This study investigates the information management in Nigerian Commercial banks; the survey method was adopted for the study. The population constituted the 365 and 248 branches of First Bank and Union Bank respectively. Both purposive and random sampling procedures were used to select the two oldest banks and 129 branches as samples for the study and the 279 samples of the respondents surveyed. The findings revealed that information sources generated are technical reports, statistical data and articles from magazines and newspapers. The technology most used to manage information is electronic mail and computers. Information technology is most important in the storage of data and dissemination of information. The findings indicate that information is used in managerial functions such as planning, controlling, organising, directing and staffing.

This lecture of 2006, never previously published, describes the making of the film Siliva the Zulu, the first fiction film made in sub-Saharan Africa with an all-black cast. It assesses its value as a rare documentary record of rural Zulu life in the 1920s and the subsequent careers of the film maker Attilio Gatti and anthropologist Lidio Cipriani. The latter’s reputation was tarnished by his support for Mussolini, racism, anti-Semitism and fascism.

It has been commonly supposed that there are major factors inherent in tropical environments which make them uniquely problematic, and essentially inhospitable-to agricultural development. They, and especially their soils, are seen as intractable and fragile, and liable to break down irreversibly if man dares to meddle with the delicate, but vaguely conceived and tenuously defined, “ecological balance” (see Gourou, 1953; Stamp, 1953 a,b; Richards, 1952; 1970; Janzen, 1975; inter alia). The unarticulated corollory is that more temperate environments are,to a great extent robust and unproblematic. Both premises may be seriously questioned, and their conjunction is dubious in the extreme. In the first place, though it may be demonstrated with some plausibility that tropical environments have presented obstacles to productive agricultural development, it remains to be shown that these problems are solely the consequence of environmental characteristics, or whether perhaps the major factor is the lack of appropriate ingenuity, with technological inventiveness inhibited by the temperate blinkers of those responsible for technological research.

Archives have significant value as primary sources for a broad range of academic disciplines. In areas where published texts are lacking, such as Ethiopia, archives elucidate the history and culture of the society and clarify the current situation of that society. However, the meaning and influence such archives provide for the people in the society must be discussed.

This paper aims to discuss new perspectives by combining archival research and anthropology. It focuses on the Kafa culture, the collections of Friedrich Julius Bieber (subsequently referred to as F. J. Bieber), recognised as the foremost authority on ethnological research dealing with Kafa in southwestern Ethiopia, and the significance of establishing archives from collections.

The paper first discusses Kafa and its history. After examining previous Kafa research, it concludes that the Kafa people refer to foreign researchers’ work when explaining their own history and culture.

King's College London agreed to participate in the area specialisation scheme in 1966, with responsibility for the publications of the Portuguese African territories, principally because of its well established Portuguese Department. The College Library already possessed a strong collection of Portuguese history, largely as a heritage of Professor Edgar Prestage's term of office as Camoen Professor, and this included most of the basic secondary works on the history of the Portuguese in Africa. Established links with Portuguese Government agencies, particularly in the Instituto de Alta Cultura and the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, brought in, as gifts, a continuing supply of monographs in series such as Estudos, ensaios e documentos and Estudos de Ciencias Politicas e Sociais, many of which dealt with the African territories.

Last year the University of Texas at Austin celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of what was to become the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, an archive named after a former English professor who had risen rapidly up the university's administrative ranks, using his considerable budgetary authority as Dean, Vice President, Provost, President, and finally Chancellor of the entire fifteen-campus University of Texas system to fulfill his vision of establishing in Austin “a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliotheque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation”. To get things started, on September 11,1957, in his position as Director of the university's Rare Book Collection, he wrote a formal letter to himself authorising the expenditure of $25,000 from Special Research Collections in Humanities “to purchase books and materials for the use of the humanities faculty in furthering their research”.

This article explains what has led to privatisation of some library services in Nigerian university libraries, with emphasis on the Ahmadu Bello University Library experience. It also discusses the prospects and problems of already privatised services such as photocopying and word processing. Other viable services for privatisation are enumerated.

The Liberian civil wars spanned fourteen years, from 1989 to 2003. It is estimated that during this time over 250,000 people were killed and more than 1,000,000 were displaced. The wars were covered regularly in American news. Reports characteristically represented the child militias, human sacrifices, and crazed army tactics, including but not limited to soldiers cross-dressing or using nudity as methods of intimidation. Initially, little attention was offered to the greater social and political implications of the war, but recent news coverage and critical research has demanded a change in the way that the civil wars were viewed and addressed, internally and internationally.

The first Liberian civil war was led by the conflicting political factions of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor. These men were backed largely by members of different groups, divided by existing ethnic tensions. These factions divided further as the war progressed, and the war continued long after Doe's assassination in 1990 and his party's defeat.

The IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) is a French research institute serving the Mediterranean and intertropical countries that make science and innovation one of the first levers of their development. It is a French public science and technology establishment (EPST) which is under the dual supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.

The Decree of 1 December 1955 (ORSTOM 1955) organising the services of the Office for Scientific and Technical Research Overseas, published in the Official Journal of the French Republic of 21 December 1955, defines the existence of a documentation centre under the direction of the Institute. Article 6 of the decree states that “le Centre de documentation est charge1 d'assurer le depouillement, la conservation et la diffusion de la documentation scientifique et technique se rapportant aux activitfe de 1'O.R.S.T.O.M.”.

Original drawings and photographs of the natural history of Africa in the libraries of the British Museum (Natural History) are described, and a brief history of the libraries is given. The different kinds of natural history drawings and their purposes, and the importance of original drawings are considered A catalogue of the holdings of original drawings and photographs of Africa concludes the paper.

The UNESCO project for a General History of Africa has been around for some time now. It was launched in 1964 by a resolution of the General Conference of UNESCO, and was essentially a consequence of the accession to the United Nations and to UNESCO of the large number of new African states which secured their independence in the early 1960s. These felt, rightly, that Africa had too long been ‘the dark continent’ of world history, and that it was high time that, the history of its peoples and cultures was placed on the same level of public record as that of the other continents.

The first positive step taken by UNESCO was to call a ‘meeting of experts’ at Abidjan in 1966. This seems to have taken the line that the first thing to be done if the history of Africa were to be written on a major scale was to provide support for research into it.