MSU’s connection to Africa began in the 1950s when a common philosophy about higher education united two incredible leaders. That philosophy—rooted in a land-grant tradition—has distinguished MSU for more than 150 years. It’s also what connected two inspiring leaders – Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first civilian president of Nigeria, and John A. Hannah, MSU president from 1941 to 1969. Both men believed that higher education should be available to all and that universities should aspire to serve the needs of the nations in which they are based.

Zik, as he was affectionately called, had a vision of a “people’s university” that could address the country’s pressing development needs. He traveled to New York to request support from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, among others, for the first “American” land-grant type university in Africa, but they weren’t forthcoming.

Zik often told the story of being dejected but not giving up hope. He remembered walking from the Upper West Side in Manhattan toward the downtown Wall Street area, and seeing a skyscraper with “cobs of maize” carved in the limestone frieze. “I knew in an instant,’ he recalled, “that if you can build a skyscraper in New York with maize, you can build a university in Nigeria with palm oil.”

Several years later Azikiwe returned to New York with a bank certificate for almost $61 million (in 2012 dollars) earned from a tax on palm oil production in Eastern Nigeria that he had engineered as governor of the province and again asked for assistance. This time, the foundations referred him to MSU President John Hannah and to the United States Agency for International Development.

Hannah and a number of MSU faculty members quickly accepted Zik’s invitation. By 1967 the institution had 30 faculty members from MSU and 400 from Nigeria, and its first graduates earned the best civil service examination scores in the country.

MSU faculty members and their families contributed more than 200 person-years in Nigeria to build the University of Nigeria. From that experience, they gained knowledge and affection for the Nigerian people and returned to bring an African focus to their teaching, research and service back in East Lansing.

“Michigan State University is fortunate to have cultivated the types of partnership over the last 50 years that allow us to observe, participate, analyze and contribute to Africa,” said James Pritchett, director of MSU’s African Studies Center.

MSU is distinctive among world universities in the role it has been asked to play in support of African Union initiatives, including the development of the African Biosafety Network of Expertise (ABNE) and food security programs in a number of countries.

Historically in the United States, MSU has been a top producer of Ph.D. dissertations on Africa and its development. “We also are providing more opportunities for students to study in Africa than any other U.S. university through 30 study abroad programs on the continent,” said Pritchett.

East Lansing is alive with Africa-focused activity: 160 MSU faculty members are researching and teaching about Africa, weekly public lectures are delivered on African topics and regular visits are made by numerous African scholars and faculty independently or through the Fulbright program. The 26 year-old African Students Union hosts an annual African Culture Festival that attracts American and international students from all over the Midwest. During each academic year, MSU boasts a total of about 200 undergraduate and graduate African students who have constructing alternative narratives about Africa, through their academic excellence, their interactions and their programming around Africa. Dozens of other student organizations engage in African issues, running both charitable programs for various causes, and supporting the budding interest in studying abroad to learn about Africa.

MSU and Africa Today
Over the years, MSU’s work has grown extensively throughout Africa. Strategic long-term collaborations have engaged MSU faculty for more than 40 years in Senegal and Zambia; 30 years in Mali; more than 25 years in Malawi; 20 years in Mozambique; and 15 years in Kenya. Additionally, recent faculty research and service activities have occurred in many other countries, including the following: Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

Many MSU faculty members have focused on addressing the development needs of the African continent. These experiences have helped sharpen MSU’s focus on four research themes critical to the continent, namely food, environment, education and health.
 

“MSU faculty involvement in agriculture in Africa is probably the largest of any U.S. institution, including dozens of projects on food security, drought coping, food markets, women in development, new crop varieties and training African faculty, ” said Duncan Boughton, associate professor for international development and co-director of MSU’s Food Security Group.
Boughton said there is terrific leadership on food security issues in Africa. “I also think it is fair to say that African Michigan State University graduates have had an enormous role in developing that leadership over the years.”
 

Education faculty members have worked in African higher education administration and coordinating effective classroom practices across the continent. For their part humanities faculty members conduct research on African and Middle Eastern literature and film, religion, languages, language pedagogy, philosophy, music and history, and having the largest faculty on the history of Africa of any U.S. university.
 

Social scientists are working on a wide range of African topics, including women in African development, urban waste management and industrial pollution, standards for African exports, democratization and civil society, environment, natural resource and water management, religion, fishing, health delivery, journalism and communications, development policy, globalization, climate change, water and land rights, and U.S. foreign policy.

