On the last four pages of Nigel Pavitt's photographic history of Kenya: a country in the making (reviewed in ARD , pp.55-56) are a series of pictures of Kenyan settler Raymond Hook catching and training cheetahs before bringing them to England in 1937 to race against greyhounds at the White City track in London. Never having come across this story before (although I subsequently discovered it briefly featured in a recent edition of the BBC television programme Inside Out), my curiosity was aroused, and what follows is my attempt to reconstruct the full story behind those remarkable images in Pavitt's book.

Africanist scholars seeking archives on Africa and Africans often travel back to the continent to conduct research, or more commonly, to the various repositories of former colonial powers in Western Europe to find their information. However, there are some archives located in the United States that, although they are not dedicated exclusively to Africanist materials, contain an array of resources relevant to Africanist research. One such archive is that of the American Baptist Historical Society (ABHS).

The American Baptist Historical Society was founded in 1853, and, according to a conversation with Communications and Reading Specialist Betsy Dunbar, contains many records “by, about, for, and against Baptists.”

Cataloguing principles and the rules that evolve from them have not been devised in a cognitive vacuum. The evolution took place in a Western cultural context and inevitably presents the problem of biases. When these cataloguing rules are applied to materials originating from non-Western cultures such biases surface and often constitute serious difficulties. This is the case with Africana materials that have caused and are still causing numerous problems to many a cataloguer. For example, many authors (Iwuji 1989, Aderibidge and Udo 1990) have pointed out the inadequacy of Library of Congress (LC) and Dewey Decimal (DD) classification schemes with regard to Africana materials claiming that they are restrictive, inhospitable, unfair, and biased.

A major constraint to the study of the visual arts as a school subject in Nigeria today is the dearth of art literature such as learned journals and textbooks. Several factors have also contributed to this problem. It is the objective of this paper to examine these and assess their impact on the study of visual arts in Nigeria in contemporary times. In doing this, it will mention the efforts that some individuals, groups of persons and organisations have made and are still making to address the problem. It concludes by stating that much could still be done to meet the demands for books on visual arts in order to enhance the study of the subject now and in the future.