In the first part of this article we showed that evidence from the Colenso papers, held at the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House in Oxford, together with other sources, throws new light on the role of Frank Colenso, the second son of Bishop Colenso, in the African Association, the Pan-African Conference of 1900 and the Pan-African Association (PAA) that grew out of the conference. We now consider the part played by Frank Colenso in the dissolution of the PAA in 1901 while its secretary, Henry Sylvester Williams [see fig 1], was in the Caribbean. We are able to throw new light on the attempt by Williams to revive the organisation and offer an alternative interpretation to that provided in the contemporary record of the dissolution that most historians have relied on.

Since the introduction of a national orthography in 1972 books and articles by Somali authors have been finding their way on an increasing scale into library catalogues in universities and centres of learning outside Somalia. Somali author entries are likely to present some difficulty for cataloguers and library users not acquainted with the Somali cultural background, and these brief notes are offered in the hope that they will be of some use to them.

As in many other Muslim countries, surnames are not normally used in Somalia. Instead, a person is identified by a sequence of names which begins with the given name, followed by the name of his or her father and sometimes also by the name of his or her grandfather. This is reminiscent of the system used in Arabic, except that the words corresponding to ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ are omitted.

Much historical evidence for the activities and reception of early African converts and indigenous Christian movements is found in the vast corpus of documentation produced and preserved by western missionary societies in Europe. In order to understand the evidence, historians, archivists and librarians do well to comprehend the nature of the sources that they use. In recent years there has been greater attention to archives as collections in order to appreciate the rationale behind historical events, personages and thought. This short essay gives some background to these historiographical issues before examining the outputs of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries in order to provide a case-study that may be a useful comparator for similar collections. My reflections emerge from my own research into socio-religious change in East Africa through a biography of a prominent Ugandan clergyman, Apolo Kivebulaya, who worked alongside CMS missionaries from the British Isles.

This article is an attempt to chart the chronology of a Library crisis and rescue, a crisis which attracted much attention from the national and professional press. It is very much a personal account. Others would tell it differently. It is an unashamedly partial account. Partial in both senses. There are some aspects of the story I do not know. I did not share in all the deliberations of the great and good and of the mercenary, muddled and misguided, which brought the Library to the brink of disaster and back and then to Cambridge. It is partial, because I find it difficult to be objective about this Library, which has always had the capacity to rouse strong emotions in its custodians and users - which is one of the reasons for its survival.

The connections between our work as librarians, archivists or scholars of Africa and the structural foundations of research (in the form of archives, documentation, and publications) we often take for granted. This paper focuses on our ethical responsibilities towards acquisition of Africana, but the principles proposed as ethical guidelines are applicable to other kinds of research, such as fieldwork. I first discuss ethical questions in general and then address how ethics relates to African studies and Africana librarianship. I discuss related problems such as what I term the African “document drain.” In a forthcoming ARD article (Limb 2002c), I elaborate upon these themes with particular emphasis on how emerging new models of partnerships, together with new electronic tools, might help mitigate such problems.

Book aid is complex, problematic, and sometimes controversial, but the literature and research on book donation programmes for Africa is surprisingly scant. In particular there is only a very small number of papers or studies written by African librarians or other book professionals who have benefitted from, or have been involved in processing and distributing book donations.

The websites of many book charities contain glowing reports and endorsements about their activities, but publicly accessible evaluations of book donation schemes are still rare, as are independent investigative studies. There are only a few case studies that have evaluated donation schemes in terms of a set of identified needs. It is therefore timely, I believe, for book donation programmes to come under some further scrutiny.

Photography which has traditionally been classified as “ethnographic” or “anthropological” has received considerable attention in recent years and some of the major contributions to the field have been on African images, presenting analytical histories of photographic production and use, for instance Geary's analysis of photographs of Bamum in the Cameroon Grassfields (1988). I am not going to review this literature or the particular issues raised by it as there have been various such useful exercises, for instance Geary (1991) and Roberts (1988); nor am I going to consider the merits of specific collections because this would merely regurgitate much of what was said on the subject, and subsequently published (Roberts 1989a), during a two day seminar convened by Andrew Roberts which took place at S.O.A.S. London in 1988.

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.

Death in the Ghanaian society is regarded as one of the rites of passage that mark the transition from the present world to the other. It is believed to extend family relationship into infinity and therefore great effort is put into organising befitting funerals. In planning the funeral, a document, which the paper calls the funeral brochure, is prepared. These funeral brochures have become a valuable source of historical, social and biographical information. This article examines 107 Ghanaian funeral brochures belonging to all classes of people in the society, printed between 1993 and 2006. It provides insight into the various pieces of information contained in these brochures that qualify them as a rich source of biographical information. The paper concludes by calling on librarians to begin acquiring funeral brochures as part of their collections.

There may appear to be little point in an “outsider” attempting to write about the censorship of the historical record. Those employed to vet official records in Great Britain perform their task behind closed doors; and since even the titles of the files they continue to withhold are often kept a secret, scholars have little opportunity to question their decisions. As editor of the Central Africa volume of the British Documents on the End of Empire project (BDEEP), my own status is certainly that of an outsider. Established in 1987, BDEEP seeks to make available an edited and annotated selection of British government documents from The National Archives (TNA), formerly the Public Record Office, charting developments in colonial policy during the decolonisation era. Yet although its volumes are published by the Stationery Office, BDEEP is emphatically not an official publication.

In this paper, I have chosen to interpret the term “Africana” quite widely and I shall discuss both primary and secondary sources. I shall refer, in particular, to my home institution, the University of Cape Town Libraries, because that is the one of which I, naturally, have most knowledge. I have tried, however, to gather as much information as I can from colleagues in other institutions in South Africa, so as to give my talk as wide a base as possible.

I should like to tell you about some of the challenges that currently face African Studies collections, about recent legislation that affects the access to information in South Africa, as well as some of the ways in which South African history is being recorded and is being made available electronically.

Originally named the Colonial Society, and also known variously in the stages of its history as the Royal Colonial Institute (1870-1928) and the Royal Empire Society (1928-1958), the Royal Commonwealth Society was founded in 1868 as ‘a place of meeting for all gentlemen connected with the Colonies and British India’ and as a centre for the study of colonial affairs. A library was one of the major objects of its founders and photographic material was early seen as an integral part of a collection attempting to present a comprehensive survey of the concerns of empire. The Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute for 1896, and for several succeeding years, invited ‘donations of photographs of the various Colonies … from Fellows and others’, and this brief appeal seems to have met with considerable success on an individual level, with many accessions dating from around this period.