Popular African Web site boasts wealth of information

The African Studies Center's Web site quietly racks up more than eight million hits a month.

Unbeknownst to most of the Penn community, the center hosts one of the most -- if not the most -- comprehensive Web site on Africa in the world.

And behind the Web site is a modest self-taught computer expert, the center's Director of Outreach Ali Ali-Dinar. He has run the Web site for the past decade out of his office, now located on the sixth floor of Williams Hall.

The site brings together scholarship on Africa from across the globe and offers extensive educational materials on all the individual countries.

A native of Sudan, Ali-Dinar has been working on developing and expanding the site's contents since its inception in the fall of 1994.

"Back in the early 1990s, he was the person who took the leadership within the Africanist community in the U.S. in seeing the value of Web-based resources on African education," says Coordinator of Outreach Programs at the African Studies Center at Michigan State University John Metzler. "He took this vision and developed some very, very unique resources."

Every few summers, Ali-Dinar journeys to several major African universities in an attempt to find out what the African scholarly community is exploring.

The result has been an ongoing dialogue between the continents, which has often directly benefited the Web site and, in turn, its users.

From the beginning, Ali-Dinar has worked with many organizations to develop and host information and research from Africa.

"Part of our role is listening to African voices about what's happening on the continent," says Lee Cassanelli, the center's former director, adding that Ali-Dinar's Web resources are one of the primary ways that the center accomplishes that goal.

Last summer, Ali-Dinar returned to his homeland in the Darfur region of Sudan where his family and friends still reside. The voyage was a personal journey, which he has been using for public awareness since then.

"It was ... an opportunity for me to go around and see some of the refugee camps that were in the city and [talk] to displaced people and [make] observations," Ali-Dinar says, adding that the material he collected enables him to provide a unique perspective in the many presentations and interviews he has given on the Darfur crisis across the country.

Along with talks on Sudan, Ali-Dinar organizes a number of workshops on Africa-related issues, but the biggest part of his outreach effort is still the Web site.

"Ali is really a serious scholar himself, and I think that helps a lot in his job," Cassanelli says. "He has to exercise good judgment on whether this [material] is really educational or whether it's commercial or partisan propaganda."

In his free time, Ali-Dinar, who originally came to Penn to pursue a Ph.D. in folklore, has been trying to work on a book about his grandfather.

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