1st Edition
Sixty Years of Service in Africa The U.S. Peace Corps in Cameroon
Based on previously unused primary sources obtained from both sides of the Atlantic, this study provides a more fundamental, consistent, and balanced source-based assessment of the role of the U.S. Peace Corps across its entire existence in Africa. The study sheds light on a new and intriguing historical perspective of the Peace Corps’ meaning and significance. Though the main trust is Cameroon, the study offers a window to understanding Peace Corps performance in all of Africa, and the larger global community. It examines Volunteers’ service in countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, and Guinea, showing how the agency transitioned from a Cold War agency to the Post-Cold War era, while asking important questions about the continuous relevance of Peace Corps in Africa.
In addressing the topic, the book goes beyond the Peace Corps and delves into America’s "Achilles heels," which was the culture of anti-black racism, showing how it impacted U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era. The book interrogates modernization theories showing how those ideas shaped the creation of the Peace Corps, but ultimately contributed to the agency’s problems. The book questions the Peace Corps’ effectiveness as a development organization and much more. Yet for all the agency’s problems, the Peace Corps served as a rite of passage for returned Volunteers to make everlasting contributions to American life and society.
This book contributes to modern African and American studies, and to diplomatic history.
Biography
Julius A. Amin is Professor of History at the University of Dayton. His books include African Immersion (2016), The Peace Corps in Cameroon (1992), Post-Colonial Cameroon: Politics, Economy, and Society (co-edited, 2018) and articles in many journals including African Studies Review, Journal of Modern African Studies, Africa Today, and The International Journal of African Historical Studies.
"Do we still need the Peace Corps? Julius Amin provides a resounding answer: yes. His smart, carefully researched book represents the first full examination of the Peace Corps in a single country across the agency’s six-decade history. The Peace Corps is not perfect, Amin shows, but it remains a force for good in our nation and our world. Anyone who wants to understand its past—or think about its future—will have to read this book."
- Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History of Education, University of Pennsylvania
"The scholarship that went into this book is superior…. The author’s sophisticated and timely use of quotes from the diaries of returned PCV and the many photos of government officials in Washington DC, and Peace Corps Volunteers in various settings in Cameroon …reminds me of my experience as a young student in Cameroon who had the privilege of having been taught by these Volunteers. The …work is timely, bridging history, political science, cultural anthropology and international relations. I will highly recommend it to foreign policy experts, policy makers in both the United States and Africa, scholars and graduate students."
- Joseph Takougang, Professor of History, University of Cincinnati
"By far the most thorough and comprehensive study of the Peace Corps role on the African continent. A great resource for scholars of the Cold War, US-African relations, or humanitarian aspects of US foreign policy. Amin's case study of Peace Corps activities in Cameroon provides insight into the organization's experience from all sides: the US government, Cameroon government, local communities served, and the volunteers themselves through an impressive collection of government documents from both the US and Cameroon and questionnaires completed by both former Peace Corps Volunteers and individuals from the local communities in which they served."
- Philip E. Muehlenbeck, author of Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders
"For six decades, the Peace Corps has helped define American engagement with the African continent. Julius Amin takes us on a deep dive into this relationship through the experiences of Peace Corps volunteers in the crucial West African nation of Cameroon from the 1960s to the present. Sixty Years of Service in Africa explores the lives of these influential young American representatives and their impact on Cameroonian society. Grounded in extensive archival research, Amin’s timely new book helps explain the contours of contemporary African life on a continent now at the heart of global great power competition."
- Thomas ("Tim") Borstelmann, Thompson Professor of Modern World History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
"Amin has written an essential, engaging overview of Cameroon's history since independence and the role Peace Corps volunteers played in it--for better and worse--shaped by the challenges and limits of cross-cultural understanding."
- Elizabeth Cobbs, author of All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s
"Drawing on a treasure trove of new sources about the Peace Corps’ activities in Cameroon, this book provides fresh insight into Peace Corps volunteers’ work, thoughts, and everyday lives from the 1960s to the present. Amin skillfully interweaves stories of volunteer experiences with details of Cameroonian politics and culture, as well as the geopolitics of the Cold War and beyond. The result is a fascinating account of the continuity of the agency’s operations in Cameroon, and the successes and challenges volunteers have faced, over the past sixty years."
- Molly Geidel, author of Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties
