Government Gazettes are a neglected source for the colonial history of Africa, and it may be worthwhile to draw attention to various types of information to be found in those for Northern Rhodesia, which have recently been made available on microfilm.

Up to 1911 the British South Africa Company administered two territories north of the Zambezi: North-Eastern Rhodesia and North-Western Rhodesia. For North-Eastern Rhodesia the Company published at Fort Jameson (now Chipata) a monthly Government Gazette from 1903 to 1911. There was no Gazette for North-Western Rhodesia; legislation for this territory was initially published in the Official Gazette of the High Commissioner for South Africa, though some relevant proclamations and government notices were reprinted in the North-Eastern Rhodesia Gazette. From 1911 the Company published a Government Gazette for the amalgamated territory of Northern Rhodesia; the frequency varied between twelve and twenty issues a year. In 1924 the Colonial Office took over responsibility for Northern Rhodesia. Thereafter the frequency of publication tended to increase, reflecting the growth of government, business, and white settlement. Before 1939 it ranged between 24 and 50 issues a year, and from 1939 to independence in 1964, between 50 and 80 a year.

This short note updates Nancy Hunt's recent report on research in Burundi. While Hunt presented a thorough description of the situation in Burundi as of 1984, my recent month-long visit in August of 1988 shows that a few of the names, as well as some aspects of the protocol, have changed.

Although Hunt adequately presented the informal process of obtaining research clearance to work in Bujumbura (attestations from the Centre de Civilisation Burundaise or CCB, mayor's office, university, etc.), the process for any area outside the city limits is more complicated, decidedly more formal, and not always guaranteed of success. Requests for research clearance in all communes except Bujumbura should be directed to Mr. le Ministre Aloys Kadoyi, Ministère de l'Intérieur, B.P. 1910, Bujumbura. The initial request should contain an introductory cover letter, a support letter from your university, and a copy of the research proposal, all in French if possible. Attestations from other sources strengthen a researcher's status in the field outside Bujumbura, but they do not replace the necessary official permission granted from the Ministry of the Interior.

During the 1987/88 academic year an Arabic manuscript microfilm project at Boutilimit, Mauritania, under sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Illinois, completed the first phase of a library preservation program with the filming of some 25.5 lineal feet/8.1 lineal meters of Arabic manuscripts (or slightly over 100,000 folios of material) on eighty-five reels. This filmed collection is available to researchers at the University of Illinois Library Archives. In contrast with what, alas, is a norm in Arabic manuscript acquisition and cataloging, and thanks to a computer program developed for this project, within four months of the termination of the filming an interim 352-page bilingual finding aid was generated for the 937 records involved. Following corrections to that finding aid in the field and additions to the collection during the 1988/89 year, indices in Arabic and English will be generated from the program. The rapidity with which this collection has thus become accessible for researchers is fairly dramatic, and the program developed for the project may well point to ways in which other comparable data sets may be efficiently managed. This description will focus on the objectives of the finding aid, the technical outline of its development, the experience to date with its application, and possible future uses for the system.

J. W. Blake, who died on 7 March 1987, was a significant and notable link in the chain of African historiography. In the 1930s he learned Portuguese, assembled Portuguese sources, and did meticulous research among the difficult and then largely unpenetrated archives of the English High Court of Admiralty. The result was a monograph on European Beginnings in West Africa, 1454-1578, published in 1937, followed by two volumes of documents relating to the same period, Europeans in West Africa, published in 1942. The outbreak of war in 1939 delayed the second publication and by preventing Blake from visiting French archives made it one nation short in its documents. The titles of these very solid works express exactly what they contain. The monograph was much admired by the distinguished Portuguese scholar, Avelino Teixeira da Mota, and by the small but growing band of Anglo-American historians who from the 1950s developed an interest in the history of Guinea. Indeed, the 1937 work was almost the earliest work to make a serious study of the first stages of European contact with Black Africa. But it was essentially a work about Europeans overseas, since Blake had been trained in a tradition of what was then called ‘imperial history.’ In modern parlance it was Eurocentric, and its references to the experiences and reactions of Africans were, by later standards, naive and uninformed.