UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER
Berkeley/Stanford African Studies Newsletter, Fall 1995

Berkeley/Stanford African Studies Newsletter, Fall 1995

Stanford-Berkeley Newsletter

Joint Stanford-Berkeley Center for African Studies
Fall 1995, Newsletter

The Cooperative Summer Language Institute: UC Berkeley, 1995

Walking around the Berkeley campus this summer, you might have heard the sounds of Swahili, Tigrinya, Amharic, Bamanankan, Chichewa, Zulu, Xhosa, or seTswana. They were all part of the Third Annual Summer Cooperative African Language Institute which made its first appearance on the West Coast this year. Despite a few bumps along the way, the Institute was a success. Over 40 students came to study with nine instructors for eight weeks. Sutdents, including undergraduates, graduates, and even faculty, were very enthusiastic, some saying they learned more than in any other language class they had ever taken. Instructors also had unique opportunities to collaborate and plan to continue working together in the future. In addition to language learning, the Institute included a film series, lectures, social gatherings and a soccer match (with World Cup-level play!). Truly a cooperative effort, students and instructors came from and were funded by universities all over the United States, including Stanford, Boston, UCLA, Ohio State, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida and Columbia, to name just a few. Two of the instructors even flew in from South Africa. Next year's Language Institute will be hosted by the Joint Center for African Studies at the University of Ohio and Ohio State University. For information, contact Issac Mowoe, Center for African Studies, 314 Oxley Hall, 1712 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210-1219; tel. (614) 292-8169. Once again, Foreign Language Area Studies summer fellowships will be available from all Title VI funded Africa Centers. It is best to check with individual Centers directly; application and deadline information may vary.

Announcement: Change in Leadership for Berkeley Center for African Studies

Following the practice of periodically rotating the position of Center Chair, Robert Price, Professor of Political Science, has passed the baton on to Louise Fortmann, professor of Natural Resource Sociology in the Environmental Science, Policy and Management Division of the College of Natural Resources. We thank Bob Price for his leadership over the past few years and look forward to the tenure of Dr. Fortmann.

The Joint Berkeley-Stanford Center for African Studies annual spring conference was held at Stanford's History Corner this year. It featured twelve panels, two plenary sessions, and attracted over 140 participants. Panels included such diverse topics as "Art and Literature in Africa" and "Gender, Health, and Power". The morning plenary session, entitled "The New South Africa: Year One", was moderated by Joel Samoff of Stanford, and the participants included Vincent Maphai, former Chair of the Dept. of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape, and this year's visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control; Robert Price, former chair of the Center for African Studies at Berkeley; and Bernadette Muthien, the 1994-95 Amy Biehl Fulbright Scholar in Political Science. The afternoon plenary session, "Literature and Liberation in Africa," was moderated by Richard Roberts, Director of Stanford's Center for African Studies, and featured Nelson Carvalho, lecturer in the Stanford Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, with Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, assistant professor in the Stanford Dept. of French and Italian, as discussant. The afternoon plenary session closed out the one-day conference, which was followed by a catered reception in the Citrus Courtyard, with the choral group Vukani Mawethu singing freedom songs of South Africa. The 1996 spring conference will be held at Berkeley.

STANFORD FLAS AWARDS

The following Stanford students have been selected as Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship recipients for the academic year 1995-96: Kathryn Barrett-Gaines, an entering graduate student in History, holds a Master's Degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Maryland, and is transferring to Stanford from the graduate program in Anthropology at Duke University. Her research project will focus primarily upon Swahili ethnic and linguistic history. Lisa Franchett, an entering graduate student in the School of Education, holds a Master's Degree in Public Affairs from the University of Minnesota. She has spent considerable time in Africa, particularly in Dakar, and plans to conduct her research in Senegal. Rudolf Gaudio, a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, was awarded a FLAS for Dissertation Research. His dissertation, entitled "Men Who Talk Like Women: Language, Gender, and Sexuality in Muslim Hausa society," is an ethno-linguistic analysis of the supposedly womanlike speech of men known in Nigerian Hausa society as 'yan daudu . Emily Osborn, a graduate student in History, was awarded a FLAS to continue her studies of Maninka, a language necessary for her research into the social history of the Kankan region of Guinea during the late precolonial and colonial periods. Wilmetta Toliver, a doctoral student in History, will use her FLAS award to undertake fieldwork in the Casamance region of Senegal. Toliver has been studying Wolof in preparation for her research of Allin Sitoe Diatta, a Diola priestess-queen at the center of a series of revolts against the French in the Casamance during the Second World War. Applications for the 1996- 97 academic year FLAS fellowships are available now from Jackie Vargo, FLAS Fellowships Coordinator, H&S Dean's Office, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2070. Application Deadline: 19 January 1996.

