Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editor's Introduction Peter Mark, Editor In the autumn of 2010, when Marty Klein wrote to offer me the editorship of Mande Studies, he urged me to view this as a three-year commitment. The three years have stretched to eight, encompassing ten issues of the journal. Ten is a nice, round number; these volumes now fill a substantial length of one bookshelf in my office. Editing has become increasingly comfortable. But with comfort comes the danger of complacency, along with a new challenge . . . preparing the editorial succession. With this issue, Rosa De Jorio joins me as Associate Editor. Next year, as she takes on a greater role in the process, she will be Co-Editor.1 And then, I shall pass the torch to a new generation. Ten issues; preparing for a new Editor; and, on a personal level, my retirement this summer from fulltime teaching; these factors lend themselves to introspection and to reflection on a career that spans 45 years. Why not, I thought, bring together the editing and the reflecting, by devoting this anniversary issue to memoirs of first fieldwork experiences? Our generation was, though we did not fully recognize the fact, a generation of optimism. We shared that spirit with our African hosts, as Mary Jo Arnoldi eloquently observes in her essay. Our teachers were among the founders of modern African Studies, or they had themselves studied with the seminal figures, notably with Jan Vansina and Yves Person. Fifty years later, however, it now feels that we (the authors of this volume, formerly students and professors) are all of the same generation. Many of us, although influenced both by the independence of the former African colonies and by the founding of the Peace Corps, were too young to serve in the initial cohort of volunteers. However, we shared the same spirit of optimism, a conviction that we could help to create a better world, a spirit so foreign to the cynicism and greed that pervade public life today. Alma Gottlieb addresses a related issue: the degree of naiveté that we also brought to our first encounters with Africa. Perhaps not all of us were unprepared for our fieldwork, but certainly she speaks for me. On the other hand, the more cosmopolitan our hosts, the less obvious were the inevitable cultural misinterpretations and miscommunication. Nevertheless, it is obvious that we—that I—at times committed terrible 'faux pas,' or made embarrassing [End Page 3] mistakes. We were there to learn. And if we cringe at some of the things we did then, perhaps this shows that we eventually did acquire greater intercultural sensitivity. September 1972: my first graduate seminar in African history, taught by a young Assistant Professor, David Robinson; the first reading he assigns is an article, "Recherches sur un mode de production africain," written by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch.2 Already an important figure in the field, the author immediately became an icon to this first-year grad student. How could I have guessed that, over the ensuing half century, Catherine would become my host at Université Paris-VII; a colleague; and a friend? One of the special qualities of African Studies is the fact that so many of us have developed lifelong friendships. Indeed, this issue of Mande Studies seems like a gathering of old friends. It is a wonderful privilege to include here, all three of these scholars who were so important to me as teachers and mentors. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Klein, and Robinson experienced North and West Africa during the last years of colonial rule or just as independence was becoming a reality. They arrived—in graduate school, in Africa—as the field of modern African Studies was being born. They were part of that period of a vanished optimism, and even idealism. We surely need a dose of that spirit, today. By the mid-1960s, under the inspiration of Yves Person and Jan Vansina, African historical studies were firmly influenced by a growing appreciation of oral tradition as historical source. Both Klein and Robinson, as they recount in their essays, incorporated oral interviews with their archival research; they also encouraged—or even required—their grad students to work in the field. Learning...