PRESS RELEASE
2006 Conover Porter Award
The 2006 Conover-Porter Award was presented on 17 November 2006 at the African Studies Association’s Awards Ceremony during the ASA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California. The Conover-Porter Award is presented every two years to the best work of bibliography or reference on Africa published anywhere in the world.
WINNER:
Teferra, Damtew and Philip G. Altbach, editors. African Higher Education:
An International Reference Book. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2003.
The winner
of the 2006 Conover-Porter award combines thoughtful essays on issues in contemporary
African higher education with a compilation of reports and statistics on the
status of higher education in the nations of Africa. Experts in the field of
education discuss themes including the history, governance, and financing of
higher education; the roles of foreign aid, private institutions, and distance
education; the status of women, indigenous languages and student activism;
examinations of trends and perspectives in African higher education and scholarly
communication. The country reports all have similar formats, but each of the
substantial entries also addresses issues specific to the country. Each report
is written by an educator from the country, and all have substantial bibliographies.
The work is rounded out by a large general bibliography, a list of doctoral
dissertations on higher education in Africa, and indexes.
African
Higher Education: An International Reference Book fills a substantial
gap in general knowledge of African life and development by supplying a wealth
of information on education in the nations of Africa. It is of particular importance
to schools of education, whose libraries are less likely to have supporting
reference tools to put higher education in national and continental contexts
than libraries supporting programs of African studies. This work is welcome
for its broad utility; its additional features and excellent scholarship and
writing make it an enduring and valuable research tool, worthy of the 2006
Conover-Porter award.
HONORABLE MENTION:
Miescher, Giorgio and Dag Henrichsen. African Posters: A Catalogue
of the Poster Collection in the Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Basel:
Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2004.
This attractive
and compelling volume is more than an exhibit catalog, yet not quite a reference
work. Nine hundred posters from the Basler Afrika Bibliographien are handsomely
reproduced and grouped into eight categories: “Liberation movements and
exile”, “Solidarity and Anti-Apartheid”, “Elections”, “Nation-building”, “Awareness
and Health”, “Economy”, “Knowledge, Information, Belief”,
and “Leisure and Pleasure”, with an introductory essay for each
section. Each poster has a descriptive entry and several keywords. The index
allows readers to search for posters by those keywords, providing a very useful
tool for academic study of the poster in African history and life, meriting
honorable mention in the 2006 Conover-Porter award competition.
SPECIAL MENTION:
Gerdes, Paulus and Ahmed Djebbar. Mathematics in African History and
Cultures. An Annotated Bibliography. Cape Town: African Mathematical
Union, 2004.
This year
a work was submitted for consideration that was so unusual and fascinating
that the committee has singled it out for special mention, despite some serious
production and editing flaws. Mathematics in Africa is a field explored more
by anthropologists and historians than mathematicians, and African mathematicians
are not widely recognized by colleagues outside Africa, particularly if their
work is not published in western journals. The material covered in this volume
is broad in scope. Many entries have annotations. Although misnumberings in
the indexes make it difficult to use, this work deserves to be revised and
published in an edition made easily available to scholars worldwide.
2006 Conover Porter Award Nominees
African Folklore: An Encyclopedia. Philip M. Peek and Kwesi Yankah, editors. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Gerdes, Paulus and Ahmed Djebbar. Mathematics in African History and Cultures. An Annotated Bibliography. Cape Town: African Mathematical Union, 2004.
Kagan, Alfred. Reference Guide to Africa: A Bibliography of Sources. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005.
Mazrui, Ali Al’Amin. The Mazruiana Collection Revisited: Ali A. Mazrui Debating the African Condition: An Annotated and Select Thematic Bibliography, 1962-2003. Compiled by Abdul Samed Bemath. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa; Berkshire: New Dawn Press, 2005.
Miescher, Giorgio and Dag Henrichsen. African Posters: A Catalogue of the Poster Collection in the Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2004.
Schafer, Rita. Gender und Landliche Entwicklung in Afrika, Eine Kommenterte Bibliographie [Gender and Rural Development in Africa: An Annotated Bibliography. Munster/Hamburg/London: Lit-Verlag, 2003.
Sheldon, Kathleen. Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005.
Shillington, Kevin. Encyclopedia of African History. 3 vols. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Teferra, Damtew and Philip G. Altbach. African Higher Education: An International Reference Book. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Tvedt, Terje. The Nile: An Annotated Bibliography. 2nd ed. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004.