BUILDING BRIDGES TO ZAMBIA

By Garth Myers

The ASRC's mission calls for us to foster linkages with African universities and educational institutions. The members of the KU African Studies Council - including all faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, and staff interested and involved in African studies - carry out this mission in a variety of ways. In any African travel, most, if not all of us foster informal links, by visiting universities or learning institutions on the continent. Other Council participants foster links by hosting African international visitors in Kansas, or simply helping to make them feel at home in Lawrence.

The ASRC has also formalized links over the years in the northern, southern, eastern, and western regions of the continent. Some linkages focus primarily on outreach, others on student exchange, and still others on research collaboration amongst faculty. Some of the more formal linkages have been around for far longer than the ASRC, while the most active linkages are the more recently developed ones. The broader goals may be said in different cases to include assisting in the internationalization of KU, deepening the activist roots of the Department of African and African-American Studies, and developing the educational human resources of African universities.

KU's linkage with the University of Zambia seeks to accomplish all of these broader goals. The KU-UNZA link began informally, through the inspiration of the personal friendship and shared research interests of Dr. Kevin Price of the KU Geography department and Dr. Imasiku Nyambe of the UNZA School of
Mines. After Price visited Zambia in 1996 with a pitch to jumpstart efforts to create a National Center for Remote Sensing in Lusaka, Nyambe earned a Fulbright Visiting Scholar award to come to KU for the end of fall 1997 and beginning of spring 1998. Price returned to Zambia to run a workshop on remote sensing later that year, and Nyambe came to KU for a National Science Foundation workshop on African Environments in fall 1999. That NSF workshop, co-organized by myself and Dr. Johan Feddema, culminated in working group discussions of how to foster linkages that would seek to integrate new and advanced technologies like remote sensing and geographic information systems with sophisticated environmental modeling and with approaches to African environments influenced by social, cultural, and political theory. Building on the success of KU's then operational linkage grant with Gaston Berger University in Senegal funded by the US Information Agency, Dr. Nyambe and I forged a successful application to USIA to link KU and UNZA formally for three years. With advice and assistance from Johan Feddema on this end and Iwake Masialeti in Zambia, the focus of the link took shape. We took aim at enhancing environmental studies teaching and research through a series of faculty exchanges. The majority of participants from KU are geographers, but future participants look to include members of the departments of Geology, English, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. UNZA's participants are fairly evenly split between the Geography department there and the School of Mines (which has three departments: geology, metallurgy, and mining engineering). After a delay in the funding process caused by the uncertainty over the USIA budget in the turmoil of electoral politics in the US in fall 2000, the work of the exchange finally got underway in March 2001 and finally earned full funding in July 2001. Part of the turmoil involved the dissolution of the USIA and its rebirth as the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs directly under the Department of State (now the formal source of funds). Although the three years of the grant technically end in June 2003, we anticipate earning an unfunded extension of the grant to September 2004 to enable us to complete all of the planned exchanges. To date, KU has received nine visitors from UNZA. The first was Dr. Nyambe, who launched the link with his planning visit to KU in March 2001. In July and August 2001, we welcomed Dr. Daniel Nkhuwa (Geology), Simon Nkemba (Geology), Iwake Masialeti (Geography), and John Volk (Geography). All four worked on research projects on their own and in collaboration with KU faculty, while also taking some advanced training in remote sensing image analysis. Wilma Nchito (Geography), Everisto Kapungwe (Geography), Simasiku Simasiku (Geology), and Dr. Lordwell Witika (Metallurgy) took in a month of KU classes and built towards collaborative research and curricular endeavors with faculty members during November 2002. In spring 2003, Dr. Nyambe will return for a brief collaborative research visit, and Masialeti and Nkemba will be in Lawrence for the full semester, taking classes and working on research. Thus far, the link has sent five KU faculty and staff members to Lusaka (Myers and Price, along with Steve Egbert, Terry Slocum, and Brianna Mercier) to run a three-week short course, with a sixth participant (Feddema) scheduled to conduct a workshop in January 2003.

The link has many tangible results - or, in the language of development, "deliverables" - to report. The KU-UNZA wing of five computers in the Computo-Geological Advisory Unit (CGAU) forms the core of that Unit's lab. The lab has played host to the two KU workshops above, as well as one in September 2002 on the Zambia Country Almanac stand-alone GIS software that is being developed at UNZA in collaboration with Dr. John Corbett, a participant at the Myers-Feddema NSF workshop in Lawrence in 1999. It is a small world: Corbett wrote to me asking about how to build in-country collaborators in GIS software in Zambia, and, voila, the KU-UNZA link went to work for him! The KU-UNZA lab in CGAU is about to be augmented by two computers to be housed in the GIS lab of the UNZA Geography department. These will be immediately put to work in ongoing research collaborations between myself and Wilma Nchito and between Feddema and Kapungwe. I am writing this from Lusaka, where I am currently conducting research on a Fulbright that results from the link, and Masialeti is a finalist for a Fulbright to come the other way. The whole team produced a mammoth NSF research grant that, while not being funded, received generally positive reviews that have encouraged us to try again, probably with a few smaller pieces rather than the whole pie. The UNZA doctoral programs of Nchito, Kapungwe, and Simasiku now appear poised to be threaded in with the linkage by external committee membership from KU faculty. Dr. Richard Prum (EEB), Dr. Byron Caminero-Santangelo (English), and potentially Dr. Douglas Walker (Geology) and Dr. Xingong Li (Geography) are in line to take the KU visits to Lusaka in several very new directions, in the process beginning to rightly broaden our connections outward into other fields. KU students and
UNZA students will, as of fall 2003, have several shared assignments and bulletin board chat rooms in collaborative curricular developments between my African Environmental Issues class, Evaristo Kapungwe's Environment and Development II class, and John Volk's course on Environment and Natural
Resources. Several Kansas graduate students are beginning to develop Zambia-focused Masters theses. Through these and other means, we are confident that the firm relationships that have developed between and among us will continue long after the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs funds dry up.

The Zambia link is really only one of several very active ties the ASRC has with African higher education institutes, including the links in Senegal, Ghana, Morocco, Kenya, and Tanzania. But it is a prime example of how personal friendships, with a little help from grantsmanship, are helping the KU ASRC to become a real presence on the continent even while African students and scholars are helping to transform KU by coming here.