In recent years scholars have shown considerable interest in the early use of photography by non-Western peoples. Research on nineteenth-century Indian, Japanese and Chinese photography has revealed a rich synthesis of European and Asian imagery. These early photographs show how non-Western peoples created new forms of artistic expression by adapting European technology and visual idioms for their own purposes. Because of the long history of contact between Sierra Leoneans and Europeans, Freetown seemed a logical starting point for similar photographic research in West Africa. The information presented here is based on ten years of searching for nineteenth-century photographs made by Sierra Leonean photographers. To locate these pictures, I have visited Freetonians and viewed their family portraits and photograph albums, interviewed contemporary photographers throughout Sierra Leone, and researched in the various colonial archives in England to locate photographs preserved from the period of colonial rule. I have discovered that a community of African photographers has worked in the city of Freetown since the very invention of photography. The article reviews the first phase of this unique photographic tradition, 1850–1918, and focuses on several of the African photographers who worked in Freetown during this period.

This article examines the role of spirit possession cults in the Swahili coastal area of Kenya and Tanzania, based on three years (1982–85) of doctoral dissertation research in seven field sites (including the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba). It provides a reassessment of the conventional theoretical viewpoint that such cults are peripheral to the wider society's value and socio-cultural structure, asserting that in this case they are, in fact, not only central to it but actually one of its most illuminating expressions.

The Institute's fifty-ninth Executive Council meeting took place at the African Studies Centre of the University of Bayreuth in the Federal German Republic in July 1986 following the Centre's annual symposium on the theme of ‘Identity in Africa’. Professor Jacob Ade Ajayi, myself, and Professors Mohamed Omer Beshir and John Paden gave papers at the symposium and Professor Michael Crowder delivered a special public lecture on the current crisis in African Studies (see p. 109). We are very grateful to Professor Helmut Ruppert, Director of Africanistics at Bayreuth, and to our Executive Council member, Professor Franz Rottland, and to Professor and Mrs Christopher Winter and all their colleagues for inviting us to meet at Bayreuth in this very productive fashion and in such congenial company. The meeting served to highlight the continuing international role of the Institute. Professors Martin Njeuma (Cameroon) and Toshinao Yoneyama (Japan) were attending Executive Council for the first time. The following new members were elected to Council: Professor AH Mazrui (Vice-Chairman), Professor Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (Consultative Director), Professor J. M. Schoffeleers, Professor Abdoulaye Bara Diop and Dr Steven Moyo. While welcoming Professor Coquery-Vidrovitch as incoming French Consultative Director, warm tribute was paid to her retiring predecessor, Professor Pierre Alexandre, who had for so many years sustained French support for the Institute. The Institute was extremely fortunate to have enjoyed the advice and guidance of a colleague of such distinction and wide-ranging expertise.

In April 1986 British Africanists met to discuss the crisis facing African Studies in their country. The crisis was easily denned as one of lack of resources in universities where current cutbacks have particularly affected area studies; of the limited funds available to libraries specialising in African Studies; and of the severe reduction in the number of publishers willing to take on monographs relating to Africa, with the result that many scholars are ‘giving up all hope of being published'.1 Furthermore, lack of travel funds has meant that many Africanists teaching in Britain have not been to the continent of their study in seven years. So few new appointments have recently been made in the field of African Studies in British universities that, unless something drastic is done to reverse the trend, in fifteen years’ time there will be a sharp decline in the numbers actually engaged in African Studies as generations grow old and are not replaced.2 Students can see no future in pursuing African Studies at the postgraduate level and their teachers are in no position to advise even their most brilliant students that doctoral research will lead to an academic appointment. These developments have taken place in a context where those who run the government have lost or are losing interest in Africa, a continent which is seen increasingly as one of unending problems which they just wish would go away. Indeed, the whole crisis in African Studies, as described by some of the leading British Africanists that April, invited headlines in the respected weekly magazine West Africa: ‘African Studies in peril. Is the study of Africa in British universities dying?

This article deals with the national languages of Sierra Leone and their use in education since 1978. Language information relevant to the period under review as well as language policy and its implementation are focal parts of our discussion.

There exists in practice if not in theory a formal mother-tongue education programme at primary school level in specially selected pilot schools of all four geographical regions of Sierra Leone. This programme was initiated in 1978 within the framework of a national language policy later spelt out in a working UNESCO study of 1981. Similarly, adult literacy education has gained rapid expansion over the same period although this sector of indigenous language education is mostly handled by so-called nongovernmental agencies such as CUSO Sierra Leone, the People's Educational Association (PEA), and similar bodies. To this extent the recommendations and proposals of the Dalby report concerning the implementation of a national language policy for Sierra Leone have seen practical implementation as well as some degree of experimentation in formal and non-formal education. In short, the bare bones of this experimental framework are illuminated by practice.

Thomas Alexander Leighton Decker, o.b.e., teacher, journalist, broadcaster, poet, dramatist, linguist and senior civil servant—to name only some of the major occupations or preoccupations of his busy life—was the man who, more than any other, crusaded for the acceptance of Krio as a language in its own right. At a time when others dismissed Sierra Leone's main lingua franca as a debased or corrupt form of English and failed to recognise its distinct identity and full potential, Thomas Decker never once faltered in his conviction that it was as good a language as any other. He spent much of his life trying to convince others of the truth of this, and the fact that Krio has at last begun to gain the acceptance he sought for it is in no small measure due to him and his efforts on its behalf.

From the time when I first became entangled with the Third World, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I have been fascinated by those contemporary ways of life and thought which keep growing out of the interplay between imported and indigenous cultures. They are the cultures on display in market places, shanty towns, beer halls, night clubs, missionary book stores, railway waiting rooms, boarding schools, newspapers and television stations. Nigeria, the country I have been most closely in touch with in an on-and-off way for some time, because of its large size, perhaps, offers particular scope for such cultural development, with several very large cities and hundreds if not thousands of small and middle-size towns. It has a lively if rather erratic press, a popular music scene dominated at different times by such genres as highlife, juju and Afro-beat, about as many universities as breweries (approximately one to every state in the federal republic), dozens of authors published at home and abroad, schoolhouses in just about every village, and an enormous fleet of interurban taxicabs which with great speed can convey you practically from anywhere to anywhere, at some risk to your life.