It gives me particular pleasure to be here. I think that I am the first Canadian citizen to be honored by the presidency of what has increasingly become an international organization. And yet, I am very much one of you. I was born and raised in the United States. I served in its army and represented it abroad as a Fulbright professor before becoming a Canadian. Passionate as my commitment to my adopted country is, my roots remain here, no place more than in this community of scholars.

Like many of my generation, my career has been marked by a tension between thought and action. As a historian, I wanted to understand the world in which I lived. As an activist, I wanted to change that world, to make it a more just, more tolerant and more egalitarian place. If you had asked me 25 years ago why I chose Africa, I would have stressed my scholarly objectives. I would have mentioned the problems that interested me and the questions I wanted to answer. In retrospect, the appeal of Africa for myself and many of my generation of Africanists was very much the excitement of watching the destruction of an oppressive colonial order and being involved in the creation of a new one. Furthermore, the quest for justice and self-determination abroad was linked, sometimes unconsciously, to the quest for equality and social justice at home. For myself, as for many of my peers, the conflict between thought and action often cut deep, and we sometimes paid a price.