We have recently completed the draft of a book on the changing representation of East African wildlife from the 1940s to the 1980s. We have used many published texts as well as visual representations such as photographs, films, and television. The output of material in these years was huge. We suggest that these media representations were a significant, and neglected, element in the emergence of a global animal-centric conservationist ethos. This article discusses some of the people involved and the papers, many of them in private hands, that we used. We believe that this is valuable material and should, where possible, be acquired by archives. The material is scattered, especially in Kenya, the UK, and USA. In the UK, the University of Bristol library now houses the Wildscreen film archives and also some private papers that could form the foundation for a larger collection.

With which sources can we write environmental histories of mining and oil drilling in Africa? Paradoxically, the pollution and environmental disruption caused by extractive industries are at once omnipresent and difficult to trace. In documentary evidence, multinational companies are hesitant to disclose the full extent of their polluting activities. In order to understand how people living around sites of extraction make sense of polluted rivers or suffocating smoke, we argue that archives need to be pluralized. State and company archives can fruitfully be paired with newspaper collections, oral history interviews, cultural production (songs, poems and literary works) and photography. Using examples from Johannesburg, Mazowe, the Central African Copperbelt and the Niger Delta, we map sources and methodologies that might be employed to grasp people’s lived experiences of environmental change in localities of resource extraction.

Participants in the International Conference on Manding Studies, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in summer 1972, were contacted to share memories of the event in recognition of its fiftieth anniversary and while such recollections could still be gathered. An event in honour of fifty years of kora music at SOAS was also documented, bringing the project into the present. The result was a lengthy special feature in MANSA Kibaru, the newsletter of the Mande Studies Association (MANSA), in early 2023. Given the strong positive response from the MANSA community, which has historically looked back to the 1972 conference as a predecessor, it was decided to revise the newsletter’s special feature as a separate publication. This is an account of the process of bringing the commemoration together, the key contributors, and the timing and connections that shaped the outcome. It provides details that do not appear in the published commemoration. Some questions at the beginning of the project were cleared up by the evidence and accounts gathered. The Manding Conference’s ‘filiation’ or influence is touched upon, including the founding of MANSA. The selective and incomplete nature of this ‘memory making’ initiative is acknowledged.

An important and timely recent article by Hans Zell on Nigerian university presses prompts wider questions about the state of Nigerian scholarly publishing, how universities in general and journal publishers in particular adapt, and how libraries access scholarly outputs. This brief response to the article seeks to widen the discussion and encourage further research and action on the subject.

Henry Miyinzi Chakava (26 April 1946–8 March 2024), often described as ‘the godfather of book publishing in Africa’, started his early career at the Kenyan branch of Heinemann Educational Books, later to become the indigenously-owned East African Educational Publishers in Nairobi. He was Kenya’s first African book editor in 1972, at a time when there were still few books or educational materials published in African languages, and he devoted much his life to preserving and boosting the region’s languages. He was also a courageous and highly enterprising publisher who has made a massive and lasting contribution to indigenous publishing and the book trade in Africa. Henry Chakava has written extensively, perceptively, and eloquently on many topics as they relate to publishing and the book world in Africa, as is reflected in this annotated bibliography. Also included are a number of profiles, interviews, and obituaries.