Archives in the Republic of Zaire contain valuable documents for historical and ethnographic research, but finding these treasures often demands a great deal of perseverance and a certain amount of luck. Since the government archives in Kinshasa deal mainly with national administration, they generally have little to offer researchers interested in more localized topics. Although a small number of documents from the countryside have trickled into the Archives Nationales (housed in a wing of the fire station on Avenue de la Justice in Kinshasa), most of them remain dispersed throughout the network of regional, sub-regional, and zonal offices that form the core of the country's administrative system.

Since policies regarding the conservation of archives and the granting of access to them are not uniform, but made on an ad hoc basis by the officials on the spot, conditions vary widely from place to place and from time to time but I should point out that during my research in the Bandundu and Equateur Regions in 1975-76, the officials with whom I worked were unfailingly helpful, though the quality of the collections varied greatly. Some archives had disappeared or fallen into disarray during the troubles of the early 1960s; yet others remained remarkably intact, although even in the best-kept archives, many older documents had been partially eaten by insects.