Doing African Studies
Stanford in Cape Town
"All the students want to do field work" in Africa, said political scientist Jeremy Weinstein, former director of the Center for African Studies. "We could send 50 a year."
Starting in January 2010, students who want to study in Africa will have a new option when the Bing Overseas Studies Program opens a center in Cape Town. The center will be directed by Timothy Stanton, former director of the Haas Center for Public Service and a frequent instructor of short-term Stanford programs in South Africa.
"Stanford teams could suggest innovative solutions
to South Africa's infrastructural problems," Norman Naimark said.
Photo: L.A. Cicero
There's still no physical home for the program, and the curriculum is a work in progress. But Norman Naimark, the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program, is optimistic.
"We've received a million-dollar grant from the President's Fund and have secured funding for five years of operation," he said in late October. "And we are hopeful that additional funding will ensure our long-term presence in southern Africa.
"Just this week we had a meeting of faculty interested in the Cape Town program, and they came from almost every school of the university, from nearly every discipline. The meeting brought up a number of interesting suggestions for integrating the teaching and research missions of the university in that critical part of the world. I predict we will have no shortage of faculty and students who want to go."
Naimark said Cape Town was chosen because of the level of interest in South Africa in general, and because of its relative safety and stability. Also, English is spoken there, though not exclusively. And Stanford has a tradition, across several departments, of collaboration with the universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape.
Three-week and quarter-long seminars have been taught in Africa for some time and are oversubscribed. Stanton has taught Community Development and Public Health in Post-Apartheid South Africa. A three-week seminar in fall by Joel Samoff, a consulting professor of African studies, is called A Decade of Majority Rule: Transformation Struggles in South Africa. Students spend time in the classroom and on site, in clinics, schools or wherever the community-service projects take them.
Another way for Stanford students to go to Africa is to win a Haas or John Gardner fellowship or to get funding through an international organization. African Service Fellowship recipients over the past three years have included majors in archaeology, interdisciplinary studies in humanities, urban studies, history, and management science and engineering.
One of Weinstein's students, Melina Platas, a human biology major, visited Uganda in 2005 with the AIDS Support Organization and returned there to work at the Daily Monitor, a Kampala newspaper. One of political scientist David Abernethy's students, Maggie Montgomery, ended up in a Yale doctoral program studying the relationship between water, sanitation and trachoma in rural villages in Tanzania. Human biology students have worked on malaria mitigation projects in Arusha, Tanzania. Stanford law students recently spent seven weeks in Namibia working on human rights projects with Namibian colleagues.
The Center for African Studies also has helped students do internships or research in a range of other countries including Sierra Leone, Ghana, Madagascar, Kenya, Zanzibar and Senegal.
"Looking ahead," the center's director, Richard Roberts, said, "we'll continue to offer many new opportunities and resources for students at all levels to deepen their knowledge about Africa in Africa."
