The first and second parts of this paper have charted the rise and decline of a specialised area of language study, concentrated in a single institution in the United Kingdom. This final part relates that decline to shifts in thebalance and direction of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and proposes that consideration be given to the establishment of an intercollegiate ‘School of Languages and Literatures’ within the University of London.

A national debate on The Development of a Strategy for Higher Education into the 1990's was initiated in November 1983 by the University Grants. Committee (UGC), after an exchange of correspondence with the Secretary of State for Education and Science.

A report in this Journal on the 1983 Annual General Meeting of the Library Association's International and Comparative Librarianship Group touched on experts and expatriates and reported as follows:

“One participant believed greater care should be taken in the selection of ‘experts’ to advise on the development of library services, while another emphasised that the major role of such people should be to retouch the proposals of local librarians in a language that should be more acceptable to the politicians, rather than to impose Western-Style Systems on African Communities. Several people thought that governments were too ready to listen to expatriates and ‘experts’ and tended to ignore the views of local librarians.”

I have always been very interested in “fringe” or “non-standard” publications. I was active in the “little magazine” movement in England in the sixties, publishing and collecting poetry from small presses. I now live in Brazil, where I avidly purchase the popular poetry pamphlets which are still sold on market stalls. It was natural, therefore, that when I was a lecturer in the Department of Library Science, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, in 1974-5, I should become interested in Onitsha market literature. I went to Onitsha twice, and visited publishers and printshops (I have had experience in setting type and working printing presses). I drafted a brief article on Onitsha publications, but other pressures prevented me from preparing it for the press. In 1983 I showed the draft to Miss Use Sternberg, responsible for African acquisitions in the British Library, Reference Division.

A National Sound Archive by its very nature has a particularly important role to play in the documentation and preservation of traditional music. “Traditional’ is used here to refer to those musical cultures which are primarily unwritten and therefore are passed down through oral tradition; this includes the ‘folk’ music of Europe and the Americas as well as most kinds of music from Africa and Asia. Such music is inadequately preserved through Western notation, which has no symbols for aspects of performance style essential to the understanding of traditional music. The audio recording, on the other hand, captures those aspects, and thus provides the main source of material for the study of traditional music. Without recordings, a large part of the world's musical cultures would be undocumented and probably unknown outside the country of origin. It is the role of a sound archive to acquire, preserve and make available this important and unique resource.

Philately is a subject which, generally, is little appreciated outside its devotees, and tends to be equated to the more general hobby of stamp collecting. However, the study of the production and use of stamps and postal history is very actively pursued and has a not insignificant place in the recording of the economic, social and, in some instances, the political history of virtually every country of the world.

As a result of the lack of appreciation of the subject, the researcher sometimes finds difficulty in obtaining the necessary assistance and access to official and other records to enable him to find the information he requires. It is the intention of this paper to give some insight into the types of research work being undertaken and the various sources from which the required information can be obtained.

The National Museum of African Art Library, a Branch of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL), is a special research collection of materials concerning the arts of Africa which not only serves the curatorial and education staff of the Museum, but also reaches out to the larger community of African art scholars, curators and students. Founded in 1971, the Library grew modestly in its first decade without benefit of a regular budget. Shortly after the Museum became part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1979, the Library became officially linked with the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. From that time its mandate and audience widened, its acquisitions budget increased, and it embarked on a collection development program to enrich its holdings in keeping with the “national” library it had become. Being part of a public and a national institution, it seemed appropriate to develop the collection to match its enhanced stature.

The deposit, on a joint basis, of the papers of A.T. Matson at the Rhodes House. library Oxford and the Kenya National Archives provides an unusual new source for East African history and sets an important precedent for co-operative efforts between the Colonial Archives Project, now being re-established within Rhodes House, and Commonwealth governments seeking papers about the colonial period. Mr. Matson, like many others with such papers, wanted them to remain in England where he could have access to them, but was at the same time he was concerned that they should be of maximum benefit to Kenya. Under the agreement reached, all material in the collection which was available elsewhere in England was transferred to Kenya, and the remaining material was arranged and microfilmed by the Kenya Archives before being sent to Rhodes House.

The Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa was initiated by Carnegie Corporation of New York in April 1982 in order to analyze the nature, causes, and extent of poverty in Southern Africa and to stimulate public debate on ways of facilitating equitable development in the region.

Based in South Africa at the University of Cape Town, the Inquiry is directed by Dr. Francis Wilson, economist and head of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the School of Economics.

The Inquiry has three primary objectives:

• * To collect and collate up-to-date facts on poverty and the process of. impoverishment in Southern Africa;

• * To generate public debate on the causes, nature, and extent of poverty in Southern Africa;

• * To stimulate thinking and action about strategies against poverty in both the short and the long run.