Previous listings of African Studies offered at American universities have appeared each year in the Bulletin, the last one being in March 1964. The Editors thank all those who kindly supplied the information on which this summary is based, and they welcome any suggestions for improving the usefulness of this annual presentation or of extending the coverage. Later numbers of the Bulletin will include summaries of African Studies in Canada, Africa, Western Europe, the USSR, and Asia.

The summary divides institutions into two main classes. First, there are those with a formally constituted Program, Center, or Committee, where African Studies has some institutionalized existence. Second, there is a group of universities which, while having no formal African Studies Program, nevertheless offer, through their regular departments, courses dealing with Africa. The latter list does not pretend to be exhaustive; there are many other institutions which might have been included, but we have no information on them at the present time.

Students who are deciding to which school they should apply might bear in mind such factors as caliber of faculty, availability of fellowships (though the closing date for most applications for 1965/66 is already past), library facilities, other institutions in the vicinity, and research opportunities. Most scholars now agree that the area studies approach cannot exist without the more theoretical comparative approach, so that the presence of certain other scholars becomes very significant: in political science, for example, it would be advantageous to have available faculty who specialize in the comparative study of processes of modernization, or of revolutions, as well as those who concentrate on Africa as an area. Therefore, this guide merely outlines some of the main features of African Study Programs in the United States.

During 1964 the External Research Staff of the Department of State took the initiative in efforts to achieve better coordination of government contracting for foreign area and foreign policy research. With the enthusiastic support of some 20 government agencies, the Staff has established a mechanism for more systematic coordination: the interdepartmental Foreign Area Research Coordination Group (FAR). The FAR Group seeks to ensure cooperative effort in research activities, prevent duplication among agencies, encourage maximum use of research results, and promote efficient use of nongovernment research. The Group's activities focus on research in the social sciences related to U.S. foreign policy--political, economic, and cultural. FAR meetings during 1964 have concentrated on research problems in the fields of China, Latin America, and Africa. Out of these meetings have emerged interagency subcommittees of research specialists charged with identifying substantive research problems and recommending courses of action to the parent FAR Group. The External Research Staff serves as executive secretariat of the Group.

Two of the papers which were presented at the third meeting, in December 1964, are likely to be of particular interest to members of the African Studies Association, and they are reproduced here by the kind permission of the writers and of the FAR Group. The two papers summarize some of the problems concerned with private research on Africa and with government-sponsored research on Africa.

It is the purpose of this paper to summarize briefly the nature of current and prospective social science research on Africa conducted by the nongovernment research community. Part I is devoted to a brief description of the attitudes and aims of the private researcher and to some general considerations about his past accomplishments and present concerns in the field of African Studies. Part II discusses African research in each of five disciplines: political science, anthropology, economics, psychology, and education.

Chief sources for the paper are the relevant chapters of the forthcoming book The African World: A Survey of Social Research, edited by Robert A. Lystad for the African Studies Association (New York, Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., April 20, 1965). This paper is reproduced by the kind permission of Frederick A. Praeger, Inc. The authors of the chapters used as references in this paper are: Political Science, Harvey Glickman, Haverford College; Anthropology, Philip Gulliver, School of Oriental and African Studies; Economics, Andrew M. Kamarck, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development; Psychology, Leonard Doob, Yale University; Education, David Scanlon, Columbia Teachers College. The present writer is solely responsible for the presentation and interpretation of their materials as they appear in this paper.

There is an increasing need of the government to know more about Africa. Trying to look ahead, many of us can see, for example, continued instability on the continent, with weak, fragile states grappling with the problems of achieving national cohesion. As we confront the problems arising from this instability, the gaps in our knowledge and understanding are vast and our need to know will probably continue to be much greater than our capacity to find the answers.

The African Studies Association's forthcoming book The African World: A Survey of Social Research has symbolic as well as substantive value for FAR insofar as it demonstrates how a group with widely diversified disciplines, interests, and missions can devise effective channels of communication to share a clearer understanding of each participant's special problems and objectives. The ASA asked the specialists in each of the 18 disciplines represented in this book to discuss, in relatively simple language and for the benefit of those in other disciplines, the problems they study in Africa, their methods, successes, and major failures.

