In August 1841 twelve little boys boarded the British steam ship Albert. They were sons of the village chief at Aboh on the River Niger. The ship's surgeon, James McWilliam, noted that they were about the same age, and had been circumcised. He added: “many of them had the hair cut close or shaved leaving tufts and lines describing diamonds and other angular figures …” The drawing in figure 1 is by John Duncan, the ship's master at arms. McWilliam describes the chief and his wives - their physical appearances, clothing and ornamentation, commenting in particular on their coral jewellery. He writes about a ceremony marking the signing of a treaty.

Since 1968 the African Studies Centre (ASC) in Leiden, The Netherlands, has published an abstracts journal, first under the title Documentatieblad (1968-1993), subsequently renamed African Studies Abstracts. In 2003 African Studies Abstracts went online. Renamed African Studies Abstracts Online, it also appeared in a limited print edition, principally for distribution in Africa where Internet connectivity was often problematic. However as the ICT infrastructure in African countries developed, the print edition was increasingly seen as having outlived its usefulness. The last paper copy of African Studies Abstracts Online, number 37, appeared in February 2012.

In the years since 1968 the abstracts journal has undergone a number of changes, not only in name and appearance, but also in frequency of publication and coverage, number of abstracts and types of indexes, and price. More fundamental changes are expected in the near future.

Collections of photographs by colonial officers, missionaries and medical personnel taken during the colonial era, can be found in many public and private archives and museums, in Africa, Europe and America. Although the existence of most of these collections have been made known to the public through exhibitions, catalogues and publications (Geary 1991, 2000; Webb 1987, 1988), some have received scant or no attention. This, however, is in spite of the role of colonial photographs as “testimony about early explorations and distant peoples and places” (Geary 1988). Colonial photography, Geary notes, is part of the “discourse about foreign worlds and foreign peoples—a discourse revealing as much about ‘us’ as it reveals about ‘them'” (Geary 1988: 11).

This article considers the challenges and opportunities for African publishing in an age of ‘book globalisation’, dominated by large multinational firms based in Europe and North America since the 1980s. ‘Bibliodiversity’ is desirable. Different kinds of networks have been structured for the African book market to sustain diffusion and distribution. It is important to take account of the institutions, economic factors and authors’ strategies which lie behind a given book. The first part of this article considers the relations between African literary production and the global book market. The second considers the Cameroonian book market and globalisation.