Part Two:
The First Faculty, Associates, Visitors, and Students

The original interest group of faculty that approached Dean MacDonald included no full time Africanists, so one of the director’s first tasks was to build a staff and faculty of specialists. Dr. Adelaide Cromwell Hill, a sociologist who had worked with Heinz Wieschof at the University of Pennsylvania, joined as Program Administrator and Research Associate. Dan McCall, an anthropologist from Columbia then doing research in Liberia, was the first of the new faculty hired and he took an active role in building the program. Economist Mark Karp was the next hire, reflecting the strong policy and social science emphasis of the early years. In quick succession Brown recruited two anthropologists: Elizabeth Colson came from Goucher College and George Horner brought the first research interest in Francophone Africa. By the time of its 1958 report to the newly formed African Studies Association in 1958, the African Research and Studies Program at Boston University listed the following faculty:

William O. Brown (Sociology)
Elizabeth Colson (Anthropology)
Adelaide C. Hill (Sociology)
George R. Horner (Anthropology)
Daniel F. McCall (Anthropology)
Mark Karp (Economics)
Carl G. Rosberg (Political Science)
George Lewis (Geography)
William Norton (History)
William Newman (Political Science)

Norman Bennett, historian of East Africa, finished his degree and joined the faculty in 1961. Others who joined the faculty in the late 1950s and early 1960s were Jeffrey Butler, Ruth Schachter (Morgenthau), Creighton Gabel, Phillip Gulliver, and Edouard Bustin. Alphonse Castagno (Political Science) became the Center’s second director in 1966, after William O. Brown’s death, until his own death in 1974. Economist John Harris (hired from M.I.T.) served as Director from 1975 through 1985, followed by anthropologist Allan Hoben (1986-92), historian James McCann (1992-2005) and James Pritchett (2005-present).

Norman Bennett	John Harris	Allan Hoben
Creighton Gabel	Edouard Bustin	Alphonse Castagno

In U. S. African studies programs in the late 1950s and early 1960s few faculty from Africa participated in African studies activities. This was also true of the ASC, though visitors with bright futures regularly called in, attracted by Boston and the Program’s early reputation for its Africa focus. These visitors and scholars included young Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, and Abdoulaye Wade. In the early 1960s a young Edwardo Mondlane came to Boston and the African Studies Program to write his dissertation (he was a then a Ph.D. student at Northwestern) and met his wife, Janet, who was then a student at B.U. In 1958-59 Dr. S. Fawzi, Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Khartoum, spent a year as visiting lecturer, making him perhaps the Program’s first African faculty member. Prof. Wande Abimbola is a worthy successor to these scholar/leaders. Many other teachers, scholars, visitors, and students from Africa followed as have a series of important institutional linkages (including Study Abroad in Niger) have followed in the past two decades.