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When I founded Safundi: The
Journal of South African & American Studies in June 1999, I
worried the journal's strength--its focus on comparative studies--would
be its very weakness. I feared what critics proclaimed, that
comparative scholarship relied on the existence of borders and other arbitrary
"lines" that encourage differentiation and "othering" rather than
objective evaluation.
After fostering Safundi's growth for more than seven years, though, I
believe the contrary of such criticism to be true. While national borders and
cultural differences are ever-changing and indefinite, one must create
the boundaries in order to cross them. Simply put, how can we define a
subject without the perspective of another? Researchers work to understand a
subject in relation to a control, to empirically understand themselves and the
world around them.
Throughout its young life, Safundi has demonstrated the importance of
relating one culture to another. The story of its creation and development
exemplifies the philosophy that all research is ultimately about self-other
symbiosis, the cornerstone of comparative scholarship.
The idea to create an online
community for South African and American scholars came to me one morning in
September 1998 as I prepared for the day, looking at myself in the mirror. From
the living room, a CNN news anchor reported the day's top stories, one of which
detailed a U.S. tour by former President Nelson Mandela. As I looked in the
mirror at my reflection, I wondered what Mandela thought of the state of
American civil rights, and I hypothesized what Martin Luther King Jr. would have
thought about the fall of apartheid. These thoughts triggered a series of
questions resulting in the idea for Safundi.
This story serves as a metaphor for comparative scholarship: looking through the
mirror of one country to gain perspective on another. George Fredrickson of
Stanford University stated this well in White Supremacy: "For Americans,
it ought to be especially illuminating to view South African issues through the
lens of their own inter-racial experiences."
By 1999 Dr. Fredrickson's two landmark historical studies, White Supremacy
and Black Liberation, had been published, and their influence renewed
interest in the comparative study of the two countries. The American media
also covered South African current events at an increased rate after the fall of
apartheid and the election of President Mandela. The timing was perfect for the
creation of a journal like Safundi.
In June 1999 the journal debuted as
"usa-sa.com," a name aligned with the boom of the Internet. However
functional, the dot-com name was a poor choice. First, having a title directly
linked to the online world by way of its dot-com suffix impeded the journal's
scholarly reputation. Second, with the inclusion of a hyphen, the title was
cumbersome to say. Third, it placed the United States "before" South Africa,
which could be misinterpreted as American egocentrism. One might deem this
irrelevant and oversensitive, but consider a favorite quote of a South African
friend of mine: "Oh brother, not another American telling us what to do."
A year later, with the publication of Issue Two and at the suggestion of Michael
Leslie of the University of Florida, I circulated a call for scholars interested
in serving on an editorial board. Selecting the board was a process worthy of
study itself.
Considering the parallel histories shared by the United States and South Africa,
I found irony in establishing an editorial board comprised of scholars I had
never met. Unless their name, curriculum vitae, or previous research revealed
fragments of their identity, it was difficult to apprehend the overall dynamics
of the applicant pool--the age or race or sometimes even the sex of the
applicants. This created an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, absolute
objectivity in selecting the board members reigned; on the other, I certainly
desired a diverse board--one balanced between nationality, race, age, and sex.
The sensitive nature of the journal's content demanded so.
After verifying the legitimacy of each applicant, I opted to correspond with
them exclusively through e-mail to retain as much objectivity as possible.
Fortunately, the appointed board contained established scholars in disparate
fields and of varied origins.
In October 2000, after the
formation of the editorial board, usa-sa.com was renamed to "Safundi."
The invented word deconstructs as follows: "S" represents "South Africa," "a"
symbolizes "America," and "fundi" originates from the Xhosa verb, "-funda,"
which translates as "to read," or "to learn."
"Safundi" was selected because of its recognition value and its African roots.
The new title also alleviated anxiety over American egocentrism by having an "s"
as the first and most prominent letter. Although the journal's web address is
safundi.com, the omission of the Internet suffix serves our goal of aligning
with an academic audience rather than with online commercialism.
As of today, Safundi is accredited by the South African Department of Education. It is
a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal edited by more than thirty distinguished
scholars primarily in the United States and South Africa. Christopher Saunders
of the University of Cape Town and Rita Barnard of the University of Pennsylvania
serve as the journal's editors-in-chief. Our community of more than two thousand
scholars accesses Safundi exclusively through its web site. As an
academic online journal, Safundi also offers a bibliography,
a database of comparative syllabi, and an online directory. It is a community that could
not have been created at any other time. With the advent of the Internet and the
fall of apartheid in the 1990s, Safundi has taken advantage of its unique
position in history.
-- Andrew Offenburger
offenburger@safundi.com
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