In September and October of 1964, I visited the various centers once forming links in the archival system of French West Africa. Contrary to what occurred in Equatorial Africa, the French left these archival holdings in place, except for current material which was shipped to the rue Oudinot (Ministry of Colonies) in Paris. The center of the West African system was the Archives of the Government-General in Dakar (later the High Commission). Based originally on the Senegalese holdings, this archive became an independent agency of the federal government and was the parent organization of subsidiary archives for Senegal, Mauritania, Soudan, Upper Volta, Niger, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. It was parallel in structure to the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), which also had its headquarters in Dakar and maintained subsidiary centers for each territory. In some cases, the archives and IFAN centers were amalgamated (during World War II) and the history of the two organizations is often inseparable. This survey is an attempt to describe the establishment and development of these archival centers, how their material was organized and can be used for research, and their current status in the independent countries.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, currently offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars that concern themselves exclusively with the history, government, and social organization of the peoples of northern and sub-Saharan Africa. The Department of Tropical Public Health in the School of Public Health, the Law School, and the School of Business Administration also find a place for Africa in their respective curricula. The Center for International Affairs has for a number of years sponsored an interdisciplinary faculty seminar on Africa. It has also supported research in the fields of African history and government and maintains a continuing interest through its Development Advisory Service in the economic problems of Africa.

The resources of the Harvard University library system serve these varied teaching and research needs. Of the more than 7 million volumes housed in the various constituent libraries of the University, approximately 34, 000 form the core of the African collection. Much of this collection is scattered throughout the component libraries and, within each, shelved among a number of subject classifications. The largest single centralized Africana grouping is found, appropriately under “Africa,” in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library. It contains about 14, 000 books and periodicals. A total of about 6, 000 additional volumes is classified according to language or under the categories Folklore, Archaeology, Economics, Education, Sociology, Geography, South America, and Asia. (Early printed titles are often housed, however, in the Houghton Library.) The Law School Library holds about 5, 500 volumes pertaining to Africa; nearly half of its collection relates to the Republic of South Africa. The Library of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology contains about 2,400 volumes of monographs, 1, 600 volumes of serials, and several hundred pamphlets, all of which, together with an index of periodical articles by author and subject, appear in the 53-volume printed catalogue of the Library. The Andover-Harvard Theological Library of the Harvard Divinity School has about 700 volumes that deal with the churches of the Republic of South Africa and some 1, 500 volumes on Protestant missions in tropical Africa. The libraries of the Harvard Schools of Medicine and Public Health, the Graduate School of Business Administration, the Graduate School of Public Administration, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology each contain several hundred books and serials directly relevant to the study of Africa. The Library of the Center for International Affairs also maintains a select collection of books and periodicals dealing with contemporary Africa.

Africana at Howard University, Washington, D.C., developed as records on the African background of the American Negro were required to supplement the Library's collection of works written by and about persons of African descent.

Among the first books acquired by the Library soon after Howard University was incorporated on March 2, 1867, were titles on Africa. Some of the founders of the University interested in foreign missions donated to the Library their files on periodicals, books of travel and description, histories of Africa, and biographies of missionaries. Among these was the first edition of Churchill's Collection of Voyages and Travels issued in four volumes in 1704; seven editions of the works of Hiob Ludolf, the Elder ( … Historia Aethiopica, 1681; … Aethiopicam … commentarius, 1691; … Lexicon Amharico, 1698; … Grammatica Aethiopica, 1702; A New History of Ethiopia, 1682 and 1684); Barbot's Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea (1732); the 1639 reissue of the 1632 edition of Africae descriptio of Leo Africanus; and works of travel by Bosman, Proyart, Kolbe, Bruce, Smith, Vaillant, and Sparrman. Some of the serial files presented were the Missionary Herald (1821-1882); Africa's Luminary (1839-1840); African Repository (1825-1900); Mouvement Antiesclavagiste (1889-1906); Liberia (1892-1908); Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (1833-1849); Afrique Explorée et Civilisée (1879-1882); and Bulletin du Comité de l'Afrique Française (1891-1919).

This is the second in a series of annual surveys of South African reference literature and follows the general pattern of the first review. Works published in 1963 which reached the compiler too late for inclusion in the earlier review are included in the present survey.

General Works. Among the generalia issued during the year was a second edition of E. Rosenthal's Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa (London, Warne; R4-45 ). The South African Library Association issued a Directory of Natal Libraries (Potchefstroom, The Association; 35c), one of a regional series, which will probably be superseded by a comprehensive “Directory of South African Libraries,” scheduled for publication by the State Library in 1965. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research published letters H and I of Periodicals in South African Libraries (Pretoria, The Council; R1O p. a.), which is a union list of serials held in South Africa.

Yearbooks. A very important reference work which appeared for the first time in 1964 was the Statistical Yearbook, compiled by the Bureau of Statistics (Pretoria, Government Printer; R4-15 overseas). The yearbook for 1964 contains 606 pages of statistical tables covering the period 1945-1963 and embracing the following subjects: population, migration, vital statistics, health, education, social security, judicial statistics, labor, prices, agriculture, fisheries, industry, trade, transport, communication, banking and finance. The last issue of the Official Yearbook of the Union of South Africa was No. 30 (1960), and later editions are still awaited. The Statistical Yearbook fills a gap in this connection.