Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  The U.S. Army’s program was clearly part of the abortive “Project Camelot” (most famously known for its focus on Chile and more generally across Latin America), a program aimed at the causes of “internal war” and rebellion. French-Canada, Nigeria, and India were also selected by the Department of Defense for behavioral research toward “increasing our capability to anticipate social breakdown and to suggest remedies.”51 The role of social science was to study societies’ social and behavioral dynamics and produce useful knowledge. A memorandum by NAS’s Wilton Dillon noted the army project’s Camelot connections and provided greater detail on the precise aims of army research funding. Lynn Baker’s memo, attached to Dillon’s, baldly stated that the army would fund “basic research” in social and human sciences “in support of counter-insurgency and limited war operations.” The role of the several new research centers would be to “review, interpret, and evaluate existing data” and train “young scientists… in the gathering of new data and the creation of new knowledge from field research.” The “Research Objectives” were to encourage “research in potential crisis areas,” emphasizing data collection and analysis “in understanding and handling the early stages of insurgency, including search for indicators of impending unrest and revolution and indicators of progress in specific insurgency situations.” The army was also interested in “youth and student participation in societal change and stability.”52

  Leading American Africanists—such as Vernon McKay—supported the concept and its goals and welcomed the “useful side effects of the Project Camelot incident,” i.e., greater attention among relevant agencies of the “problems existing in the relationship between government agencies and the academic community.” A plethora of committees had resulted from Camelot’s “downfall,” including the NAS’s Advisory Committee on Government Programs in the Behavioral Sciences and renewed efforts by agencies such as the Bureau of Research and Intelligence of the State Department. Yet Africanists worried that they would still be seen as CIA agents in Africa and face greater obstacles for research clearance from the authorities.53 However, it remained the case that many, though not all, Africanists were willing to produce “basic research” funded by the military, in the belief that working on “impractical” topics could be profoundly valuable.54 In the aftermath of Project Camelot, however, Carnegie refused to serve as a financial conduit for U.S. Army funds to Africanists conducting oral-history research on nationalist movements, including Mau Mau in Kenya,55 although the Ford Foundation provided funding for the Oral Data Collection project of the ASA’s Research Liaison Committee (RLC). The Department of Defense used other means to mobilize Africanists’ expertise for possible future military operations. This was highlighted by Pierre L. van den Berghe’s exposure of one such proposal to contribute to a DoD project entitled “The Impact of Tribalism on the National Security Aspects of Nation Building in the Congo.” This project, directly following the demise of Camelot, aimed to provide military planners information on “‘social tension, civil unrest, violence, and insurgency’ in the Congo so that ‘military policy decisions can be made more accurately… especially for counterinsurgency operations,’” citing a previous U.S. military intervention in the Congo in 1964 as precedent.56

  REBELLION IN MONTREAL, 1969

  Serving U.S. Army research plans—and becoming embroiled in Project Camelot’s acrimonious demise—was in part the cause of the rebellion by mainly black ASA members against its leaders. Though it culminated at the ASA’s annual convention in Montreal in 1969, the problems had been simmering for several years. The problems stemmed from the oligarchical character of the ASA and its powerful committees, which had become increasingly linked with “the key priority-setting and grant-making institutions in the African Studies field,” according to Pearl T. Robinson.57 ASA board members and committee chairmen, such as Gwendolen Carter (chair of the Languages and Linguistics Committee), acted as gatekeepers for funding in their respective areas: Carter’s committee acted as an advisory panel to the National Defense Education Act’s administrators in the field of African languages, channeling funds to specific institutions and programs.58 More subtly but very effectively, ASA board members dominated the Joint Committee on African Studies, a body of research scholars appointed by the SSRC and ACLS; the Joint Committee administered and disbursed research grants and planned future research in the humanities and social sciences. Robinson argues that such activities initially “lent prestige and legitimacy” to the ASA; later, they were its “Achilles heel.”59 Continuing the Greek-tragedy theme, “just when the prestige of the Association was at its highest point, a dramatic showdown” with members centered on the claim that the ASA’s influence was built on “the wheeling and dealing of academic politics and of [ASA leaders] pursuing their goals by cultivating their connections with the government and foundations.”60 A protest begun in 1968 by a black caucus of ASA members demanding greater black participation in ASA affairs transformed in 1969 to a full-scale rebellion—racial and ideological—against the association, temporarily halting the Montreal convention. While black members complained of their exclusion from ASA leadership roles, racist research agendas, and the complete lack of attention to domestic race questions, others—so-called Young Turks—condemned ASA for its “conservative bias” in favor of established power in Africa.61 Too late in the day, the ASA agreed to reform, prompting a mass walkout by black members, who set up the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA) under the leadership of John Henrik Clarke. The “old guard” were in a “state of shock”;62 even a year later, the then-president of ASA, Gray Cowan, could not refer to the rebellion in Montreal other than as “events at the meeting.”63

