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From
the Desk of Secretariat
A
Call for Your Support
The
Encyclopaedia Africana Project
(EAP) was established with the objective of
initiating, facilitating and producing peer-reviewed articles
from all over Africa and elsewhere on biographies, history,
economic systems, architecture, religion medicine and other
aspects of indigenous African life. These articles were to
be published into a series of volumes as the:
Encyclopaedia
Africana:
Dictionary of African Biography®™
To
co-ordinate the above activities, a Secretariat for the EAP was established in Ghana in 1962, under the auspices of the then
Ghana Academy of Learning. Presently however, the
Secretariat functions under Ghana's Ministry of Education -
Tertiary Education Division.
At the
inception of the EAP, an international Standing Committee
consisting of a member of each participating African Country,
was constituted. The Committee's basic function was to
periodically set the agenda of the Secretariat and to identify
authors.
The
international socio-economic support received by the EAP in its
initial years mainly stemmed from the involvement, enthusiasm
and dynamism of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first
President and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, who also became the
first Director of the Project.
Dr.
W.E.B. Du Bois died in 1963, in Ghana, West Africa. Barely
three years later Dr. Nkrumah's presidency was terminated.
By
1967, due mainly to the absence of the two pillars of the EA
Project, and other political and economic changes in Africa, the
financial base of the Secretariat could not allow the Project to
efficiently pursue its set objectives.
The
Standing Committee therefore, directed the Secretariat to
concentrate on publishing a 20-volume
Encyclopaedia Africana: Dictionary of African Biography®™ . Each volume was to cover a country or a
group of countries, depending on the number of biographical
articles.
Your contributions are greatly appreciated.
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