Meeting Africa’s Challenge: The Story of the American Committee on Africa

Abstract

In the early 1950s when the American Committee on Africa was formed, American interest in and knowledge about Africa was something of a joke. There was a Tarzan mentality in the US about the continent. Few books about Africa were known even by the reading public. Gunther’s Inside Africa, when it came out in 1956, served as a reference book for years for those Americans who wanted to get a perspective on the continent. I remember listening to Chester Bowles, who served as under secretary of state briefly in the Kennedy administration, speak about his own attempt to find relevant material about Africa in a Connecticut town. He told about his visit to the town public library, where he culled through the card catalogue. To find books on the Congo he said he had to search under “B” for “Belgium.” In searching for material on Ghana (then the Gold Coast) or Nigeria, he had to look under “Great Britain.” He found books about Liberia and Ethiopia under “Miscellaneous.” Knowledge of Africa was minimal, and the continent was on the whole looked upon as an extension of Europe.