The Institute
Pictures taken at the Training and Offical Presentation of Conflict Prevention Resources Pack for Civilian Actors in West Africa. -Sponsored by the West African Civil Society Institute (ACCRA, Ghana)
About the Institute
The institute of African Studies has its pivot on Research,Publications and Teaching based on African culture and civilization.
There is no gainsaying the fact that Africa has a rich and enticing heritage which should be jealously preserved and guarded. Beyond material artifacts and hardware, Africa has had the fortune of creating awareness and drawing attention to her colossal mass of intangible heritage which, even in the new world, has thrived as sources of alternative culture and undercurrent of sub-cultures. These would continue to be the basis of values,standards and norms that have helped to sustain the enslaved or captive 'pilgrims' through the terrors of the middle passage and the material, circumscribed subsistence of a new emergent world which has now become a point of reference as the African Diaspora.
Culture, Courage and Creativity have been the normative and ethical hallmark of a people who have always had to re-invent themselves through their history and the circumstance of their geography or ecology. Today, these values have provided a cultural group that is authentically ageless and conceptually homogeneous.
There are, of course, genetic strains and factors in the potent blood of a primordial species determined to survive against all odds in a world that re-affirms the antagonist 'other'. The sustaining magic has been the endowment to compound the periphery and the margins with the essence of an overwhelming predominating centre; that pluralist factor of a world that has always affirmed the overwhelming 'other'.
The institute started with an essentially tripartite mission of indigenizing scholarship, setting an agenda for Africanist Studies and encouraging imaginative development of new cultural forms and new adaptations to modern life. In furtherance of all these to partner with forerunners and practitioners in the development of Africanist culture and research. It is in this context that the Institute became the open, planetary window for the primal institution of higher learning in Nigeria, and the umbrella institution for various centers concerned with cultural learning and exchange.
In furtherance of the focus of her establishment, the Institute is in league with Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC), The French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA), and other like-minded institutions.
The institute is pioneer to Nigeria's Peace and Conflict Studies programme,a separate discipline to apprehend and research issues emanating from conflicts in the various parts of the African continent and our world. As part of its continuous awareness of the need to attune Africana Studies to contemporary experience, the curricula now incorporate the broader disciplines of Women and Gender Studies and Performance Studies. Since its inception to date, there have been research chairs in Linguistics, Folklore, African Art Forms, African History, African Law, African Music,African Religion and Thought [Indigenous Knowledge] Systems, and Performance and Cultural Studies.
Apart from Research Fellows in the full employ of the institute and university, there are associate and guest lecturers drawn from relevant faculties at Ibadan and other universities. The legendary Wednesday seminars of the Institute have always been multidisciplinary and cut across faculties and institutions. There is always room for the integration of traditional institutions and resource persons to share their experience in the spirit of town and gown.
Among the facilities are the library (with over four thousand titles), The Women's Research and Documentation Centre (WORDOC), a museum and the publications office.
The publications office is responsible for the periodic and occasional publications of the Institute. African Notes, the institute's journal which started as a bulletin in 1964, has been a forum for people who are involved with interdisciplinary study of Africa and other related cultures. Since the 1960,there have been a series of joint and sole occasional publications available in the publications unit of the Institute.
There have been research projects carried out in the field of Linguistics and Folklore. The projects were research initiatives into the cultures of peoples in various parts of Africa.
The institute has about fifteen academic staff and about fifteen non-teaching/technical staff.
Of late, there has been an improved review of regulations and curriculum for the postgraduate degree program of the Institute. This was borne out of the call by the Postgraduate School and the Institute's new repositioning to update her courses for greater relevance and benefit to the ever-increasing would-be students of African and Diaspora Studies.
Today, the Institute of African Studies houses a record of not less than a thousand seminars, symposia and lectures given by academics, resource persons and others from outside of the university. Its complex also houses The French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) and the Centre for Black African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC), with whom collaborations are being presently explored. The Institute has trained over two thousand masters and doctoral degree holders and has an average annual registration of two hundred and fifty students.