Background on Africa America Institute
Students studying in Lesotho, 1963
Founded as The Institute for African-American Relations in 1953, the Africa America Institute (AAI) has played a notable role in fostering educational ties between the United States and African countries. At a time when the decolonization and liberation movements in Africa and the demands of the Cold War shone a spotlight on international relations, the AAI emerged as a major source of funding for African students wishing to study in the U.S. and a voice for Africa in the United States. As it has evolved through the years since, the AAI has launched a series of initiatives to strengthen the human capacity of Africans and promote the continent's development through higher education and skills training, while promoting dialogue between the continents' political and economic leaders.
The AAI's vision began to take form with its earliest organizers, a multi-racial group that included two prominent scholars with deep interests in Africa. A sociologist, educator, and civil rights advocate, Horace Mann Bond (1904-1974) was President of Lincoln University when the AAI was founded and was keenly aware of the school's sizable number of African alumni, including Nigerian independence leaders Nnamdi Azikiwe and Ozumba Mbadiwe. Perhaps the key event in piquing Bond's interests in the continent, however, was the invitation he received from West African alumni in 1949 to visit the continent and review the higher education systems. In October and November of that year, Bond toured Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, meeting with civic, educational, and political leaders, and establishing direct contacts that would prove invaluable in the early history of AAI. In the 1950s, Bond returned to Africa to promote American economic investment, and his commitments continued to grow through service on the Board of the Council on Race and Caste in World Affairs, participation in the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists, and as both an organizer and founding president of the American Society of African Culture.
Joining Bond in establishing the AAI was William Leo Hansberry (1894-1965), a pioneering American historian of Africa who served on the faculty at Howard University. A specialist in Ethiopian history, Hansberry, like Bond, was a scholar-activist, and has been considered to be the first person to offer a course in African history at a U.S. university. In addition to his contributions to AAI, Hansberry helped found the All-African Students Union (of which Bond was a Board member), the African Students Association, and the All-African Student Union of the Americas, as well as the Africa House, a retreat for African students that became noted for nurturing and connecting young leaders in the independence movements.
From its base in Washington, D.C., the AAI first directed its focus on a problem all too familiar to educators: although a steady stream of highly motivated African students had made its way across the Atlantic, limited resources forced many to abandon their degrees before completion. In response, the AAI began what would become a decades-long commitment to offering scholarship support for African students in the U.S., while simultaneously seeking to build more comprehensive, longer-term support for education. To raise awareness of Africa's challenges and promise, the AAI began publishing a magazine, Africa Report in 1956, and they began building relations with governmental officials in the U.S., particularly after President Dwight Eisenhower established the first Africa Bureau at the Department of State in 1958.
Several of the AAI's most successful initiatives were launched in the 1960s, an era when both federal and private funding for international projects began to flow more freely. Two programs launched in 1961 proved immediate successes. The AAI's International Visitors Program helped bring representatives from African countries and institutions to the U.S., while the broadly collaborative Africa Scholarship Program of American Universities (ASPAU) provided a firmer base of support for undergraduate study by Africans in US universities. More ambitiously, the Africa Graduate Fellowship Program (AFGRAD), begun in 1963, extended fellowship support to graduate study at American universities, and more notably, it shifted emphasis beyond the support of individuals to building capacity in Africa, preparing students to enter government service, higher education, or the private sector. Extending the logic a step further, the AAI established its annual African-American Dialogue in 1968, which created opportunities for leaders from both the governmental and private sectors in the US and Africa to gather in an informal, structured setting.
With the transformation of the African map through independence and the evolution of priorities, the AAI fine-tuned its programs in the 1970s through 1990s, sometimes narrowing its focus on specific regions. The persistence of apartheid in southern Africa and of colonial rule in Lusophone countries absorbed a great deal of the AAI's energy, resulting in the Southern African Training Program (SATP) in 1976, in which trainees from South Africa and Zimbabwe attended the National University of Lesotho, and later programs such as a USAID-funded project on development in Portuguese-speaking Africa and a training program in agriculture in Mozambique. While some program were narrowly focused, others reached out into newly emerging fields of need. In 1990, the Advanced Training for Leadership and Skills Project (ATLAS) became a force in promoting sustainable development, yielding alumni such as Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, while between 2002 and 2007, the African Technology for Education and Workforce Development (AFTECH) applied information technologies to the need for accelerating workforce development in Africa. The AAI also increased its efforts to address women's issues in Africa, including the 10,000 Women Initiative, a 2008 partnership with the Goldman Sachs Foundation that offered non-degree and business degree training for African women.
Procession in legal robes, ca. 1976
As the AAI approached its 50th anniversary it selected its first African President and CEO, Amini Kajunju, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its current programs include a Future Leaders Legacy Fund, the Transformational Leadership Program (TLP), an Annual Awards Gala, a State of Education in Africa Conference, and the AAI Speaker Series. As of 2015, the AAI had over 23,000 alumni.
