With rare and only partial exceptions, research and teaching institutions and individual scholars in these countries welcome the prospect of an increase in the frequency, range, and quality of research by American students of Africa and of greater coordination between them and scholars in Africa. Each government in principle also welcomes researchers who are intellectually, personally, and politically respected and whose projects are thought to be broadly relevant, or at least not antithetical to, the needs of the society. Despite the resemblance among countries in these general respects, each presents a unique cluster of opportunities, research settings, and problems which will be discussed in this report.

The information for this study was collected over a period of six weeks during the summer of 1968. Periods of one week were spent in Khartoum and Addis Ababa and of four weeks in South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Twenty-three interviews were conducted in Khartoum, twenty-two in Addis Ababa, and fifty-five in southern Africa, including thirteen in Lesotho and Swaziland. Eight of the eleven universities and three of the five university colleges in South Africa were visited. 150 people participated in the interviews. Of these eighty percent were in academic occupation such as university teachers/researchers or administrators, and twenty percent were in government posts (including a few officers in American embassies or consulates), international organizations, or private organizations engaged in or concerned with research.

For those of us who have been members of the African Studies Association since its founding in 1958, it is hard to believe that Bill Brown will no longer be with us at our annual meetings and as an ever willing member of our committees. We became so accustomed to calling on Bill for advice and guidance at moments of crisis that we are just a bit at a loss when we realize we can no longer turn to him in need.

Bill was a founding member of the ASA, a member of its board, and its past President. These offices, to which Bill was overwhelmingly elected, were no more than fitting tributes to his qualities as a scholar and a leader in his field of study -- qualities which the members of the Association recognized and to which they gladly paid tribute. But Bill was much more than a founding father; he was one of the small group who saw in the early fifties that African studies were to grow from the concern of a handful of devoted men to a major branch of area studies in the American academic roster. Bill was a member of the small committee which met from time to time in 1956 and 1957 to lay out the goals and purposes of the future association. Bill's wise counsel then, as it has so often since, prevented us from making irretrievable errors. I can remember sitting in several long and confused planning meetings in the Spring of 1958 in which alternative forms of the Association were brought up, one after another, and at the end, the group turned to Bill, who, seemingly, had absorbed all the confusing threads of the discussion. He was able to weave them together into a series of decisions which sounded much more intelligent than they ever were, I am sure, during our discussion; and out of them came the Association as it now is.

In the process of looking at the record of the Association's accomplishments over the past ten years, I came across some of the early records of the negotiations which brought the Association into existence, and I thought it might be of interest if I were to compare what has been done to what was envisaged as the task of the Association when the idea was first suggested. The origins of the Association go back to a seminar on Africa which met privately and informally in New York in 1954. Out of this group a plan was put forth for the formation of an African Institute, and an organizing committee, consisting of William A. Hance, Jean Comhaire, Alan Pifer, and Nicolaas Pansegrouer, was constituted to take care of the practical steps toward organizing such an institute. The proposed activities of the Institute included the assembly of documents and periodicals referring to Africa, the provision of scholarly and technical information and consultative services to educational, religious, governmental, and business groups, and the facilitation of visits to Africa for study and observation. Names suggested for the new body were the North American Institute of African Studies and the American Institute of African Studies. Not unsurprisingly, much of the discussion at this time, as now, centered about financing the new Institute.

The Comoro Archipelago is situated at the head of the Mozambique Channel, midway between Cape Amber and Cape Delgado. The largest of the four islands, Great Comoro (or Grande Comore), 175 miles from Mozambique, is the northernmost island in the group. Mayotte (or Mayotta), the first of the islands to become a French colony, and the southernmost in the group, is the closest to Madagascar. To the northwest of Mayotte is Anjouan (or Johanna), referred to by authors, both ancient and modern, because of its fertility, as the “Pearl of the Comoro Islands”; immediately to the south of Great Comoro, and almost parallel with Anjouan, is Mohilla (or Moheli), the smallest island in the group.

The population of the islands is a mixture of African, Arab, and Malagasy, numbering over 170,000 people, with the heaviest concentration on Anjouan. The exportation of agricultural products has always been the chief industry of the archipelago. Its location at the head of the Mozambique Channel, and the wide range of food products available, made the Comoro Islands a popular supply stop for ships bound for India and the Far East via the Mozambique Channel; for the ships of the British antislavery squadron; and for whalers fishing in the southern Indian Ocean. European technological progress and the opening of the Suez Canal combined to render this function obsolete. During the last half of the nineteenth century, Mayotte, which became a French colony in 1841, was a moderately successful sugar colony. Plantations were also opened on Anjouan and Mohilla, but it was not until after the establishment of a French protectorate over the other two islands in 1886 that plantation economies and new crops were introduced to the rest of the archipelago. Ylang-Ylang, a perfume essence, is the major export crop; sisal, vanilla, cocoa, and coffee are also exported. Coconuts are the only export commodity which has survived from the precolonial economy.

