities, while giving inadequate recognition to black universities that ran graduate programs, such as Howard. For all the recognition among liberal elites, especially in the foreign policy field, that emerging Asia and Africa were watching how America’s racial disorders and pathologies were playing out and that America needed to put its own house in order if it were to win hearts and minds among people of color in the world, the relative liberals who ran the foundations permitted, encouraged, and funded a virtually segregated program of research and teaching in African studies for over two decades. The consequences of this were dire: a major revolt against the African studies “establishment” in the 1960s and a “permanent” split in the African studies community.28
The importance of Africa and African studies to American foundations may be indicated by the levels of funding provided from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. The Ford Foundation alone spent $164 million on African development programs between the early 1950s and 1974, particularly in the social sciences, and a further $18 million on research and training programs. Of the $25 million that Ford contributed to Nigerian universities, one third was invested at the University of Ibadan. Rockefeller Foundation contributed a further $9 million to Ibadan between 1963 and 1972. Carnegie, meanwhile, expended $10 million at African universities, particularly, though not exclusively, in the field of teacher education.29
The Ford Foundation was the largest single benefactor of African studies programs in the United States. Of its over $34 million investment in African studies, $16.4 million went to Columbia University alone; $8.5 million went to Chicago, $6.3 million to Yale, and $3 million to Johns Hopkins. Foundation funds also went in large quantities to programs at Northwestern, Boston, Indiana, Wisconsin, UCLA, Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, and Wisconsin.30 By the mid-1960s, twenty-two institutions offered programs of study of Africa, an increase of thirteen since 1957. In addition, thirteen colleges offered three or more courses whose primary focus was Africa.31 By the 1990s, many of the original programs in African studies funded by the foundations and federal government were designated National Resource Centers in African Studies, though they were joined also by Howard, Tuskegee, and Lincoln universities, among others.32 At the founding of African studies in its modern form, however, Howard University was seen in a highly negative light by those who went on to “found” the field. In a report to the Ford Foundation in 1958, L. Gray Cowan, Carl Rosberg, Lloyd Fallers, and Cornelis W. de Kiewiet noted the weakness of all extant major universities in their national survey of the field. For example, they noted the predominance of anthropology and lack of political science, history, and economics of Africa at Northwestern; the very low standards and prestige of Boston University’s graduate programs; California’s nonexistent program; and Harvard’s unwillingness to develop African studies unless the foundations guaranteed fifteen years of funding. Howard, on the other hand, which had run an African studies program since 1950—at both the undergraduate and graduate levels—was dismissed as an institution, along with its Africanist program. Despite being the nation’s largest black university, Howard’s claim to have a “special interest in Africa” was denied. Howard’s raison d’être, the survey committee claimed, as a “Negro university is slowly disappearing,” while its Africanists, “while competent in their field… did not appear to us to have any very strong drive nor were they particularly concerned with new fields, such as African History,” although Howard’s course in African history was noted, along with its courses in African art and on the economic and social impacts of the West on the continent. Black universities, it was concluded, had “no prior claim” to African studies: “While, undoubtedly, they are doing… some excellent work, it would appear that it could equally be done at any other university.” The wafer-thin logic of this line of reasoning was contradicted by other reports written by Ford officials in awarding admittedly small grants to Howard in the mid-1950s. Even Ford’s reports, however, bore the mark of racial assumptions when they justified grants to Howard on the basis that its programs were no longer based on “emotional or political bias.”33
A Ford report by one of its Africa represent
atives noted in 1970 that Ford’s International Training and Research Division had signally failed to “recognize the special interests in Africa among black Americans” and provided no “meaningful support for development of a single major African Studies Program among the black colleges.”34 Interestingly, however, LeMelle (who was African American) credited Ford with the ability to right past mistakes, even on strategies that were “correct” and effective in other regards in “discovering” Africa and in making manifest the “restless African continent[’s]” unanticipated complexities.35 The challenge that was Africa was urgent, however, and Ford had answered the call and trained “a generation of Africanists” by 1970, many housed in over sixty university centers, including twenty major centers. By 1970, faculty numbers exceeded five hundred in African studies proper, and an even larger number had received “an exposure to Africa” during graduate training. Research produced was considered to be of high quality and large in quantity, with 1,422 research projects registered between 1965 and 1969. The African past was being “reconstructed” as “essential for understanding ‘contemporary’ Africa.”36 Without the support of the Ford Foundation, African studies, it was claimed, would not have achieved “academic legitimacy” or its breadth and depth of development. Indeed, echoing the ideas of Harold Laski, cited earlier, LeMelle argues that Ford was responsible for providing the “constructive criticism” that “reoriented” Africanists to pay increasing attention to “development problems such as urban planning, land economics, development administration, demography… political stability and national integration” and to problem solving rather than general and basic social science.37
THE AFRICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION
