In September 2022 Samson Kambalu attracted international attention when his 5.5 metre statue of John Chilembwe, who led a brief, bloody and ultimately unsuccessful revolt against British colonial rule in Nyasaland in 1915, was displayed on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. This impressive statue towers above an accompanying statue of British missionary, the Rev. John Chorley, who was then Chilembwe’s only known white friend and confidant. The reason for their disparate heights is stated to be an indicator of their respective relevance and locus each to the other in Malawi’s rich history. The artistic merit of the statues is unquestioned. Unfortunately, an apparent lack of rigour in providing historical context to the statues may have unwittingly detracted from the already well known, powerful and compelling story of John Chilembwe. This article seeks to redress the balance in terms of historical accuracy and provide timely context to Chilembwe’s aspirations, tribulations and untimely death at the hands of African police.

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.

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.

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.

African medicine is an important component of the cultural adaptive system. The system has been evolving interminably in response to changing environmental vulnerabilities and health care needs since primordial times. Flexibility of indigenous African ethnomedicine and its associated customs has since time immemorial incorporated new techniques and knowledge. The resulting textual and discourse heritage on African medicine has often depicted its dialectical interrelationship with western biomedicine and other medical systems. The oral and documentary records on the authenticity of African medicine either conceal or condescend to its contributions to overall healthseeking and illness behaviour. Tensions in conceptualisation of African medicine relate to its pragmatic borrowing from non-African medical systems that are compatible with local pluralistic systems and indigenous ontology. The advent of colonial and post-colonial health care paradigms further define the emergence of dialectics in the documentation and appraisal of African medicine against western standards of science and health care practices.

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”.

Miriam Cheales was born in Southern Rhodesia on the 28th October 1914 at Lincoln Farm in Beatrice, just south of Salisbury to Alan and Irene Cheales. They returned to England to deal with family business in the early 1920s and Miriam was brought up in rural Lincolnshire. After completing her education she undertook some training in basic physiotherapy, and served as a nurse during World War Two. In September 1945 Miriam married Frank Staunton. As Frank was also originally from Rhodesia, with his family farming substantial amounts of land they decided to return to Africa and Frank took a post as a native commissioner. Upon arrival in Southern Rhodesia, Staunton was both adjusting to married life and finding herself back at “home” despite the fact she rarely thought of herself as Rhodesian.

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.

The National Documentation Centre in Khartoum was set up by the Sudanese Government in 1974 as part of the National Council for Research, which had been set up in 1973. The aims of the National Council for Research are to

Within the same Act there was provision for

Thus on the face of it, the National Documentation Centre exists solely to provide research information in order to facilitate government research. In practice, the Centre has taken on and is attempting to take on far broader responsibilites in the fields of librarianship and information science.

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.

This article focuses on the range of sources to be found in the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collections for the study of southern Africa. For the purposes of this article ‘southern Africa’ is taken to include South Africa (comprising the former colonies of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal); Namibia (formerly South West Africa); Lesotho (formerly Basutoland), Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland) and Swaziland; Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia), Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) and Malawi (formerly Nyasaland); Angola and Mozambique.

At a first glance, the name Oriental and India Office Collections does not immediately suggest rich pickings for researchers as far as sources on southern Africa are concerned. Yet this lesser known corner of the British Library provides a rich mine of diverse information from Britain's earliest interests in the region from the 1600s until the present.