Interdisciplinary Action
It’s a hot, sticky day in early September and the Kent lecture hall is much too small for the growing crowd inside. Anthropology professor Mahmood Mamdani’s undergraduate course, Major Debates in the Study of Africa, is meeting for the first time and every seat is filled. People without seats crouch or lean against all four walls of the room.
You could dismiss the huge turnout as part of the course shopping rush. But Mamdani’s class isn’t the only popular course on Africa. History professor Gregory Mann, who teaches Main Currents in African History and sections of the African Civilization seminar, estimates that 250 students enrolled in introductory Africa-related courses last year, compared with 152 in the 2001-2002 academic year.
Assistant Vice President for Global Programs Kathleen McDermott has seen a similar increase in students studying abroad in developing countries. Last year, 20 Columbia College and SEAS students studied abroad in Africa, compared with 11 in the 2002-2003 school year.
A big draw for studying Africa at Columbia is its Earth Institute, one of the world’s leading academic centers for the study of sustainable development. The institute brings a new, more holistic approach to poverty-related problems.
Mann also points to increasing numbers of students at Columbia who are children of African immigrants. “[We’re seeing] more and more students who are American Africans—first-generation, second-generation Americans. So there’s the coming into being of a new African diaspora, which brings a new intellectual and academic strand to it [African studies].”
Still, Columbia has struggled to keep pace with the growing interest in African studies. The hunger strikers who have been stationed on South Lawn since Nov. 7 are calling for more professors of African and African-American studies. Katie Cronin, CC ’08 and a political science major, came to Columbia with an interest in studying Africa, but wasn’t happy with what she found. “You look at how many courses there are on Europe, and then you look at how many there are on Africa. It’s like one fourth of that. And how many times bigger is Africa?”
Mamdani, surveying his classroom, echoes Cronin’s sentiment. The professor, a prominent Africa scholar and former director of Columbia’s Institute of African Studies, looks at the crowd in the undersized lecture hall. Smiling, he quips, “So this is the University’s estimation of the interest in Africa.”
As a first-year, my academic interest in Africa was sparked in Main Currents in African History, in which I was exposed to literature, history, and politics in a whole new way. Buchi Emecheta’s heart-breaking novel, The Joys of Motherhood, in particular, drew me into the story of a continent undergoing rapid change. Wishing to pursue my interests further, I asked my academic adviser about a major called “regional studies,” which I had noticed in the online course catalog. He looked at me quizzically. He had never heard of it.
Hardly anyone knows about regional studies, an undergraduate major offered in conjunction with three different institutes in the School of International and Public Affairs—the Institute of African Studies, the East Central European Center, and the Institute of Latin American Studies. Mann, the faculty adviser for the African regional studies major, says he knows of only one student currently pursuing it.
This is as close as Columbia College gets to an African studies major, though Barnard has a rapidly growing Africana studies program. Other on-campus academic opportunities can be found in Teachers College, the School of Public Health, SIPA’s newly reopened Institute for African Studies, and the Earth Institute. But these leave few options for undergraduates—even Earth Institute interns are largely graduate students.
Instead, many undergraduates look outside Columbia’s gates for academic fulfillment, finding it in various study abroad programs or outside the academic context altogether.
The good news is that current first-years and sophomores may not have to look as far to find Africa-related academic opportunities. Between the Institute of African Studies and more faculty appointments on the horizon, course offerings should begin to expand to match the rise in student interest. More professors who study Africa would allow more seminar-style Major Cultures classes, one component of the strikers’ demands surrounding the Core. Africa has now been officially incorporated into the department of Middle East and Asian languages and cultures and a new interdisciplinary Columbia College major is in the works.
Barnard students, on the other hand, already have a major. Barnard’s Africana studies program has been around for 15 years. Its popularity has increased in recent years—14 juniors and seniors are currently declared majors.
But the program has a rocky history. No director has stayed on more than a year or two and course offerings tend to be limited. “There’s a problem of how one supports interdisciplinary programs,” explains English professor Kim Hall, the program’s current head. “Since we’re a program, not a department, we don’t have what they call core faculty. The faculty all have home departments that they are primarily responsible to.”
This means professors end up with double advising duties, a particular burden for young faculty who need to get tenure. But things are turning around. Hall plans to stay for her full five-year term and senior Africana studies majors say they have never seen so many courses offered.
Terra Holman, BC ’08, switched her major at the beginning of the year from economics to Africana studies and says she’s much happier. “I never knew my professors in the economics department,” she says. “Africana studies is a much smaller department, so there is very much a one-on-one connection. I feel so much more a part of the program.”
When asked what she would add to the program, Holman speaks about more recognition from Barnard College as a whole. Hall echoes this sentiment, saying that the most important gain for Africana studies would be increased attention from other parts of the college.
