Most of the Fellows of the African Studies Association have participated in at least one Peace Corps training program, so that they have an interest in, and opinions on, this subject. The present article summarizes the major factors of training programs, outlines the main characteristics of the projects in Africa and of the volunteers, and then considers some aspects of the relationship between the Peace Corps and the universities. Finally, there is a detailed summary of all Peace Corps training programs for Africa, from the first one in June 1961 through the summer of 1965. Forty-four different universities, colleges, or other organizations have produced 132 programs for 19 different African countries, and some 6,000 volunteers have successfully completed the training and gone to serve with the Peace Corps in Africa (the usual service period spent in Africa is two years).

The first step in the establishment of a training program is a discussion between an interested university and the Training Division of the Peace Corps, followed by a series of negotiations which culminate in a formal contract. The contract specifies the duration of the program, the number and educational background of trainees, the faculty who will participate, the details of phases of training, and the country and project for which the trainees are being prepared. An important part of the contract is the budget, the cost generally being a little more than $200 per trainee per week.

The “winds of change” had barely swept across Africa when the newly-independent nations felt the chilling gusts of the cold war. Decolonization created a power vacuum in the prevailing bipolar structure and for a time it appeared that the African continent would be one of the areas in which the struggle between capitalism and communism would be resolved. As the center of gravity of the cold war shifted towards the periphery, the USSR became increasingly interested in extending its influence in Africa. This interest was sharpened as Sino-Soviet rivalry intensified. Under Khrushchev, Soviet policy in Africa was expansionist, vigorous and unrealistically optimistic, both in its assessment of African gratitude towards Moscow and in its estimation of the socialist potential of certain regimes. A series of spectacular setbacks in the Congo, Guinea, Ghana, and Mali led Khrushchev's successors to reevaluate their Third World policies and downgrade Africa as an area deserving extensive Russian resources.

In this essay, we discuss some differences between professional and popular perceptions concerning the identification and prevention of birthing difficulties among the rural Peul in Guinea. This difference in perceptions is evidenced principally by three key elements having an influence in the progress of the pregnancy and labor as well as in the prevention of birthing difficulties. These include the daily domestic tasks, the fast of Ramadan, and the diet appropriate for the pregnant woman. The analysis shows that the mechanisms of prevention elaborated by the health professionals (medical perceptions) and those of the pregnant woman's personal entourage (popular perceptions) are realistically based but arise from different assumptions. From the popular perspective of those in a pregnant woman's entourage, the fear of labor, based on the generally high elevated rate of maternal mortality—especially elevated among the Peul in rural Guinea—justifies in certain measure the preventative activities centered on diet and the execution of domestic tasks. By contrast, among the health professionals interviewed, the attention is placed on the prevention of anemia which arises in women during pregnancy. In sum, we have here two different logics on the prevention of birthing difficulties.

For political scientists, and particularly scholars and students of Africa, Crawford Young needs litde introduction. However, as he has now achieved an emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, it is time to present his intimate understanding of African politics in the last forty years.

Born in Philadelphia in November 1931, Young received his B.A, from the University of Michigan in 1953. He studied at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London from 1955 to 1956 and at die Institut d'Etudes Politiques, University of Paris, from 1956 to 1957. He dien entered graduate school at Harvard University, completing his doctorate degree in political science in 1964. In 1963 Young was offered an assistant professor position by the Department of Political Science at die University of Wisconsin–Madison. He remained tiiere for his entire career, retiring in January 2001. He has held visiting professorships at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda (1965–66), and at the University of Dakar in Senegal (1987–88). He also served as dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the Université Nationale du Zaire from 1973 to 1975. Among his publications are twelve monographs, over one hundred articles, and chapters in numerous books. Several of Young's works have been translated into different languages.

Young's professional career includes extended field research in Congo-Kinshasa, Senegal, and Uganda. He has received many prestigious awards such as the Herskovits Prize (African Studies Association) and the Ralph Bunche Award (American Political Science Association) for The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Wisconsin, 1976), and the Gregory Luebbert Prize (APSA) for The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (Yale, 1994).

People of African descent in America occupy a singular position in relation to the race problems faced by Blacks in South Africa. Many Afro-Americans have had firsthand experience with the practice of race discrimination either in its blatant Jim Crow manifestations or in its more covert institutional forms. This common experience with race discrimination in South Africa and the United States makes it possible, for example, to correlate W.E.B. Dubois' description of the warring “double consciousness” of the black American made in 1903 with the expressions of frustration written by Albert Luthuli in 1962. This commonality also establishes a basis from which a meaningful assessment can be made regarding the historical role of black Americans in the race issue of South Africa.

Before Sir Alec Douglas-Home made his extended visit to Salisbury in November 1971, an advance British team led by a noted lawyer, Lord Goodman, had made at least four trips to Rhodesia to discuss with the Smith regime the general points which would then form the basis for a settlement. With both Britain and Rhodesia eager to settle the six-year old dispute which had caused injury to the former’s international image (particularly within the commonwealth) and had brought Rhodesia to the brink of economic disaster, Goodman’s mission seemed destined to succeed. In fact, during and following his talks, a lot of optimism said to be founded on leaks of information from well-placed sources in both Salisbury and London was expressed.

Higher education in Africa has gone from favored focus to disparaged wastrel to development engine in two decades.

—Joel Samoff and Bidemi Carroll

First and foremost, this is an impressive piece of scholarship. It provides an invaluable framework for the study of the ever-evolving relationship between universities in Africa and the diverse, not to say motley, set of external institutions (academic and financial) that have worked with them from the time of independence to the present. As a comprehensive and largely descriptive account it covers rather fully the variety of issues that have emerged in the course of these relationships and pulls together much important information and many of the sources from which future scholarship can depart. It represents in itself a major and impressive piece of research and compilation and goes far to fulfilling its expressed aim: “to provide the foundation for frank debates about the merits, modes, and pitfalls of partnerships” (p. 72).

The report is analytical in the sense of identifying issues, but judicious in seeking balanced comment, and because it is careful to avoid judgments, it steers clear of provocation. For this reader, and no doubt for others who lived and worked throughout much of the period being described, it also has an inevitable biographical quality. For that reason I had expected to be taking issue with some, if not a great deal, of its content. Not so! Because of the circumspection, the balanced perspective, and the careful restraint with which issues are presented, it is hard to disagree fundamentally with much of the account.

This article addresses the issue of the relationship between contemporary South African politics and the type of socially committed theater that might be capable of mounting a critique of those politics. The author highlights the contradictions between the aspirations of the Freedom Charter and the realities of subscribing to the neoliberal world order. His contention is that any theater form that is seeking cultural intervention must find a way of representing contradiction if it is to remain true to the experiences of its audiences and its participants. Such a representation can be achieved through a combination of Bertolt Brecht's praxis in relation to contradiction and current practices in Theatre for Development, which themselves draw upon aspects of the antiapartheid resistance theater.