I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history. Few, if any, university administrators claim that each field of history is subject to an ethnic qualification -- that only those of English descent, for example, can teach English history. At the annual meeting late last year of the African Studies Association, it was evident that many administrators nevertheless advertise positions in African history in ways that make it clear that the job will go only to someone either African or of African descent. Colleagues in African-American history tell me that a similar preference for African Americans operates in that field as well.
This strategy ghettoizes African history, by making the field an enclave within the university set aside for black scholars. The flip side of the strategy is the de facto requirement that black historians must teach African or African-American history, no matter what their actual field of specialization.
This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs. I know of at least one university where faculty members teaching the history of Africa discourage applications for graduate study from white students. Most of us with graduate programs in African history accept doctoral candidates regardless of race, but many of us advise our white graduate students to have an alternate field of specialization as a form of security in a ghettoized job market.
African history has long held a peculiar position in the historical profession in both Europe and the United States. Africa was the last continent to have its history taken seriously elsewhere. Before World War II, the history of North Africa was included with that of the Middle East. The history of tropical Africa was the history of European colonizers, while South African history was limited to the history of the white minority in that country. In the United States, the only universities that taught African history were the then-segregated black colleges, where it was considered a part of “Negro history.” It was taught there largely because of the efforts of Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Journal of Negro History and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Even so, few Americans of any color carried out historical research in Africa.
After World War II, the serious academic study of Africa had its first real beginnings in England and in France, as those countries began to move away from their colonial relationship with Africa. Study of the continent then began in tropical Africa itself, with the foundation of the first universities there in the 1950’s. The United States followed, with the first graduate seminars to train doctoral candidates in African history established at Boston University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1957. After that, growth was rapid. By 1970, African history was an established field of historical study, with several hundred faculty positions at American universities. Some were filled by new Ph.D.'s specifically trained in that field and some by “retreads” whose doctoral study had been in some other field.
The rise of African history in the United States paralleled the rise of the civil-rights movement. Most of the early historians of Africa were white, but they were at least on the fringes of the movement and many had a general sympathy for the underdog, whether for disenfranchised African Americans or for the history of a continent that had been neglected because of racism and cultural chauvinism.
Yet the field never attracted many African Americans. The founders of the first graduate seminars were white scholars from other fields. At Wisconsin, for example, I helped start the first seminar in African history, coming to the subject from Caribbean history. My colleague at Boston University came from anthropology. For some years, comparatively few black Americans went into academic life in any case; the most able African-American graduates sought careers in fields such as law, medicine, and business. Those who went into history rarely looked to Africa, preferring instead to study the history of their own community. After all, their connection to Africa seemed very distant.
African-born blacks who came to this country for graduate training, however, had a strong interest in African history, and many stayed on here after they finished their graduate work. Thus today the majority of the black faculty members teaching African history in this country were born in Africa.
Starting in the late 1980’s, two new interests appeared in American universities. Global awareness increased the demand for international studies of all kinds. At the Johns Hopkins University, where I teach, we have international programs within the disciplines of anthropology, political science, history, and economics -- along with a minor in “global studies,” administered by the interdepartmental Institute of Global Studies.
The second and parallel interest was a growing ethnic consciousness, sometimes identified as the “rising tide of cultural pluralism.” This has occurred not only in the United States but in the rest of the world as well. Students of various ethnic groups are demanding the right to study their own particular heritage.
These two factors have helped create more university posts in African history, but they also have helped create demands from African-American students that courses in African history be tailored to meet the concerns of contemporary African Americans. Students also often demand that courses be taught by African Americans or, when not many African-American candidates are available, by Africans, with whom students want to feel a common heritage. When these demands are put side by side with the laudable efforts by colleges and universities to increase the number of black faculty members, the result is often the ghettoization of African history. If students want someone of African descent to teach African history, after all, that seems a logical place to concentrate on recruiting black faculty members.
Because overt racial requirements for job applicants are illegal, it is hard to know just how many of the current positions in African history have been restricted to African-born or African-American candidates. An informal survey conducted in the 1993-94 academic year by a professor of African history indicated that about half the new openings in African history were reserved for black candidates. A university might start with a preference for an African-American scholar. If such a candidate cannot be found, it might hire an African; failing that, a white person. Or it might drop the search for a year. Sometimes an opening is advertised in a way that makes the racial requirement clear.
In October, for example, Duke University announced an opening in African history, stating: “Funding for the position comes from the President’s special fund for minority recruitment.” Many other universities make similar announcements. A conversation I had with a member of the Duke search committee made it clear that “minority” was simply a code word for “black.” If the department decides to raid an African university to fill the position, the new staff member will only become a minority when he or she arrives on the Duke campus. This kind of raid has been occurring too often in recent years. It produces affirmative action that does little to help disadvantaged African Americans, while at the same time creating a “brain drain” from Africa.
For Africa, the decline in the quality of its universities over the past two or three decades has been sad to see. A half dozen of the best African historians under 50 years of age are now pursuing their careers in the United States or Canada. The older generation of historians in Africa, the first generation trained in the West, has now largely retired. The absence of others at the peak of their research potential will make it hard to maintain the standards that the leaders of the field have set.
I do not mean that we should discourage able scholars from coming to the United States from Africa. But I believe that we must not automatically favor immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean over white Americans, in the name of affirmative action, if the latter are of greater ability. The lack of a genuinely competitive market for historians specializing in Africa means that the quality of work in the field is likely to decline, as some able white graduate students are pushed into other areas of history.
It is hard to know how to stem this tide. But one way would be for scholars to press administrators to work for more genuine multiculturalism. Doing so could include encouraging African-American graduate students to study all kinds of history, instead of pressing them to study African-American or African history. We could continue by using affirmative action to integrate rather than ghettoize the universities, by re-committing ourselves to recruit black faculty members for posts outside African and African-American history, and by hiring qualified whites, as well as blacks, to teach those subjects. Above all, we must honestly acknowledge what is happening. We need to guard against the often-unconscious racism that has pushed black scholars into academic ghettos.
Philip D. Curtin is professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.