One of the problems encountered in doing many types of research on Africa is the absence of adequate bibliographical materials on maps. It is true that reliable maps at the desired scales do not exist for some features or areas of Africa. Often, however, the maps do exist but are so scattered through map files and journals and other publications that finding them is a research job in itself. Unlike the situation on books, periodicals, and journal articles, there are only a few references which deal with the nature and availability of African maps, and none of these cover all types of maps.

The range of subjects covered by maps, of course, is enormous--from natural features like the amount of rainfall or types of soils to cultural topics like population distribution, tribal areas, and agricultural products. The major purposes here will be to describe the common types of maps of Africa, to give some suggestions on their uses and availability, and to list a few references which give further information. The authors are making a survey of maps of Africa which is supported by the African Studies Center of U.C.L.A. and welcome this opportunity to call attention to the problems and scope of the project.

The United States Department of Commerce is the largest data collecting organization in the world. Its Bureau of the Census has the monumental job every ten years of conducting a population census; its Office of Business Economics has the important task of measuring the national income and computing the balance of international payments and is also nationally known for a family of publications including the scholarly monthly SURVEY OF CURRENT BUSINESS.

These data are intended primarily to provide statistical guidelines relative to the course of the domestic economy. However, a different kind of data collection activity is carried on regularly by the Department in the Bureau of International Programs and the Bureau of International Business Operations. These two bureaus have primary responsibility within the department for the promotion of United States foreign commerce and private international investments. Both are new organizational units created as of August 8, 1961 to replace the former Bureau of Foreign Commerce, and both are under the supervision of the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for International Affairs who is, in turn, responsible directly to the Secretary of Commerce. In announcing this reorganization in the department's international affairs' responsibilities, Secretary Hodges stated that the Commerce Department must “fulfill our role in formulating U.S. foreign economic policy especially as it affects the American business community. … We want to be in a position to advise both business and government on the imminent changes in world trade and investment resulting from regional economic integration, from the threat of the Sino Soviet Bloc, and from our own economic growth. We need better methods to evaluate and set upon developments abroad which have an impact on the U.S. foreign and domestic trade.”

Hopefully there has been enough contact between humanists and social scientists in recent years and enough attempt at creating a common concern with common problems so that the one no longer entirely distrusts the cold and myopic eye of science peering into the literary intricacies of folklore and the other no longer thinks of folklore as a kind of folk entertainment, “a floating segment of culture,” which is marginal to his main concerns. I cannot speak for the humanist, though I should imagine he has learned to put up with the sometimes heavy hand of the anthropologist or political scientist for the sake of the wealth of contextual crosscultural data he gets from him. But speaking for the anthropologist, I would be surprised if there are any of us left today who would not collect what oral narrative we could, exploiting to the fullest the potentialities of such data in arriving at explanations for the workings of society and culture. We recognize well enough that folklore functions within a social and cultural context whose cultural content and social integration it both reflects and determines; We should therefore find some agreement in regarding folklore as having efficacy in human affairs - as being an agent.

That folklore is an agent of particular vitality and potential in Africa is something that can hardly be denied by those who have been there. We have evidence for this in the many extensive collections of traditional verbal art from the different quarters of that continent, and most recently we have only to mention the Herskovits collection inDahomean Narrative. But folklore is not to be seen only as a manifestation of tribal tradition now on the wane. It must be seen as an aspect of African culture that willenjoy and suffer the greatest exploitation for the sake of the African future. This should surprise neither humanist nor social scientist for they both know well “how inviting, from its very nature the field of folklore is for those who wish to exalt national character and a national destiny.” (Herskovits, 1959: 219). We have watched it being used to these ends in countries as far removed as Ireland and Argentina, and now we see the same thing in Africa. We see, for example, how the concepts and the circumnambient mythologies of “African personality” and “negritude” depend in their expression upon authentic or reinterpreted African folklore. In the matter of migration legends alone one has only to read the work of one of the early African intellectuals to articulate these notions-Cheik Anta Diop's Nations Negres et Culture (1948)-to realize how crucial to the arguments of these cultural pan-Africanists are the migration legends of the various African peoples.

