African Studies at Columbia — Early 1990s

The newsletter archive of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia opens a window onto a particular moment — the early 1990s — when the Institute was rebuilding itself intellectually and institutionally, finding its shape after years of financial strain and reduced university support. To understand that moment, it helps to know something of what preceded it.

The story begins in 1957, when Melville J. Herskovits convened a meeting at Northwestern to organize the African Studies Association and expand African studies across American universities. L. Gray Cowan, political scientist and the ASA's first Secretary-Treasurer, was among the key scholars present. Money was flowing: Ford Foundation and federal government funds were being directed toward the study of Africa, and Cowan returned to Columbia to establish the University Seminar on Studies in Contemporary Africa that same year. The early seminar was private; no notes or records were kept. Two years later, in 1959, Cowan drew on these same funds to found the Institute of African Studies itself, directing both through their formative years.

Cowan's departure in 1971, alongside Immanuel Wallerstein's exit from the sociology faculty that same year, combined with the loss of Ford Foundation and federal funding, marked a significant downturn. A 1972 New York Times article features the newly appointed director, Professor Hollis Lynch, presiding over an institute under serious financial pressure, negotiating with the Columbia administration for its survival. The negotiations were lengthy. African Studies at Columbia survived.

The fall of 1989 brings a new beginning. The Institute launches two publications: Africa on Campus, its official newsletter, and Magana, a monthly bulletin of African events in the New York area, edited by anthropology doctoral student Janet Roitman and International Affairs master's student Ruth Marshall. These newsletters are the primary archive for this period. 

Through their pages we see the Institute rebuilding administratively and intellectually.

By 1989, the Institute was under the direction of George Clement Bond, professor of anthropology, who would spend four decades at Columbia. Bond earned his PhD at the London School of Economics, training under Lucy Mair, Raymond Firth, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, before moving from structural functionalism toward Gramsci and the analysis of cultural mechanisms of power. As Mamadou Diouf observed, at a moment when anthropology was understood as a colonizing intervention, Bond chose not to abandon the discipline but to reframe it from within. 

Through decades of fieldwork in Zambia's Uyombe region, he developed a sustained argument about the making of African elites: that colonized peoples assert their own identity by taking control of their historical narratives, and that authority and legitimacy are conjoined through the fabrication, inscription, and recitation of history. "I have sought," he wrote, "to represent the voices of Africans as they contributed to the making of their own history." For Bond, education was not incidental to this project but its very condition — the means by which colonized peoples could claim the authority to narrate their own past and determine their own future.

His grandfather, enslaved and later freed, attended Oberlin. His father, J. Max Bond, served in the State Department and helped found the University of Liberia. His uncle, Horace Mann Bond, authored landmark studies in Black American education. His cousin was the civil rights activist Julian Bond. He did not separate this lineage from his academic work. It was under this directorship, and with this conviction, that the Institute entered the 1990s.

Bond hired Dr. Eve Sandberg, trained in political science at Yale, as assistant director. Sandberg occupied the role as a scholar administrator: she taught courses, mentored students, organized programming, and maintained her own research agenda, supported by administrative assistant Marlyse Rand and a team of student workers.

The assistant director role remains, through successive appointments, in the hands of scholars with active research agendas. When Sandberg left for Oberlin in 1993, she was succeeded by Dr. Ron Kassimir, trained in political science at the University of Chicago. Kassimir later moved to the SSRC, and the position passed to Dr. Nigel Gibson, a Columbia PhD supervised by Edward Said and a leading figure in Fanon scholarship. Each brought not only administrative capacity but intellectual orientation. Gibson co-taught classes with Bond and later co-edited Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories: Contemporary Africa in Focus (2002).

This pattern reflects something important about the field's disciplinary landscape during these decades. Political scientists played a central role in African Studies at Columbia from the beginning. Cowan had been a political scientist. Lynch's concern over losing him was not merely administrative but intellectual. When the record resumes in the early 1990s, it is again political scientists who anchor the rebuilding: Claude Ake, a Columbia PhD in political science who had taught at the university from 1969 to 1971, returning as visiting professor teaching political economy; Dr. Anthony Marx arriving, specializing in internal opposition movements in South Africa. Dr. Achille Mbembe joined the History faculty as assistant professor from 1988 to 1991, arriving as postcolonial theory was beginning to reshape the field. He was succeeded by Dr. Mohamed Mbodj in 1992. 

In 1993, the Institute is designated a National Resource Center under Title VI funding — securing its institutional footing at the same moment that two new initiatives reshape the intellectual landscape around it. Columbia recruits Dr. Manning Marable to establish the Institute for Research in African-American Studies; Barnard appoints Dr. Kandioura Dramé to lead a newly formed Pan-African Studies Program.

The mid-1990s bring further changes: the tenure of Anne McClintock and the publication of Imperial Leather (1995), a subtle movement away from area studies and an opening toward gender, race, and postcolonial theory visible in both the hires and the pages of Africa on Campus. Notable speakers across these years include Thabo Mbeki, Wangari Maathai, Abena Busia, Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani, and Kwame Appiah — figures who themselves embody the reach of the field beyond any single institutional or disciplinary location.

In a 1994 interview in Africa on Campus, Marable is clear that African Studies and African-American Studies are distinct projects. His Institute is rooted in the local community, focused on Black urban life and politics — a different intellectual formation from African Studies, which remains concentrated on the continent. The two fields are related but not continuous. If there is a figure who embodies the connection between them, Marable suggests, it is Bond — whose family history, fieldwork, and scholarship move between Africa and the diaspora without collapsing the distinction. What that connection means intellectually, and what it reveals about the world-historical ambitions that both fields carry, is the subject of the next installment.