American Anthropology in Africa and Afro-America: The Early Days of the Program of African Studies

Simon Ottenberg

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/N2RB3X

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American Anthropology in Africa and Afro-America: The Early Days of the Program of African Studies

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As a world power after World War II, some U.S. government officials and private foundations realized how little we knew of Africa, though allied troops had been engaged in North Africa and transported through West Africa. And the Cold War was leading to growing USSR influence in Africa. “It was sometimes said in the 1940s that the few African experts in the United States could hold a convention in a telephone booth.”2 Through funding from the Carnegie and Ford foundations and later from Fulbright awards and other government agencies, in 1948, Northwestern University became the first major African Studies Program, in the United States with support from the Carnegie Foundation. Multiple reasons for the choice were the pre-war research in Dahomey of Melville J. Herskovits, his former student, William R. Bascom’s anthropological research among the Yoruba of Nigeria,3 and Bascom’s intelligence work in West Africa during the war,4 both who were teaching anthropology at Northwestern. Further, three Ph.Ds on African subjects had been awarded there in anthropology by 1945, and one in Political Science by 1949.5 And there was the apparent absence of other African programs in the U.S. I write at a time when there is a resurgence of interest in Herskovits and the Program of African Studies at Northwestern. The art historian Suzanne Blier has critiqued aspects of the Dahomean research of Melville and Frances Herskovits.6 There is Jerry Gershenhorn’s book on race and politics, a general one in the making by Kevin A Yelvington, and a film by California Newsreel released in 2009 with the title of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. For the New World there is Robert Baron’s dissertation on Herskovits’s folklore research, Kevin A. Yelvington’s study of Herskovits’s Afro-American research and a book on his research in Suriname by Richard and Sally Price.7 There are also numerous articles which have appeared in the last twentyyears reflecting on and evaluating the work of Herskovits, some of which will be cited here. I will discuss the African Program from 1949 to 1962, especially the early years, which I knew best. I took graduate courses in Northwestern’s Anthropology Department from 1949 to 1951, and was there part of 1953, finishing my dissertation on the Afikpo Igbo of Nigeria in 1957, while teaching at the University of Washington. However, I knew most of the anthropology graduate students during the years covered in this paper, keeping in touch with many of them.

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