African studies in the USSR are at present concentrated in Moscow and Leningrad. The two centers have individual characteristics and, in the case of Africa, fairly defined fields of academic interests. Some introductory remarks on the disciplines concerned and on the general organization of higher studies in the Soviet Union will be relevant, before examining African studies in detail.

Regional studies have developed strongly inside the Soviet Union, first because the living material for such studies is within the confines of the state; secondly because a society which is consciously remolding its future to a specific pattern needs such basic knowledge, and thirdly because of a tradition in and love of the study of popular cultures going well back into the 19th century. Such studies cut across academic disciplines; field work is predominantly undertaken by “complex expeditions” which, to the core of ethnographers, add archaeologists, linguists, folk-lorists, art historians, and sociologists. Ethnography in the Russian sense is mainly concerned with material culture; folklore deals entirely with recording oral tradition and poetry. In a paper read at the VIth International Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnographers in Paris in June, 1960, Professor Tolstov, President of the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences, explained the Institute's academic conceptions as follows:-

When Carl Rosberg, the chairman of our program committee, asked me to deliver a presidential address at tonight's banquet, I agreed to do soonly if I couldnot find a better speaker for the occasion. Happily for you, I found him. Moreover, if you'll forgive a commercial, you can read all my potential presidential addresses anyway — in my bookAfrica in World Politics which Harper's is publishing next month. So you can have the best of both worlds.

Governor Williams has shown in many ways that he is a good friend of our association. In introducing him to you, therefore, I want to take a few minutes to pay him a special tribute by giving you my assessment of his achievements during the nearly two years he has been in charge of African affairs.

When President-elect Kennedy began to select his advisers late in 1960, many of us were surprised to find him putting the cart before the horse. That is to say, he appointed the Governor to be Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, even before he designated Dean Rusk as Secretary of State. The Williams appointment suggested to me, however, that the President considered African problems second to none in importance. He chose a man of stature, already baptized in the fire of Michigan politics on political, racial and social issues — a man with direct access to the President and a seasoned politician and administrator who is more than a match for the Assistant Secretaries for Europe and other areas in the State Department. At this point, I hasten to add that my remarks have not been cleared either by the State Department, or by the Fellows of the African Studies Association!

The city of Salem, Massachusetts, was a major port for American commerce to Africa for much of the nineteenth century. Even in the latter years of the century, when trade had moved to larger centers, the Salem men still played an important role in some African areas.

Due to the efforts of the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute, many of the papers relating to this American contact with Africa have been preserved. The collections include logbooks of vessels, merchants' account books, and letters to and from agents and captains.

The following pages briefly describe the materials relating to the history of Africa in the archives of the two Salem institutions. The list includes only those items of historical interest. (There are many logs of voyages to Africa of only nautical value.) It attempts to be complete, but no claim is made to having found every document of interest to the historian. Part of the contents of the archives remain uncatalogued and materials relating to Africa are occasionally uncovered under unlikely headings. Research for new sources is being continued.

It is a high honor to be with the distinguished Africanists who form the African Studies Association.

Five years ago, you had the vision to recognize that what most people then thought was esoteric learning about a dark continent was, in fact, the essential understanding which would permit the people of America to live fruitfully with one of the most dynamic movements in world history.

This unique position in the intellectual world gives you not only an unusual opportunity to influence the events of your time, but a heavy responsibility to make certain that the fruit of your labors is of the very highest quality. Though I am but a neophyte in the field, I know many of you well enough to appreciate your recognition of and devotion to this awesome trust.

The variety and volume of Africa-related record, archival and manuscript materials in the United States today are only partially known. However, in view of the extensive American commercial, missionary, philanthropic, scientific, governmental and other contacts with the African continent over the past three centuries or more, as well as the activities of manuscript collectors, the total is probably quite considerable.

