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”.

African studies has increasingly gained recognition as an area of study on both sides of the Atlantic. For us in the Caribbean it is of particular significance since Africa is the ancestral home of the majority of the population in most of the territories which comprise the English-speaking Caribbean. Among the legacies of colonialism was an education system based on the English curriculum which resulted either in the absence of or a biased representation of Africa in schools. There have been, however, particularly in Jamaica initially, distinct elements in the society for whom Africa had an even greater significance. The movement associated with Marcus Garvey and also the Rastafari cult are both groups which believed that Africa was home and whose members looked forward to the day when they might return there.

The National Documentation Centre in Khartoum was set up by the Sudanese Government in 1974 as part of the National Council for Research, which had been set up in 1973. The aims of the National Council for Research are to

Within the same Act there was provision for

Thus on the face of it, the National Documentation Centre exists solely to provide research information in order to facilitate government research. In practice, the Centre has taken on and is attempting to take on far broader responsibilites in the fields of librarianship and information science.

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.

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.

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.

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 connection between the Sudan and Durham (England) may not be immediately obvious. Indeed, one might wonder why the largest collection of original research material on the Sudan outside the Sudan, apart from the Public Record Office, London, happens to be in Durham rather than elsewhere. In 1957, the year after the Sudan became independent and some years before the Oxford Colonial Records Project and St. Antony's Middle East Private Papers collection were set up, Durham had the three vital ingredients for successful archival enterprise: knowledge and enthusiasm (Mr. R.L. Hill, lecturer in Modern Near Eastern History at Durham University, formerly of Sudan Government Railways); premises and academic support (Professor T.W. Thacker, Director of the School of Oriental Studies, Durham University); and a sponsor in good standing with potential donors, with a Durham interest (Mr. K.D.D. Henderson, formerly of the Sudan Political Service and Secretary of the Spalding Trust).

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 attempts to discuss the concept of national libraries and the state-of-the-art in Africa. The role of national libraries and the challenges facing them are also analysed. It has been found out for example, that a majority of national libraries in Africa are found in the French-speaking countries. Other libraries such as public and university libraries are performing this role in the English-speaking countries. It is argued that although there is no alternative to a national library, African countries should make adaptations to suit their circumstances.

As Ian Colvin observed in his classic Introduction to Sidney Mendelssohn's South African Bibliography, the first recorded voyage round the Cape (by Bartholomew Diaz in 1487) took place at about the time that printing was being ‘invented’ (that is, re-discovered and developed) in Europe. Yet it was not until 1910, more than four centuries later, that the, first comprehensive bibliographical record relating to Southern Africa appeared in print. The almost ‘onlie begetter’ of this seminal work was the elder son of a comparatively impecunious liberal Jewish Rabbi, a mid-19th century immigrant to Britain from Germany, albeit a collateral descendant of the distinguished philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Sidney, brought up in the West country, followed his father to Kimberley soon after the latter had taken up his appointment as Minister to the Jewish Congregation of the small diamond-field town in 1878.