Our colleague Sara Berry chose the title of her Herskovitz Prize-winning book an inscription she seen on a Nigerian city bus: No Condition is Permanent.  Over the ASC’s 55 year history we have almost defied that rule.  Six locations in 55 years are not exactly peripatetic.  For each of our locations there has been among the African studies community members a strong sense of place and belonging – and a sense of permanence as a set of people and goals. 

In its early years after 1953 the African Studies Program occupied a temporary structure on Bay State Road in a space that is now affectionately known as the SMG parking lot.  Then in the mid-1950s, as recognition for what Prof. Emeritus George Lewis calls “a reward for being a good program,” the Program moved east down Bay State Road.   Those more elegant quarters at 154 Bay State Road were in the building next to the current Department of International Relations. With its State Department training grant in those years the Program expanded to include another brownstone, now a residence hall, on a corner opposite the Gothic gabled Castle, the oldest building on the Charles River campus.  Between 1966 and 1982 the African Studies Program (designated as a “Center” in 1965) occupied a large Tudor-style house at 10 Lenox St. near the University President’s house in Brookline.  That building’s sweeping staircases, wooden paneling, and spacious faculty offices is the space that many senior visitors and Africanist scholars recall as the ASC’s benchmark location of those academic generations.  In 1982 the ASC moved back to the heart of the Charles River Campus, occupying the marble floored townhouse at 125 Bay State Road, next to the Office of Admissions.

In 1984 the ASC moved to the fourth and fifth floors of 270 Bay State Road, which would be its home for 25 years.  This was the location that was a home for faculty, valued research fellows, staff, and 6 generations of students.  Its views of the BU “Beach,” the Charles River and the campus’ most extensive green space on the Alpert Mall established a strong, stable sense of place for the ASC’s classes, offices, and community events.  Joanne Hart and the staff were able to create an ideal space for intellectual engagement, social conviviality, and teaching.  There were no marble floors (as at 125 Bay State Road) or wood paneling (at 10 Lenox St.) but its dedicated seminar rooms, Outreach Library (later renamed the Adelaide Cromwell Suite), lively bulletin boards, and art displays made it a distinctive and effective academic space –the place had a heart.  We often argued that 270 Bay State Road was the most intellectually appealing and comfortable quarters of an African Studies program anywhere in the nation for the study of Africa.

No Condition is Permanent.   Dean Sapiro in April 2009 told us that a realignment of several campus programs meant that the African Studies Center (along with International Programs, Economics, and the School of Social Work) after 25 years in place would be trading spaces to create a new alignment of offices along Bay State Road.  In late spring we organized an African Studies Bazaar to prepare for our move by exchanging books and carefully boxing our art collection, and ritually marking our move 150 meters east down Bay State Road to spacious and carefully renovated quarters on the 4^th and 5^th floor of 232 Bay State Road.  These new offices place African Studies in the same building as the Departments of Anthropology and Political Science, and next door to the Department of History.  Faculty and students arrived for the Fall 2009 semester at the new offices to find views of the Charles River and MIT, an elegant and renovated entranceway, and quarters that, again, make the ASC the best appointed physical space in the nation. 

The new space includes new carpets, newly appointed seminar rooms, faculty offices, built-in state of the art media equipment, an Outreach Library, kitchen, lounge, and sunlit interior hallways.  Our main William O. Brown seminar room holds 45 people and includes the familiar New Hampshire hand-made cherry seminar table, a LCD projector, maps and chalkboard.  Around the new ASC there are familiar objets d’arte, cloth, colloquy seating areas, bulletin boards, a kitchen, a lounge, a graduate student office, and lots of natural light.  Over the first few months the ASC community itself will find places to meet, have lunch, discuss, and share information about teaching, events in Africa, and common interests.  The new space will bring us together in familiar ways, but also perhaps in some new places with new people in the new academic year.  The Condition already feels permanent.