Anthropologists in America Take a First Look at Africa

By Simon Ottenberg

The author, as an adolescent, wanted to be a polar explorer. He did not seem to care whether he went to the North or the South Pole. But at Northwestern University, he became interested in its African program, one of two major programs in anthropology there. The other was on African cultures in the Caribbean and South America. So as a graduate student, he did a study of African cultural survival in a community along the coast of Georgia. However, he was more interested in Africa at a time when Americans realized, after World War II, how little they knew about it. Government and foundation funds became available, and Ottenberg took advantage of it for his first African research in 1952-1953 on a year's grant for work in Nigeria. That began a long career there, where his interests varied over the years--from children and adult masking to family life to art and other subjects. He found African culture to be anything but simple; rather it is very complex. Each aspect has links to others; it's a web of behaviors to be traced in which language played key roles while Western cultural influences were changing African cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638606321

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Overlooked and Underplayed Thoughts

Chapter 2: African and African American Cultures

Chapter 3: The Anthropological Background to Herskovits’s Scholarship

Chapter 4: First Experience

Chapter 5: Afikpo Titles 1960

Chapter 6: The Boston University African Studies Center

Acknowledgments

Jennifer Delliskave did a very helpful job of editing my sometimes messy writings, for which I will always thank her.

Charles Carley-Ledgerwood was a magician at the computer, reminding me when things went wrong that it was not the fault of the computer, but it was I who had stumbled and not the machine.

Chapter 1

Overlooked and Underplayed Thoughts

There are always matters that have been left out, considered trivial or unnecessary, or that simply did not find a place in one’s writings. Years later, they may appear to be significant, whether because of changes in the social and intellectual world, to alterations in the leading ideas of the moment, to the evolution of the writer’s own thoughts. Having lived to an old, old age, I am fortunate to be able to perceive the importance of certainty of my ideas and thoughts that were previously overlooked or underplayed. One cannot simply insert overlooked ideas and conceptions into old texts, but one can present them and comment on their level of usefulness.

These articles focus on the early days of the American scholarly interest in Africa, particularly anthropology, roughly from 1945 to 1970, following the end of World War II. It was the time when African countries were gaining independence and the United States was setting up diplomatic relationships with them while colonial officers were being replaced in each country by native inhabitants. It was the time when the African section of the US State Department was being developed. Two Black colleges established small underfunded African American Studies programs with African components, Fisk in 1945 and Roosevelt in 1950. Fully White-funded African Studies programs by private foundations and, later the United States government, were begun at Northwestern University in 1948 and at Boston University in 1953, along with the establishment of African Studies centers at other institutions of higher learning. Training in an African language, when available, was also begun within or external to the African Studies program.

The papers in this book might each appear to be isolated in content from one another, just a throwing together of some writings in Ottenberg’s unpublished files. But each paper has associations with at least one other paper. Chapter 2 describes the growing interest among American anthropologists in Africa and the first American African Studies program at Northwestern University, which began in 1948 under Melville J. Herskovits. Chapter 3 provides biographical data on Herskovits’s interesting anthropological life and the problem of developing an interest in Africa among American anthropologists. Chapter 4 follows the first field experiences of two of Herskovits’s graduate students in Nigeria during late colonial times. Chapter 5 is an example of the ethnographic writing style of the Northwestern program in its early days, although this particular study of Afikpo titles was actually written later on. The high level of achievement expressed by the Afikpo in this chapter matches the high level of achievement of Herskovits’s anthropology. Whether one agrees with his ideas or not, some of which have been absorbed into anthropology and some that have not. Chapter 6 is about another early African Studies program, this one at Boston University. It illustrates how diverse one African Studies program can be from one another and how different in personality may be its leader, yet still producing an interesting and useful program serving the needs of the African field and the public. Together, these papers provide something of the flavor of African Studies during its early days in the United States.

