The concept of outreach has become associated with public service to community, media and business interests, to public and private educational institutions, and to African and Africanist academics at home and abroad lacking access to resources to pursue their studies and research. This paper is concerned chiefly with the role of colleges and universities in African studies outreach, which is not to minimize the importance of other agents of change, private and public, committed to the task of improving the quality and quantity of our understanding and knowledge of African affairs.

According to the guidelines of the United States Office of Education, one aspect of outreach should deal with the community in which a particular area center is located. In asking personnel from other educational institutions with African outreach programs to provide me with information on their outreach activities into their respective communities, I emphasized the following areas: civic organizations, businesses, churches, prisons, radio and television (public and educational), newspapers, senior citizens, public libraries and museums, women’s/men’s clubs, and finally future or ecology-oriented groups. Each was asked to describe the type of outreach done and to evaluate the results.

The question immediately suggests itself: what constitutes a major American city? Subjectively, but with a long side glance at Jane Jacobs, I would define such a metropolitan area by several attributes. One obviously is population density, though the actual number of people that make up the city is less important than the diversity within the population that allows for a great diversity in culture. Major American cities are composed of many cultural, racial, and economic constituencies coexisting in a single polity. Thus, even though Peoria and San Francisco are dense population centers, one is a major farm town, and the other is a major city. This multiplicity of ethnic constituencies is reflected in a city’s educational, economic, religious, political, and cultural institutions which are likewise fragmented, though interdependent. Such cities with enormous and highly diverse constituencies are likely to be more self-sufficient culturally, politically, and economically than other American towns. They supply their own news and publications, stage their own cultural events, concentrate more on their own political processes, and establish autonomous norms of behavior. In fact, what happens in these cities more often creates the news, the culture, the mores, and the politics for the rest of the land. A university operating in such a milieu is not just a light on the hill. It is a constituency within a mosaic of constituencies. It is linked to those other constituencies politically, socially, culturally, and economically, just by being where it is. It must frequently act on an ad hoc basis, responding to requests and solicitations that are sometimes immediate, and sometimes imperative. The parameters of its actions are clearly traceable in the mosaic of relationships which describe the city. It is not as free as the state university in the college town to define its own program, but by its existential commitment to its locale it draws whatever important qualities it will have for itself, for its community, and for the nation.

Africanists experienced in outreach generally agree that in the long run the most effective way to improve the U.S. public’s knowledge of Africa will be to reach the precollegiate school population. And by extension, the most effective means of reaching that student population is through those persons who determine the substance and scope of materials taught on the precollegiate level: teachers, administrators, librarians, and other support personnel.

Preservice teachers, especially those actually engaged in student teaching, face a barrage of daily challenges. In many cases these challenges are new and unique. How does one cope with the needs and wants of thirty-plus students while simultaneously responding to the pervasive school time sequence affectionately known as “the bell”? Further, how does one maintain classroom order and harmony and inspire confidence when teaching a subject for the first time, often an unknown subject?

One of the most critical paradoxes of the last quarter of the twentieth century is the declining support for area studies, especially at this time when the global community has entered such a notable phase of interdependence. The continent of Africa and its people are as important in this interdependency as any others of the world community. Indeed, no other continent in the world’s history has provided to the international community so many new and independent nations. Concomitantly, this world area has among its assets unknown quantities of potential wealth in natural resources.

Educators teaching about Africa and other foreign areas cannot ignore the demands in American education for the basics—reading, writing, and arithmetic. These are important societal skills not merely because they result in writing grammatical sentences, spelling correctly, multiplying, and adding but more importantly because they play a central role, or should play a central role, in developing critical thinking abilities. In this respect, the critical thinking that is fostered by reading, writing, and arithmetic is essential for any relevant study about Africa today. Both African methods in education and content about Africa can be utilized in the K-12 curriculum to enhance these basic skills.

“No, No, No! I won’t marry that ugly little spider! He’s gross!” shouted Christie, waving her hands dramatically. The rest of the fourth graders listened, spellbound. Christie’s version of an “Ananse” story she had seen another class dramatize kept the original story line, but it was clearly her own creation, with fanciful detours here and there. Face and body totally Involved, she was a true storyteller in the best African tradition. A few days later Christie produced an entirely original “Ananse” story, this time bringing the famous Ghana trickster to America to buy roller skates. Her story, accompanied by a picture of the spider on roller skates, involves a contest between Ananse and a kente cloth weaver. In the end, Ananse’s legs, all eight of them, become entangled and weave a “kente cloth.” The story ends with the traditional moral, “Sometimes when you brag about being better than anyone else, you come out the loser!”

How do we learn? How do we develop opinions, form impressions, and conceive images of peoples, places, and events? Once having developed these, how are they changed? Although the whole learning process may not yet be fully understood, it is clear that our cognition of things outside ourselves derives from information received through sensory sources. The major ones are tactile, aural, and visual, with smell and taste being less important.

