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.

Original drawings and photographs of the natural history of Africa in the libraries of the British Museum (Natural History) are described, and a brief history of the libraries is given. The different kinds of natural history drawings and their purposes, and the importance of original drawings are considered A catalogue of the holdings of original drawings and photographs of Africa concludes the paper.

In the early 1950s it became apparent to the Rhodesia Government that the rapid increase in literacy amongst Africans, due to the increased tempo of education, would present its own problem. This problem can best be summed up in three words, “Literacy without Literature.” Many school leavers only reached primary level and, although literate, were only literate in their own vernaculars, Shona or Ndebele. Unless books in these languages were provided urgently the people would lose their newly attained skill through sheer lack of practice and in many cases revert to illiteracy. Literacy creates its own type of hunger, hunger for books which must be satisfied, or frustration will ensue.

Thus, in 1953, the Rhodesia Literature Bureau was created, (since 1963 it has been part of the Department of African Education) to make available a supply of literature to fulfil these special needs.

King's College London agreed to participate in the area specialisation scheme in 1966, with responsibility for the publications of the Portuguese African territories, principally because of its well established Portuguese Department. The College Library already possessed a strong collection of Portuguese history, largely as a heritage of Professor Edgar Prestage's term of office as Camoen Professor, and this included most of the basic secondary works on the history of the Portuguese in Africa. Established links with Portuguese Government agencies, particularly in the Instituto de Alta Cultura and the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, brought in, as gifts, a continuing supply of monographs in series such as Estudos, ensaios e documentos and Estudos de Ciencias Politicas e Sociais, many of which dealt with the African territories.

The Liberian civil wars spanned fourteen years, from 1989 to 2003. It is estimated that during this time over 250,000 people were killed and more than 1,000,000 were displaced. The wars were covered regularly in American news. Reports characteristically represented the child militias, human sacrifices, and crazed army tactics, including but not limited to soldiers cross-dressing or using nudity as methods of intimidation. Initially, little attention was offered to the greater social and political implications of the war, but recent news coverage and critical research has demanded a change in the way that the civil wars were viewed and addressed, internally and internationally.

The first Liberian civil war was led by the conflicting political factions of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor. These men were backed largely by members of different groups, divided by existing ethnic tensions. These factions divided further as the war progressed, and the war continued long after Doe's assassination in 1990 and his party's defeat.

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.

It has been commonly supposed that there are major factors inherent in tropical environments which make them uniquely problematic, and essentially inhospitable-to agricultural development. They, and especially their soils, are seen as intractable and fragile, and liable to break down irreversibly if man dares to meddle with the delicate, but vaguely conceived and tenuously defined, “ecological balance” (see Gourou, 1953; Stamp, 1953 a,b; Richards, 1952; 1970; Janzen, 1975; inter alia). The unarticulated corollory is that more temperate environments are,to a great extent robust and unproblematic. Both premises may be seriously questioned, and their conjunction is dubious in the extreme. In the first place, though it may be demonstrated with some plausibility that tropical environments have presented obstacles to productive agricultural development, it remains to be shown that these problems are solely the consequence of environmental characteristics, or whether perhaps the major factor is the lack of appropriate ingenuity, with technological inventiveness inhibited by the temperate blinkers of those responsible for technological research.

Research is an important component of any discipline. This is because through research the frontiers of knowledge are extended. It provides the stimulus for the growth of a profession. For a profession to develop, research must be vigorously pursued and the findings regularly disseminated. The case of the library and information science (LIS) profession is unique, given the on-going debate as to whether LIS is a profession or a discipline or both. In such a situation it is expected that the research process will be complex. What is clear, however, is that LIS is a multidisciplinary profession that draws from library science, information science, publishing, computer science, communication science, engineering, management, etc. There is no doubt that it is a multifarious profession that needs to be constantly researched.