Looking back over the steps undertaken before the Ghana Library Services were established, it seems very important that so much preliminary work was embarked on. First a country-wide survey was made, and a detailed plan worked out of the future development, taking into account the educational system, the general standard of literacy and the rate of its increase, the languages in common use, population distribution, the transport and communication systems, the demand - as opposed to the need - for books, the pattern of local authorities and their view on the principles of library provision and - very importantly - who would ultimately be responsible for the financial needs of the library system, the purpose of the library provision and what it hoped to achieve, the resources needed for the Services and draft estimates for the first five years.

The bibliographic array for the study of Africa and African scholarship has reached proportions which were unthinkablefiftyyears ago at the birth ofAfrican Studies Programs. Not only has the bibliographic coverage marshalled material in all areas of research but this coverage is readily available at the click of a computer in most corners of the globe. In an ideal world the actual resources would also be accessed with ease and digital speed. Indeed much research material is readily obtained in microfilm, microform, and CD-Rom format. However the bulk of retrospective, archival, ephemeral, and manuscript literature is to be found only in a few selected centres often far removed from students and scholars, especially those based in Africa.

The constitutional changes that took place in Nigeria in the decade before independence granted significant authority to the colonial state's three regions. The 1954 constitution gave both the federal and regional governments the authority to legislate on broadcasting issues. In 1959, Western Region leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, established the Western Nigeria Television Service (WNTV), a service considered the ‘Gateway to Africa’. This article historicizes the processes and politics of the founding of this station, revealing metropolitan efforts to control the television service's direction in order for it to remain aligned with British cultural and imperial interests. It also shows the BBC's attempts to stall the successful launch of a service that it considered a competitor. The study argues that the broadcasting service's creation was an act of dissent against British colonial rule and its cultural imperialism and sheds light on how the Western Region's political elites embraced emerging public communication technologies to undermine colonialism.

In this essay I seek to describe some of the workings of the secondhand and antiquarian book trade relating to Africa, in which I've been involved for twenty years. I apologise in advance if the account appears overly autobiographical, but in a sense there is no alternative to this method of presentation: there is no standard path to becoming a bookseller, no course on which to enrol and no qualification to achieve, as there is with librarianship. Those involved in the field become so for all number of reasons, those who stay involved do so through a love of books that sometimes borders on a passion, a passion mirroring that of their most avid customers. Lurking beneath the bookseller exterior we often find the nascent psychology of that fascinating species, the book collector. (Incidentally, I've never been happy with the term ‘Africana’, which in any case, and according to the Oxford English Dictionary definition, relates particularly to books on Southern or South Africa; however there seems to be no alternative label, and when it came to register a name for a new website, it was this that I chose. Nevertheless it throws up some odd expressions, including one I saw in a catalogue some years ago, which described an item as “An interesting and unusual Africanum”.)

The Internet and other communication networks are development tools, quite as important as educational, agricultural and training programmes. Information, Information Technologies and data networks have (and have had) a fundamental role in the development of ‘northern societal and cultural environments’, though the Internet is still seen by some people in developed countries simply as a pastime, as a new multimedia entertainment providing nice graphics and images. In a society sated with information, the need for Information and Information Technologies are perhaps not always fully appreciated. The role of networks as valuable development tools may therefore be better understood in the African context. The purpose ofthis article, however, is not only to point out the importance of electronic communication networks such as the Internet in helping the processes of development in Africa, but also to offer readers of the Africa Bibliography an up-to-date guide to the extent and kinds of connectivity currently operating or being planned in African countries, and to some of the problems – political, financial, technical – that the new information technology faces today.

The Cumulative Bibliography of African Studies was published in 5 quarto volumes by G.K. Hall of Boston for the International African Institute in 1973.