Illustrative of what is already known to exist are the following descriptive entries adapted from a recently published general guide to the archival and manuscript holdings of American depositories: (1) papers of Zachary Macaulay--philanthropist, abolitionist, editor, and early Governor of Sierra Leone -- and his family, 1793-1888, 1014 pieces (in the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California); (2) archives of the American Colonization Society, including materials on Liberia, 1816-19 08, 626 vols., 32 boxes, and 4 bundles (in the Library of Congress); (3) papers of Edmund Roberts, merchant, diplomatic agent in the Far East and Africa, and negotiator of the 1833 commercial treaty between the United States and Zanzibar, 1805-36, 10 vols, and 5 boxes (in the Library of Congress); (4) papers of Richard Palmer Waters during his ante-bellum term as U. S. Consul in Zanzibar (in the Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts); (5) papers of Henry S. Sanford, Minister to Belgium, associate of Leopold II in connection with his Congo operations, and member of the American delegation to the 1884-85 Berlin African Congress, 1838-91, c. 10,000 pieces (in the Sanford Memorial Library, Sanford, Florida); (6) papers of John A. Kasson, politician, diplomat, and head of the American delegation to the Berlin Congress, 1877-1910, c. 1 200 items (at the Iowa State Department of History and Archives, Des Moines, Iowa); and (7) records of the foreign missionary activities of the Congregational churches (chiefly) in Angola, 1880-date, French Equatorial Africa, 1842-70, Liberia, 1834-42, South Africa, 1835-date, and Southern Rhodesia, 1893-date (among the materials deposited by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at the Houghton Library, Harvard University).

Traditional African art for the most part was more closely integrated with other aspects of life than those which might be described as purely esthetic. Art for art's sake — as agoverning esthetic concept—seems not to have existed in Africa. Indeed, the more closely an art form is related to a major non-esthetic aspect of culture such as religion, the more distant it is from such separatist philosophical concepts.

In fact traditional Africati sculpture might best be described as based on a concept of art-for-life's sake. It was, in most cases, closely allied to those cultural mechanisms dedicated to the maintenance of order and well being. In short, sculpture was oriented to those social values upon which depended the sense of individual and tribal security.

These values were often formalized in exceedingly practical and commonsense terms, as is demonstrated in this Bambara prayer addressed to the ancestors:

I sacrifice this hen to you in the name of my children and myself. Protect us from all evil. Give us rain at the time the rains begin; give us a good harvest, a happy old age, women, children and the health to cultivate our fields. Do not be angry with us. We love you, we honor you. Be happy during your sojourn in Lehara, the realm of the invisible. (Kjersmeier 1935: 15).

The opening session was devoted to a discussion of the UNESCO Conference on the Development of Higher Education in Africa held in Tananarive, September 3-12, 1962, and its implications for the United States. Speakers on the panel were Dr. de Kiewiet; Karl Bigelow, Teachers College of Colum-gia University; Robert Van Duyn, Agency for International Development; and Kenneth Snyder, Bureau of International Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Dr. de Kiewiet, introducing the panel, paid a tribute to Dr. Ras Johnson of AID, a member of the official delegation, who lost his life while returning to the United States.

Dr. de Kiewiet remarked that, having assumed official delegations went out with highly specific instructions, he had made the reassuring discovery this was not the case. The delegation had largely determined for itself what the issues were and had developed responses to them; this flexibility had been important in establishing a successful relationship between the conference as a whole and the public and private sectors of American higher education.

Some of the most accessible sources for African maps are the new atlases which have been published since World War II. If we interpret the term “atlas” loosely so as to include any assemblage of maps which can be placed on a book shelf, the range of subject materials covered is surprisingly large -- from agriculture to zoogeography. But despite the wealth of data which is presented in convenient map form, it is difficult to obtain information about atlases and their contents. The purpose of this article is to provide a guide to the kinds of information which is available, and a list of atlases and other publications with African maps which have appeared since 1945.

The analysis is based mainly upon atlases examined at the Map Division in the Library of Congress, at the American Geographical Society in New York, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. A few additional atlases were obtained through inter-library loan. Mrs. Clara Egli LeGear, of the Map Division, Library of Congress, provided especially helpful bibliographic aid at the early stages of the survey. This article is a part of a research project supported by the African Studies Center at U. C. L. A. More extension listings of African maps and atlases are in preparation; the authors would therefore welcome comments upon errors or omissions which may be noted in the article.

It is a time-worn cliché that music is an important constituent element of African culture closely associated and integrated with the daily living of the African—a cliché that would not merit repetition here were it not for the fact that this statement has rarely been applied to political activities in African societies. Ethnographers and ethnomusicologists have reported the music and the music making of various tribes in relation to religion, the “rites de passage,” agriculture, work, and social life, but the use of music as an agent of political expression has received scant attention.

