ABSTRACT
Back in London for the autumn term of 1965, I soon faced a considerable extension of my job at SOAS. My director, Cyril Philips, had planned a fundamental reorganisation, whereby the departments divided according to disciplines would be balanced by the creation of five “area centres” that would be concerned with the development of interdisciplinary studies and teaching programmes dealing with Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Far East. I was invited to become the first chairman of the Centre of African Studies. It involved, first and foremost, the responsibility for devising and implementing a programme of one-year master's courses in which students with an appropriate first degree would be taught in seminars rather than lectures, each taking three seminar courses and submitting one long essay embodying an element of original research. The success of the venture would depend on the richness and diversity of the whole programme and therefore on the number and quality of the teachers who could be persuaded to take part. We had some seventy Africanists on the staff of the school at that time, and there may have been another twenty scattered around other colleges in the university. I made it my business to meet them all individually, and on the whole I marvelled at the generous response of the busiest people to the suggestion that they might take on what, in terms of teaching, preparation, and assessment, would probably amount to an additional day's work each week for no tangible reward. Ironically, it seemed to be those with the lightest teaching duties, such as those responsible for languages for which there was little or no student demand, who were the least inclined to search their experience for what they might usefully contribute.
