Edwin Munger - First Fulbrighter to Africa
Fulbright Student to Tanzania and Uganda
Field: Geography
Grant Dates: 1949, 1951-1952
Edwin Munger, the first Fulbrighter to Africa
In 1951, Edwin Munger was pictured in the Institute of International Education's Annual Report, standing in front of Mt. Kilimanjaro with his wife. Munger was a Fulbright Fellow that year, conducting geographical research in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Since then, Munger became a world-recognized authority on Africa, traveled to the continent 86 times, and visited every African country.
The first Fulbright Fellow to Africa, Munger was a founder-trustee of the African Studies Association and the U.S.-South African Leader Program, a board member of the Institute of Race Relations in South Africa, and, for 14 years, President of the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, an organization working to increase scientific knowledge and public understanding of human origins and evolution. In 1985, Munger founded the Cape of Good Hope Foundation to help mostly black universities in Southern Africa, and subsequently sent more than three million dollars worth of books to help those institutions. Munger amassed a library of over 45,000 volumes on Sub-Saharan Africa, the largest private collection in the U.S. and a unique cultural resource.
Edwin Munger passed away in June 2010, but his spirit of inquiry and openness to Africa and the rest of the world lives on. As he said, "One of the joys of being a geographer is that the world is my oyster, world travel my most stimulating teacher."
To the U.S.-Tanzania Fulbright Program