It is an honour to have been invited to address a SCOLMA conference on such an auspicious anniversary. Birthday greetings are clearly in order - but I did wonder about the inscription in my card. Dryden seemed a bit frivolous: “I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty”. And Shakespeare's sonnet is too gloomy:

I considered Benjamin Franklin's opinion: “At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.” But I have opted instead for the refrain of a music hall classic, My Old Dutch:

Leaving to one side the sui generis Royal African Society, which in 2000 marked its centenary with a special history (Rimmer and Kirk-Greene, 2000), the formalised study of Africa in British academia may be said to be approaching its 80th year. For it was in 1926 that the International African Institute, originally the Institute of African Languages and Cultures, was founded in London, followed two years later by the maiden issue of its journal for practising Africanists, Africa, still among the flagship journals in the African field. Indeed, the 1920s were alive with new institutions promoting an interest in African affairs, whether it be the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1924); the Phelps-Stokes Commission reports on education in British Africa (1920-24), culminating in the Colonial Office Memorandum on Education Policy (1925); the major contribution to public awareness made by the Empire Exhibition at Wembley, however politically incorrect some of its idiom seems today; or the attention generated by the League of Nations’ Mandates Commission, the bulk of whose remit was focused on Africa and whose British representative was no less than Lord Lugard, the biggest “Africanist” of his day.

In terms of African scholarly resources, the new millennium has begun much as the last ended. Book and journal famines, limited Internet connectivity outside capital cities, and continuing brain and document drains that sap the resources and morale of African scholars and libraries. Co-operation among Africana librarians and between scholars and information workers thus has never been more urgent. The author reports on several important new projects focusing on electronic scholarly communication, publishing, and information resources, including the African e-Journals Project, African Journals Online, and the African Online Digital Library. He also draws attention to the contradictions and ethical issues apparent in some Western collecting practices, for instance the deployment of Western financial muscle to acquire African collections.

Almost ten years ago to the day I gave a talk at SCOLMA's 1992 annual general meeting on African documentation in the Netherlands, and possibilities for European co-operation. My talk focused on the Afrika-Studiecentrum (ASC) in Leiden and the work of the Library and Documentation Department. This talk, too, will focus on the Afrika-Studiecentrum. As the only research and documentation centre in the Netherlands devoted exclusively to Africa, the Afrika-Studiecentrum plays a pivotal role in Dutch African Studies and, as in 1992,1 happen to work there, so it is what I know best. I would like to tell you something about the Afrika Studiecentrum's origins and objectives, its research programme and the work of the Library, Documentation and Information Department.

Africana resources and collections: three decades of development and achievement, edited by Julian W. Witherell, and published by Scarecrow Press in 1989, is a festschrift honouring Hans Panofsky, a pioneer in Africana librarianship. It was, and continues to be, a fitting tribute to a man who was a leading figure in the promotion of co-ordinated co-operative programmes for acquisitions and bibliographic control of Africana from 1959 to 1989. This one volume with contributing articles by Hans’ Africana colleagues contains a wealth of historical information about librarianship, cataloguing, and the acquisitions of Africana for that time period. An update of this volume is now due.

Within the last two decades, there have been many significant developments in American libraries. This short presentation will not attempt to bridge that distance. Instead, it will offer a brief accounting of fairly recent Africana activity in selected American libraries.

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.

The word “Luso” comes from an old constellation of Iberian-Celtic tribes established in the mountainous areas of today's Portugal and Spain. They were a warlike people who offered fierce resistance to the Roman conquest. However, once the territory was conquered, the romanisation was so intense that, apart from one or two words, little remained of the previous cultural legacy. One cannot even affirm that this ancestral people, the Lusitans, were the main basis of today's Portuguese population. We can, however, see the undeniable importance of these tribes from their numerous archaeological remains. However, as Jorge Dias, an eminent Portuguese anthropologist notes: “the country was destined to be a meeting point of many races, coming from the Mediterranean, like the Phoenicians, who secured the ports, and others from the extreme north, like the Normans who invaded its coasts”.

In the last ten years researchers have become accustomed to being able to search the catalogues of university and research libraries remotely: first using the Telnet protocol, but increasingly via the World Wide Web. It has been many years since personal visits to such libraries were necessary in order to discover information about their printed book holdings. Users of academic libraries with these facilities are now used to exploring collections from a distance and arranging access to off-site items in advance of their visit. Union catalogues such as COP AC, which provides access to the holdings of 22 UK university libraries and the British Library, have made resource discovery easier still. For archives, however, the situation has been less straightforward.

Nigeria, independent since 1960, is today a country with a population of over 120 million, of whom only about 30% are literate. Serving that population are 25 universities, 35 polytechnics and 60 colleges of education. The North, twothirds of the landmass of the country, holds slightly over 60% of the total population of the country.

The Ministry of Education, through the Nigeria Universities Commission, stipulated in the late 1990s that 10% of capital cost should go as library funding to Nigerian universities. There has been a significant increase in the funding of colleges of education with the establishment of the National Commission for Colleges of Education, while the National Board for Technical Education regulates the activities of Polytechnics. All these new developments have come into being since the late 1970s.