The African Studies Association (ASA) received over $630,000 from the foundations from its founding in 1957 to the late 1960s.38 The ASA was founded in March 1957, with a grant of $6,500 from the Carnegie Corporation, at the strong suggestion of Alan Pifer, because he felt that the study of Africa needed to be promoted by a professional society independent of governmental influence, in strong contrast to the African-American Institute.39 Yet, Pifer would have been aware of numerous discussions between foundation heads of the necessity of “closer link[s] between research activities and output of the U.S. with the decision-making process in the State Department,” which directly challenged the notion of both the political objectivity of the foundations and of some of their funded organizations.40 Instructively, the thirty-six founding members of ASA, selected by an ad hoc committee that had been meeting sporadically with Pifer for two years, and the constitutional arrangements they developed and endorsed contributed to the split in the organization a decade or so later. According to Gwendolen Carter, a leading light in ASA’s conception, birth, and growth, “fears of McCarthyism or of CIA infiltration” led the founders to create a College of Fellows that would act as gatekeepers of the organization and as nominators and electors of its officers, including president, vice president, and the members of the eight-person board of directors. Such control of ASA led directly to charges of “elitism and autocracy” and also served effectively as the principal mechanism of white elite control over the association. Fears of McCarthyism, however understandable, were also an effective method of racial and political exclusion—of predominantly black Africanists who operated as scholar-activists in historically black colleges, had nailed their colors to the mast of pan-Africanism, and had directly linked the plight of Africa to the condition and treatment of black Americans. Challenging mainstream approaches, black American Africanists felt duty bound to use their knowledge to make scholarly advances and political arguments. This made them “suspicious” and “un-American” to American elites and brought them attention from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.41 E. Franklin Frazier of Howard University, who, by the late 1950s, was seen as more “objective” and less “biased” and “emotional” about Africa, was the sole African American at the ASA’s founding meeting, though St. Clair Drake had been invited but was unable to attend.42 As Gershenhorn argues, the foundations opposed funding any scholars challenging continued European domination of Africa or the State Department’s Cold War stance.43 Thus Lincoln University, Kwame Nkrumah’s and Nnamdi Azikewe’s alma mater, headed by the prominent African American scholar Horace Mann Bond, and cast as “suspect in British colonial eyes,” received no funding for its Institute for the Study of African Affairs, formed in 1950.44
With additional “core funding” of $100,000 from the Ford Foundation in 1961, supplemented by $150,000,45 the ASA grew rapidly; by the mid-1960s, it had 1,700 members; its working committees encompassed a wide range of fields—archaeology, archives/libraries, fine arts and humanities, government and academic research, languages and linguistics, literature, oral data, publications, research liaison, undergraduate and high school education, and Washington liaison.46 The ASA was later characterized by a Ford Foundation report as “a strategy of directed development”—“a sizable general support grant combined with the skills of astute academic politicians and sound economic management” helped greatly in “institution-building,” according to Pearl T. Robinson. Its “close-knit network” of leaders was both the source of the ASA’s success and its “Achilles heel.”47
Although founded to be independent of the American state, it is clear that the ASA was anxious to be helpful to American governmental agendas. Such interest extended to collaboration with the U.S. Army, which, in the wake of uprisings in Congo, Algeria, and Kenya, was interested in the dynamics of African societies.
In 1964, the U.S. Army presented to the National Academy of Science (NAS) a proposal for “a center for basic research in social psychology, sociology, and ethnology and humanistic science on Africa.” This was one prong of a program of three research centers that would also focus on Latin America and the Oceanic South Pacific. The primary focus was to bring to bear the whole range of the social sciences, as well as industrial and civil engineering and agricultural expertise, for “research on problems of military interest.” In addition, universities selected for the Army programs were expected to have already established “liaisons or other base connections in the appropriate foreign areas to facilitate ready entrance of scientific personnel into the university and civil life of the countries and cultures of major concern” (emphasis added). Extant centers of African studies earmarked as essential by the U.S. Army were precisely the ones built up by the big foundations: Northwestern, UCLA, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Boston, and Columbia—represented at the meeting by the leading lights of the ASA, including Gwendolen Carter (Northwestern), Gus Liebenow (Indiana), Philip Curtin (Wisconsin), Al Castagno (Boston), Vernon McKay and Robert Lystad (JHU), James Coleman and Benjamin Thomas (UCLA), and L. Gray Cowan (Columbia).48
The proposals were then presented to representatives of Africa research centers in February 1965, at a conference at Northwestern University. There were participants from all the major university programs and from the U.S. Army (Lynn Baker), State Department (Robert Baum), and the National Academy of Science–National Research Council (Glen Finch). Noting the necessity of additional funding to assist the research of Africanists and increased interest among “public agencies” for “knowledge covering the whole range of human behavior and environment in Africa,” the meeting decided to form a committee of Africanists to consider proposals. Northwestern was tasked with seeking an initial research development contract worth $100,000 from the U.S. Army.49
The principal concerns expressed by Africanist scholars about the U.S. Army’s proposals were pragmatic and summed up by James Coleman of UCLA’s African studies program. He noted that social scientists had worked long and hard for recognition of their potential contributions to public policy and were, therefore, “extraordinarily reluctant to respond negatively” when approached by “a responsible research agency of the Federal Government.” Social scientists had concerns, of course, about collaborating with the government, but that did not “reflect an ideological hostility,” because
there was no “doubt that the goals of those agencies reflect the moral purposes and national goals of our society, and, consequently, such a relationship does not—certainly need not—contaminate or corrupt the purity of objective scholarship.” However, there were severe problems of perception of American social scientists in Africa: most Africans regarded American scholars as government agents. Indeed, “the notion of a scholar being independent of his government is difficult for all but the most educated Africans to comprehend” (emphasis added). The issue, then, was to develop and maintain an “image of scholarly independence and objectivity… if social scientists are going to maintain access and their credibility” in Africa (or anywhere else). Coleman counseled against a “direct relationship between the Department of the Army and formally constituted African programs in American universities,” in favor of funds administered by the NAS or the National Science Foundation and in consultation with the ASA (emphasis in original).50 Clearly, this would establish a certain distance between the U.S. Army and Africanists, but it would remain the case that the purposes of army funding and the basis for evaluating the funding program would be research useful to the American military’s goals in Africa. The army was setting the conditions and context for research with social scientists eager for public recognition.