Starting from scratch: how students and faculty are collaborating to bring Africa studies back online after the pandemic

Read Time:6 Minute, 10 Second

Aaron Dane

Edited by Alexandra Huggins

Washing down Swahili chicken wings, samosas, and jollof rice with Serengeti beer, students and faculty rang in the Africa Club’s spring semester. The welcome reception was a fitting tribute to a year-long effort to revive the club following the pandemic, through which student leaders have sought to sustain a culturally immersive energy at club events.

“Something that [Dr. Chiedo Nwankwor] really pushed us on at the beginning was that the club should be African. When we have events, we play African music and serve African food,” says Fatimata Ndiaye, the club’s former president. “You get to have that experience.”

Prior to the pandemic, such welcome receptions took place annually, kicking off impressive line-ups of engagements that established SAIS as a leading institution in African studies.

When the pandemic hit, however, the cycle came to a grinding halt. “We had a defunct Africa Club,” says Bill Lawson, who served as the club’s president after Ndiaye. The pandemic, coupled with the reshuffling of SAIS’s curriculum structure, caused many of the regional clubs to fall into disrepair.

Although SAIS’s website listed an Africa Club as one of the student organizations, no such club existed by the time Ndiaye came to SAIS in the fall of 2021. After meeting in class, she and Lawson took up the initiative to turn things around. With support from faculty—like Dr. Nwankwor—as well as other Africa-focused students, they eventually founded the new Africa Club with the goal of bringing both “African perspectives” and “perspectives on Africa” to SAIS.

For Ndiaye and Lawson, starting the club was a passion project—and a challenge. “We felt like we were doing everything from scratch,” Ndiaye says. They, like other SAIS students who took on the task of starting up clubs after the pandemic, had to write a new constitution, complete 25Live training, and secure funding for the club. Lawson says that “money was always tight,” and SGA-allotted funds were insufficient to cover food and supplies. Ndiaye and Lawson admit that they occasionally contributed their own resources to the club to pay for food.

The biggest challenge, however, was to ensure that their efforts in the spring carried into high participation in the fall. To ensure continuity and drive up interest, the club organized virtual events over the summer. When school started, they expanded participation by recruiting students from across the academic spectrum. “In the same vein that we want to bring African voices into the conversation, we want to bring students’ voices into the Africa conversation,” says Lawson. Ndiaye frames the approach as “Africa and.” When the eyes of the world were on Morocco during the semifinals of the FIFA World Cup, the club looked at the connection between Africa and soccer. A club member interested in LGBTQ+ issues helped to organize a talk on Africa and LGBTQ+ rights.

At the institutional level, the Africa Department “went offline for two years,” according to Dr. Peter Lewis, the former chair of the Africa Department who now serves as the Africa Focus Area lead under the new curriculum structure. Pivoting to virtual learning was challenging enough for many departments, but the Africa department lost some faculty and administrative support in the restructuring. This resulted in fewer course offerings and fewer opportunities to engage with faculty and outside experts.

Africa Club members hear from United States African Development Foundation President Travis Adkins and former United States Ambassador to Niger Eunice Reddick at an event organized in partnership with the SAIS Black Student Union.

When Dr. Lewis started as Director of the Africa Department in 2006, the program was in a similar low period. He admits that such fluctuations happen at all schools. Organizational difficulties, waves of retirements, and shifts in academic interests all contribute. “Having had a career in academia, you see this all the time,” he says. “I wish it were otherwise, because if you’re a student, you want to be here during a time when the program you’re interested in is firing on all cylinders, and things are really cruising.”

Having revived the program in 2006, Lewis says he is up for the challenge this time around and sees opportunity in the new program structure. Before the change, there was a limit to the number of Africa courses—“maybe 5 or 6 specific to the program and 5 or 6 that we cross-listed,” says Lewis—that the school could offer each year. Now that the school has eliminated the barriers of the department structure and allowed for more flexibility in cross-listing, courses relevant to Africa can fit into multiple focus areas, and faculty with expertise in Africa have more opportunities to teach an Africa course regardless of their “department.”

With the challenges of lockdown behind them, both the Africa Club and the Africa Focus Area are planning for the future with an eye toward intellectual leadership. For the club, that means “bringing the conversations into the 21st century,” says Kosi Ogbuli, a first-year student and a member of the Africa Club board, who wants to “infuse modernity” into the conversation through events focusing on technology. Noelle Boyd, another board member, is aiming for higher-level talks, roundtables, social events, and even an Africa Club gala.

For its part, the Focus Area hopes to drive policy conversations and plan events that round out a successful academic department. Lewis points to four benchmarks of success. The first is intellectual leadership. He believes that SAIS is taking a leading role in the evolving conversations on the continent, including concerns about debt stress, problems in the information space, questions of migration, and debates about geostrategic competition in and around Africa. Secondly, it’s important to have a “very active” speaker series that maintains the program’s relevance.

Third is publications, particularly working papers. The final benchmark is building community. “This is where the Africa Club comes in,” Lewis says. In addition to hosting its own policy talks, the club offers social events, professional panels, and career panels.

The Africa Club also wants to push the Focus Area to continue expanding course offerings. Ndiaye and Lawson pointed to a lack of subregion-specific classes and classes about regional economic bodies as evidence that there is room to grow. Ogbuli also would like to see the school offer a Swahili language course.

Still, they are excited about the progress of the past year. They were particularly enthusiastic about the recent Nigeria pre-election and post-assessment panels that brought in prominent policy analysts from both within and outside of SAIS, including Zainab Usman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Africa Club encourages all students to take advantage of similar events in the future. “We invite people from other parts of the community to join in,” says Obugli. “It’s hard to say that you’re an international relations student if you ignore what may be the most consequential continent of the coming century.” There are 54 states in Africa, and the continent’s population is expected to reach 2.4 billion by 2050. By 2100, the world’s biggest cities will be concentrated in Africa. Given these staggering numbers, Lawson poses a question that Dr. Nwankwor asked him and other students: How can you not talk about Africa?