The Nigerian Field Society was founded in 1930. The original rules stated that The object of the Society is to encourage interest in the fauna and flora of Nigeria, its history, legends and customs, its native arts and crafts, its science, sport and hobbies. Its interests soon extended to other parts of West Africa. The first issue of its journal - The Nigerian Field - appeared in 1931 and it has continued to be published regularly. The Society is active in Nigeria and also has a Branch in the United Kingdom.

In 1990 the main event of the UK branch was a symposium on Nigerian Archives, held at Rhodes House, Oxford, on 30 June 1990.

Between 1914 and 1938 the Colonial Office in London sent out three circular letters on the care and preservation of the records of the various administrations in the colonies. In some colonies these circular letters eventually resulted in the establishment of archival institutions by the Colonial administration. In Nigeria, however, the establishment of national archives came about as a result of the activities of the late Professor KO. Dike who, when he was preparing the thesis for a PhD, had to undertake field work in Nigeria. At this time he was shocked at the deplorable condition in which he found the non-current official records of the government. On his return to Nigeria he offered his services free of charge to rescue these records. He was commissioned in 1951 by the Nigerian government to undertake a survey of all government records in the country.

The purpose of this brief paper is to draw attention to the significance of non-Government archival resources in Nigeria, the role of non-governmental institutions in their collection and preservation and some of the problems they face in the current economic situation. The distinction between public and private archives is based on the purpose of the initial collection, but I draw no hard and fast line. Many of the records that end up in public archives are generated initially in private places. Some of them, after they have passed through the public domain end up in the private collection of public figures. The facilities for copying documents today ensure much overlapping. What needs to be underlined here is the role of non-Governmental institutions, particularly universities, in archive collection and preservation.

For historians (who, for once, are in the minority in this gathering of Nigerianists) archives represent both the bedrock of research and the essence of the historical record. When, in the context of this symposium, we talk about the archives of modern Nigeria up to 1960, we are really limiting ourself to the colonial period: anything before 1900 is neither ‘modern’ nor, strictly speaking, ‘Nigeria’, and anything after independence relates to artefacts which probably ought to be ia Nigerian rather than British repositories. Naturally, the descriptive term “Nigerian” as used in this archival context refers to anyone who worked in Nigeria or to material relating to Nigeria, and not narrowly to nationals from that country.

Rhodes House Library is a dependent institution of the Bodleian Library, the principal library of the University of Oxford. It is housed by the Rhodes Trustees, but does not receive regular financial support from them. Founded in 1929 on the basis of the university's existing collections, it specialises in the history, government, etc., of the non-Indian Commonwealth (the Indian sub-continent is the province in Oxford of the Indian Institute Library), of Africa south of the Sahara, and also of the United States of America. Its extensive manuscript collections, which run to some 15000 storage units (volumes, boxes, etc.) are therefore held alongside the printed holdings of a large specialist academic library whose statutory claim material (under the Bodleian's privileges deriving from British copyright acts) has been systematically developed by the acquisition by purchase or deposit of overseas publications.

The Royal Commonwealth Society (previously known successively as the Colonial Society, the Royal Colonial Institute and the Royal Empire Society and now linked with the Victoria League in Commonwealth Trust), was founded in 1868 and from its early days has maintained a library which now consists of 250,000¢ items, classified geographically; a substantial proportion of this is concerned with Africa. The small library of the Royal African Society was embodied in it in 1949. Subjects covered include all but purely technical ones, ranging from history, geography and politics to art, literature and natural history.

The literature of exploration and discovery is particualarly extensive and there are original editions of nearly all the significant books in this field. The Library is also strong in general accounts of voyages and travels, collected voyages, and the publications of the major relevant societies; much material on Africa appears in this form.

At first glance archives and manuscript collections in SOAS Library do not provide an obvious resource for information relating to the natural environment of Nigeria. The scholars, missionaries, civil servants and business men who have deposited their papers in SOAS Library were primarily concerned with the peoples of Africa and Asia and their antiquities, customs, folklore, languages, literature, trading practices etc rather than with the natural world. But when one comes to examine these collections more closely it is surprising how much one can find that does throw light on the climate, the vegetation, on agriculture and natural resources, sometimes on the general flora and fauna, always on any exceptional sightings of the wilder animals or birds and on the local terrain.

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies (University of London) exists to promote advanced study of the Comomonwealth of Nations within a research environment. Its activities include the promotion of inter-disciplinary and inter-regional research; courses and supervision for higher degrees; and an imaginative programme of seminars, conferences and publications. Within the Institute's walls are currently housed the British Documents of End of Empire Project and the activities of Dr. Anne Thurston, whose initiatives in the field of archival materials in Commonwealth countries and associated backup programmes of staff training and conservation workshops, have stimulated an awareness of the value of archives in many African countries. The Association of Commonwealth Archives and Record Management has its Secretariat at the Institute.

Collections of African material at the University of Birmingham in part reflect links with Cadbury's whose gifts of land helped to establish the University on its Edgbaston site, and whose involvement in the early West African cocoa track is well-known; the Library's collections of Africana have however been particularly developed over the last thirty years or so, since the establishment of the Centre of West African Studies here in 1963. All relevant library and archive materials are kept in the Main Library not at the Centre.

