This paper considers different publishing and distribution models for African studies journals. The case considered in detail is that of Africa, the journal of the International African Institute (IAI). I discuss the publishing model employed by the Institute for its journal, some other comparable African studies journals, and the dissemination of journals edited from Africa. Flowing from our experiences of publishing an important journal in the field, I offer some more general reflections on the possible directions of publishing African journals in the era of electronic publishing.

The IAI was established as the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in London in 1926. It had a dual mandate of providing an international centre to promote research and dissemination of information and knowledge on Africa cultures; and increasing and strengthening the link between knowledge and practical activities and the needs of administrators, educators and missionaries (Schapera 1949).

In 2005 I helped organise an exhibition of the work of two Cameroonian studio photographers in the National Portrait Gallery, London (see ed. Swenson 2005). This arose from my twenty year involvement as a social anthropologist working in Cameroon. One of the photographers, Joseph Chila, introduced me to Jacques Touselle who had taught him photography in the early 1960s. Together we made several visits to ‘Photo Jacques’ in Mbouda, Western Province, and I was shown the pile of boxes containing what I now know to be some 40,000 negatives, which is the legacy of Touselle's 40 year career. The collection is an unparalleled archive of local photographic practices spanning several decades. With the help of the British Library's ‘Endangered Archives Programme’ the negatives are being scanned and catalogued as a first step to ensuring their long term survival.

Since pioneering work in the late 1970s (e.g. Sprague 1978) there has been an explosion of interest in African photography.

The Pan-African conference held in London in 1900 was a key moment in the early history of Pan-Africanism. Though the Pan-African Association (PAA) that emerged from it was short lived, the conference was the precursor of subsequent Pan-African conferences or congresses in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927 and 1945, the last of which laid the groundwork for the advent of the African independence movements of the second half of the twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois, who dominated organisational Pan-Africanism later in the century, tended to minimise the significance of the 1900 conference, but he conceded that it “put the word ‘Pan-African’ in the dictionaries for the first time”. The 1900 conference established the idea, basic to Pan-Africanism, of African people and people of African descent uniting globally and leading the movement for their own liberation.

It is now almost 30 years since Dame Margery Perham, the internationally acknowledged academic expert on British colonial administration and a widely respected figure at Oxford University (Research Lecturer in Colonial Administration, 1935 and Reader 1939-48, Fellow in Imperial Government at Nuffield College, as well as being its first female Fellow, Director of the Institute of Colonial Studies and founding Director of the Oxford Colonial Records Project), died in 1982. Her work as research consultant to Lord Hailey and his team on the African Survey project (1938), her record of co-operation with the Colonial Office as a leading member of several of its committees including that set up to plan the post-war training of Colonial Service cadets (the Devonshire Courses) and her close links with a number of the new university colleges in the overseas territories, notably Makerere led to the award of the CBE in 1948.