Over the past five years, the Yale University Divinity School Library has been acquiring a significant collection of postcards that document missionary work in Africa and Asia. The majority of these postcards have been made available by one vendor who has scoured flea markets and used books stores through Europe. The collection of more than 4,000 postcards complements other holdings in the Yale Divinity Library's Day Missions Collection. The Day Missions Collection makes up approximately one third of the Divinity Library's 500,000 volumes, and constitutes the bulk of its manuscript and archival collection. Since its foundation in 1892, the collection's scope has enlarged from a fairly narrow focus on training missionaries to become one of the preeminent collections documenting the thought, history, and practice of world Christianity.

In the era of information explosion, published material is no longer the apanage of specialized journals. Researchers in all fields — and African literature is no exception — must gather data that are scattered in eclectic publications. For instance, three journals that do not specialize in literature recently published the following articles: Teisseyre, Ch. ‘Interrogation sur la littérature africaine d'expression francaise'. Revue Francaise d'Histoire du Livre 48 (1979): 805-811; Yaek'Olingo, Wufele. ‘Brefs regards sur l'image de l'autorité post-coloniale dans le roman africain de langue francaise’. Genève-Afrique 19 (1) (1981): 103-122; Menga, Guy. ‘Expérience d'un dramaturge: l'essor du théâtre moderne au Congo’. Ethnopsychologie 35 (2-3) (April-Sept. 1980): 81-86. In this study, several interdisciplinary indexes which cover journals pertaining to francophone African literature (including but not limited to, monographs, collective works, dissertations, and proceedings of conferences) are analyzed and compared in terms of their coverage, relevancy and currency.

The formalisation of African Studies in Canada began in December 1962 when a Committee on African Studies in Canada was formed. The Committee was established with the encouragement of the Social Science Research Council and the Overseas Institute of Canada. At the initial meeting the Committee stated its purposes to be: the promotion of African studies in Canada, the creation of a national organisation for scholars interested in Africa in Canadian universities, the representation of Canada at the International Congress of Africanists and the publication of a newsletter. The first president was Professor Ronald Cohen of McGill University.

The first newsletter was published in November 1963 as The Bulletin of African Studies in Canada. Three volumes, each of two issues, were published, the last in May of 1966.

Social media applications have become increasingly popular components of our everyday lives in today's globalising society. Social media provide a context where people across the world can communicate, exchange messages, share knowledge, and interact with each other regardless of the distance that separates them (Sawyer, 2011). Technological developments the world over have made the internet an innovative way for individuals and families to communicate. Family members use social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace to create and sustain relationships (Boyd and Ellison,. 2007). These social media sites let those who use them create personal profiles, while connecting with other users of the sites; users can upload photographs, post what they are doing at any given time, and send personal or public messages to whomever they choose. In this “information age,” social media sites seem to be growing rapidly in popularity, especially among young adults (Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert, 2008).

This article focuses on the range of sources to be found in the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collections for the study of southern Africa. For the purposes of this article ‘southern Africa’ is taken to include South Africa (comprising the former colonies of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal); Namibia (formerly South West Africa); Lesotho (formerly Basutoland), Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland) and Swaziland; Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia), Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) and Malawi (formerly Nyasaland); Angola and Mozambique.

At a first glance, the name Oriental and India Office Collections does not immediately suggest rich pickings for researchers as far as sources on southern Africa are concerned. Yet this lesser known corner of the British Library provides a rich mine of diverse information from Britain's earliest interests in the region from the 1600s until the present.

The word “Luso” comes from an old constellation of Iberian-Celtic tribes established in the mountainous areas of today's Portugal and Spain. They were a warlike people who offered fierce resistance to the Roman conquest. However, once the territory was conquered, the romanisation was so intense that, apart from one or two words, little remained of the previous cultural legacy. One cannot even affirm that this ancestral people, the Lusitans, were the main basis of today's Portuguese population. We can, however, see the undeniable importance of these tribes from their numerous archaeological remains. However, as Jorge Dias, an eminent Portuguese anthropologist notes: “the country was destined to be a meeting point of many races, coming from the Mediterranean, like the Phoenicians, who secured the ports, and others from the extreme north, like the Normans who invaded its coasts”.

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.

African medicine is an important component of the cultural adaptive system. The system has been evolving interminably in response to changing environmental vulnerabilities and health care needs since primordial times. Flexibility of indigenous African ethnomedicine and its associated customs has since time immemorial incorporated new techniques and knowledge. The resulting textual and discourse heritage on African medicine has often depicted its dialectical interrelationship with western biomedicine and other medical systems. The oral and documentary records on the authenticity of African medicine either conceal or condescend to its contributions to overall healthseeking and illness behaviour. Tensions in conceptualisation of African medicine relate to its pragmatic borrowing from non-African medical systems that are compatible with local pluralistic systems and indigenous ontology. The advent of colonial and post-colonial health care paradigms further define the emergence of dialectics in the documentation and appraisal of African medicine against western standards of science and health care practices.

A consistent feature of contemporary research into the colonial period is the emphasis on personalities. The modern historian is increasingly aware of how cogently he may need to identify and interpret who was who before he can start to explain why was what. In support of this human approach, one may cite the view of the most recent historian of empire. “Personality not policy”, argues Martin Daly in the first volume of his history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Empire on the Nile (1986), “determined the course of the Condominium” (p.452). The same thesis underlay my own earlier profile of Africa's administrators: “Only when we are intimately acquainted with who the imperial administrators are can we proceed to a soundly-based study of imperialism” (The Sudan Political Service, 1982, 1). Robert Collins’ interpretation of the Sudan's administration was postulated on a similar hypothesis:

The Mill Hill Missionaries (more properly, the St. Joseph's Society for the Missions) was established in 1866 by Fr. Herbert Vaughan, later Archbishop of Westminster. The first missionary field of the society was among the blacks of the American South. However, the major missionary effort of the Mill Hill missionaries has been Africa. In 1894 the Vicariate of the Upper Nile was organized and encompassed the whole of eastern Uganda and western Kenya including Kampala and Busoga. This was divided in 1947 into the Vicariates (later dioceses) of Kampala and Tororo, and later the diocese of Jinja was. formed from Kampala. In western Kenya the Mill Hill missionaries received the Prefecture of Kavirondo in 1925 and this later was divided into the dioceses of Kisii, Kisumu, Ngong, and Kakamega.

This paper is a slightly revised version of a lecture given on 16th August 1975 at the Somali Institute of Development Administration and Management in Mogadishu. The text of the lecture was published in the same month, as a booklet, by the Academy of Somali Culture in Mogadishu, but in a limited number of copies only. It was also presented, orally and in absentia, at the Symposium held on 19th September 1975 at the Annual General Meeting of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

In order to make the information which it contains accessible to a wider public I now offer it to readers of African Research and Documentation.

This article is based on a talk given to the SCOLMA annual general meeting in 1993 and is, very largely, a personal backward look at my involvement with people, places and African studies since the late 1950s.

When I first went to Africa in the fifties long distance travel was not the commonplace it is now. Uganda, where I took up my first overseas appointment as Librarian to the Department of Agriculture, was then a twenty-four hour flight away with stops at Rome, Benghazi and Khartoum. It is difficult to recapture first impressions on setting foot on African soil but there is a confused memory of heat, blazing sun (at 8 am), and the brilliant colours of the trees, flowers and the dresses of the Baganda women as well as mild cultural shock at finding that all the men wore shorts: I was not prepared for all those hairy knees.