Singularly lacking in the current discussion of concepts as the appropriate basis for the new social studies curriculum are concepts which are comparative in nature. For example, the Social Studies Curriculum Center at Syracuse University identified eighteen substantive concepts that “appear to be appropriate for elementary and secondary programs in social studies.” Only one concept -- “comparative advantage” -- of these eighteen substantive concepts, however, even faintly implies a comparison. Moreover, comparative advantage is described in terms of bargaining and conflict, not in distinctive social realities. A different group of concepts was identified by the Wisconsin Social Studies Committee. The Committee attempted to identify several basic conceptual ideas that underlie the central elements of history and each of the social sciences in order “to help our young people extract meaning and bring order from the sea of facts which may otherwise inundate them.” But the concepts identified by the Wisconsin Social Studies Committee are vague and do not imply comparison of data or interpretations. The major concept identified for history, for example, is “Change is inevitable.” But what does the concept mean? Does the concept help the student in extracting meaning and bringing order to a sea of facts? More important, does the concept exclude the possibility of constants in history which may be the truth of the matter for some societies? Indeed, the concept, as stated, encourages convergent rather than divergent thinking by the student. Like a Mondrian painting, the reality depicted may be impressive but no one is quite sure what it all means.

Because of their location at the head of the Mozambique Channel, the four islands of the Comoro Archipelago, Anjouan (or Johanna), Grande Comore (Great Comoro), Mohilla (Mohély), and Mayotte (Mayotta) have been the subject of a considerable body of literature. European ships in need of supplies for their voyages to the east, or along the eastern coast of Africa, stopped at one or all of the islands, and many travelers and ship captains published their observations on the archipelago. Literature dealing with the period before 1800 has been arranged into collections cited below, but the numerous accounts of nineteenth-century travelers ar e scattered in periodicals and books, and the major bibliographical works on the islands, by and large, cover die same ground. This essay brings together accounts of the Comoro Islands arranged in a geographical and historical, although not necessarily chronological, context; and secondary material particularly related to the events and people is also described.

I would like, first of all, to express my profound sympathy to Mrs. Ida Brown and the children of my former mentor, Professor William O. Brown. Also to the Center and this our University for the loss of its founder Director of the African Studies Program and pioneer scholar in the field of African studies. I feel very honoured indeed that I have been invited to give this memorial lecture.

I first met Professor William Brown in September, 1951 when, as part of a tour of European centres of learning with programmes on Africa, he came to the Department of Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University. As the Professor and the lecturer in the Department were both away, it fell to me to show him round the Department and talk about our work; but, as I had only just been appointed to the Department, we spoke more about Africa than about the Department's programme.

This acquaintance was deepened into a lasting friendship when, in the Spring of 1953, I had the privilege of entertaining him as my house guest when he visited Sierra Leone. In the evenings we spent together in Freetown, I got to know Bill Brown; I got to know him as a man dedicated to and genuinely interested in the advancement of Africa. His was not merely an antiquarian interest; nor was he only interested in the kinship structures and anthropological tidbits of the African societies. He saw the Africans as personalities, as human beings, pursuing the same goal as others, and wanting for themselves the same rewards out of life. Those were the colonial days but, even in those days, Bill Brown was already deeply interested in the development of the African countries into viable nation states. It is not surprising, therefore, that this Center, under his leadership as its first Director, did not develop any narrow parochial interest, but studied Africa from a broader dimension, giving equal importance to historical, economic, political, as well as sociological factors in the development of Africa from traditionalism to modernity.

The National Archives of Tanzania (Idara ya Kumbukumbu za Taifa la Tanzania) were established on 28 August 1965. Since this date energies have been directed toward building an efficient archival service: better storage facilities have been acquired, trained Tanzanian personnel have been hired, and there is now seating space for ten researchers. The most significant development from the historian's point of view has been the recent organization of the German records into a concise and convenient index catalogue.

In June 1967 the West German Government Technical Aid Program sent Mr. Peter Geissler, an Archivinspektor at Hessiches Staatsarchiv, Marburg, on a two-year project to reorganize the German records. Mr. Geissler is already familiar to historians of the American Revolution for his research on the Hessian troop records at Marburg. In Deutsch-Ostafrika the old German Registry System (renewed in 1902 and in effect until 1916) had been utilized in numbering the various files. A still extant two-volume Registry lists all the documents in existence before the First World War, but many of these have since been lost, eaten by white ants, stolen, or destroyed. It is evident that only a few records concerning district political administration have survived, while land, legal, mission, public works, and education files are among the most complete. The files have been divided into two main groupings: (1) the old German Registry and other German Government Administration (G 1 - G 65); and (2) Private Archives (G 66 - G 86). Each file card contains both the new “G” number and the old German Registry designation. In addition Mr. Geissler has performed a painstaking task in listing on each card some of the outstanding names, places, etc. mentioned in the particular file.

