Suchergebnisse

May 1983 saw two diametrically opposed efforts to change some fundamental features of contemporary South Africa. On May 3, Prime Minister Botha's new Constitutional Bill was introduced in the House of Assembly providing for the first time for the inclusion of Coloured and Indians in the previously all white national legislature. Minor as the role of these two minorities will be should the new structure be adopted, the provisions signaled two white objectives: to split the black front, such as it is, and to underline the permanent exclusion of the majority Africans from any share in making national decisions.On May 20, what might be considered the response to that formal exclusion came with the use for the first time by the seventy-year-old African National Congress of a new and deadly tactic when it exploded a car bomb outside airforce headquarters in Pretoria, killing eighteen people.

For decades, American scholars have been studying one aspect or another of the African experience. From 1927 on, Professor Melville J. Herskovits used his field research and scholarly insights to fashion courses on Africa offered as part of the regular curriculum at Northwestern University. Northwestern and Indiana graduate students, and possibly others, were already completing distinguished Ph.D. dissertations in the late 1930s that were based on field research in Africa or other types of original data. What we generally mean by African studies developed at a later stage, when the scholarly interaction of specialists on Africa drawn from a number of disciplines is formalized through a structure established by their institution.

For generations, Blacks in southern Africa have tried one expedient after another to promote change in the highly discriminatory conditions under which they live. In choosing to concentrate in this lecture on certain specific approaches made in recent years by African and American Blacks to achieve this purpose, there is no intention of underrating these long and persistent attempts made in earlier periods and also by many others. Insofar as this paper is infused with a basic assumption, however, it is that Blacks must unite their efforts within and across national and continental boundaries and use the widest range of pressures if there is to be a chance of creating basic change in colonial and minority-ruled southern Africa.