  The ASA reformed itself. It ended its exclusive arrangements with the large African studies programs at major universities, foundations, and government agencies; operated an open, single-category membership policy; had greater African representation on its board; and condemned the racist and colonial policies of South Africa, Portugal, and Rhodesia. Nevertheless, the ASA lost its exclusivity and, therefore, some considerable credibility as America’s only Africanist organization. Yet it proved able to recover some lost ground, based on its Ford Foundation–sponsored Research Liaison Committee (RLC), originally formed in 1967 to manage and improve ASA relations with Africa-based scholars in the wake of Project Camelot and other claims by Africans of being exploited by American graduate students and scholars!64 But Ford took some of the blame for the ASA’s failings. Robinson noted that Ford had endorsed the ASA’s exclusive practices and its connections with government-agency research agendas. The foundation “demonstrated a certain lack of sensitivity to issues which ultimately proved to be critical,” Robinson argued. It is important not only to build institutions, Robinson opined: “even more important in terms of long-range developments are the policies and outputs which will result from the new creation.”65 Carnegie’s response to the events at Montreal was neutral, though nothing was said about their own responsibility in encouraging the formation of an oligarchic ASA.66

  In the spirit of “reform,” Ford adopted a three-pronged “attack” on the problem of racial exclusion in the field of African studies: it limited its funding for the AHSA, financed a number of Afro-American studies programs at “strategic centers,” and offered fellowships to black Americans to conduct field research in Africa and the Middle East. While these were welcome initiatives, Ford’s approach was elitist in application and displayed many of the same insensitivities and racial assumptions that had come to cause such a rupture in the Africanist community in Montreal. President McGeorge Bundy’s view seemed to weigh heavily on Ford officials’ minds: in speaking about the possible effects of new Afro-American programs of study, Bundy warned that “there is a box here that is being opened and out of it will come pain and trouble.”67

  Funding to AHSA—a radical Africanist organization for scholars of “African” descent—was limited to its annual conference of 1970. Ford awarded $10,000 t
o cover costs of travel for overseas speakers.68 While the AHSA’s executive committee prepared a funding proposal to the Ford Foundation, there is little in the records after 1970 to suggest that Ford assisted the organization. According to the rationale for the Middle East and Africa Fellowship Program for Black Americans (MEAFP; see below), neither the white-dominated ASA nor the African-only AHSA were “perceived to be neutral,” and both were part of the “state of profound confrontation” in “American black/white Africanist relations.”69 Despite that, however, Ford Foundation annual reports for 1970, 1974, and 1975 show that $165,000, $90,600, and $50,500 (totaling just over $300,000) was voted in each of those years, respectively, to the African Studies Association. Ford simply was not interested in funding to anywhere near that level an organization such as AHSA, which aimed “to counterbalance… Eurocentric” perspectives on Africa and African Americans by “redressing traditional misconceptions” by being “Afro-centrically relevant” and building appropriate networks between all people of African descent.70 Despite its non-neutrality in evaluating the disbursement of grants, the ASA remained the favored Africanist organization.

