In the era of information explosion, published material is no longer the apanage of specialized journals. Researchers in all fields — and African literature is no exception — must gather data that are scattered in eclectic publications. For instance, three journals that do not specialize in literature recently published the following articles: Teisseyre, Ch. ‘Interrogation sur la littérature africaine d'expression francaise'. Revue Francaise d'Histoire du Livre 48 (1979): 805-811; Yaek'Olingo, Wufele. ‘Brefs regards sur l'image de l'autorité post-coloniale dans le roman africain de langue francaise’. Genève-Afrique 19 (1) (1981): 103-122; Menga, Guy. ‘Expérience d'un dramaturge: l'essor du théâtre moderne au Congo’. Ethnopsychologie 35 (2-3) (April-Sept. 1980): 81-86. In this study, several interdisciplinary indexes which cover journals pertaining to francophone African literature (including but not limited to, monographs, collective works, dissertations, and proceedings of conferences) are analyzed and compared in terms of their coverage, relevancy and currency.

In July 2010 I discovered the National Archives (Kew, London) while working on a dual project: my doctoral thesis, and a grant awarded by the Olympic Studies Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland. My goal was to conduct a comparative historical analysis of the administrative and political colonial situations of the United Kingdom and France. I wanted to understand their influence on the integration of the former British and French colonies into the Olympic movement between the end of the Second World War (1945) and the hosting of the Olympic Games in London (1948) on the one hand, and colonial independence in Africa in the 1960s on the other, reflected at the IOC by the creation of the Committee for International Olympic Aid (CIOA) to help the new countries in the Third World.

The online searching of databases to retrieve bibliographical information is increasingly becoming common research practice in a wide range of disciplines. For the scholar of African studies there is as yet no single comprehensive database covering the literature from the continent on a multi-disciplinary basis; however there are a number of existing databases which serve as a useful and up-to-date bibliographical tool. The aim of this paper is briefly to outline those currently available databases which are of relevance to African studies and to offer some suggestions as to how this valuable service may best be utilised.

Online information retrieval services first became readily available to the public in the early 1970s, chiefly in the area of science and technology.

My presentation divides into two parts. The first explains what BDEEP is in terms of how the project originated, how it is administered and financed and what it is (and what it is not) intended to achieve. The second looks more closely at the place of Africa within the project by explaining at greater length the contents of some of the volumes and by introducing a number of documents which will be included.

First then the background to the project. BDEEP has its origins in two earlier collections of published documents concerning the end of British rule in South and South-East Asia. The first is Constitutional Relations between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power, 1942-1947, which was edited by Professor Nicholas Mansergh and published in twelve volumes between 1970 and 1983 by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO).

The formalisation of African Studies in Canada began in December 1962 when a Committee on African Studies in Canada was formed. The Committee was established with the encouragement of the Social Science Research Council and the Overseas Institute of Canada. At the initial meeting the Committee stated its purposes to be: the promotion of African studies in Canada, the creation of a national organisation for scholars interested in Africa in Canadian universities, the representation of Canada at the International Congress of Africanists and the publication of a newsletter. The first president was Professor Ronald Cohen of McGill University.

The first newsletter was published in November 1963 as The Bulletin of African Studies in Canada. Three volumes, each of two issues, were published, the last in May of 1966.

When I began researching for my talk, I started by consulting the published volume celebrating SCOLMA's 50th anniversary that came out of the 2012 conference on African studies in the digital age: disconnect? I turned to the index at the back of the book to see how many times the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) was mentioned. There were three entries. The first included the programme amongst a list of projects that have supported or funded both large-scale and smaller digitisation initiatives in the region. The second mention was slightly more critical in tone, saying that the programme should provide more technical and logistical assistance, and the last reference was a brief sentence about a Gambian historian who had consulted the digitised Muslim court rolls from one of our projects when writing his doctoral thesis.