LIBRARY NOTES

Phyllis Bischof, the UC Berkeley Africana Librarian, attended the Future of Area Librarianship Conference in Indianapolis on July 12-14. Among the topics covered were current and future trends in international education and research at American universities and their impact on libraries. The conference is part of a three-year project whose goal is to expand the pool of individuals with appropriate subject, language and professional preparation available to work in American academic research libraries in area specialist positions. This project is a cooperative effort linking the five U.S. Dept. of Education Title VI National Resource Centers (African Studies, East Asian Studies, Inner Asian and Uralic Studies, Russian and East European Studies, and West European Studies), the School of Information Science, and the University Libraries.

The following materials have been recently received at Stanford's Hoover Library: (1) Reports and pamphlets from the African National Congress (Southern Natal and Northern Natal Regions), the Inkatha Freedom Party, Freedom Alliance, and the National Party, dating from 1991-93; (2) a collection of material from the historic October 1994 Mozambique Elections. The elections, in which Joachim Chissano received over 53% of the presidential vote and FRELIMO and RENAMO received 44.33% and 37.78% of the parliamentary votes, ended 16 years of civil war. Acquired were materials from the political parties FRELIMO, FUMO, PIMO, PPPM, RENAMO, and UNAMO. Included are pamphlets, books, posters, leaflets, and a FRELIMO T-shirt, pin, and neck scarf.

AFRICA BUREAU SUMMER OVERSEAS INTERNSHIP PROGRAM - 1996

Under this annual program, sponsored by the Bureau of African Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, a small number of highly qualified graduate students, with a B average or above, will be given the opportunity to work for the summer at a U.S. embassy or consulate in Africa on a level equal to that of a junior foreign service officer. Special experience and skills such as knowledge of Africa, political and/or economic background, and foreign languages will be important factors in the selection process. Application Deadline is Nov. 1, 1995. To be considered for selection, applicants must submit: a statement of interest (500 words maximum); undergraduate transcript; graduate transcript when available; a resume; two letters of recommendation from professors; and complete all forms (available at either the Berkeley or Stanford office of the Joint Center for African Studies).

This program provides temporary employment in the Foreign Service of the U.S. for roughly a 90- day period.

Successful applicants must secure at their own expense: a regular tourist passport and appropriate visas; and personal medical insurance and appropriate inoculations. The State Department will provide student with a round-trip ticket to and from post and housing.

Generally, students depart the second week of June and return in August/September; exact dates are based on completion of security clearances and negotiations between post and the student.

Forms for application are available at either the Berkeley or Stanford office of the Joint Center for African Studies.

Rockefeller Foundation African Dissertation Internship Awards are granted to African graduate students enrolled in American universities to undertake supervised dissertation research in Africa. The awards are open to citizens of African countries studying in the United States or Canada who are about to embark on dissertation research in the fields of agricultural sciences, health, life sciences, and others. Next application deadline: Mar. 1, 1996. Contact: Rockefeller Foundation, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036. Phone: (212) 869-8500. Fax: (212) 764-3468.

Conference Announcements

The 1995 African Studies Association Meeting will be held Nov. 3-6 in Orlando, Florida. Registration information is available on-line through the ASA web page or in either office of the Joint Center. Program highlights will include an ASA Women's Caucus Lunch with an address by Ayesha Iman, Institute for Development and Economic Planning, Dakar, Senegal; and a two-day series of Teachers' Workshops that will focus on innovative ways of teaching about Africa. Bay Area participants are especially encouraged to attend in order to prepare for the 1996 ASA meeting in San Francisco. If you are interested in volunteering to help with local arrangements for the 1996 meeting, please call Martha Saavedra at the Berkeley Center for African Studies: (510) 642-8338.

Please Note: The African Studies Association (USA) now has its own web page, locatd on the home page for African Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Its url is: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/AS.html. The ASA welcomes your comments and suggestions at: africa@emory.edu

Beyond "Primitivism": Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity" University of California, Davis: Mar. 28-31, 1996 An interdisciplinary conference hosted by the African-American and African Studies, and the Religious Studies Program will be held at the University of California, Davis, on Mar. 28-31, 1996. Participants will include scholars in Religion, Anthropology, Native American Studies and Area Studies. Designed to stimulate reflection on the manner in which Religious Studies and other disciplines situate indigenous traditions within their understanding of the world, the conference will explore several cutting-edge issues including: a) The relationship between these traditions and general theory and method in the academic study of religion; b) the ideological content and scholarly and extrascholarly representation of indigenous religious traditions; and c) changes that take place within indigenous religions as they interact with forms of extra territorial religions such as Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. This conference is supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute; Davis Humanities Institute; and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. For details, contact Jacob K. Olupona, Conference Convenor, African-American & African Studies, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, Phone: (916) 752-1548; Fax: (916) 752-9704.