  To address the issue of increasing demand in the colleges and universities for black studies and Afro-American studies, Ford decided to try to influence the long-term development of the subject area. Believing that “properly conceived” courses were necessary, they targeted “pace-setting programs under way at strategic locations” such as Yale and Howard. Yale was to receive $184,000 to establish an undergraduate program; Howard received $143,567 to set up a new department of Afro-American Studies. Howard was seen as the source of almost half of America’s black leaders. Ford understood that it had fallen behind the times on this matter, as hundreds of colleges had hastily established Afro-American programs. But, as ever, Ford would steer America toward “orderly development… by helping a few strategic institutions get off on the right foot.” Anxious to avoid developing “model” programs with immediate effects, Ford-sponsored programs, it was expected, “may set some standards of quality by which other institutions can measure and eventually revise their own offerings.”71

  The Middle East and Africa Fellowship Program (MEAFP) for black Americans received almost $1 million from Ford funds over a period from 1969 to 1980. The aim was to improve black representation in development-related agencies, train more blacks from historically black colleges in the South, and try to “heal” the split in the Africanist community. The program failed on all counts, according to a Ford-sponsored report, although it constructed a new “black fellowship network” of funded scholars to rival the “white fellowship network” that most black and some white Africanists had protested about.72

  Of the historically black colleges, just two (Atlanta and Howard) offered graduate programs in African studies and therefore fell within the remit of the MEAFP initiative. Ford had wrongly assumed that most black Africanist students were registered at black colleges; in fact, most blacks in the field were at the major white universities and African studies programs. The consequences of this assumption, however, were clear: in 1971–1972, all fifteen fellowships awarded went to students from elite universities, with Harvard winning four, Stanford three, NYU and Columbia two each, and the remainder shared by Yale, Chicago, Northwestern, and Michigan State. Research topics included economic planning in Nigeria, Nigerian political development, Egyptian manpower problems, the Africanization of Nigerian universities, the impact of religion on economic behavior, and the state in the Congo.73 That is, research topics remained in line with the “needs” of African development. By 1979, 79 percent of all fellowships had been awarded to black students in the major universities, while 44 percent came from just four universities: Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA. Only two fellowships were awarded to students from black colleges.74 Further, black fellows complained that white scholars continued to dominate funding sources, such as the equivalent and much larger fellowship program funded by Ford through the SSRC; failed to respect black scholars’ research competence; and appeared to be “racist” in their analysis of Africa. Craig Howard, reporting confidentially to Ford, noted that the “underlying causes of the earlier friction [made manifest at Montreal in 1969] appear to remain” a decade later.75

  Craig Howard’s report also highlighted the role of black selection panels—drawn from elite universities—in channeling fellowships to students in their own disciplines studying at elite institutions. Applicants from such institutions were better advised on application and interview processes and often used their advisor’s connections with selection-panel members to influence outcomes subtly; they were part of a “fellowship network,” while faculty at small black colleges were not. Pearl T. Robinson, for example, who had been a MEAFP fellow, later became a selection panelist. Outside that network, black and white applicants were disadvantaged. Black fellowship applicants to the SSRC’s program in the same field, however, were severely disadvantaged, with a less than 10 percent chance of success between 1976 and 1979. On the other hand, the Ford program had produced sixty-four black Africanist Ph.D.s in ten years.76 The program was discontinued in 1980, because the Ford Foundation assumed, wrongly, according to Howard, that blacks could now compete in the SSRC program. In fact, of the thirteen MEAFP fellows—some of them among the strongest of candidates—who applied to the SSRC between 1976 and 1979, only one was successful; this outcome was likely to perpetuate patterns of black marginalization in African studies. Howard called on Ford to be even handed—either retain the MEAFP or cut the SSRC’s funding for such programs too, or face the fact that Ford was reestablishing “the control point of future access to the field in the hands of one aspect of a continuing conflict [which] would aggravate both the tension and the inbalance [sic] in the field.”77

  While most black fellows went on to teach mainly at state universities, just two joined elite universities such as Indiana and Michigan, four were faculty at black colleges, and several joined important policy-oriented organizations. For example, Randall Robinson, as director of Trans-Africa, mobilized black public opinion on Rhodesian issues, while other fellows went onto consultancies with the State Department, World Bank, and the United Nations.78 The major results of the program seemed to have been significant, but not necessarily in ways foreseen by Ford: there was an increase in the cadre of black Africanists attached to mainly elite white universities, welded into an effective network, who went on to join “mainstream” organizations. Network building and, through networks, incorporation remains, therefore, a key outcome of foundation programs.

