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Accidental Archives: Tracing Africa in the India Office Private Papers in the British Library

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Marion Wallace
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Extract

This article deals with the British Library's collections on Africa, and especially with its collection of private papers of India Office officials (with a particular focus on the twentieth century). The choice of India-related collections may seem surprising, but in fact these records contain much that is relevant to African history.

In this article I am concerned not only to describe what is held at the British Library, but to discuss the historical construction of these collections. That is, how factors that might be thought mundane and pedestrian - decisions about the selection or destruction of records, and their preservation and arrangement - affect both the nature of archival holdings and the scholarship built upon them.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 98 , 2005 , pp. 23 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © African Research & Documentation 2005

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Footnotes

1

Thanks are due to Jill Geber, Penny Brook and Danny Millum for help with this article.

References

Notes

2 For the idea of the archive's “energies” see Verne Harris, “The archival sliver: A perspective on the construction of social memory in archives and the-transition from apartheid to democracy” in Carolyn Hamilton et al. (eds), Refiguring the archive (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic, 2002), pp. 135-51, p. 136.

3 For an overview of the British Library's collections on Africa see Use Stemberg and Patricia Larby (eds), African studies: papers presented at a colloquium at the British Library, 7-9 January 1985 (British Library occasional papers 6, British Library and SCOLMA, London, 1986). See also the British Library's Africa web pages at http://www.bl.uk/collections/african.html. For enquiries about the Library's African materials please email [email protected].

4 For a listing of some Africa-related papers in this collection see J.D. Pearson (ed.), A guide to manuscripts and documents in the British Isles relating to Africa (London, 1993; a new edition of the Matthews and Wainwright volumes of the same title), vol. 1, part 1.

5 Maps 63905(1).

6 For general information on the India Office records see Martin Moir, A general guide to the India Office Records (London, British Library, 1988); Timothy Thomas, Indians overseas: a guide to source materials in the India Office Records for the study of Indian emigration, 1830-1950 (London, British Library, 1985).

7 On Africa-related material in the India Office collections see especially Jill Geber, “Southern African sources in the Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC) of the British Library”, African Research and Documentation, 70,1996,1-35; idem, “The English East India Company at the Cape and the Cape of Good Hope factory records, 1773-1836”, South African Archives Journal, 36, 1994, 54-64. On African materials in both the India Office and Private Papers Collections see Pearson, Guide to manuscripts, vol. 1, part 1.

8 See http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/indiaofficeselect/welcome.asp. (Note that searching under “Africa” as a subject will not produce all references to Africa: for better results, it is necessary to use regional terms (“Africa, East” etc.) and names of individual countries or territories.) Keyword searching of catalogue entries is also possible through the AccessZArchives database (http://www.a2a.org.uk/), and names of depositors/authors can be found on the National Register of Archives (http://www.nra.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/).

9 See Manuscript collections in Rliodes House Library Oxford: Accessions 1978-1994 (Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1996) and preceding volumes published in 1968 and 1971 (both ed. Louis Frewer) and 1978 (ed. Wendy Byrne). Descriptions for some of the holdings are to be found on the Archives Hub at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/.

10 Ashley Jackson, “Review article: Governing empire: Colonial memoirs and the history of HM Overseas Civil Service”, African Affairs, 103, 412 (2004), 471-91. Terry Barringer, Administering Empire: an annotated checklist of personal memoirs and related studies (London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London 2004).

11 For example, F 111/258, Curzon Collection, 1902-4.

12 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial archives and the arts of governance: on the content in the form” in Hamilton (ed.), Refiguring the archive, p. 90.

13 Harris, “The archival sliver”, p. 136.

14 Mss Eur F 111, Curzon Collection; Mss Eur E 267, Seton Collection. Bruce was Lady Seton's brother.

15 Mss Eur E 267/46, Major Bruce to Lady Seton, 21 Aug 1910. The Alaafin in question was Lawani Agogo-Ija Amubieya, who reigned 1905-1911 (see M.O. Ogunmola, A new perspective to Oyo Empire history: 1530-1944 (Ibadan, 1997), ch. 15).

16 Mss Eur D 724/20, Hume Collection, Hume to his parents, 1 Jan 1951. Hume was in the Indian Civil Service between 1927 and 1947, and went to Kenya as a civil servant in 1950.

17 Some of the photographs remain in the India Office Private Papers collection; some have been extracted and are now held in the India Office Photographs Collection, the catalogue of which is available at http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/indiaofficeselect/photoform.asp. There is also an India Office Prints and Drawings Collection with a catalogue at http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/indiaofficeselect/pdform.asp.

18 Mss Eur E 267/184, Seton Collection, Photographs ?taken by Bruce in SA [1905-6]. For Sekhukhune and Phokwane see Peter Delius, The land belongs to us: the Pedi polity, the Boers and the British in the nineteenth-century Transvaal (London, 1984), pp. 210,233-4.

