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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

This paper attempts to discuss the concept of national libraries and the state-of-the-art in Africa. The role of national libraries and the challenges facing them are also analysed. It has been found out for example, that a majority of national libraries in Africa are found in the French-speaking countries. Other libraries such as public and university libraries are performing this role in the English-speaking countries. It is argued that although there is no alternative to a national library, African countries should make adaptations to suit their circumstances.

In the Netherlands there is an active community of Africanist scholars, numbering about 200 to 250. They work mainly in universities and other research institutes, but also in increasing numbers for government ministries (notably of Foreign Affairs and Development Co-operation), NGOs, and other aid organisations. Fields in which Africanists are strong are history, anthropology and geography, and to a lesser extent development sociology, medical science, law, comparative politics and religious studies. The following survey is necessarily a selective one.

African Studies in the Netherlands can pride itself on a long history only if we include the many travellers, traders and missionaries active in African regions before the twentieth century. The scholarly study of the continent seriously started a few decades later than in other European countries: after the Second World War, when an Africa Institute was founded (in 1946, see below) and the first special professorial chair in African ethnology was instituted at Leiden University.

As Ian Colvin observed in his classic Introduction to Sidney Mendelssohn's South African Bibliography, the first recorded voyage round the Cape (by Bartholomew Diaz in 1487) took place at about the time that printing was being ‘invented’ (that is, re-discovered and developed) in Europe. Yet it was not until 1910, more than four centuries later, that the, first comprehensive bibliographical record relating to Southern Africa appeared in print. The almost ‘onlie begetter’ of this seminal work was the elder son of a comparatively impecunious liberal Jewish Rabbi, a mid-19th century immigrant to Britain from Germany, albeit a collateral descendant of the distinguished philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Sidney, brought up in the West country, followed his father to Kimberley soon after the latter had taken up his appointment as Minister to the Jewish Congregation of the small diamond-field town in 1878.

Mr Kirk-Greene, who five years ago started work on the history of the modern British Colonial Service in Africa with the help of pilot research grants from the British Academy, the Rhodes Trust and the Hoover Institution, prefaced his talk by drawing attention to the vigorous current revival of interest in the colonial period. He cited the recent phenomenon of the “mini-industry” on the Raj - instancing the time given by television, radio, SOAS and the Imperial War Museum to Charles Allen's oral history project Plain Tales from the Raj and Raj: A Scrapbook; the success of Paul Scott's novels in the Ran Quartet, now being filmed; the India Office Library Hunt and Harrison project, The District Officer in India;