I am honoured to have been asked to give the keynote speech at this year's SCOLMA conference, especially so for two reasons. Firstly, Terry Barringer, John Pinfold, Mandy Banton, Lucy McCann and others connected with SCOLMA were an invaluable source of assistance and advice when I was researching Tip & Run - The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa. Secondly, if I am honest I feel like a bit of a ‘has been’: Tip & Run was published almost a decade ago and since then scholarship in the field has flourished. The evidence is before us today, with papers on a wide range of new topics to do with World War 1 in Africa.

Since the millennium interest in the Africa campaigns has grown exponentially across a broad front. Knowledge has been advanced by academic and popular historians, medal collectors, descendants of combatants, military associations.

Before war broke out in August 1914, the Union of South Africa had determined to include the German colony of South West Africa in the Union fold if ever an opportunity arose. So, when Britain went to war on 4 August 1914, the British War Cabinet request that South Africa put the German wireless stations in the South West African territory out of action was likely to be met with favourable response. It was, but not by all as this paper will set out.

In 1914, South Africa as a country was only four years old and was still trying to heal the wounds caused by the Anglo-Boer or South African War of 1899-1902. The Union Defence Force (UDF) was even younger, having been approved in 1912. Where the Union had already had a number of years to develop, the UDF was in effect starting from zero.

This article describes the First World War diaries of the King's African Rifles, one of the British African colonial regiments. The documents are held, together with other related material, at The National Archives, Kew, London. The content of these daily accounts of the activities of individual Units is discussed and their position within the structure of the archive is outlined, as is their relationship with certain other categories of War Office and Colonial Office records. It is suggested that the information contained in the war diaries might potentially contribute, apart from the military history of the East African campaign, to a social history of the regiment and to an environmental history of the campaign.

Essex Record Office (ERO) holds many collections containing stories of men and women who served during the First World War. The vast majority refer to men who were posted to the Western Front. However, a recently-deposited family collection included a diary and photographs, which revealed the experiences in an overlooked theatre of war of a motor cyclist with 26th Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps serving in British East Africa. This article is a case study based on the type of papers which can be found in local Record Offices.

The diary was written by Harry Joseph Edward Ripper who was born on 18 September 1897, the second son of Harry Tucker Ripper and Edith Sarah Ripper.

Frederick Njilima, was born in Nyasaland, today's Malawi, a small country of some 48k square miles; slightly smaller than England. It is about 520 miles long by 100 miles at its widest point. Lakes comprise some 20% of the surface area of the country with the largest Lake Nyasa - now called Lake Malawi - being some 360 miles long by about 50 miles at its widest point. It is the third largest lake in Africa and the fourth deepest in the world. At the time of the First World War, Nyasaland shared a border to its north east with German East Africa, today's Tanzania, to the west with Northern Rhodesia, today's Zambia, and with Portuguese East Africa, today's Mozambique to the south west, the south and the east.

Librarians have tended, for various reasons, to neglect comic art and yet it is one of the fastest growing (sub-) genres in Africa today. With the rapid adoption of online media by African artists to present their drawings it is now easier to track down these artists, often hunted remorselessly by politicians keen to censor their ironic barbs. One reason for neglect by libraries has been the difficulty of acquiring comic art from Africa or even from the North about Africa given that ‘comics’ are often outside the normal trade spheres, and with that in mind this article seeks to offer practical suggestions for those wishing to build their collections in this area. I first sketch the background to comic art and libraries, then discuss the ‘art of collecting', particularly from Africa, and finally raise questions of digital art.