This is the second in a series of progress reports on African archaeology in the United States. These reports are being produced at the request of the Archaeology Committee of the African Studies Association as a means of indicating the nature and extent of current North American participation in this aspect of African research.

William Y. Adams of the University of Kentucky is leading an archaeological expedition to excavate the medieval Nubian village site of Kulubnarti in the Republic of the Sudan. The object of the expedition is to try to discover evidence of Islamization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- a historical problem which received almost no attention during the recent High Dam salvage campaign in Nubia. Work will be carried on from January to May 1969 under the direction of Dr. and Mrs. Adams with four student assistants and a labor force of 125. The expedition is sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, under a grant from the National Science Foundation.

All of my work in the last fifteen years has been influenced by my association with Bill Brown. But it is perhaps especially appropriate that this piece be included in this tribute to him, for it is the first paper which I wrote after joining him, and it focused on what was always of prime concern to him: the clarification of concepts. I still recall some of our discussion when I showed him the first draft: he was with it, at least insofar as the limits of space permitted development of the topic. Perhaps I remember this because this paper was in a way an earnest of what my stewardship in his institution should be.

The paper was read at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings in Detroit, December 1954, in the Symposium on Economic Factors in Stability and Change. I made no effort then to submit it for publication in any of the appropriate journals because I had taken time out from writing my dissertation to do the paper and returned my attention to that urgent task (it was also my first year of teaching a survey course on African ethnography), and the paper was soon out of mind. Now, after a lapse of time, the question arises, should it be brought up to date? Two quite different things can be implied by this question. First, should more recent data be adduced? To do so would be to write a new paper which would have none of this one's association with W. O. Brown. Furthermore, this paper now has a certain historical value as a contemporary description of some aspects of late colonial conditions. Second, should the interpretation and conclusion be modified in the light of more recent writings? I feel that both can stand. Therefore, no change has been made in the text.

The problem of obtaining permission of national governments for field research in Africa has been frequently documented. The Research Liaison Committee of the African Studies Association was formed in 1966 with the purpose of serving as a center for collection and dissemination of information on U.S. scholars and their research in Africa, communications on the role and mode of research in Africa, referral of questions it was unable to answer itself, collection of files on research clearance regulations, establishing of contact on behalf of researchers going to Africa, and maintaining liaison with African studies groups outside the United States. In interviews conducted in East Africa for the Committee in 1967, Vernon McKay learned that control procedures associated with foreign scholars in Africa were only partially security oriented. Officials, especially those in the national capitals, were being inundated by would-be researchers. Although the value of research was not denied, officials suggested to McKay that research be directed toward needs of the host country -- toward studies that would aid its economic, social, and development planning. Local officials issued a plea that research results be made available to the host as soon as possible.

Research clearance problems in Tanzania are better structured than elsewhere in Africa. Applications are directed through the University College in Dar es Salaam. In Tanzania, as in other countries, even the clearance successfully completed must be followed by establishment of contacts and working relationships “upcountry.” Field research circumstances, especially pertinent to geographers, demand the tolerance, if not the active encouragement of local (subnational) government.

On the evening of March 20, 1828, a group of free men of color organized a society that had as its purpose “the mental improvement of the people of color in the neighborhood of Philadelphia.” This organization was to be known as the “Reading Room Society.” Immediately a library was established and the librarian instructed to lend books to members for no longer than a week. Books were to be withdrawn or returned at the society's weekly meeting. Freedoms Journal, the earliest Negro newspaper, the first issue of which appeared in March, 1827, and Lundy's Genius of Universal Emancipation, an antislavery publication, were among the first works circulated. In May, 1833, the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons appealed for “such books and other donations as will facilitate the object of this institution.” By 1838, this library had 600 volumes. Since Negroes could not enjoy the same privileges as whites in libraries, they established for themselves some 45 literary societies between 1828 and 1846 in several large cities, mainly in the East, most of which maintained reading rooms and circulating libraries.

As a consequence of these activities many Negroes were stimulated to assemble private libraries. In 1838, in Philadelphia and nearby cities, there were 8333 volumes in private libraries. In New York City, David Ruggles, a Negro abolitionist, pamphleteer, and printer, was probably the first Negro book collector. He maintained a circulating library and made antislavery and colonization publications available to many readers. He charged a fee of less than twenty-five cents a month for renting books relating to the Negro and slavery.