International affairs students revived an organization this semester focused on African politics and U.S.-Africa relations after a year of inaction, aiming to raise community awareness of Africa’s role in global affairs on campus.
Operation U.S.-Africa hosts speaker events featuring African officials and holds discussions on topics related to the continent, including politics, international influences and domestic issues in specific countries. The group’s student leaders said they plan to expand discussions beyond security issues to include topics like local infrastructure projects and economic development in specific African countries as the group works to strengthen its presence on campus after a year of inactivity.
OPUS Africa hosts general body meetings every few weeks on different topics relating to the African continent, where students take turns researching and presenting. The group’s most recent meeting last week focused on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam — a dam and hydroelectric power plant on the Nile River in Ethiopia — which they hosted in tandem with GW’s Ethiopian-Eritrean Students Association.
The group also hosts speaker events, like a September presentation about counterterrorism in Mozambique with Ambassador of Botswana to the United States Mpho Churchill O. Mophuting.
Robert Jackson, OPUS Africa’s vice president, said master’s students first founded the organization in spring 2024 to discuss security-related issues in Africa, like election security. He said the previous leadership, comprised of master’s students, had busy workloads that caused the group to remain inactive for much of the 2024-25 academic year.
Jackson said OPUS Africa’s initial focus on security issues is a crucial component of discussions on Africa, but the organization’s new leadership wants to expand beyond the original security-based discussions and focus on other topics relevant to the African continent, like business and economic related topics.
“We thought that Africa is more than just a war zone or that kind of topic,” Jackson said. “That’s usually what dominates the discussion, but there’s so much opportunity and really interesting stuff.”
Jordan Grossman, OPUS Africa’s finance officer, said the organization’s leadership is a completely new slate of students, all of whom have an interest in further educating themselves and other students about the African continent. She said they all feel they haven’t had an adequate education on the continent because there are few African-based courses available in the Elliott School of International Affairs.
Students in the Elliott School can pursue a concentration in African studies, which includes courses on African international politics or literature from the continent, and all international affairs majors must take a “regional foundation” course, which could include a course related to the African continent, according to the University Bulletin. The Elliott School also has the Institute for African Studies, but the school does not offer a major in African studies, unlike Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies.
Grossman said they are working on expanding the club’s focus beyond African security policy and U.S.-Africa relations to include domestic issues as well, like the ongoing civil war in Sudan, which began in 2023. She said the group is also interested in exploring economic development in Africa, along with infrastructure and the influence of the United States and Russia on African politics.
Grossman said she believes students overlook the African continent, favoring other countries and regions, like China and the Middle East. She said she believes if countries like Nigeria, which have a larger population in Africa, continue to grow, they will become more crucial on the global political stage, and GW students should be more interested in learning about them.
Grossman said she wants students, like those who attended their event on Botswana, to become informed about the African continent, not just from the U.S. and foreign relations perspective but domestic politics and culture as well.
“Our modern OPUS Africa is more concerned also with economic welfare in Africa and what actual Africans in African countries want for their countries,” Grossman said. “Because it’s not always, ‘Oh, we want more U.S. aid,’ maybe they want roads or trains or something.”
Grant Perry, the group’s outreach director, said he wants OPUS Africa to expand students’ knowledge of the continent as a whole, like African domestic issues, international politics and cultural traditions, especially as African countries see growth in different sectors, including technology advancements, like in Kenya.
“We want to be just facilitating discussion because there’s a lot of other foreign policy clubs, there’s some related to China, there’s some related to whatever, but we want to be one solely on Africa that can get good speaker events and facilitate discussion,” Perry said.
Perry said that OPUS Africa is accepting applicants for students interested in conducting research about the continent, which will be published in their online journal after it goes through an editing process. He said students can submit papers they wrote for other classes or write them with the organization’s help on different topics, adding that he himself wrote a governance article about terrorism in Mali and West Africa.
“We have one on security and conflict, we have a governance one, we have an economic one, African diaspora and African history, those are the five subtopics,” Perry said.
Matthew Volfson, the organization’s president, said the group would like to conduct site visits to embassies and think tanks related to U.S.-African relations. He said the site visits align with the club’s broader goal of connecting students with African officials for potential internships and future career aspirations, given D.C.’s international presence.
“But also for people who are hired, that kind of know what they are doing already, like myself and some of my e-board members, we’re giving people a professional opportunity to get into the door,” Volfson said.
Volfson said a goal he has for this year is to expand OPUS Africa’s collaborations with African cultural organizations, such as EESA, addressing a lack of collaboration between organizations he believes many groups on campus overlook. He also said he wants to include more speaker events, which can pique students’ interests in the continent and expose students to networking opportunities.
“We believe that we can help people either who don’t know what they want to do, freshmen and sophomores, understand how interesting Africa is because we’re providing these interesting speakers who are high-level diplomats,” Volfson said.
