African Studies will lose one of its leading members when the University’s only professor of African history departs after spring term, leaving a big hole in the history curriculum for the world’s second-largest and second-most populated continent.
Spring will be Associate Professor Laura Fair’s last term before she makes the move to Michigan State University, which recruited her to join their well-developed African Studies Center.
“We need another (historian of Africa) for sure, there’s no question about it,” Assistant Professor of International Studies Stephen Wooten said, who has played a significant role in expanding African Studies at the University.
The history department will not decide if they will hire another historian of Africa until they meet in late winter or early spring term, but History Department Head John McCole said “there’s a strong presumption” that another historian of Africa will be hired.
Another critical decision that the department must make is whether to hire an adjunct historian to teach African history until a new hire is made, an in-depth process that will not be complete until around spring 2008, potentially leaving African history courses untaught at the University for more than a year.
“We would, I’m sure, love to be able to do that,” McCole said, “the question is always whether we have the resources.”
The African studies landscape has changed significantly since Fair arrived at the University in 1994, joining only two other Africanists, journalism and communication professor Leslie Steeves, and linguistics professor Doris Payne . But the scene has begun to fill in with 14 faculty members on the African Studies Committee , including people in dance, anthropology and sociology.
While most of those individuals teach about Africa part-time, and that number is still visibly sparse when compared to the dense terrain covered by other areas of world study at the University, it has taken the significant efforts of many to make this gradual growth possible.
A 2005 two-year, $160,000 U.S. Department of Education grant, for which Wooten and Associate Professor of International Studies and Political Science Dennis Galvan served as co-principle investigators, has provided vital funding for recent developments, including a minor in African studies, speakers and language opportunities.
A major step forward is the development of a minor in African studies, which is currently in the review process. The plan is to have it available by fall term if all goes well. A core requirement of this minor is a course in African history.
“(The minor) really represents a formalization of students’ work,” said Wooten. “That means that they’ve devoted a good chunk of time during their college career to really trying to learn something about the complexities and importance of Africa and Africans’ lives.”
Wolof and Bamana are now both taught as self-study languages, and Swahili, which began as a self-study language, is now taught as a regular language course.
“It’s telling when students do something like (self study),” said Yamada Language Center Director Jeff Magoto. “It’s for personal enrichment and the chance that you may get to use it if you study abroad.”
Students’ unfolding curiosity about Africa has also been an important force spurring African studies growth.
“The African studies committee is terrifically happy that the students are so interested in Africa,” Wooten said. “We add new classes, they get filled up. We have old classes, we make them bigger.”
Fair said she wants her students to develop understanding and respect for Africans as active participants in their history and also to recognize the impact of colonialism, especially on African political and economic structures.
History major Caitlin Elwood believes that Africa has been ignored for too long and wishes that the University offered more focused courses in African history.
“All you hear about today is the AIDS/HIV epidemic, but it is important to know how and why the majority of Africans live in poverty. The colonial past is a definite cause. (at least in my opinion),” Elwood said in an e-mail interview.
But courses are just the beginning.
After taking African studies classes, Wooten sees many students go on to do internships, study abroad, or get involved with humanitarian rights campaigns, or non-governmental organizations, and “the best thing to do to learn about Africa is to experience it.”
Study abroad programs are available in at least 12 African countries.
“And then once students get into Africa, often for simple and straightforward reasons, it confounds, it perplexes, it challenges,” Galvan said. “Confronted with the ingenuity, creativity, adaptability of people in this region, most of us who spend time in Africa come back learning more about ourselves and our strange place in the world than about ways to ‘help.’”
A two-year Peace Corps service in Mozambique helped student Garrett Roberts to be more humble with his views, as he realized that most of his assumptions about human nature were really culturally based.
“It’s really easy to read books and talk about ideas, but once you try to implement them it gets a lot harder,” he said.
Since 2000, Professor Steeves has led a group of students to Ghana each summer, where they live together for about six weeks and experience the country through media internships.
“Students have certain perceptions about Africa,” Steeves said, and the experience allows them “to learn first hand, to meet, in this case Ghanaians, become friends with them, to work side by side with them.”
With funding from the grant coming to a close, “We’ll continue to generate new courses, study abroad and internship opportunities for students interested in Africa,” Galvan said. “As we apply for new external funding, we’re putting a major emphasis on finding funds to get more students to the continent.”
“I hope the UO continues to support those efforts to expand opportunities in Africa,” Fair said, as well as the many “other places across the globe that we just don’t cover very well.”
As for the loss of Fair, it’s “a big blow,” Galvan said. “Laura has been a foundation stone of our program. No one teaches more courses on Africa or has been more committed over such a long period of time to building African Studies at UO. She will be sorely missed here, by students and colleagues alike.”