The Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU) was established on 7 January 2009. Located behind the Osun State Secretariat, southwest Nigeria, the CBCIU prides itself on being the inheritor of the archival estate of Ulli Beier, the late German connoisseur and African culture enthusiast. Housed in its Archive and Documentation Room/Unit, this repository contains very rich archival materials that include over 700 photographs with carefully preserved negatives and slides all dating back to the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, and thousands of works of literature published between 1921 and the 2000s on virtually all aspects of Yoruba art, culture, philosophy and intellectual history. Based on fieldwork conducted at the CBCIU in 2018 and 2019, this study embarks on three mutually-connected transactions. First, it examines Ulli Beier's ‘cultural border-crossings’ into Yorubaland, particularly in Osogbo, southwest Nigeria, where his diverse cultural interactions facilitated the revival of a diminishing culture. Second, the study discusses the genesis of the CBCIU dating back to Ulli Beier's emergence in Nigeria in 1950. Third, it analyses what it means for the CBCIU to inherit an invaluable material legacy. This is done by giving an account of the inventories and a summary of the holdings in the Archives. While the Archive forms the very nucleus of what the CBCIU stands for, I argue that this agency serves as a worthy inheritor of a material legacy that continually seeks cultural relevance and perpetuity.

The Africa Bibliography has been published by the International African Institute (IAI) as a print volume since 1985. The first editor was Hector Blackhurst, a social anthropologist turned academic librarian at the University of Manchester. In the inaugural volume, Jacob F. Ade Ajayi, the then Chairman of the International African Institute wrote that ‘Greater technical experience will, it is hoped, facilitate typographical improvements'.1 A second concern of the Bibliography, as expressed by Ajayi, was to monitor and record material produced in Africa ‘that does not always circulate widely and might otherwise escape notice’.2

What is information literacy and why is it important for African studies?

Today's information environment for African studies, as in other areas, is vastly different from what it was in the last century. The central problem for library researchers in African studies decades ago hinged on awareness of a relatively few specialist, published reference and other print bibliographic tools for discovering relevant materials (Frank-Wilson 2004: 106; see McIlwaine 2007a). Many more resources are available now from African and other sources, but they present a complex terrain to navigate for many reasons, both old and new (see Limb 2007). The field has become more interdisciplinary in terms of data sources and subject matter, making bibliographic searches in any single topical, geographical, or discipline-based source (or even in the most comprehensive index databases) less likely to fulfil all of one's scholarly needs. While scholarly sources of documentation are freely available online, these may be fragmentary, idiosyncratic or incomplete as citations are made available passively and without context through services such as Google Scholar.1 Students may encounter library resources online without having developed the critical evaluation skills and contextual judgement that more experienced scholars may take for granted (Hargittai et al. 2010), and which may be essential to employ during library research to identify and engage effectively with African scholarly perspectives.

There are few generalisations that can be made about Africa, but the huge thirst for knowledge and information throughout the continent is almost certainly one that can. In the past access to written information in Africa has been primarily through printed books. To Western visitors the limited number of books in shops, libraries, and school environments leaps out. A publishing sector that has been limited by lack of investment capital, a large but poor population, and difficult logistics, particularly in rural areas, means that the need for books is not matched by the level of availability and accessibility of books.