Interaction

Winter 2008

On the Ground in Africa

“All the students want to do field work” in Africa, said Jeremy Weinstein, director of the Center for African Studies. “We could send 50 a year.”

L.A. Cicero

"Stanford teams could suggest innovative solutions to South Africa's infrastructural problems," Norman Naimark said.

The most common way of getting there is to win a Haas African Service or John Gardner fellowship or to get funding through an international organization. (In 1998, the Amy Biehl Fellowship, named for the Stanford graduate killed in South Africa in 1993, was established for community development in Cape Town. That fellowship later was rolled into the Haas grants.)

One of Weinstein’s students, Melina Platas, a human biology major, visited Uganda in 2005 with the AIDS Support Organization (TASO) and returned there to work at the Daily Monitor, a Kampala newspaper. David Abernethy’s former student Cammie Lee, ’07, an international relations major, is at the United Nations secretary-general’s office now on a John Gardner Fellowship. 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.

Another of Abernethy’s former students, Maggie Montgomery, ’01, MS ’02, now at Yale, is finishing up doctoral field research in Tanzania on the relationship between water, sanitation and trachoma in rural villages.

Montgomery confesses to have landed in African studies by chance, having found Swahili more fun than Italian.

“I loved the language and the culture,” she wrote in an e-mail from Tanzania, “and went abroad my junior year with School for International Training to Tanzania on an ecology program. I earned transfer credits through Stanford. Then, after my junior year, I earned an Undergraduate Research Grant through Stanford to conduct work on community conservation of a rainforest in Tanzania for my senior honors thesis. I returned a third time with a Fulbright grant after finishing my MS in engineering at Stanford.”

Until recently, if students wanted to spend a full academic year in Africa, they had to figure it out on their own. But starting in a couple of years, they may have another option. The Bing Overseas Studies Program hopes to open a center in Cape Town, South Africa. Fundraising is under way.

Three-week (2-credit) and quarter-long seminars in Africa have existed for some time and are completely oversubscribed, said Norman Naimark, the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program. This spring, for example, Timothy Stanton, currently at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities and formerly the director of the Haas Center for Public Service, is teaching “Community Development and Public Health in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” A three-week seminar in fall, taught by Joel Samoff, a consulting professor of African studies, was 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 project takes them.

And beyond Bing, the Center for African Studies helps students do internships or research in a range of other countries, including Sierra Leone, Ghana, Madagascar, Kenya, Zanzibar and Senegal.

Clearly there is a market for a longer-term overseas experience in Africa. The program’s associate director, Kim Rapp, said students come into her office all the time, asking how they can go there.

“We have a very strong African studies program now, a great program,” said Naimark. “So I talked to African studies, and we decided to propose a program. We decided on Cape Town because there’s so much interest at Stanford in all sorts of areas related to South Africa, it’s relatively safe and it promises long-term stability.”

Also, of course, they speak English in South Africa, though not exclusively. (Stanford’s English-speaking centers in Oxford and Australia are enrolled to capacity.) And there is a tradition of collaboration with the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape. Archaeologist Lynn Meskell works closely with colleagues there; the Stanford–South Africa Biomedical Informatics Program sends people back and forth, as does the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

But South Africa was not the only candidate for the new center, and there were members of the faculty who urged alternative sites, particularly given the success of the Tanzania seminars. Maybe sometime in the future, said Richard Roberts, a historian studying West Africa.

Tom Seligman, director of the Cantor Arts Center, also wished for a West African site, particularly in Ghana.

“West Africa has always been the other Africa, the real Africa, the victim Africa,” he said, “with a dynamic unlike anything in North, South or East Africa. I discovered it as a Peace Corps volunteer 30 years ago. But it’s not a victim; it’s an incredibly rich place.” And for that reason, among others, Stanford students will surely continue going there, just not on the yearlong overseas program for now.

The most important features of the Cape Town program, Naimark stressed, will be that the center will have a strong service-learning component and will attract students and faculty members from across the university, from literature to engineering, from medicine to sociology.

“There is no shortage of faculty interest from almost all the schools of the university,” he said. “The possibilities are really amazing.”

Depending on the personnel, he envisions projects and courses on race (the program has discussed a venture with the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity), healthcare, the environment and infrastructure.

“How could people innovate? Build new cities?” he asked. “Stanford teams could suggest innovative solutions to South Africa’s infrastructural problems. They could help remake the townships. Education, medical delivery and economic development all need attention. Our students are very tuned into these questions. So there are unending things they could learn there.”