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Winter 2015/Volume 25, Number 2 NEWS AND EVENTS Program of African Studies NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PAS, consortium partner awarded four-year, $2 million grant By Hilary Hurd Anyaso PAS and its consortium partner, the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have been awarded US Department of Education Title VI funding for both the National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) programs. The total amount awarded for 2014–15, the first year of the four-year grant, is $518,000. The total commit- ment is expected to amount to more than $2 million through 2018. With Title VI funding, PAS’s long-standing involvement with the African continent will extend to local engagement that makes the program’s faculty and student expertise, as well as rich library resources on Africa, available to a variety of communities. The NRC grant will fund collaborative activities between Northwestern and the University of Illinois that enhance African studies on both campuses and provide new opportunities for students and faculty, including annual joint symposia, new course and concentration offerings, and strengthened instruction in African languages. PAS director Will Reno and Merle Bowman, director of the Center for African Highlights for Northwestern include development of a new Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign interdisciplinary graduate certificate in African security studies; an intensive summer workshop on Arabic manuscripts from Africa; “Title VI support for research and education is the backbone and new practicum sites in Africa for the Access to Health Project, of international studies and foreign language training in this an initiative in which students country,” said Will Reno, professor of political science and PAS and faculty from the School director. “This grant is crucial for PAS’s mission to train students Inside of Law, Center for Global and aid researchers to engage and work with counterparts in foreign Health, and Kellogg School countries. This grant will expand our program’s reach in a compre- hensive range of research, teaching, and outreach activities.” In memoriam: of Management work with a The consortium will also support the integration of African Ivor Wilks (1928-2014) 2 developing-world community to assess and design ways to studies and languages into K-12 teacher education and community PAStories 4 meet its public health needs. college curricula through partnerships with Northeastern Community news 8 FLAS funding will allow Illinois University, Malcolm X College, the Newberry Library’s Teachers as Scholars Program, and the Global Reach Initiative in Events calendar 10 Northwestern to offer two graduate academic-year fellow- Urbana-Champaign. ships and three graduate or Title VI was introduced as a part of the National Defense undergraduate summer fellow- Education Act of 1958 as a means of promoting language develop- ships per year for students of ment, with a focus on less commonly taught languages. African languages and related area studies. In memoriam: Ivor Wilks Professor Emeritus Ivor G. H. Wilks, one of the most dis- anticolonial struggle in Palestine, where he was a lieutenant tinguished historians of Africa, died at his home in Wales in the Indian army for two years after World War II. In 1948 on October 7, 2014. He was 86 and had long been in poor he entered the University College of North Wales and, after health. graduating, accepted a teaching post in 1953 at the five-year- One of the groundbreaking Africanist scholars who old University College of the Gold Coast (later the University decolonized African studies in the late 1950s, Wilks of Ghana). He served in various capacities: lecturer in the phi- specialized in the Asante empire and its periphery and losophy department (1953–55), resident tutor for the Northern in West African Islam. He Territories for the Institute joined Northwestern two of Extra-Mural Studies different times. In 1967 he (1955–58), resident tutor for came to the Department Ashanti and Brong-Ahafo of History, resigning a year (1958–61), senior research later to take a position fellow at the new Institute at Cambridge University. of African Studies (1961– Unhappy with Cambridge’s 63) and its deputy director offering him limited oppor- (1965–66), and research tunity to conduct research professor in African history in Ghana, Wilks returned (1964–66). to Northwestern in 1970 During Wilks’s time and remained here until his at the University of Ghana, retirement in 1993. He was scholars at African institu- appointed Melville J. tions explored a range of Herskovits Professor of methodologies, old and African Studies in 1984. new, to reorient the study Wilks was a dedicated of Africa to African agency and inspiring teacher and and innovation rather than adviser who took time to listen to his students. (A tribute a response to European colonialism. One of the most impor- from one of them accompanies this article.) Altogether tant new tools was the use of oral materials (local traditions, he advised 28 