African Scholarship on the Internet
A crucial component of dual intellectual citizenship
is familiarity with the wide gamut of perspectives
on Africa that are represented in scholarship produced
both on and off the continent as well as by both African
and Western scholars. This familiarity is impeded,
however, by the marginalization of knowledge produced
in Africa. Inaccessibility is perhaps the most fundamental,
but also the most easily corrected, cause of the marginalization
of Africa's scholarship. African journals and reviews
are published in small numbers and their dissemination
tends to be narrow and slow. They and the scholars
who publish in them are consequently little known in
international academic circles. Electronic technology
greatly facilitates the dissemination of information
across the globe and enhances the possibilities for
accessing new sources of knowledge. Penn proposes to
bring scholarship produced in Africa to a new and wider
audience by posting it on our African Studies Web site.
With a site that typically receives over a million
requests for documents each month, Penn African Studies
will become an even more important disseminator of
knowledge -- new knowledge that has until now been
confined to the local African academic and research
community. Not only the West will benefit from this
initiative; Africa now has a number of electronic information
dissemination hubs (e.g. Addis Ababa, Accra, Harare,
Kampala, Dakar, and several sites in South Africa)
and the network is constantly expanding. The audience
for this new scholarship is thus very broad.
One source of significant African scholarship during
the first years of this initiative will be the Council
for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa
(CODESRIA), a pan-African research institution. Through
their many conferences, workshops, institutes and symposia,
CODESRIA has brought together the leading intellectuals
and researchers of Africa. The themes and topics of
these events have ranged from education, gender, and
academic freedom to governance, conflict, and human
rights. While the papers and articles resulting from
these events appear in various CODESRIA publications,
their dissemination is very limited.The existence of
these important materials is unknown to many Africanists
around the world, a situation that could be corrected
by their availability on the internet. Our collaboration
with CODESRIA was inaugurated in Fall 1998 with the
establishment of its website on our own. The URL is:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/codesria.html
Penn is currently taking similar steps with the Economic
Commission on Africa (ECA) and the Organization for
Social Science Research in East Africa (OSSREA). Although
both ECA and OSSREA have their own websites, Penn African
Studies will collaborate with these institutions by
aiding in the training of personnel on internet-related
activities and selection of materials to be made available
on-line.
Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar, aadinar@mail.sas.upenn.edu