Ask any teacher of Africa about outreach programs. Ask any teacher of Africa what they try to do! Ask any teacher of Africa about their past performance. Ask any teacher of Africa what they ought to do in the 1980s.

Outreach. The term was first made known to many Africanists by the U.S. Office of Education (USOE) as a mandated responsibility of Title VI Language and Area Studies Centers and seemed to represent something Africanists at many institutions had probably been doing all along anyway without any specific person or any additional funds. Outreach in the mid-1970s seemed so appealing and harmless enough to the directors who submitted applications for their programs to be named Title VI centers that they deemed to insert the required 15 percent minimum budget for outreach activities and usually a request for the hiring of an outreach coordinator as a line item supported through soft money. By 1979 outreach had become so integral a part of center activities and outreach coordinators that the one African program not re-funded as a center was nevertheless able to continue its outreach program through university funds. By late 1979, however, some center directors were also expressing the view that outreach risked becoming the tail that wagged the dog, while others were beginning to realize that they might have lost control of these coordinators who were calling themselves directors! By late 1979, too, both the personae in USOE committed to outreach and the evaluation review sheets used by the expert panels for center and fellowship funding had been dramatically reduced, indicating a decline in O.E. emphasis on outreach but, in the African field, probably also an implicit recognition of the substantial commitment and achievements of the Africanist group.

The task of conducting outreach through NDEA centers has not been restricted to African centers. From the mid-seventies all such area study programs funded through Title VI were called upon by the federal government to undertake some sort of outreach activities. The Office of Education in its guidelines identified four areas to which such programs should direct themselves: the business community, the general public, precollegiate educational institutions, and other universities and junior colleges that had no NDEA-funded centers.

Librarians have always served a wider clientele than those we are expected to serve. In part this is due to our reluctance to question the status of individuals who come before us and in part it is due to the public service orientation of most librarians. In college and university libraries this wider clientele includes people of all ages from the community, former students, visiting scholars who come to the library and, through interlibrary loan, many others long distances away. Some librarians would say that “outreach” is what every good librarian does.

Since 1960 the United States has been emerging from a period of neglect of Africa and unsystematic collection of information about the continent to a period of increasing interest in Africa and an expanding collection of information about the continent. When the total range of information about Africa available to the average American citizen is taken into account, however, it must be recognized that the majority is biased, impressionistic, and inaccurate by the standards of Africans, scholars, and Africanists.

It is no secret that funding for African studies has been on the decline since the 1960s, and there is a well of pessimism in the Africanist community regarding future support, which has swelled in proportion to this decline. Among area specialists today, words such as proposal or funding are frequently heard in sharp cynical tones or in subdued voices of disappointment. Recently a colleague shared with me his visual interpretation of the funding situation for African studies, which he laughingly referred to as “the intravenous connection”—an emaciated body kept alive by a small but steady flow of nourishment directly into the bloodstream. The analogy is not inappropriate.

The year 1976 marked more than the U. S. Bicentennial for those interested in global studies in America. It represented an auspicious moment in the evolution of the government’s “predisposition” toward support of language, area, and international studies in the United States. In that year Phase III of the NDEA Title VI Centers Program took on a revised USOE outlook upon the concept of outreach and an intensified federal commitment to the promotion of outreach activities as an integral part of the programs of the four-score Foreign Area and International Studies Centers around the nation. The Bicentennial Year was also important for the Congressional passage of the Education Amendments of 1976, which provided for the Citizen Education for Cultural Understanding (Section 603) Program. This program, which would hold promise for the development and/or expansion of global studies particularly in the elementary and secondary school classrooms of the nation, commenced in 1979 the award of federal assistance to projects that sought to “increase the availability to students in the United States of information about the cultures, actions, and policies of other nations so that these students might make more informed judgments with respect to the international policies and actions of the United States.”

The Education Amendments of 1976 authorized the Citizen Education for Cultural Understanding Program under Section 603 of Title VI of the National Defense Education Act, as amended. Not until the fall of 1978, however, did there appear to be any significant support for the funding of the program; but by the time an appropriation was visible in early spring 1979, the interest level across the country appeared exceptionally high. Then in response to publicity of the program and the wide dissemination of over 10,000 application booklets in April and May 1979, the Office of Education (Division of International Education of the Bureau of Higher and Continuing Education) received 473 applications for grant awards in June 1979, from every state but Alaska, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wyoming. In September 1979 public announcement was made of 39 grant awards in this the first year of the program commencing October 1, 1979 and funded for one year. For the second cycle, 466 applications were submitted in February 1980. There are likely to be 36 grant awards for 1980, totaling $2 million, bringing the total number of projects for the first two years to 75 and the total federal outlay to $4 million.