The conference was held at one of Japan's top centres for Asian and African studies, the Institute for the Study of the Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.  This institute takes pride in its research publications in the fields of linguistics and cultural anthropology, which have made it world-famous. Professor Shun'ya Hino of the ILCAA presented the conference with a detailed study and list of the ILCAA's many accomplishments in African studies.

This conference was a follow up to the previous year's exploratory workshop at the University of California, Los Angeles.  In Tokyo African scholars were represented for the first time, and the participants got down to more specifics about what possibilities existed for cooperation.

    Keynote addresses were given by two of the world's top experts on African studies, Dr. Merrick Posnansky of UCLA and his old friend from their days at Makerere University together, Dr. Masao Yoshida of Chubu University.

    Dr. Posnansky was recently the subject of a special issue of The African Archaeological Review, in which is former students contributed papers in his honour.  Dr. Yoshida was until recently a researcher at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE), a parastatal with strong ties to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). These two distinguished scholars have together inspired the nascent institutional cooperation between Japanese and American Africanists.

    In their keynote addresses they reviewed the progress that their project has made so far, and summed up the opportunities for cooperation in the future.  Dr. Posnansky argued that the strengths of Japanese African studies lay in the long periods of field work made possible by the employment of many scholars in research institutions, the interdisciplinary possibilities opened up by the emphasis on research teams, and the incorporation of the natural sciences and economics into African studies.  This has led to Japanese excellence in such fields as agronomy and economic anthropology.

    American African studies, on the other hand, benefited from the close ties between research and postgraduate education, which guaranteed a self-renewing supply of highly qualified Africanists, not only for future university positions but for the government and the private sector as well.

    The sheer number of Africanists and their dispersal around the US university system also contrasts with Japan, where African studies is concentrated in a few centres, and helps ensure that accurate information about Africa reaches a wider public in the US.

    Dr. Yoshida agreed that the strengths of Japanese and American African studies were largely complementary.  Americans have done much to study African history and make it available to a wider public audience.  Japanese on the other hand have made great strides in understanding environmental issues, as well as in documenting traditional technology which could be used to help create sustainable development in Africa.

    Unfortunately the failure of attempts to transfer technology to Africa contrast with the success Japan had in combining traditional technical know-how with modern methods introduced from the West.  This is an area where comparative historical studies could be useful for the future of Africa.

    There were three workshops.   The first, which this reporter attended, concerned strengthening research and education in African history.  This correspondent had no opportunity to visit the other sessions, so information about them is gathered from the plenary session held on the final day.

Concluding part of John Edward Philips's report on the meeting in Tokyo of top Africanist scholars

    Professor Isaria Kimambo of the University of Dar es Salaam, one of the most important figures in the development of African history as a modern discipline, gave a penetrating talk on the challenge and opportunity of African history.  He set forth three propositions: (1) that Africanist historians have a duty to combat the prevalent ignorance about their subject, (2) that institution building and organised exchanges of information are essential to this undertaking, and (3) that scholars must come to grips with changing interpretations, especially the new, post-modern interpretations.

    Dr. Kimambo identified three problems facing African history today.  The first is the declining support for African studies in the West.  This has affected history more than the "relevant" subjects of Anthropology and Political Science.  The second problem is a result of the collapse of African economies and especially African publishing, which make it harder for historical information to become available once it had been recovered.  The third problem is the difficulty of communication between Africa and Africanists in the outside world.

    Dr. Kimambo noted that since Japanese scholars were just beginning to study African history they could learn much from the false starts and mistakes of their predecessors in other countries.  They must also be aware of the biases and preconceptions of their audiences: a Japanese public which has been fed a media diet of wild animals and primitive humans, and an Africanist community which began African studies with primatology and later moved to study hunter gatherer societies for comparison.  Popular stereotypes of Africa have thus been reinforced by some of the scholarly work done in Japan.

  Professor David P. B. Massamba, also of the University of Dar es Salaam and currently a visiting scholar at the ILCAA, gave a paper on the importance of language in education and research.  This paper demonstrated with facts and logic the indispensability of languages for foreign studies in general and African history in particular.  If anything this paper did not go far enough in its stressing the importance of linguistic knowledge for historical researchers.  Some of its substantiating data was from early Arabic geographies which require knowledge not only of the languages involved but of Arabic script to be properly understood.

