Africana resources and collections: three decades of development and achievement, edited by Julian W. Witherell, and published by Scarecrow Press in 1989, is a festschrift honouring Hans Panofsky, a pioneer in Africana librarianship. It was, and continues to be, a fitting tribute to a man who was a leading figure in the promotion of co-ordinated co-operative programmes for acquisitions and bibliographic control of Africana from 1959 to 1989. This one volume with contributing articles by Hans’ Africana colleagues contains a wealth of historical information about librarianship, cataloguing, and the acquisitions of Africana for that time period. An update of this volume is now due.

Within the last two decades, there have been many significant developments in American libraries. This short presentation will not attempt to bridge that distance. Instead, it will offer a brief accounting of fairly recent Africana activity in selected American libraries.

The Yorùbá language materials at the British Library (BL) span the years between 1843, when the first item was published, and the present day, providing an impressive catalogue of the history of Yorùbá writing through the early days of 19th-century missionary writings with a yet undeveloped orthography, the boom of anthropological literature of the later 19th century, the creative fervour of the early and mid-20th century, and the later experimentations of 21st-century monolingual and bilingual writings. From September 2019 to September 2020, I was Chevening Research Fellow at the BL working on this wide-ranging collection with the BL’s Africa Curator. In this article, I present an analysis of what the records contain and what is missing, along with a record of some challenges I faced cataloguing the work – ranging from technological limitations to issues of orthography.

Between January and April 2016,1 was part of a British Library-funded project to restore, preserve, and digitise the archive of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA). The archive is held in a small room in the bell tower of St. Andrews church, Nairobi. The collection consists of the records of the colonialera Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) and its successor institution, the PCEA, which was formed in 1956 when the African church became independent from the Scottish mission. When I first accessed it, it was being used by the church as a place to store and dump all sorts of miscellaneous and unneeded objects. As well as the heaps of papers, it contained an old lectern, posters, brochures, parish leaflets, and general rubbish. Depending on one's perspective it could have been seen as not much of an “archive”, or much more than one.

The Library of the Royal Commonwealth Society, founded in 1868, has built up a very substantial collection on Nigeria over the years, and therefore had a good basis on which to undertake responsibility for that country, under the SCOLMA scheme, in 1964. A progress report was made in April 1969 and published in Conference on the Acquisition of Material from Africa, I.D.C. 1969, pp.88-90, also R.C.S. Library Notes, new series No.152, August 1969. Many of the problems described therein still apply, but the following summary outlines the position at the close of 1975.

Though the main purpose of the scheme is to acquire material published in the country concerned, the Library endeavours to obtain significant material published outside Nigeria, and this is relatively easy.

The Victoria and Albert Museum, or V&A, is a museum of art, design and performance based in South Kensington, London. It was established in 1852, following on from the 1851 “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” spearheaded by Prince Albert. The museum's collections today number over 2.7 million objects, amassed over the past 150 years through active collecting. Amongst them is a small but very significant collection of Ethiopian material, which tells a story about the complex relationship between Britain and Ethiopia during the 19th century, as well as prompting much discussion about how African collections and objects associated with military expeditions are displayed and interpreted by UK museums today.

For several decades, members of the Colenso family conducted a vigorous humanitarian campaign across two continents, keeping in touch and exchanging information with one another between England and Natal. Prolific writers, continuously immersed in the often frenetic day to day activity of their campaigning work, they had little time to consider preserving for the future the vast amount of correspondence and documentation they produced. The result is that much of their prodigious output survives today only by chance, dispersed between different collections in the United Kingdom and South Africa.

The Colenso papers are authored not by an individual but severally by the members of a family, the family of John William Colenso, the first Bishop of Natal, his brother in law, his wife, their five children and two daughters in law.

This study investigates the information management in Nigerian Commercial banks; the survey method was adopted for the study. The population constituted the 365 and 248 branches of First Bank and Union Bank respectively. Both purposive and random sampling procedures were used to select the two oldest banks and 129 branches as samples for the study and the 279 samples of the respondents surveyed. The findings revealed that information sources generated are technical reports, statistical data and articles from magazines and newspapers. The technology most used to manage information is electronic mail and computers. Information technology is most important in the storage of data and dissemination of information. The findings indicate that information is used in managerial functions such as planning, controlling, organising, directing and staffing.

The Illustrations Section of the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) is administered by the library, which, in addition to being a legal depository, is Zimbabwe’s national reference library. It collects printed and audiovisual materials, relating to this country, both published and unpublished, for permanent preservation. The photographic collection originated as a group of 343 prints and negatives illustrating the country’s history from 1561 to 1924 and collected for an exhibition in 1936, and it has grown into a classified and indexed collection of nearly 23 000 negatives and approximately 26 000 photographs. There is also a number of other large deposits, as yet unprocessed, which will be referred to later. The section strives to reach the twin goals of preserving a photographic record of every aspect of life in this country and of providing a service to members of the public.

This lecture of 2006, never previously published, describes the making of the film Siliva the Zulu, the first fiction film made in sub-Saharan Africa with an all-black cast. It assesses its value as a rare documentary record of rural Zulu life in the 1920s and the subsequent careers of the film maker Attilio Gatti and anthropologist Lidio Cipriani. The latter’s reputation was tarnished by his support for Mussolini, racism, anti-Semitism and fascism.

Leaving to one side the sui generis Royal African Society, which in 2000 marked its centenary with a special history (Rimmer and Kirk-Greene, 2000), the formalised study of Africa in British academia may be said to be approaching its 80th year. For it was in 1926 that the International African Institute, originally the Institute of African Languages and Cultures, was founded in London, followed two years later by the maiden issue of its journal for practising Africanists, Africa, still among the flagship journals in the African field. Indeed, the 1920s were alive with new institutions promoting an interest in African affairs, whether it be the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1924); the Phelps-Stokes Commission reports on education in British Africa (1920-24), culminating in the Colonial Office Memorandum on Education Policy (1925); the major contribution to public awareness made by the Empire Exhibition at Wembley, however politically incorrect some of its idiom seems today; or the attention generated by the League of Nations’ Mandates Commission, the bulk of whose remit was focused on Africa and whose British representative was no less than Lord Lugard, the biggest “Africanist” of his day.