students who completed PhDs in African Asante stool histories, lists of rulers, songs, and life histories). history, and he served on the dissertation committees of Wilks undertook the systematic collection of such materials in another 35 in non-African fields. Akan areas, publishing many articles on transformation in state His most influential publication, Asante in the Nine- building, economies, religion, and community institutions. teenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political His academic interests ranged beyond Africa to national Order (1975), was based on wide-ranging oral history resistance in Wales and Palestine. In 1984 he published a study fieldwork. It was awarded the African Studies Associa- of Welsh resistance, South Wales and the Rising of 1839: Class tion’s Herskovits Award in 1976. Other major works were Struggle as Armed Struggle, which received the Welsh Arts Chronicles from Gonja: A Tradition of West African Muslim Council Prize for Nonfiction in 1985. More recently, he pub- Historiography (1986), coauthored with Nehemia Levtzion lished A Once and Past Love: Palestine 1947, Israel 1948 (2011), and Bruce Haight, and Wa and the Wala: Islam and Polity a memoir recounting his experience as a young officer in the in Northwestern Ghana (1989). Many of Wilks’s articles British colonial army. It is available at www.northwestern.edu were republished in the collection Forests of Gold: Essays on /african-studies/publications. the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (1993). Wilks continued writing and research in retirement. Wilks’s interest in Africa developed out of his strong Among his projects were a study of colonial Asante, an Asante Welsh nationalism. He found common cause in the biographical dictionary, and a life of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq of 2 Timbuktu. In 1995 he gave the Aggrey-Fraser- “ Ivor Wilks taught history as a craft, Guggisberg Memorial Lectures at the University of Ghana, a weeklong series that was published as Ghana much like cabinet-making, and his Past and Present: One Nation, Many Histories. He told instructions were straightforward: that audience, “I have no teacher or teachers, I have no isnad, no chain of teachers extending back over genera- assemble your tools, hone your skills, tions. My real teachers were men, and sometimes women, who had no academic credentials whatsoever, but whose practice your craft. Ivor was an understanding of the past was truly remarkable.” He ended the lecture series by paying tribute to six people extraordinary teacher and mentor, who influenced his interpretation of Ghanaian his- patient and generous with his time, tory, including a World War I veteran, a member of the Kumasi Nsumankwa, a head butcher, a mufti of Bobo- and remarkable in his ability to make Dioulasso, a Muslim scholar, and a Christian clergyman. Wilks donated his valuable Ghana-related manu- students—be they disoriented script collection to the Herskovits Library. The core freshmen or advanced PhD students— of the collection, some 12,000 cards, form the primary database of the Asante Collective Biography Project, feel that their ideas were worthwhile which he founded in 1972 in collaboration with Thomas McCaskie, then a Northwestern history graduate student. and deserved to be taken seriously. The cards document items of biographical information drawn from a wide range of published, archival, and oral He lived by the Asante proverb ‘Nyansa sources. They include material in English translation nyɛ sika na wᴐakyekyere asie’ from Akan, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, and Hausa texts. The ACBP has two goals: to provide (Wisdom is not gold dust that should a readily accessible source of information of the Asante past and to lay the foundation for a future dictionary of be tied up and put away).” Ghanaian national biography. Provisional steps towards this latter objective are described in the ACBP’s journals — Jean Allman (PhD 1987), former student of Ivor Wilks Asante Seminar (1975–76) and Asantesem (1977–79). and currently J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities Many graduate students in Northwestern’s history and director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts department have contributed data to the project and used and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis data in it. A number of them now hold senior academic posts in universities and continue to publish on the history of Ghana. Wilks is survived by his wife, Nancy Lawler; four children from his former marriage with Grace Amanor- Wilks: Professor Kojo Amanoor (Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana); Dede Amanoor (devel- opment consultant and politician in Ghana); David Amanoor (broadcaster with the BBC World Service); and Suzanne Peggy Amanor-Wilks (neurodevelopmental movement specialist, USA); and many grandchildren. 3 PAStories Herskovits Library state building in Congo, Rwanda, and acquires papers of Burundi helped reorient the study of African history from its former Euro- Jan Vansina pean emphasis to a modern African emphasis.