  PROGRAMS IN NIGERIA

  Although domestic squabbles are supposed by some to stop at “the water’s edge,” it is clear that the racial, elitist, and imperial mentalities evident in African Studies were reproduced in the encounter with Africa itself. The Cold War contextualized the origins of large-scale American interest in Africa,79 and its end signaled a cooling of federal and foundation interest in the continent, but the post-9/11 war on terror has again revived interest in Africa’s Muslim populations in particular.80 The networks established by federal and foundation funds were extended to Africa, with the relations between American researchers and African institutions experiencing the difficulties between rich and poor and between the representatives of the powerful west and north and dependent south. This inevitably skewed the development of the African university to be more closely attuned to the concerns of American foundations—and if American academics skewed their research toward well-funded foundation programs, how much greater was the pressure to do so on African scholars and institutions with few, if any, alternatives?81

  Wallerstein notes that American anthropologists acted as “secular missionaries” in Africa, assigning themselves “the role of counselor and advisor to African institutions, overtly and covertly, explicitly and implicitly, invited or uninvited.” Of course, their intentions were sincere and good; their effects, however, could be explosive, as was shown at the Montreal meetings of the ASA in 19
69 and also by events in Africa itself.82

  Carnegie led the charge into Africa, given its long-standing interest in the British colonies. With a mindset not unlike the paternalistic British Fabians at the turn of the twentieth century, Alan Pifer lamented the lack of known facts about Africa and wanted to generate a greater knowledge base of its problems and needs, as a first step toward investing in the continent. Inevitably, the Carnegie view was that education held the key to development, and most of their efforts, as well as of those they mobilized, such as Ford and various U.S. agencies, were directed to developing a system of colleges and universities that would mass produce men and women qualified to “develop” Africa. Without any African input at the planning stage, Carnegie officials, British colonial experts, and others met to determine the future directions of African higher education, especially focusing their attention on Nigeria, which by the late 1950s was preparing for independence from Britain.83

  American foundations, despite being separate organizations, did have an informal “plan” for Nigeria, a plan that was coherent and integrated, leaving a lot less to chance than the Development Plan for Nigeria they promoted (with full participation of the Nigerian state). Part of the foundations’ plan involved intervening in Nigerian education, especially in building the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s only university.84 The Carnegie Corporation–funded Ashby Commission on Nigerian education recommended in 1960 a university in each region of the country as the basis for modernization. The Ashby Commission’s report was accepted by the Nigerian federal government. According to Ashby, the commission advocated an “evolutionary, not a revolutionary programme” for Nigerian universities that “must be built upon the past and must not be discontinuous with it.”85 The Nigerian federal government accepted and implemented every one of the commission’s recommendations, including establishing, with Carnegie funds ($225,000), a Bureau for External Aid, which leveraged in $30 million of aid from the U.S. Department of Education to Nigerian universities over the following decade. At a cost to Carnegie of around $87,000, the Ashby Commission yielded over $80 million dollars in foreign aid to Nigerian higher education. Murphy concludes that Carnegie-inspired processes were “pivotal” to Nigerian educational development in the 1960s.86 Several new universities sprang up, though Ibadan retained its central role as the intellectual “engine” of the entire Nigerian university system, which became increasingly oriented to serving development and nation building in independent Nigeria. Ibadan also, therefore, became embroiled in Nigerian politics through its increasing involvement and identification with the Nigerian federal government. In consequence, it was dragged into national-ethnic politics, losing Ibo ethnic staff during the 1967–1970 civil war.