Geography is well established as an academic discipline in Britain, and geographers make a substantial contribution to African studies here. About 30 British university teachers are concerned primarily with the human geography of Africa, and for about 30 others it is a subsidiary interest. These individuals are widely scattered around the country (Appendix 1), and their particular concerns are very diverse, so many are not closely in touch with one another. No organization binds them together or reviews their work, and therefore this is a purely personal assessment - though it has benefitted from the comments of several colleagues.

A review such as this is inevitably somewhat arbitrary in its limits, for the studies in question take place within a complex system of interrelationships with a wider range of studies.

In 1977 a group of Italian linguists set up a research program on the Somali language, in the context of the technical co-operation between Italy and Somalia. The program was sponsored by the Italian Ministry of External Affairs and the Somali Ministry of Higher Education. The scientific bodies involved were the University of Rome and the National Research Council (CNR) on the Italian side, and the Somali National University and the Academy of Sciences, Arts and Literature on the Somali side. The program was divided into two separate but obviously related projects: 1) the elaboration of a comprehensive reference grammar of Somali, at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels; 2) the compilation of a bilingual (Somali-Italian) dictionary and of various glossaries of specific terminologies.

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;

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.

The growth of the Africa Division of the Library has reflected the growth in the range of the School's activities in African studies. Before the war the emphasis was on languages, but since the war the policy has been to expand into the fields of the humanities and social sciences.

Works on African languages and cultures now total about 32,000. The African languages section is very strong and the collections in the humanities and social sciences are being built up as rapidly as finances permit.