The Oxford Development Records Project (1977-) is the lineal descendant of the Oxford Colonial Records Project (1963-1972), whose work on collections of private papers acquired from those who had worked in the Colonial Service has been well described by Patricia M. Pugh in Journal of the Society of Archivists, 6, 1978, 76-86 and by J.J. Tawney (‘Personal thoughts on a rescue operation’) in African Affairs, 67, 1968, 345-50.

Neither of these accounts, in the event, paid adequate attention to the Oral History dimensions of the OCRP whereby, with the help of an honorary Research Officer, tape-recorded interviews were concluded between 1967 and 1972 with nearly eighty members of the Colonial Service or Colonial Office (along with a few from the private sector), ranging from the Governor-General with thirty years’ service to his credit to the unconfirmed Cadet who resigned after three.

This article arises out of our experience in the compilation of a bibliography on the East African economies of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda. Approximately one-quarter of the items were gathered between 1976 and 1979 by Killick, and the compilation of the remainder was organized by Finucane and Rupley in 1980 and 1981. The classification system was largely designed by Killick. Nearly all the work was carried out at the University of Nairobi. The bibliography is to be published by G.K. Hall, Boston, as Tony Killick, Lawrence Rupley, Brendan Finucane, The Economies of East Africa: 1974-1980. This present compilation serves to update Tony Killick's The Economies of East Africa( Boston: G.K. Hall, 1976), which covered the 1963-1974 time period. For the most part, this volume takes up where the earlier one ended, although items missed in the earlier one are included herein.

This stage of the Zimbabwe documentation project was made possible by a UNESCO grant which the National Archives sought after Independence in order to locate, list and where possible acquire or copy documentation in Britain relating to Zimbabwe from the earliest times through to the present. Such documentation was seen as ranging from manuscript material through to films and photographs and certain printed and published material. Most of the latter category comprises the output of the Zimbabwe liberation movement when it was in exile in the 1960s and 1970s, which obviously it was difficult to acquire in Rhodesia at that time. In fact it remains difficult to acquire even now since much of it tended to be ephemeral in nature. (The national library is part of the Zimbabwe Archives, which is why the project also encompasses printed items). The intention was also to supplement the written record by interviewing relevant people in Britain for our Oral History Programme.

The idea to undertake this project began when Zed Press commissioned Ben Turok as editor for a collection of documents on the above subject as part of a series called ‘The African Liberation Reader’. The scope of the collection of documents was to be determined by its editor, Ben Turok, who had been briefed to collect documents for publication in two volumes.

Such a task required collaborative effort, both in terms of identifying sources/institutions to write to at home and abroad as well as ascertaining if any relevant material already existed locally. In effect, a strategy had to be worked out in order to undertake the project with some measure of success, especially since any cost involved in collecting the documents would not be met by the publisher.