Stanford Faculty Notes

Richard Roberts recently had published an edited volume with Alan Isaacman on the production of cotton in Africa during the colonial period, entitled Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History Sub- Saharan Africa (Heinemann Social History of Africa series). A detailed study of cotton production in the French Sudan will be out in the Fall of 1996, entitled Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and the Regional Economy in the French Sudan, 1800-1945 (Stanford University Press). He continues to work on law and colonialism in West Africa and organized the third annual "Law and Colonialism Symposium" in May, which dealt with conflicts surrounding property.

Kennell Jackson and David Abernethy will be jointly presenting a Fall lecture series sponsored by the Stanford Women's Club of San Francisco entitled Africa: Behind the Headlines. The location will be the St. John's Presbyterian Church, 25 Lake St., San Francisco on the following dates: October 11, 18 & 25 and November 1 & 8. Time: 10:00a.m.-12:00 p.m. Cost: Series-$30/Women's Club members, $35/nonmembers; Single lecture-$7/members, $8/nonmembers. For more information contact Sheila Larsen, (415) 931-1159.

Larry Diamond's most recent book, an edited volume with Marc Plattner entitled Ethnic Conflict and Democracy, is available through Johns Hopkins Press.

Joel Samoff recently completed major education research projects. The first involved the organization of five country case studies focused on the impacts of economic crisis on structural adjustment on education and training. Coping with Crisis: Austerity, Adjustment, and Human Resources (Cassell, 1995) reports the studies' results. A second project involved developing an inventory and analytic overview of nearly 230 studies of African education commissioned by external funding agencies during the early 1990s. Analyses, Agendas, and Priorities in African Education: A Reveiw of Externally Initiated, Commissioned, and Supported Studies of Education in Africa, 1990-1994 (UNESCO, 1995) will be released this month, during the biennual meeting of the Association for the Development of African Education.

Berkeley Faculty Notes

David Leonard spent the early months of 1995 in Africa working on his project, "The New Institutional Economics and the Restructuring of Veterinary and Human Health Care Systems in Africa." The major work of the project is being done by seven junior African scholars in Senegal, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia, with Prof. Leonard providing the initial impetus, advice, and support. The project is being funded by the Government of the Netherlands and the U.S. National Science Foundation, and is being administered by the (Canadian) International Development Research Center in Nairobi. The project grew out of a seminar on the same subject which David and the African Studies Center ran at Berkeley in July 1993.

Larry Hyman took a year's leave to work on his CBOLD Project with Dr. Jean-Marie Hombert, director of the Dynamique du Langage in Lyons, France.

Emery Roe published an article, "Against Power, for the Politics of Complexity", in Transition 62, 1994, which dealt with "the current predilection of African Studies to be obsessed with issues of power". The article resulted in a lively debate, which led to a follow-up article: "The Sharp Edge of the Sword: Reply to My Critics", in Transition 64.

Chikwendu Christian Ukaegbu, a Fulbright Scholar at Berkeley in 1991-92, has written a paper which was published recently in an edited book, The Significance of the Human Factor in African Economic Development, ed. Senyo B-S.K. Adjibolosoo, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995.

New Video on Sudan

Last spring, the Berkeley Center and the Center for Middle East Studies jointly sponsored a one- day workshop for middle and high school teachers on Sudan. Out of that workshop came a 23-minute video and accompanying curriculum unit. This unit, "Sudan: Confluence of African and Arab Worlds", is available through the Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS). ORIAS is an outreach office recently established by the UC Berkeley Dean of International and Area Studies. To obtain the unit, send $20 to ORIAS, 342 Stephens Hall, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2300 (Make checks payable to "UC Regents".). Other units covering all the world areas are available. Contact ORIAS for more information. Phone: (510) 643- 0868; or e-mail: orias@uclink.berkeley.edu.

Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) 1995 Report

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) performs a vital function in preparing curriculum units for use in K-12 instruction. Conveniently housed next to the Center for African Studies in the Littlefield Center on the Stanford Campus, SPICE made considerable progress in 1994-95 on curriculum related to Africa. "Mapping Africa," which was released in the fall of 1994 as part of the SPICE World Geography series, is continuing to sell well. Jane Boston, SPICE Director, says "it fills a big gap in solid geographic information on the continent, and our largest distributor, Social Studies School Services, has picked it up." Included in this 72-page guide are "map hunts," an activity on the important influence of climate, an activity on human-environmental interaction, and an exercise on the use of latitude and longitude to locate African capitals.

