These notes are published at the request of the editor, but with great diffidence on the part of the author. In 1982, when I was completing a study of the European partition of West Africa — begun quarter of a century earlier, in what seems a different historiographical era — I agreed at short notice to offer some reflections on my French sources to a symposium of the African Studies Association (UK). This was in no sense a systematic survey. Manuscript sources in France are covered supremely well in the two volume Guide published in 1971 by the International Council on Archives, and any attempt to survey printed sources would have been a major bibliographical exercise. My own research was essentially a study of relations between European and African politics in the later nineteenth century, and what I offer here are essentially user's notes and comparisons with British sources.

In April of this year John Walford, Head of Modern Records at the PRO, gave a paper to the SCOLMA AGM on the preliminary findings of an investigation of the Zanzibar Archives covering their content and condition and proposals for their preservation. The essence of those proposals was a training/salvage workshop programme, which was carried out in Zanzibar from late July through August. The workshops were hosted by the Zanzibar Government and sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust and commercial firms in Tanzania, the UK, Kenya and Germany.

The programme comprised three concurrent workshops: Paper Conservation, Arrangement and Description of Documents and Archives Administration and Records Management. Each aimed to review or teach the fundamental procedures in its field, to provide practical supervised experience in dealing with real record problems and to achieve as much basic work on the records themselves as possible.

Lesotho originated as an independent African kingdom whose 19th-century monarch, King Moshoeshoe, suffered the humiliation of seeing his people's lands diminished as a result of confrontations with white settlers on the High Veld.

Not long after the creation of the Orange Free State Republic in 1854, the process of encroachment escalated, and at one point it seemed likely to lead to the extinction of Lesotho as an independent policy. King Moshoeshoe, however, astutely invited British intervention, and Lesotho survived, though it had by then lost much of its best agricultural land. The country remained under British rule for the period 1868 to 1966, a period during which it was known as Basutoland.

A number of recent developments in South Africa both on the political front and on the literary scene, could be termed ‘radical’, depending on one's own political and literary perspectives. I myself, for example, am not enthusiastic about the so-called radical reform of South Africa's parliamentary system, which has been much in the news lately. Although this move will give a tiny minority of black South Africans a limited form of representation in parliament, it seems to me to leave the essential power structures untouched. To members of the ultra-right wing political parties, on the other hand, this move appears to threaten the very foundations of white civilisation, and should be resisted at all costs.