In a pioneer study of African music von Hornbostel wrote: “In the life of so-called primitive man, and especially of the African Negroes, music and dance have quite different and incomparably greater significance than with us. … Music is neither reproduction (of a ‘piece of music’ as an existing object) nor production (of a new object), it is the life of a living spirit working within those who dance and sing” (Hornbostel 1928: 32). The spirit animating all Africans today is one of independence from colonialism, freedom, and nationalism. In a paper pregnant with ideas and suggestions for new approaches in the study of African music, William Bascom has written: “It is my belief that we would better understand change in political beliefs if we knew more about the way in which music, the dance, or any other forms of traditional behavior develop, and of how they are modified by the outside influences with which they are brought in contact.” (Bascom 1959: 7) It is the purpose of this paper to examine and assess the function and role of African music in contemporary political movements with special attention to the repertory of songs.

I am delighted with the manner in which these three papers have dealt with the social and political relevance of sculpture, folklore, and music. This is no startlingly new discovery. It has been recognized before by those interested in the arts, but it has been largely ignored by those who specialize in social and political studies. The contributors to this panel are to be congratulated for their documentation of this function of the arts, and our chairman deserves special recognition for this attempt to bring it to the attention of those who so often overlook it.

The panelists have stressed the lessons to be learned by the social scientists, but I wonder if there is not one for the humanists as well. The fact that artists are often rebels against thestatus quo is a truism in our society, but the significance of the arts as a medium of social and political action, and of change, is often ignored although similar examples can be found in Africa today as well as in the history of other societies.

Where does this leave our conventional definitions of art as aesthetic expression, as creativity, as “art for art's sake,” as concern with form for its own sake, or as elaboration beyond the point of utility? All these, I fear, underevaluate the socio-political utility of art which these papers have demonstrated in their different fields.

(The following article on the forthcoming First International Congress of Africanists is reprinted from theBulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, No. 2, 1962, pp. 88-9. Previous accounts of planning for the Congress, by Conrad Reining and William O. Jones, may be found in this Bulletin, October I960 and December 1961.)

African Studies until very recent times were developed as a part of Oriental Studies. To some extent this is explained by the fact that the northern, most developed areas of Africa are populated by Arabic-speaking peoples, and there are not a few reasons for regarding them in historical, cultural, and political aspects as part of the general Arab world. Northern Africa was usually included in the rather vague concept of “the Orient,” and then, this time without any reason for it, the whole continent began to be included in “the Orient.”

But the main reason for including African Studies in Oriental Studies is that the study of the countries of Asia and Africa was pursued primarily by the scientists of the colonial powers, and inasmuch as their work fundamentally served the aims of ruling enslaved countries in the interests of imperialist monopolies, both the great continents were regarded as one single colonial complex.

The first of a series of meetings at which material concerning the current status of social research in Africa was considered, was opened by the chairman, the editor of the African Studies Association's forthcoming volume on this topic. At this plenary session John Fage, of the University of London, spoke on recent developments and trends in African history, Arthur Schiller of Columbia University on law, and Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University on linguistics.

Taking historical studies on Africa from their beginning, Dr. Fage indicated that there had been a continuous output of historical material relating to Africa from the time of Herodotus up to the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the writing of African history ceased to be respectable. One reason for this was a change in the character of historical research, with great emphasis being placed on written sources. By comparison with the western world, Africa was deficient in written history and records, and the attitude that Africa therefore had no history came to prevail. This attitude was not unconnected with the supremacy of Europe, with the feeling that Europe would have to civilize Africa, and it was considered that the study of Africa was the job of the ethnographer rather than the historian. Secondly, there emerged a new branch of historical enquiry, that of colonial history in Africa, with its emphasis on European rather than African activities. The result was that academic historians had no contact with Africa. In fact, however, historical materials on Africa did exist, and in ignoring them the historian had simply left the field to anthropologists, or to amateurs. Anthropologists established a close association with Africa but were little concerned with the past and suspicious of “conjectural history.” Their concentration on simple societies and the relative lack of attention given to political structures kept the social anthropologists from developing too close an interest in African history.