Feature: MSU's Afrian Studies is National Leader

MSU'S AFRICAN STUDIES IS NATIONAL LEADER

After a third of a century, MSU's African Studies Center has become perhaps the premier such center in the country.

New York City, early 1950s. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first civilian president of Nigeria, faced a Mission Impossible. He wanted to persuade the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations to pour millions of dollars into a colony struggling towards independence. He wanted to create a university like the American land-grant universities whose mantra he espoused---a commitment to pass relevant knowledge on to the many, not the few. The foundation people basically laughed at him. 'Be serious,' they told him. 'You can't build a university with just our grants. We give program grants. We don't build universities. It's not our business.'

Now shift to July 1992. David S. Wiley, director of MSU's African Studies Center, was part of a small MSU delegation in Nigeria. Their mission was to re- link MSU with the University of Nigeria at Nsukka--the African leader's 'mission impossible' come true.

Against all odds, Azikiwe eventually did pull off building the university of his dreams, linking it to MSU, only to have the protracted Nigerian civil war interrupt this unique educational marriage in the 1960s. But let Azikiwe continue his story, as he did for Wiley's delegation in July 1992: Rebuffed by the foundation executives, but not dejected, Azikiwe recounted, he pondered his next move as he walked the cold, rainy streets of Manhattan that night. As he strolled past the Colgate, Palmolive, Peet Building, he noticed the palm trees carved on the front of structure. 'I knew in an instant that if one can build a skyscraper in Manhattan from palm oil,' he recalled, 'then you certainly can build a university in Nigeria with it.'

Azikiwe's vision and persistence jelled 10 years later. Carrying a check for œ 5 million (British pounds) raised from a portion of the profits from Nigeria's palm oil business, this first African Governor of Eastern Nigeria met again with the same charitable organizations. The financiers were flabbergasted. Instead of naysaying, this time they directed him to the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), which in turn referred him to a Midwestern university president who enjoyed a reputation for having international vision. 'Try Michigan State,' they told Azikiwe.

If any three words ever fulfilled a dream, these did. Azikiwe hurried to East Lansing and was welcomed by 'a most enthusiastic' President John A. Hannah. As the result of this meeting, Azikiwe not only fulfilled his dream for a Nigerian university built on the land-grant model, but he and Hannah sowed the first seeds that, over the years, germinated into MSU's African Studies Center (ASC).

Today, the ASC enjoys global acclaim and ranks consistenly as a leader among among the 10 largest similar centers on the campuses at Yale, UCLA, Cornell, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Berkeley, Florida, Indiana, Illinois, and Stanford.

Responding to the challenge issued by Azikiwe, AID, and John Hannah, literally dozens of MSU faculty members packed their bags and headed to a destination some located on a map for the first time. These MSU pioneers shared their multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills with their new found African colleagues and friends. From this effort, the University of Nigeria at Nsukka evolved. This remarkable achievement earned world-wide respect for Azikiwe, 'the George Washington of Nigeria.'

The sharing has not stopped. With their mission completed, the MSU scholars and ambassadors returned to MSU excited with their newly-gained knowledge of Nigeria, its people, history, culture, businesses, and the manifold post-colonial challenges, which they were anxious to share with their MSU colleagues and students. New curricula would be designed at MSU. Importantly, a growing fountain of graduate and undergraduate studies and faculty research about Africa was launched.

The relationship has been mutually beneficial. Many African students have since come to East Lansing to learn new technologies and scientific advances that can help their nations in self-sustaining development. At the same time, MSU now boasts some 130 core faculty members who have worked in Africa; through the African Studies Center and its many departmental links, they add to a rich reservoir of knowledge that includes one of the largest research libraries on Africa in the nation.

The ASC is one of 10 federally-designated National Resource Centers in African Language and Area Studies as an advanced institute of knowledge to train the next generation of M.A. and Ph.D.-level experts. These African specialists are brought together in the ASC's weekly Noon Luncheon Lectures and many special seminars, workshops, and conferences. Simultaneously, the center serves as a resource for other universities, colleges, federal and state governments, corporations, the media, and elementary and secondary schools.

Each year, the center impacts the teacher training curriculum in more than 50 colleges and universities. It also helps television broadcasters, textbook and encyclopedia publishers, corporations, and film makers and distributors.

Among other goals, the center seeks to counter the traditional image of Africa as a 'dark continent,' leaving behind the stereotypes of Tarzan and 'The Gods Must Be Crazy.' And now, the center's success and excellence will surely enjoy more appreciation by the MSU administration.

New president Peter McPherson has a vast background in African affairs. As head of AID, he helped negotiate the massive U.S. linkage with Zimbabwe. Indeed, he has visited all but three of Africa's 55 countries. As Wiley points out, 'That's more countries than all our faculty have visited.'

A sociologist who has studied environmental change, religion, and urbanization in Zambia and Kenya, David Wiley has directed the ASC since 1977, after leaving a similar post at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 'Across the Michigan State campus are a large number of outstanding faculty who wet their feet internationally on this pioneering project in Nigeria, or in the Peace Corp, U.S. AID projects, or regular academic research,' Wiley notes. 'We believe State's commitment to the study of Africa probably is unparalled in the United States.'

Another of the ASC's marks of distinction, adds Wiley, is that no other campus offers instruction on-demand in 25 African languages. At its inception at MSU more than 33 years ago, only eight or so faculty members with experience in Africa formed the ASC nucleus. Today, some 130 African specialists are scattered throughout the campus in more than 25 departments; their expertise includes the arts, languages, literature, history, social sciences, education, agriculture, economic development, the natural sciences, health, and medicine.

Building African Studies and Development MSU Africanists are now involved in service in Africa in areas such as health, food production, environmental protection, and education. A number of medical projects are tackling some of the dreaded diseases of the tropics--malaria, river blindness, sleeping sickness and schistosomiasis--as well as public health. Consider, for example, Dr. Terrie E. Taylor from MSU's College of Osteopathic Medicine. Since 1986, Taylor and a British colleague have been concerned that one million African children under five years of age die every year from mosquito bites that transmit the malaria-causing parasite. 'We're losing the battle with this disease and the problem is a lot worse than before,' says Taylor, who will spend six months in Malawi, a small country between Zambia and Mozambique.