19 Mss Eur F 197/72.

20 For these details see his diary, held at Mss Eur F197/260, and Patrick French, Younghusband: the last great imperial adventurer (London, 1994), ch. 9.

21 Mss Eur F197/649, Younghusband Collection, photographs c. 1896. Clues to the identity of the subjects are possibly to be found in Younghusband's correspondence, though I have unsuccessfully searched his diary for this period (Mss Eur F 197/260). A search of The Times for “Younghusband” and “Mashonaland” was similarly unsuccessful. The byline on reports at this time is generally “From our own correspondent”, making it impossible to locate Younghusband's reports by using his name. Younghusband wrote about this trip in his South Africa of to-day (London, 1898), chs 12-13, but did not reproduce his photographs of Africans, nor mention individual Africans by name.

22 Staler, “Colonial archives”, p. 92.

23 William Malcolm Hailey, An African survey: A study of problems arising in Africa South of the Sahara (Oxford, 1945,2nd ed.).

24 Mss Eur F203/35-46, Caroe Collection. The files cover the period 1954-55.

25 I deal here with Mss Eur D 724/21 (1952-3), Hume Collection. Files Mss Eur D 724/20-2 contain his letters from Kenya, 1949-57, and his diaries for 1949-57 inclusive are held in Mss Eur D 724/80-88.

26 Mss Eur D 724/21, Hume Collection, Hume to his parents, 21 Dec 1952. It is evident from his letters that Hume was a devout Christian.

27 Mss Eur E 267/46, Seton Collection, Major Bruce to Lady Seton, 11 May 1906.

28 Mss Eur F 112/80, 81, 1908-9, Curzon Collection.

29 Mss Eur C 313/54-6, 1929-31.

30 Mss Eur D 819, Gilchrist volume.

31 Mss Eur F 111/258, Curzon Collection, “Official proceedings and notes on the employment of indentured Indians as miners in Natal”, 1902-4. Note that the correspondence of the India Office includes much similar material.

32 Mss Eur E 341/16-18, Tyson Collection, letters from South Africa and elsewhere, 1927-30.

33 A polo scurry is a race for polo ponies.

34 This was presumably the British conquest of the kingdom of Ogwashi-Uku, in southern Nigeria, in 1909. Elizabeth Isichei, A history of Nigeria (London, 1983), p. 375.

35 Mss Eur E 267/17, Major Bruce to Lady Seton, 21 Aug 1910.

36 Mss Eur D 724/20, Hume Collection, Hume to his parents, 14 Jan 1951; Mss Eur E 341/16, Tyson to his family, 4 June 1927.

37 Mss Eur D 724/21, Hume to his parents, 30 Sept 1952.

38 Material at the BLCASRH includes reference Mss.Afr.s.970.

39 The British Library material is at Mss Eur E 220. Hailey's papers appear to have been divided between Indian and African material, with the former coming to the British Library.

40 Hume's papers at the BLCASRH are under references Mss.Afr.s.2006 and Mss.Afr.s.1436.

41 Mss Eur F 252/38 (diary, East Africa, 1939), 48, 49 (diaries, West Africa, 1949), 75 (diary, South Africa, 1967-68).

42 Mss Eur F 232/18-32, Ouwerkerk Collection, diaries 1952-64.

43 Mss Eur F 232/58, Ouwerkerk Collection, papers, notes and correspondence with Laurens van der Post, 1980.

44 Mss Eur F 232/101, Ouwerkerk Collection, letters to Louise Ouwerkerk from Peter Wright in Nairobi and Delhi, 1952-55. Wright was also in contact with the radical priest Michael Scott.

45 Mss Eur F 111/547.

46 Mss Eur F 108, White Collection.

47 White Collection, Mss Eur F 108/56 pt b, telegrams Oct-Dec 1899, B 5/4 no. 7.

48 Mss Eur D1002 (1947-61), Coke Wallis Collection, typed article “From our own correspondent”, n.d.

49 Mss Eur E 372/13, Sir Hugh Dow Collection, papers on Royal Commission on East Africa, 1953-5 and E 372/28, photograph album.

50 Mss Eur D 724/20, Hume to his parents, 14 Jan 1951.

51 Mss Eur E 341/16, Tyson Collection, Tyson to his family, 23 May 1927.

52 Mss Eur E 341/17, Tyson Collection, Tyson to his family, 31 May 1928.

53 Mss Eur F 108/74, White Collection, BD 1/58, studio of Horace Nicholls, Ealing, West London. Cf the title of a well-known contemporary account of the siege, Donald MacDonald, How we kept the flag flying: the story of the siege of Ladysmith (London, 1900).

54 Mss Eur F 108/74, White Collection, BD 1/56, captioned “Headquarters of the Hero of Ladysmith. The humble Headquarters of Sir George White from where the Flag was kept flying at Ladysmith.“

55 Mortimer Durand, The life of Sir George White, V.C. (Edinburgh, 1915); Thomas Coates, Sir George White V.C: the hero of Ladysmith (London, 1900), p. 251