The most notable archive is that of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), which is on deposit at the University Library. This archive is in three sections: early papers up to 1880; 1881-1934; and 1935-49. Later material has been retained at CMS. The archives cover many African countries, including Nigeria, and all other countries in which the CMS has worked.

The archives of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) can be of use to anyone interested in European travellers in Nigeria. The quantity of records is small and there are no large deposits of the papers of important political figures, yet almost all the well known travellers of the 19th and early 20th century are represented there in some way. From its foundation in 1830 the RGS has generated records and correspondence through its own activities and those of its Fellows. In addition the Society has been the recipient of manuscripts, letters, diaries and field notes of those who have felt the RGS to be a suitable home for records of their independent travel or geographical enquiry.

Documents of the 19th century relating to Nigeria reflect, at first, the enthusiasm felt by the government and by the RGS to see the course of the river Niger and its tributaries accurately mapped.

The Natural History Museum has been at South Kensington, London in the romanesque style building of Alfred Waterhouse since 1881. Before that it existed as the Natural History Department of the British Museum, when that institution was established in 1759, with the collections of Sir Hans Sloane, offered to the nation on his death in 1753. The separation of the natural history collections to a new building at South Kensington was forced on the Trustees as a result of the rapid growth of those collections since the Museum's foundation, but especially during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This growth of collections and libraries has, of course, continued right down to the present time, and has compelled the Trustees to transfer some parts of the Natural History Museum to out-stations, such as, for example, the Zoological Museum, Tring, where the ornithological collections are now housed.

Most people know Kew only as a public garden with very special greenhouses and other buildings. Few visitors realise that it is a scientific institution with research laboratories, a great herbarium and archives of all descriptions. In the context of this symposium the living collections in the Gardens are unlikely to be applicable as an archive, although there are many specimens of great historical interest, including the world's oldest greenhouse plant (Encephalartos Iongifolius) which is an African species brought from Natal by Mason in the 1770s.

Over five million dried specimens are housed here in systematic order. They have been received from collectors all over the world during the last two centuries. The Herbarium is especially rich in tropical African collections, including Nigerian. For example those from Theodor Vogel's Niger Expedition of 1841 formed the basis of Hooker's Niger Flora (1849).

The Society's manuscript holdings date back to those of Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) and among those of his pupils, Thunberg, Sparrman, Solander, and Osbeck all travelled down the West Coast of Africa en route to India, the Far East and Australia. Afzelius was the only one to explore the natural history of West Africa, landing in Sierra Leone, but there is no known material recorded from Guinea. The only specific reference in the Linnaean archives is an undated hand-written note with a description of a monkey “…ex Costa Guinea”.

The Society was founded in 1788 and holds the papers of its precursor: the Society for the promotion of Natural History. These include an account of the Harmattan by Henry Smeathmam. His account of the Tarantula is among the Linnean Society papers, but both probably refer to Sierra Leone where Smeathmam collected.

The Wellcome Institute was created by Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), founder of the international pharmaceutical company, the Wellcome Foundation Ltd (formerly Burroughs Wellcome). He was a wide-ranging collector of materials of all kinds relating to the history of medicine. His collections continue to be administered under the provisions of his will by the Wellcome Trust, which also funds medical research. The library underwent some reduction after his death, largely to restrict it more closely to the history of medicine and science and to reduce it to manageable bulk. In World War II the company headquarters at Snow Hill were bombed, and the firm moved into the Euston Road Building originally intended to house the Wellcome Research Institution.

“God did not make Nigeria. The British did” is a remark attributed to a principal chief of Lagos, of the Royal House of Addo. Whether the attribution is correct I cannot say, but the political and geographical entity that we now know as Nigeria was most certainly a creation of the European scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century, and it was indeed the British who coined the name Nigeria itself.

As the Secretary of State for the Colonies was the Minister charged with the duty of advice to the Crown on matters relating to Britain's overseas dependencies, the library of the Colonial Office (CO) naturally reflected these wideranging official concerns and developed into what Sir Charles Jeffries described as “a unique and comprehensive collection… an institution of which the Office is justly proud”.

The Public Record Office, as the national archive for England and the United Kingdom, holds primarily, but not exclusively, the records of central government. Many government departments had, and continue to have, an interest in Nigeria which is reflected in their records. For the period with which the Nigerian Field Society is primarily concerned - from the late nineteenth century until independence - the richest source is to be found among the records of the Colonial Office which assumed responsibility for Lagos when it became a colony in 1862, for the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1899, and for Southern Nigeria and Northern Nigeria the following year. A variety of Colonial Office records relate to those territories as well as to the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria from 1914.

Pitt Rivers Museum is one of the major anthropological museums in the world and as such has considerable object collections from Nigeria. Less known is its archive collection which contains a small but interesting collection of material relating to Nigeria. The Museum has been collecting archival material since its foundation in 1884 and the collections are still growing annually as more material is donated. At present the entire collection stands in the region of sixty manuscript collections of varying sizes and about 70,000 photographic images. The archive collections do not document specific objects in the museum collections (any material of this nature belongs with specific object records) but the broader historical and intellectual contexts which shaped anthropology in general and the Museum's collection in particular. The Nigerian material, although it is somewhat uneven, typifies this collecting policy and comprises both manuscripts and photographs.