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.

It was originally intended that this article would be the result of an informal “sounding” of a few Australian academics. After several such “soundings”, it became increasingly obvious that there was sufficient interest in Africa to warrant a reasonably detailed survey of the existing situation. A short questionnaire was therefore drawn up with the hopes of obtaining the following information:

1. (i) The names of academics and postgraduate students with a research interest in Africa.

2. (ii) The nature of this research and any resulting publications.

3. (iii) Courses taught in Australian universities concerning Africa, or which contained a substantial African interest, and approximate number of students involved each year.

4. (iv) What would be the level of support for the calling of a conference/meeting of academics with an African interest?

Mr Kirk-Greene, who five years ago started work on the history of the modern British Colonial Service in Africa with the help of pilot research grants from the British Academy, the Rhodes Trust and the Hoover Institution, prefaced his talk by drawing attention to the vigorous current revival of interest in the colonial period. He cited the recent phenomenon of the “mini-industry” on the Raj - instancing the time given by television, radio, SOAS and the Imperial War Museum to Charles Allen's oral history project Plain Tales from the Raj and Raj: A Scrapbook; the success of Paul Scott's novels in the Ran Quartet, now being filmed; the India Office Library Hunt and Harrison project, The District Officer in India;

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.

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.

Tony Kirk-Greene has described to you some of the separate biographies and autobiographies relating to Colonial Administrators in Africa, and also the Staff Lists, Blue Books and other works recording their careers. I would like to follow this by looking at the value of more general biographical reference works in this respect.

The most familiar of such works are the Dictionary of National Biography and Who's Who. The DNB, originally published in 63 volumes, containing 29,000 entries, between 1882 and 1900, supplemented in three further volumes and now brought up to date with ten year supplements, the latest of which brings it to 1970, concentrates on British biographies, but has also included what was originally called “Colonial achievement”, including administrators.

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.

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.