The Comorian archipelago is located at the northern end of the Mozambique channel in the western Indian Ocean. Of volcanic origin, the archipelago consists of four major islands and several smaller ones which, for many centuries, have been the sites of ports for ships from Asia, Africa, and Europe. They played an especially prominent role in the networks of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean during the fifteenth century and were involved in the maritime trade much earlier. As one would expect of people involved in trade over a long period of time, Comorians have been keepers of records. Thus, the Comoro Islands have become a rich source of both written and oral documents.

Some of the numerous documents that have been discovered on the islands have served as the basis of the published histories of the Comoros. Others have been published themsleves and all have provided valuable information about life in the islands. Many documents, however, still remain unpublished. I have had the opportunity to collect numerous documents over the nearly twenty years that I have been gathering information about the Comoro Islands, and this collection continues to grow today. When I am not in the islands, Comorians send or bring documents to me in Kansas which I copy or record before returning them to their owners. During my trips to the islands I have taped oral information, photographed data of historical significance, hand-copied documents, and have been given or lent rare publications.

This continues to update the basic list of serial bibliographies of possible interest to Africanists which appeared in the 1983 volume of History in Africa and which will continue to appear to the extent that new materials are noticed. Most of the following items are of only peripheral interest to Africanists but each is likely to contain at least some material which does not appear in other bibliographies at all, or at least not so quickly. Where available, I have included OCLC numbers, which may be useful for those with access to the OCLC data base.

Published by the Magyar Mezogazdasagi Muzeum in Budapest, the Bibliographia attempts to incorporate all materials relating to rural and agricultural history and related fields, a field not so fully covered, as far as I know, by any other bibliography. Unfortunately, publication is behind (and may even have ceased); materials for 1975 and 1976 were covered in the volume published in 1979. This included a total of 5790 items in 10 major and numerous minor categories, including economic and social history, history of agrotechnics, prices and wages, agrarian ethnography, and agricultural settlements. A list (obviously incomplete) of 90 to 100 journals is included and there are geographical and author indexes.

A hundred years ago Johannesburg was not even a hole in the ground. Yet we know far more of its history since then than we do of Cape Town, the Mother City of South Africa, established at the southern tip of the continent over two centuries before. The key importance of the Witwatersrand in the development of the economy, the rapid expansion of Johannesburg and the conflict that accompanied it, have all ensured the region a dominant role in all histories of South Africa. The dramatic events surrounding the mining of gold and the growth of southern Africa's largest and wealthiest city have attracted only an increasing number of historians. These scholars have an enormous range of written sources to draw upon and are currently making innovative use of oral testimony. When we talk of the economic and social history of the Witwatersrand, we are referring to a substantial body of historical writing.

The history of Cape Town over the last century is much less visible. It is less dramatic, less documented, and less researched. Explorations have been made, some of the results of which are reproduced by the Cape Town History Workshop, but there is no possibility of producing a useful mapping of the social and economic development of Cape Town until more basic research has been completed. The recording of this ‘local history’ is not only important for its own sake, for the central focus of most overviews of South African history on the Witwatersrand has dulled our ability to understand, and even perceive, major and continuing regional differences in South Africa and the forces of which they are the product.

This is a report on provisional efforts to reorganize a regional archive in Dosso, Niger. The information is provided in hopes that it will be of some use to students of West African history, and will arouse the interest of archivists.

While conducting research in the Dosso region of Niger during 1981 and 1982, I had occasion to work with historical materials in the Prefectural archives of the Department of Dosso. At the time of my arrival in Dosso, the archival documents were stored in more than twenty metal and wooden cabinets and files, and on open shelves. These were located inside a very large room without electric lights, illuminated dimly during the daylight hours by a single small window, permanently open and paneless, high on as eastward facing wall. The disorder of the cabinets inside the room was such at the beginning that it was impossible to penetrate more than a few feet. In some cabinets the contents were more or less uniform, but in most there was considerable disarray, said to date from the late 1970s when a national youth festival was held in Dosso. As a result, it was not uncommon to find mimeographed reports from the 1970s alongside registers of handwritten.entries dating from the early 1900s, and typescripts from the 1930s and 1940s. In others, voracious termites left for years to eat as they liked, had caused considerable destruction, consuming the documents, and in the case of wooden construction, the cabinets and shelves that contained them.

The Divisions of Sefwi Wiawso, Sefwi Bekwai, and Sefwi Anwhiaso in the Western Frontier District of the Gold Caost were brought within the operations of the Native Jurisdiction Ordinance (1883) under the ‘Headchief of Sefwi Wiawso in 1909.’ They were administered from the Ankobra District until 1911 when an increase in the number of Assistant District Commissioners permitted the appointment of a Commissioner to the Western Frontier District. The headquarters of the Western Frontier District were at Amoya, a very small town near the Bia River and the Ivory Coast border. Three years later, however, in 1914, the Sefwi District was created and new headquarters established in the old capital of Sefwi Wiawso, the town of Wiawso perched on the top of a steep hill and not far from the important ferry crossing of the Tano River. The Sefwi Wiawso Native Tribunal was first established at this date. A few years later Native Tribunals were also established at Sefwi Bekwai and Sefwi Anwhiaso. The present court rooms in Wiawso were built in 1927/28 and the court records for Sefwi Wiawso to which I had access date from this time.

The court records had been deposited (in 1970) on the floor and shelves of a storeroom at the back of what is now the District Magistrate's Court in Wiawso. Some of the earlier volumes seemed to be missing and many were in bad repair. I did my best to rebind these before returning them to the store.

Indian fighter, explorer, scout, soldier and hero: during Frederick Burnham's life he filled all of these roles. Consequently a myth grew up around him cultivated by various “real-life adventure story books” in which he featured, and his own autobiography in which he stressed the more adventurous aspects of his life. The adventurous aspects of his career are, indeed, not without significance. For example, it was Burnham who killed the Mlimo during the Ndebele War of 1897 and this action may well have had an important effect on the morale of Ndebele fighters. Nevertheless, Burnham's career as a mineral prospector, mining engineer, and business manager is as significant as his more publicized activities. In some instances the latter were, in fact, a consequence of his employment in the former.

Born in the United States, Burnham was brought up in California. He received a limited formal education but in the course of his early working life in the western United States he acquired a knowledge of mining, particularly gold mining. From 1893 to 1897 he was in present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia. It was he who led the Northern Territories (BSA) Exploration Co. expedition which established for the outside world that major copper deposits existed in Central Africa.