    There were too many other important papers presented in this session to explain them all in detail.  Professor Senteze Kajubi, former Vice-Chancellor of Makerere University, discussed educational development in East Africa, with special reference to Uganda.  The familiar problems of tradition and modernisation were dealt with, and the suggestion was made by several commentators that Japan's experience building a modern educational system should be looked into for relevant lessons.

    Dr. Gwendolyn Mikell of Georgetown University gave a paper comparing and contrasting the development of feminism in Africa and in the United States.  Due to differences in culture, there were significant differences in the forms the women's movement took in Africa and the United States.  Here again the lessons of Japan, [a] non-Western but developed country where the women's movement has developed very differently than that of western countries, would have been important for comparative purposes.

    Dr. George Brooks of Indiana University summarised the thesis of his new book Landlords and Strangers, in which he developed a periodisation of West African history based on climate change, and showed how the rise and fall of kingdoms, culture areas and the slave trade correlated with the climatic changes affecting West Africa.

    Professor Katsuhiko Kitagawa of Shikoku Gakuin University reported on his success in reconstructing African economic history by means of Japanese consular reports.  These consular reports contain a wealth of information about African economies, but have been largely neglected by scholars who are not well-versed in the Japanese language.

    Finally, Yoko Nagahara gave a report on the approval of text books in independent Namibia. History textbook approval in Japan has been especially controversial, and the question of how to deal with World War II has sparked outrage among Japan's neighbors and lawsuits from historian Saburo Ienaga.  This is an area where Japan could learn much from Namibia and its liberal policy of national reconciliation.

    The second session was chaired by Dr. Jun Mori of Osaka University of Arts.   Various papers at this session focused on the traditional arts and crafts which are rapidly disappearing and the necessity of documenting them and disseminating information about them to [a] wider public.  Various problems of documenting traditional production techniques were also considered, as were possibilities for improving traditional technology to make it competitive in today's world economy.  It was also suggested that African methods of reusing discarded materials could be important to recycling in the developed world.

    The session on environmental preservation and the local society was one where Japanese expertise showed itself best.  Research in ethnobotany and traditional land use patterns attracted much attention.  Again the theme of integrating old and new knowledge emerged, as several participants spoke of the need to update traditional practices, which had worked to preserve the natural environment, with more efficient modern techniques, which were necessary now that population growth was so large.

    Professor Yuko Sugiyama of Hirosaki University presented a paper on the 'citememe' system of slash and burn cultivation as practiced among the Bemba of Zambia.  She looked not only at the ecology of the system itself, but at how changes were adopted by the society. Her paper thus challenged several traditional concepts of "tradition", "modernisation", and "change".  The mode of change adopted in a society must be considered part of its tradition and must be taken into account by those who wish to introduce change into a society.

    Much information was exchanged, and many contacts were made for the exchange of further information.  At the end of the final meeting a list of African e-mail addresses was distributed to all participants, in the hope that computers would make communication and information sharing between African scholars and their colleagues in the developed world easier.  All were enthusiastically agreed that further cooperation would be in the best interests of scholarship in Japan, Africa and the United States.  Another conference was being planned for Ghana.

    The importance of Japanese studies in Africa was also a theme of this conference that was not stressed at the previous workshop in UCLA, but which was raised by African scholars in Tokyo.  One African remarked that his Africanness had been challenged by Japanese culture, since people in Japan were also used to sitting and sleeping on mats on the floor.

    There was general agreement among the African participants that they had much to learn from the Japanese experience in development and that this project should involve not only a flow of information about Africa to Japan and the US but more importantly information about the US and Japan to Africa.  Databases concerning traditional knowledge must be made available to a wider audience in Africa as well, since the traditional knowledge being documented was often local in nature.

    It is unfortunate that the limited and highly specialised training of most scholars leaves many Japanese Africanists ill-equipped to offer a serious, detailed study of their own society.  It also leaves most Japanese Japanologists poor at foreign languages and ill-equipped to explain their society to foreigners.  The little experience they have teaching about Japan is usually either to Americans or to other Asians.  Their limited understanding of Africa precludes much ability to explain Japan to Africa.

    In light of this, and of the importance attached by this conference to foreign language study, a Japanese Africanist with experience and training in teaching Japanese as a foreign language should be included in the next conference, to provide a solid foundation for the establishment of Japanese studies in Africa.

    With the next stage in the development of African universities being the development of science and technology, there is a great role for the Japan Association for African Studies to play.  Having the scientific community already within the Association should make it easier for the Japanese Africanists to participate in the expansion of scientific education in African universities.