Housed in vaults and basements in various locations at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, is a remarkable collection of photographs, plant specimens, cultural artifacts, postcards, letters, and field notes of Dr. Homer Leroy Shantz (1876-1958). Shantz was a noted plant physiologist and former President of the University of Arizona (1928-1936), and one of the earliest professional botanists to survey and photograph the flora in select regions of southern, central, and eastern Africa. In 1919/20 he traversed the African continentfrom Cape to Cairo with a Smithsonian-sponsored research team to evaluate Africa's plant resources and agricultural potential. As the team's agricultural expert, Shantz gathered numerous specimens, made sketches and watercolors, and took several thousand photographs of the cultivated and wild flora in the regions he traversed.

His collected materials, conserved at the University of Arizona, constitute a major contribution to African agricultural and ecological history for the early colonial period. His photographs give rare glimpses of the agricultural components of daily life of that era. They also include among them a rare set of approximately 600 photographs of southern Urundi (now Burundi) taken during a one-month stopover at Nyanza on the Lake Tanganyika coast. For the cultural and political historian of Burundi these photographs represent the first opportunity to view the ordinary people and chiefs of southern inland Urundi (the region of Buragane), where European presence was not firmly established until the 1930s.