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African Studies in the UK: measuring what we have achieved in the past 50 years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Anthony Kirk-Greene
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Extract

This article does not attempt to give a full answer to the question of what has been achieved in African Studies. It does attempt to give a preliminary checklist of measurement indices which might be helpful especially as the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) approaches its half century in 2013.

ASAUK was founded in 1963, on the initiative of Professors Roland Oliver and John Fage, who went on to organise its first conference in 1964. Appropriately this was held at the University of Birmingham, where Fage had been appointed to direct a new (1962) Centre of West African Studies. Identifying Birmingham as the first Africa-dedicated centre in the UK must not be allowed to mask the pioneering role of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) which however, though founded in 1916, did not add Africa to its title until 1938.

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Article
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African Research and Documentation , Volume 105 , 2007 , pp. 63 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2007

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References

Notes

1 An important source is the one hundred page special issue of African Affairs (Spring 1965). This contains not only the papers presented at the inaugural conference but also “the address of the first ASAUK president, Margery Perham.

2 For a detailed account and analysis, see the Introduction and the chapter “The Emergence of an Africanist Community in the U.K.” by Kirk-Greene, A.H.M., in the volume commissioned to mark the centenary of the Royal African Society, The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa in the Twentieth Century, edited by Rimmer, Douglas and Kirk-Greene, Anthony (Macmillan, 2000)Google Scholar. Also important sources are such contributions as the reminiscences of Audrey Richards in her presidential address (African Affairs, 66, 1967, 40-54) and those of J.D. Fage in “British African Studies since the Second World War” (African Affairs, 88, 1989, 397-413); Roland Oliver's autobiographical account in his In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997)Google Scholar along with his inaugural lecture at SOAS “African History for the Outside World”, 1964; and Harrington, J.A. and Manji, Ambreena, “The Emergence of African Law as an Academic Discipline in Britain” (African Affairs, 102, 2003, 109-34)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Cf. David Killingray, “Colonial Studies” in Rimmer and Kirk-Greene, op. cit. On the senior role of social anthropology in developing African Studies see Daryll Forde on the special issue of African Affairs (1965) (Note 1 above)

4 Report of the Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, East European and African Studies (Scarborough), HMSO 1947; Report of the Sub-Committee on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies (Hayter), HMSO 1961; Speaking for the Future(Parker), University Grants Committee, 1986.

5 The first two volumes were published by the University of Bristol on behalf of the Royal African Society.

6 This is also well portrayed in the autobiographical accounts by a group of ‘Anglo-African founding fathers’ in A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, ed, The Emergence of African History at British Universities (World View Publications, 1995), with contributions by J. Fage, C. Fyfe, R.Gray, J. Hargreaves, K. Ingham, N. Sanderson, G. Shepperson and T. Ranger.

7 African Affairs: Special issue (see Note 1, supra)

8 See her presentation at the ASAUK conference 2006, published as “Confessions of a Reviews Editor”, African Research and Documentation, 102, 2007, 13-21.

9 The 4th revised and expanded edition of Hans Zell's African Studies Companion, 2006 is a good place to start.

10 While most Africanist humanities scholars are at home with this change in vocabulary, I confess to being lost in reading the regulations for Oxford's new MSc in Nanotechnology, with its optional modules of Nanoparticles, Soft Lithography, Hard Lithography, Thin Layers and Surface Modification (Gazette, 12 July 2007).

11 Reproduced in ARD, 102, 2007, 3-12.