With the introduction of the Interdepartmental Program in African Studies next semester, Macalester students will have the opportunity to pursue an in-depth course of study on Africa.

The Interdepartmental Program in African Studies will offer a minor requiring six courses, one of which must be a seminar focusing on Africa. The minor will also require a research paper in that area.

The program is the brainchild of 10 professors from the Geography, Political Science, International Studies, Anthropology, Music and French Departments.

Planning for the program began in January, 2003. After numerous meetings, the faculty members submitted a proposal to the Educational Policy and Governance Committee (EPAG), which approved the proposal this semester.

According to faculty members, the program will take a multidisciplinary approach to a region that many feel has historically been misrepresented.

“Since 9/11 it has become appallingly apparent that we in America don’t know a lot about other parts of the world,” Geography Professor and coordinator of the African Studies program William Moseley said. “I think it is terribly important that in this country we have scholars and citizens who understand Africa. In the popular press there are a lot of stereotypes that depict Africa as a place full of famine and civil strife. Africa is an enormous place with lots of good things. We want students to be able to make connections between several different disciplines.”

History major and African Studies minor Emily Potter ’04, who studied abroad in Senegal, said she believes that studying Africa is important. “I think the program is a good idea for a lot of reasons,” she said. “The main reason is that there are so many misrepresentations of Africa in the popular media in the U.S. Even for people who are not going to become Africanists, it wouldn’t hurt if everybody was learning more about Africa.”

Potter is the first student to have completed the courses required for the minor.

To ensure an interdisciplinary perspective, the minor requires that students take classes related to Africa in at least two, but preferably three departments. Three to five of the six required classes must have an exclusively African focus. The other classes must have a significant part devoted to Africa.

The program also recommends that students take introductory courses in several disciplines including Anthropology, Geography, History and International Studies and that they participate in a study abroad program focused on Africa.

“Area studies, of which African Studies is a part, forces you to look at one part [of the world] with interdisciplinary approaches,” Moseley said. “It is a very nice complement to a [major] discipline as it leads to a broader understanding of many factors in one area.”

Because the African Studies program is interdepartmental, it has no budget and has to make use of the current courses offered at Macalester. Currently, there are eight courses focusing on Africa alone and an additional nine that have a significant African component.

“We had to work with what we had,” Moseley said. “It was a matter of taking what’s out there, organizing it and forming a coherent program.”

According to Moseley, student interestin the program has been high. “There has always been student interest in an African Studies program,” Moseley said. “Since the start of the program I have gotten at least a dozen e-mails from students expressing interest.”

“I’ve been interested in Africa since I was pretty young,” Political Science and History major Rachel Tenney ’06 said. “ My mom traveled in Africa and told me stories and I wrote papers on Africa in high school. When I got to Macalester I decided to take an African history class. Since then the continent has become more of an interest of mine.”

Potter’s interest in West African dance led to her desire to know more about Africa. “I studied abroad in Senegal last fall mostly because I really like West African dance. After I got back I realized how little I knew about Senegal,” Potter said “I was sad to return to the states, so I took some classes focused on African studies.”

In the past, Macalester did not have enough faculty with knowledge of and interest in Africa to create an African Studies program.

“It’s amazing to me that we didn’t have the program before, given Macalester’s international focus and that our most famous alum, Kofi Annan, is from Africa,” Moseley said.