The goal of this course is to foster a critical engagement with humanitarian interventions in Africa. Through this course, we will develop a better understanding of the complexity of humanitarianism and its often-unintended consequences in different parts of Africa. Our approach is not prescriptive in the sense that it provides a course of action or a politics to follow. Instead, we use historical methodology as an analytical tool in evaluating the connections between humanitarianism and Africa over more than two hundred years.

This is a Freshman & Sophomore seminar. Africa is often understood as a site of suffering, whether because of conflict, poverty, endemic disease, environmental degradation, or lack of religious enlightenment. In the increasingly interconnected modern world, these perceived problems have demanded international interventions as remedies. In this course, we will explore new ways of seeing the history of Africa as bound up with international humanitarian institutions. We will treat topics including anti-slavery, development, aid organizations, environmental policy and religious proselytization of both Christians and Muslims.

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Requirements class fulfills