“What really needs to happen is that the study of Africa and the study of the diaspora need to be integrated into the other departments,” she says. “You shouldn’t be able to be a history major and not know anything about Africa. You shouldn’t be able to be an English major and not know anything about African-American literature.”
The Earth Institute, famous for Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Development Project, is another recent Columbia-based academic opportunity. Max Fraden, CC ’09 and an economics major, has had a rare chance to study through the Institute as an underclassman, working on the Institute’s Millennium Village Project. The Villages, community-led development projects scattered across 10 African countries and launched in 2004, work to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development goals—a set of targets ranging from increasing primary education to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Fraden supports the project’s priorities. “I think its [the Earth Institute’s] vision is the right one. What you need to do is allocate a decent amount of money, over a long time, for agriculture, health—all these sectors.”
Sachs’s revolutionary, holistic approach to economic development is what supporters like Fraden find so attractive about the Earth Institute. But studying Africa through the lens of development can be problematic for humanities professors. As Mann says, “I’m not interested in sending students to fix problems.” Most agree, however, that Earth Institute scholars are an important element of the academic discussion on Africa.
“I think there is a place for the Earth Institute, so long as there is a People Institute,” Mamdani says with a smile. “So long as you also study what people do and think, their history, their perceptions, capacities, visions, and choices—all those questions.”
Though the changes may come too late for the class of 2008, African studies at Columbia is set to grow far beyond the Earth Institute. The discipline is finally acquiring the financial and institutional support it needs for expansion. The IAS’s new director, Mamadou Diouf, is the face of these revitalization efforts.
Diouf is a busy man. Apart from teaching responsibilities, he has been charged with rethinking the study of Africa at Columbia. He is jointly appointed in history and MEALAC in addition to his SIPA post and has two different offices—one in the International Affairs Building where the IAS is housed and another with MEALAC in Kent.
After several years of instability and interim directors, the IAS collapsed last fall. Since then, Columbia administrators, professors, and students have worked hard to breathe new life into the study of Africa. Christabel Dadzie, SIPA ’07 and then-president of the student-run SIPA Pan-African Network, was the central figure in organizing the student response, which included students in the business and law schools, SIPA, Teachers College, and undergraduates.
“I spoke with a lot of undergraduates who were shocked and appalled and more than willing to put their names on petitions, come out to the town hall meetings, and really confront the administration,” says Adoma Adjei-Brenyah, CC ’08.
As president of the African Students Association, Adjei-Brenyah became the undergraduate representative during meetings in the spring semester, at which Vice Provost of Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks and other administrators spoke with students about the future of the IAS and African studies at Columbia.
The fruit of those discussions was the appointment of Diouf and the official reopening of the IAS—with $200,000 of additional funding—in July. Diouf is focused on hiring a staff and programming events like last week’s African Diplomatic Forum, which involved panel discussions with eight African ambassadors.
“The institute is back on the Columbia stage,” Diouf says. “What I am trying to do is engage in conversations about the curriculum.”
Diouf sees the undergraduate curriculum as very different from the approach used in SIPA or the Earth Institute. “SIPA is recruiting graduate students who are more interested in policy than in a kind of academic discussion,” he says. “We [classical departments] study the cultural, social, and political environment in which people are operating. Such approaches are much more nuanced, and they are also more academic. But I profoundly believe that what is important is respecting the pluralism of approaches.”
But even if the IAS does not directly offer undergraduate classes, it plays an important role in coordinating events and speakers and offers an academic touchstone for students throughout the University.
“I think of it like MEALAC,” Adjei-Brenyah says of the IAS. “The way that MEALAC is an area-studies department, but also a go-to point at Columbia for the Middle East for undergrads, post-docs, Ph.D. students. I feel like the Institute of African Studies needs to be that source for African studies.”
Diouf, a charismatic speaker and prominent scholar in the field, has received much praise for his leadership. “He’s an amazing presence,” Hall says of Diouf. “Having a scholar like him at the head of this will attract so many incredible speakers and other faculty and will be a big support for our junior faculty. You can already sense a kind of excitement around here.”
Administrators announced last year that Africa is being incorporated into the MEALAC department, the title of which Diouf hopes to change to include Africa. This integration is part of a larger rethinking of MEALAC itself, professors say. Space concerns also influenced the decision to integrate the departments.
When the decision was first announced last year, many students objected, saying the combination was short-changing Africa by lumping it in with the Middle East and South Asia. Indeed, as Mamdani jokes, “You have nearly half the population of the world in MEALAC.”
On the other hand, the combination offers several advantages, including the incorporation of African language courses run previously through the Language Resource Center. Mariame Sy, who teaches the West African languages Wolof and Pulaar, and Swahili teacher Elson Khambule, are now affiliated with MEALAC.
Diouf is excited for Africa’s inclusion in MEALAC. “It’s an interesting site to discuss issues related to globalization, to religion and secularism. So we can share not only resources, but also methodologies.”
Mamdani points out that much of pre-colonial literature on Africa is written in Arabic or in Arabic script, so having Arabic scholars and Africanists in the same department makes sense. The combination also benefits the study of North Africa, an area on the margins in Middle Eastern studies and often ignored in African studies programs focused on the sub-Saharan region.
The study of Africa within MEALAC may take several years to mature. In the meantime, Diouf and Mann are developing a more immediate option for undergraduates—a new interdisciplinary major.
“This is going to be key to the revival of African studies,” Diouf predicts. The major will likely comprise some combination of introductory courses, two years of an African language, a study abroad requirement, and a senior thesis.
The next step is to gather professors from different departments and discuss what the academic foundation for the major should be. Mann says, “We need to sit down with the faculty and decide, ‘What is the core?’ There has to be some discipline or method that we are teaching.”
Many Columbia students studying Africa cite study abroad programs as an essential part of their education. My own semester in Ghana gave me a grounding for what had been, until then, a textbook-based education on Africa. Nothing in a classroom can replace the experience of talking politics with a Nigerian cab driver or negotiating with a council of elders to climb the nearest mountain.
Holman’s study abroad experience transformed her academic focus. When she left for South Africa, she had been a declared economics major and had been planning to write a thesis on post-segregation development in South Africa and the American South. But while she was in South Africa, she changed her mind.
“I became far more interested in the people rather than the economic situation. I feel like before, I had put economics above the culture and the people, but when I was there I kind of flipped the two.”
Mann says many undergraduates who come to him with an interest in the continent do so after they have traveled or studied there. Cronin’s semester abroad was a classic cultural immersion experience. For four months, she became part of a large Muslim household in Mali, mastering the art of the bucket shower. Like many students who live with host families, she formed a strong bond with hers.
“I find that talking to the people I went abroad with, talking to people in Mali—because I still call all the time—is the best way to stay connected to that experience,” Cronin says.
One of the advantages of living in New York City is that elements of such experiences are never far—immigrant communities like Little Senegal exist just a few blocks from Columbia. For American students returning from Africa, such neighborhoods can serve as much-needed extensions of their experiences abroad.
When Cronin returned with her djembe, a Malian drum, she was looking for a teacher. Now she makes the trek out to a Brooklyn dance studio once or twice a month to take lessons from Guinean drummer Mangue Sylla, who she met through a Barnard African dance course.
Fraden took a different approach to studying abroad. Instead of opting for an overseas academic program, he took the second semester of his junior year off and spent nine consecutive months working for the Millennium Village Project of Rwanda after spending the previous summer there. He worked on agriculture and public health issues, combining fertilizer loans with registration for health insurance systems.
“Coming back has been a really strange experience,” Fraden says. “When I left I was really sad and I was not too keen on starting classes again. I think every day I’m getting more and more frustrated.”
The immediate future for African studies at Columbia is looking strong. Diouf hopes to have the new interdisciplinary major approved by the end of the semester and Hall says Barnard students “are clamoring for a minor” to join the school’s major. Diouf hopes to hire five additional professors for the MEALAC department in the next few years, and Hall will search for two more professors of Africana studies at Barnard.
The long-term fate of African studies is less certain. Despite recent improvements, Hall still worries there is not enough widespread support. “There’s just been this kind of ongoing denigration, that the study of Africa is not serious, and is too attached to identity interests and politics.”
It is also unclear whether Africa will remain a part of the MEALAC department in five or 10 years and if so, what will become of the interdisciplinary major now under construction. Some feel placing Africa in its own department would leave the field underfunded and isolated from other parts of the academy. Diouf sees this as a potential problem, but is more concerned with the program’s academics.
“For me, the institutional discussion is not the most important. The most important is the intellectual discussion, the possibility of coming up with a common intellectual program, and then finding ways to support it institutionally, financially.”
With graduation in six months, future plans for seniors are also uncertain. Cronin is considering graduate school, but not until she completes at least two years with the Peace Corps. In July, she will start teaching English in a francophone African country, though she doesn’t know her assignment yet. Aid work may also be in Cronin’s future, but she isn’t sure. “I feel like something on a very grassroots level will really clarify some issues for me,” she says.
Holman’s travel plans are less concrete, though she would like to see more of Africa. “That is my passion now: to discover new cultures and allow them to discover me.”
For Fraden, the return will serve as motivation for many more years of education. “Understanding the key determinants in this persistent poverty affects how you go about designing systems to end poverty,” he says. “When I go to medical school after working in a rural health care system, I know what tools I’ll be able to bring back to a place like Bugesera District in Rwanda.”