SPICE also put the finishing touches on a new elementary school unit, "What Do We Need to Live on Planet Earth? A Case Study of Life in Traditional East Africa." Marcel Fafchamps, in the Stanford Food Research Institute, was particularly helpful in the development of this unit. The field-test draft of the unit, "Why Is There Hunger in Africa? Nature Pleads Not Guilty" is nearing completion and should be in the schools for field-testing this November.

Lastly, a unit on Ghana is being developed. SPICE is working with a group of School of Education students to move this project forward. The project as currently conceptualized will introduce the students to contemporary Ghana as well as providing a rich historical context with lessons on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial history. Jane Boston believes the unit can be taken to the field-test stage by the end of 1996. The newest addition to the SPICE staff is Michelle Zimney, who has been named Project Assistant for Africa. Michelle is a Stanford University graduate in International Relations who has taught overseas as well as in the U.S. She will supervise the field-testing and review process of the new SPICE Africa units being developed.

For information on SPICE materials, or to order units, please contact Patricia Cruz, Sales and Marketing Coordinator at the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, 1-800- 578-1114, or E-mail her at SPICE.SALES@forsythe.stanford.edu.

Steve Gish, Stanford History Ph.D., 1995, wrote a text on Ethiopia, the latest volume in the Times Books International (Singapore) series, Cultures of the World. The text is intended for use in high school classrooms and is available in area libraries.

Alumni Notes

Stanford PhDs Awarded
Thomas McClendon: "Genders and Generations Apart: Labor Tenants, Law, and Domestic Struggle in Natal, South Africa, 1918-1944;" Meredith McKittrick: "Conflict and Social Change in Northern Namibia, 1850-1954."

Placement of Stanford PhDs
Steve Gish, Ph. D. History '94, James Madison University; James Lance, Ph.D. History '95, California Polytechnic University; Thomas McClendon, Ph.D. History '95, UCLA; Meredith McKittrick, Ph.D. '95, Southwestern University; Donald Moore, Ph.D. Anthropology '95, S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Post-doctoral Fellowship in Natural Resource Economics at UC Berkeley's Institute of International Studies.

Stanford Undergraduate News
Julia Novy, B.A. Human Biology and African Studies '93, recently returned from her Fulbright research fellowship to Madagascar, where she spent the past year exploring sustainable alternatives to deforestation. In September she will be embarking on a Marshall scholarship to the University of Sussex's Institute of Development Studies.
Julie Keane, B.A. Anthropology and African Studies '94, will be entering the Peace Corps in the Fall of 1995. She will be working as an agro-forestry extension agent in Niger.
Dana Weeks, B.A. Anthropology and African Studies '94, has also volunteered for the Peace Corps. Dana has been assigned as a water and sanitation "social mobilizer" to Cape Verde.

AFRICA TABLE, FALL 95
Free Noontime Lecture Series, Bechtel International Center, Stanford

10/25 Peter Buckaert, JD Candidate, Stanford Law School
"The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa"

11/1 Kathryn Barrett-Gaines, Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford History Dept.
"The 'Africa' in African-American: Lessons from the Swahili Episode"

11/8 Vincent Maphai, Professor of Political Science at the University of the Western Cape, and 1995 CISAC Visiting Fellow
"Power-sharing: the South African Experience So Far"

11/15 Emily Osborn, Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford History Dept.
"Outbreak of Fear: Ebola, AIDS, and African (Zairian) Sources of Disease"

11/22 THANKSGIVING WEEK---NO AFRICA TABLE

11/29 Peter Lewis, Assistant Prof., School of International Service, American University, and 1995-96 National Fellow , Hoover Inst.
"The Contradictions of Reform in Nigeria"

For more information, call (415) 723-0295

Berkeley Lecture:

Thursday, 19 October, Noon: "AIDS in Rural KwaZulu-Natal" by Gail Hughes, Ph.D. student, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley. Gail has recently returned from nearly a year long stay in KwaZulu-Natal where she carried out an epidemiological study of AIDS. For more infromation, call (510) 642-8338.

Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 10:56:26 -0800
Message-Id:199511081856.KAA13030@uclink.berkeley.edu
From: Martha Saavedra martha@uclink.berkeley.edu
Subject: Stanford-Berkeley Newsletter

Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar

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