At the 2008 MSU Commencement, in accepting an honorary doctorate, Nelson Mandela said:

“It is a privilege to receive the honorary degree from the Michigan State University. We recall your support during our struggle for freedom. Many universities and colleges, religious organizations, labor unions, and local and state legislatures followed this example. We are inspired by your numerous programs that continue to support our efforts to transform our country. In this spirit of continuing friendship we wish to challenge you to act accordingly in addressing the many challenges confronting our continent and our world.”

A number of faculty members at MSU have applied strong pro-Africa standards to work in Africa and are at the forefront of promoting strong codes of ethics for MSU faculty and graduate students in research in Africa and in standards for partnerships with faculty in African universities and colleges. Faculty members and students also have a history of vigorously supporting human rights throughout Africa.
 

MSU has a unique history on South Africa as the only African studies faculty to vote to honor the UN cultural boycott of SA in the 1970s and 80s and the first major U.S. university to totally divest from stocks of companies operating under apartheid. MSU held five major national conferences and called for U.S. universities to educate South Africans, including young refugees outside SA, at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels to prepare for “the New South Africa.” MSU also offered many fellowships to South Africans. As a result, more than 50 young South Africans graduated at MSU with MA, MS, and Ph.D. degrees to become faculty and professionals in building for a new non-racial society.

MSU and African Scholars
One of Michigan State University’s major contributions to Africa over the years has been through the thousands of African students who have completed bachelors, masters, and Ph.D. degrees at the university. MSU graduates have become vice presidents, legislators, ministers, permanent secretaries, vice chancellors, and directors of departments and institutes in government, higher education and the private sector across Africa.
MSU has long been popular with African students. “We offer the opportunity to interact with other African youth from far more countries, more ethnic and linguistic groups, and representing more differing stations of life than had been possible in their home countries,” said Jeffrey Riedinger, dean of International Studies and Programs.

“Relationships are built at MSU, plans are constructed, and networks emerge that serve students’ needs and then throughout their professional careers,” said Riedinger.
“More than a few of our African undergraduates return later to do graduate work or seek additional professional training,” said Riedinger.
 

Looking forward to 2020 and beyond, it is clear that several game-changing trends will have an enormous impact on how Michigan State University equips its students and focuses its research particularly in Africa.

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African Studies Resources at MSU

The African Studies Center, a unit serving faculty and students from 59 MSU departments, is one of the leading world area studies centers in the United States. Designated as a U.S. National Resource Center for African Studies by the U.S. Department of Education under Title VI of the Higher Education Act, the Center produces a seamless web of opportunities for faculty and students to jointly engage Africa in and outside the classroom.

MSU’s Africana Library Collection, with two Ph.D. Africanist librarians, is a leading Africana collection in the United States and supports the university’s research on Africa, as do the large collections of art and artifacts in the MSU Museum and MSU Kresge Art Museum. MSU has taken the lead in disseminating African information internationally through, among others, a number of websites on African film and video, online curriculum on South Africa, African higher education, and African academic journals online.
 

African Online Digital Library is a portal to multimedia collections about Africa, and the history of its countries and peoples, developed by the African Studies Center and MATRIX: The Center for Humane, Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at MSU. The digital collections are managed through a cooperation with MSU’s African Studies and partnering universities and cultural heritage organizations in Africa. Plans are underway to add digital tools in order to enable scholars to work with and add to these materials.

MSU’s outreach program on Africa is the largest in the nation, including programs for 75 universities and four-year colleges and 29 community and junior colleges, focused on how to improve teaching about Africa for undergraduate students. Outreach to school teachers, students, administrators, and board members includes resources such as Exploring Africa and South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid Building Democracy, two online secondary school curricula resources. Outreach to state and federal government and to legislators links Africanist scholarship to U.S. policy making on Africa, and these resources, as well as many others, are available to the general public, media, and business.

Another area of emphasis has been MSU students’ knowledge of African languages. With five African linguists, MSU offers approximately a dozen languages every year including Arabic, Chichewa, Hausa, Igbo, Kikongo, Swahili, Yoruba, Xhosa and Zulu. MSU’s African Language Program is one of the leading programs in the nation aimed at improving African language instruction and creating a model for offering languages needed by scholars to conduct research in Africa.

As a leader in study abroad programming, MSU offers great opportunities for students to learn about Africa with some 29 study abroad programs in Africa, more than any other U.S. university.