The African Studies Association gives its Presidents no formal guidance on the content or presentation of their addresses, but my predecessor Rowland Moss suggested that one method was to chose a title first and write the address afterwards. In my case, the major part of the title was easy to decide on, since it was as the representative of SCOLMA, the Standing Conference on Library Materials on Africa, that I first joined the A.S.A. Council in 1964. I do not, however, intend to speak about SCOLMA in any detail, since I have done so on more than one occasion; my aim is to look at the materials which one might find in a major library on Africa and consider how they came to be written, the categories into which they fall, and the way in which they reflect changing attitudes to Africa.

I am not everybody,
But I am somebody,
I cannot do everything,
But I can do something,
What I can do,
I ought to do,
What I ought to do,
By the Grace of God
I will do.

So wrote Will Freshwater in a family commonplace book on 1 October 1900. It must have been shortly before then that he had resolved to train for the African mission field. Eighteen months later-he was to embark with other, more experienced missionaries for Chinde in Mozambique, en route for the London Missionary Society's (LMS) Central Africa Mission in North Eastern Rhodesia. At his death in 1936 he left a small collection of private papers which is still in the keeping of his family.

Except for explicitly missiological studies there has been little perceptible inclination on the part of Africanists to exploit a voluminous and important genre of source - the published writings of missionaries who served in Africa. For better or worse, the desire to devote as much time, energy, and expense to collecting oral materials in the field has come to dominate research programmes to the inevitable exclusion of analyzing as wide a range as possible of other materials. As far as the missionary materials are concerned, this failure is prompted to some degree by a tendency to devalue these materials because of the smug and patronizing attitudes so often manifested in them.

This conscious or unconscious eschewing of a major body of source material is unfortunate in itself.

The Lesotho Agricultural Sector Analysis (LASA) Project was undertaken by the Department of Economics of the University of Colorado for the Lesotho government, with the intention of developing ”… the capacity of the Government of Lesotho to design, implement and utilize sector analysis in their development planning efforts”. The project was to consist of three phases: One, a “start up” period of approximately ten months; Two, six months for the establishment of a team of economists and related personnel in Maseru, Lesotho; and Phase Three, the agricultural sector analysis, estimated to take twenty months. Phase One will be the one of direct concern to this article.

The object of Phase One was to set up a plan of work for the following two phases, and to develop a “knowledge base” with the primary purpose of serving the team, firstly in Colorado and later in Lesotho.

The archives of the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi have recently been sorted and listed. They are now, available to students of East African history and form a useful addition to the source material on the subject. As well as the Museum's own archives, they include collections of papers and photographs given to the Museum by private individuals. The material dates from about 1900 to the present day.

The Museum was begun in a single room by the East Africa and Uganda National History Society in 1910, and moved to its own building in 1920. In 1929 it was moved into the first buildings on the present site and renamed the Coryndon Memorial Museum. In December 1964 it became the National Museum of Kenya.