It seems clear from the results of most of the research of Herskovits’s students that they were providing ethnographic conclusions relating to ethnographic issues and were little concerned with applied anthropology issues. It is likely that the contributors to the funds for African research discovered this and turned to support what they considered to be a less theoretical view and a more pragmatic outlook at Boston University’s African Studies center, a program less concerned with anthropology’s problems than matters of the day and so helped to fund a more pragmatic and applied approach. This creates the impression that Herskovits and his students were more into anthropological theory than the Boston program, when, in fact Herskovits’s students were generally writing good old ethnography. But it is also true that, later in his life, Herskovits so became involved in the theater of world concern about Africa, busy with African affairs in meetings and writings, that he had little time for students and left African Studies to his growing African Studies faculty, not all of whom followed Herskovits’s conceptions on how to study Africa.

The United States and Africa

Until after World War II when embassies were established in many newly formed African countries, the United States had few or no formal relationships with African countries, which were mostly colonies of European countries, so that all major items of correspondence went through the colonial office of the mother country, rather than directly.

The trade of African slaves to the Americas (1600 to its formal ending in 1850. Although it continued for many years afterwards), directly or through the Caribbean, was the most significant of America’s relationships ever between the two continents, causing the most problems to this day but also allowing for positive solutions. Of what is known as the triangular trade, slaves came to the Americas, cane sugar and tobacco grown in the Americas and rum produced there went to Europe, and manufactured goods—including Manchester cloth, rum, and tobacco—were traded from Europe to Africa. Trading companies grew up along these routes and eventually cities.

Among the most dramatic relationships between the United States and Africa occurred between 1801 and 1805. American government warships were in the Mediterranean chasing pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco who were capturing American ships and sailors for ransom. This led to the Barbary Treaty of 1805, presuming to end these practices. In 1915, a separate treaty was developed with Algiers for similar reasons, known as the Second Barbary Treaty.

In the mid-1850s, freed Black slaves formed the American Colonization Society and established a colony and, against the wishes of the local inhabitants, declared it in 1947 to be an independent country, the first in Africa. But it was not recognized by the United States until 1862. The settlement, which grew to some fifteen thousand inhabitants, had the support of some prominent Black American intellectuals, while others thought that Blacks should work out their problems in the United States.

Monrovia became the colonist’s capital, sitting along the Atlantic coast. But tensions between the descendants of the original inhabitants and the settlers and their descendants, which began shortly after the Americans arrived, were never resolved.

During World War II, American military in West African ports facilitated the movement of troops from West Africa to East Africa and on to Asian combat areas. American troops were also involved in North Africa beginning in 1942, with Allied forces attacking Algiers, which was taken, and Tunisia, where they were less successful. But the war forced the United States to consider Africa in terms of economic and political matters. These could no longer be denied.

Part of a Larger Effort

This book of papers explores only a small part of emerging engagement of the United States with Africa through scholarly research in anthropology. Other programs with Africa in history and political science were evolving. How much of the information that scholars and student scholars gathered was actually used? Probably very little, except when these individuals who wrote them were embedded in government institutions, as were some of Boston University’s African program. Many of the pioneer researchers went on to teach and became acknowledged specialists who gave advice, presented lectures, and were personally useful agents of change compared to the technical books that they wrote.

The book does not discuss the growth of African Studies in European countries and in Japan on Africa. The task of doing so is beyond my capabilities as the author, although it is important that this should be done, with a comparative discussion of how each country’s scholarly interest in Africa developed as it did.

In closing, it is good to remind the readers that views here of the early history of this very exciting period in the development of African Studies in the United States is only one interpretation for anthropology and that there are other anthropological views in publications and in the files of the Melville J. Herskovits African library at Northwestern University. Also, each academic discipline has developed its own histories of early relationships with Africa. These need to be put together to provide a general view.

Chapter 2

African and African American Cultures

The Early Days of Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies in the United States

The first two papers are based on my personal experience as an anthropology graduate student at Northwestern University (1949–1952, 1954) and my early years as a professional anthropologist. They are also based on research into the published materials and archives during that time. They are personal interpretations. Others have also written on