The development of the Internet is exciting and significant for most companies. I think it is particularly important for small organisations with limited means. African Books Collective falls into this category as a non-profit-making organisation responsible for letting the world know about 1700 books published by its participating publishers in Africa. As well as finding homes for the books, we aim to increase awareness of publishing in Africa and of mainstream African authors. For anyone unfamiliar with ABC, it is an African-owned company which has spent the past ten years marketing and distributing English language books for its member African publishers - currently a total of 45 from 11 countries. The extent of the promotion work we do is limited by resources, so it was great news for us when the Internet started to become a real tool for sharing information and then a means for selling.

Eritrea is a tropical country which stretches from 12 to 18 degrees north latitude and 36 to 43 degrees east longitude. It is located in North East Africa - sometimes called the Horn of Africa - west of the Red Sea. Eritrea, with an area of 124,320 square kilometres, has about 1000 kilometres of coastline and over 350 islands in the Red Sea. Its neighbours are Sudan in the west and north-west, Ethiopia in the south and Djibouti in the east. Yemen and Saudi Arabia, across the Red Sea in the east, are also its neighbours.

The population of Eritrea is about 4 million. There are nine nationalities, Afar, Baza, Bilen, Hidareb, Kunama, Rashaida, Saho, Tigre, and Tigrigna, each with its own language. According to their racial origin the people are divided into three main groups; Nilotic, Hemetic and Semitic.

Missionary periodicals are like librarians. They have an image problem. People think they are boring. Like librarians, they spent a lot of time agonising over their image. Their editorials were full of complaints that even regular church and chapel goers are ill-informed and indifferent to foreign missions and regard missionary magazines as uninteresting. They were constantly exhorting their readers to go out and sign up more subscribers. If the missionary magazines had a problem in their own time, it was a long time before scholars took them seriously as source material. Scholars tended to think of them, if they thought of them at all, covered in a pietistic haze, of interest only to committed missionary antiquarians. All this is changing. I do not have to convince readers of ARD that librarians are not boring; I hope to convince you that missionary periodicals are not boring either.

The idea of compiling a gazetteer for the second Anglo-Boer War presented itself quite simply because of the numerous mistakes and misspellings of place names that we have come across in the literature of the war. In his Author's Note to his splendid illustrated bibliography, R.G. Hackett comments that ‘The variance in spelling of place names follows a decision to adopt the form used in source material’. And in his recent book, M.M. Evans notes the ‘passionately-held and wildly differing views on the spelling of place names’.

Southern Africa is a land of many languages, some of which were in a state of rapid transition at the end of the 19th century as the war started. It was then overwhelmingly rural and the names of topographical features as well as farms and villages largely reflected the landscape in which they were located.