A consistent feature of contemporary research into the colonial period is the emphasis on personalities. The modern historian is increasingly aware of how cogently he may need to identify and interpret who was who before he can start to explain why was what. In support of this human approach, one may cite the view of the most recent historian of empire. “Personality not policy”, argues Martin Daly in the first volume of his history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Empire on the Nile (1986), “determined the course of the Condominium” (p.452). The same thesis underlay my own earlier profile of Africa's administrators: “Only when we are intimately acquainted with who the imperial administrators are can we proceed to a soundly-based study of imperialism” (The Sudan Political Service, 1982, 1). Robert Collins’ interpretation of the Sudan's administration was postulated on a similar hypothesis:

This paper is a slightly revised version of a lecture given on 16th August 1975 at the Somali Institute of Development Administration and Management in Mogadishu. The text of the lecture was published in the same month, as a booklet, by the Academy of Somali Culture in Mogadishu, but in a limited number of copies only. It was also presented, orally and in absentia, at the Symposium held on 19th September 1975 at the Annual General Meeting of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

In order to make the information which it contains accessible to a wider public I now offer it to readers of African Research and Documentation.

The connection between the Sudan and Durham (England) may not be immediately obvious. Indeed, one might wonder why the largest collection of original research material on the Sudan outside the Sudan, apart from the Public Record Office, London, happens to be in Durham rather than elsewhere. In 1957, the year after the Sudan became independent and some years before the Oxford Colonial Records Project and St. Antony's Middle East Private Papers collection were set up, Durham had the three vital ingredients for successful archival enterprise: knowledge and enthusiasm (Mr. R.L. Hill, lecturer in Modern Near Eastern History at Durham University, formerly of Sudan Government Railways); premises and academic support (Professor T.W. Thacker, Director of the School of Oriental Studies, Durham University); and a sponsor in good standing with potential donors, with a Durham interest (Mr. K.D.D. Henderson, formerly of the Sudan Political Service and Secretary of the Spalding Trust).

African studies has increasingly gained recognition as an area of study on both sides of the Atlantic. For us in the Caribbean it is of particular significance since Africa is the ancestral home of the majority of the population in most of the territories which comprise the English-speaking Caribbean. Among the legacies of colonialism was an education system based on the English curriculum which resulted either in the absence of or a biased representation of Africa in schools. There have been, however, particularly in Jamaica initially, distinct elements in the society for whom Africa had an even greater significance. The movement associated with Marcus Garvey and also the Rastafari cult are both groups which believed that Africa was home and whose members looked forward to the day when they might return there.

The Mill Hill Missionaries (more properly, the St. Joseph's Society for the Missions) was established in 1866 by Fr. Herbert Vaughan, later Archbishop of Westminster. The first missionary field of the society was among the blacks of the American South. However, the major missionary effort of the Mill Hill missionaries has been Africa. In 1894 the Vicariate of the Upper Nile was organized and encompassed the whole of eastern Uganda and western Kenya including Kampala and Busoga. This was divided in 1947 into the Vicariates (later dioceses) of Kampala and Tororo, and later the diocese of Jinja was. formed from Kampala. In western Kenya the Mill Hill missionaries received the Prefecture of Kavirondo in 1925 and this later was divided into the dioceses of Kisii, Kisumu, Ngong, and Kakamega.

Geography is well established as an academic discipline in Britain, and geographers make a substantial contribution to African studies here. About 30 British university teachers are concerned primarily with the human geography of Africa, and for about 30 others it is a subsidiary interest. These individuals are widely scattered around the country (Appendix 1), and their particular concerns are very diverse, so many are not closely in touch with one another. No organization binds them together or reviews their work, and therefore this is a purely personal assessment - though it has benefitted from the comments of several colleagues.

A review such as this is inevitably somewhat arbitrary in its limits, for the studies in question take place within a complex system of interrelationships with a wider range of studies.

This article is based on a talk given to the SCOLMA annual general meeting in 1993 and is, very largely, a personal backward look at my involvement with people, places and African studies since the late 1950s.

When I first went to Africa in the fifties long distance travel was not the commonplace it is now. Uganda, where I took up my first overseas appointment as Librarian to the Department of Agriculture, was then a twenty-four hour flight away with stops at Rome, Benghazi and Khartoum. It is difficult to recapture first impressions on setting foot on African soil but there is a confused memory of heat, blazing sun (at 8 am), and the brilliant colours of the trees, flowers and the dresses of the Baganda women as well as mild cultural shock at finding that all the men wore shorts: I was not prepared for all those hairy knees.