Direction for Du Bois

The recent grand opening of the Du Bois Institute’s new location marked a milestone in the development of Harvard’s incipient African and African American Studies (AAAS) program. For many, the new office space also reflects new optimism for the program’s future, which has been in question for the past couple of years. Yet while AAAS’s prospects are bright indeed, the conventional wisdom about the vicissitudes of the program’s fortunes and how to make it flourish has been all wrong.

As the orthodoxy goes, AAAS has never been the same since the departure of its star, Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West to the bucolic refuge of Princeton. With him went a peerless academic mind, an architect of intricate and novel theories on the politics and sociology of race that revolutionized our understanding of American society. It is said AAAS will be lucky if it ever recovers from the loss.

Fortunately this is not the case. West’s departure liberated, rather than doomed AAAS; its scholarship has progressed not in spite of, but precisely because of his absence. West is a virtuoso indeed—in every pursuit (film acting, political consulting, autobiographical writing, musical recording) but serious research and analysis. Far from providing the AAAS clout, West stifled its real scholastic accomplishments with the oversize presence of a top-notch showman.

With Du Bois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. at AAAS’s helm and West out of the picture, the fledgling program’s potential is more apparent. However, the prevailing belief that African American Studies must constitute the heart of AAAS is erroneous. The real future lies in African Studies. While African American Studies is a nebulous subject that dubiously stands by itself, African Studies is a bona fide and coherent field of regional study akin to East Asian or Near Eastern Studies. As such, it is a weighty area of inquiry that sadly has not received adequate attention, especially since it addresses urgent issues currently affecting humanity and the planet.

Gates is investing increased resources in building up African Studies. This greater focus on Africa is long overdue. It is difficult to imagine how the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and AAAS could prioritize the study of a roughly 40 million-strong demographic group, however important, within a single country over the study of the second largest continent in the world, with 54 sovereign states and over 800 million people, a seventh of the total world population. Africa contains a multitude of different cultures and peoples living in a land-mass of great climactic, topological, ecological diversity. It boasts the longest human history in the world, featuring several proud and vibrant civilizations.

Unfortunately, Africa also recently has been the scene of severest forms of misfortune and suffering—communal conflict including genocide, authoritarian and kleptocratic rule, political upheaval and anarchy, poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, disease, economic underdevelopment, and environment degradation. Yet, while it may be more distressing and less profitable to deal with Africa than with other regions or issues, it must not be ignored. Africa’s problems are precisely the reason to hone in on the continent—both for the moral cause of helping fellow humans, and for the self-interested rationale of preventing Africa’s plights from spreading or arising elsewhere.

Gates seeks to develop the vitally important study of Africa by first constructing an extensive program in African languages. Though a respectable endeavor, given the enormous dearth of common knowledge on Africa and the urgency of gaining a deep and nuanced understanding of it, focus on language is misplaced for two reasons. First of all, while language sheds light on culture, fundamentally it is just a communication tool. One semester in African political systems or African history will provide a much more broad and profound knowledge of Africa than learning basic grammar and vocabulary in Yoruba. It is far more important for the vast majority who know very little about Africa to learn about its particularities, and quickly, which is most easily done in one’s own language.

Secondly, the vast continent of Africa teems with over 1,000 languages of varying currencies. A choice of four, even if they are among the most widely spoken, is incomplete, arbitrary, and of limited utility. Studying one of these languages means that at an early stage in his intellectual journey a student would be confined to concentrating on the narrow region where this language is used. It makes much more sense for a student of Africa to satisfy himself with his knowledge of English or French—two of the continent’s much more far-reaching lingua franca. This notion is liable to be criticized as colonialist and directed exclusively at communicating with Western-educated African elites. However, it is only reasonable to choose to undergo African language education once one is far enough along in the study of Africa to know to a degree of certainty which locality one wants to focus on.

The African Studies program should emphasize study that facilitates deeply understanding the challenges of African countries and working to practically meet them. Such knowledge includes history, political science, sociology, anthropology, (development) economics, public health, and environmental studies. Study of African culture and arts is of secondary importance, but is also desirable to deepen appreciation for Africa and dispel the pervasive stereotype of Africa as a primitive backwater. Reality and morality require a deep and nuanced study a troubled but not hopeless continent. This endeavor would not only confer upon Harvard further academic notability, but civic and humanitarian distinction as well.



Taro Tsuda ’07 is a government concentrator in Pforzheimer House.