Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23,1942. Raised in a middle class family, he won a scholarship to enter the most prestigious local school, Queen's College in Georgetown. In 1960, he went to the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica. After his undergraduate degree, he attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London where, at the age of 24, he received his PhD with honours in African History. Rodney's thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800, was published by Oxford University Press in 1970.

During his studies at SOAS, he travelled to Spain, Italy and Portugal in order to access archives about Guinea coast. In these countries, he made contact with anticolonialist movements, especially the Portuguese one headed by Amilcar Cabral.

In 1968, while redecorating my grandmother's flat, I came across an old battered brown suitcase containing the letters my father had written to her from the Gold Coast. I had lived in Tamale as a three year old child, and our closest family friends were from that period of my father's life. So I grew up with the stories and affection for Tamale - my first home - and a place called Zuarungu. In later life I encouraged my father to write his memoirs, reminding him of half remembered stories and encouraging him to dig deep into his memory. We discussed shaping these memoirs into book form, but he died in 1985 leaving me to finish the task.

My somewhat unorthodox idea was to make it an edited autobiography of his early life, by integrating interesting letters into the text, and further illuminate it with detailed footnotes added by myself.

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 Olive Schreiner Letters Project (OSLP) is making use of ‘personal papers’ associated with, amongst a number of other important concerns, the history of Southern Africa, and doing so in an innovative way. The OSLP is transcribing and analysing all of the extant letters of the feminist, social theorist and writer Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), and will contribute theoretically and methodologically to the use of letters and other epistolary materials in social science and humanities research. In addition, the project will publish in digital format transcripts of the complete Schreiner letters, which will be free access. The project is funded by the ESRC (RES-062-23-1286), and is multi-site, led by principal investigator Professor Liz Stanley, and with research and technical teams based at the universities of Edinburgh, Leeds Metropolitan and Sheffield.