Feedback—the process by which written versions of history influence subsequent presentations of oral history—is now a well-documented process. In writing on African history, Henige in particular has emphasized the importance of feedback in oral history, and has suggested that feedback from written sources is a process of contamination which has affected oral history all over the continent.

Some aspects of the oral history of Bonde, the area around the town of Muheza in northeastern Tanzania, would seem to present a counterexample to this thesis of written history as a contaminant of hitherto pure oral history: oral histories of at least two important nineteenth-century events in this area are at variance with fairly widely-available published sources. Evidence from Bonde suggests that, here at least, feedback from written sources is not a particular and unique influence on the making of oral history.

Judicial and legal records in the National Archives of Ghana headquarters repositories are important primary source materials for historians, social scientists, and other researchers, and in particular practicing lawyers. The holdings of the national archives service, both in Accra and its network, cover records relating to the political and bureaucratic activities of government. This paper focuses on the Accra holdings pertaining to judicial and legal records, in order to draw attention to the decisive attractiveness of these record series in general and, in particular, the Accra judicial and legal records to a generation inclined to both quantification and sociological analysis and to provide a guide to prospective users.

The headquarters of the national archives service, where the judicial and legal records are located, is situated on Castle Road in Accra near the junction with Barnes Road. The offices are open from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday. The search room functions between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. The formal requirement for admission to use the archives materials is the searcher's ticket obtained from the Search Room Officer on the spot.

There has been an effective movement afoot in the Republic of Guinea to improve the climate of study and research for local and foreign scholars alike. The most obvious physical evidence of this is the dramatically improved archival facility in Conakry. In April 1991 Les Archives Nationales du Guinée began moving into an entirely new, specially constructed building next to the Ministère de la Jeunesse, des Arts, de la Culture et des Sports. By the summer of 1992, the lengthy process of settling into the building's 1600 square meters appeared to be complete.

This is a modern, well-equipped facility, organized and administered by trained Guinean archivists who are appropriately concerned with preservation of resources. A tour of some of the main archival storage areas revealed a large collection of bound, well-preserved documents. According to the Associate Director, Seydouba Cissé, there are five such climate-controlled rooms, containing a total of 5,000 meters of metal shelving. According to the personnel list there are two conservators on the staff. At their disposal is a studio for restoration and a room for cleaning books and documents. There is also a microfilm room (I did not have time to examine this collection), and a microfilm reading machine. In the summer of 1992 photocopying was readily available at a reasonable price per page. The card catalog in the air-conditioned reading room was in fairly good order, though some student mémoires (see below) were filed under categories inconsistent with their titles.

Fluctuations of colonial policies toward territorial integrity were not without effects, first on the people of these colonies and then on the organization of their own administration. A case in point is the tortuous history of colonial administration in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). Created in 1919 out of the oversized Haut-Sénégal-Niger—which extended from the Sénégal river to lake Chad—in order to rationalize the administration Upper Volta survived as an autonomous colony until January 1933, when it was officially dismembered. The northwestern part (i.e., Ouahigouya) was ceded to the French Sudan, the central and southwestern regions (Mosi and Bobo) to Côte d'Ivoire, and a small portion of the eastern portion (Fada N'Gourma) to Niger. After harsh negotiations the colony of Upper Volta was recreated in 1947. Researchers who have worked on this part of the French empire know that every adjustment brought to the administrative arrangement also caused personnel and documents to be displaced to the new centers—Abidjan, Niamey, or Bamako.

This institutional constraint on the organization of complete sets of archival documents for the study of the region's past has been strengthened by a well-known post-independence symptom: bureaucratic plethora. Indeed Burkina Faso is probably the only country in the world to possess more archivists than organized archives. The Direction des archives, with its dozen archivists in the 1980s, had not produced a single inventory of what could be found in the capital (Ouagadougou) or in the regions, although important work had been done by individual archivists appointed to specific Ministries or by expatriate researchers.

Colonial administration, as every other administration, was built on the production and management of numbers: export figures (to assess the economic performance of each colony); population estimates, often falsely labeled “censuses” (to establish each colony's capacity to pay the head tax); school enrollment statistics (to establish budgets and document the road to “civilization”). French colonialism was probably one of the more centralized and number-producing systems. The regional (e.g., Dakar) and central (Paris) capitals were always requesting data for budgeting or simply for monitoring the evolution of each component of the empire.

In the field of population statistics, before 1945 the process yielded very few reliable data, though a more systematic examination is required to be sure. Historically this can be explained by the evolution both of data collection and training in statistics in France during the first half of the twentieth century. The situation was well documented in the first decades of the century by Fernand Faure, a prominent member of the Société de Statistique de Paris, who noted that training in statistics was not very popular in the French civil service because no specific demand was made by higher levels of administrative or political power. Nevertheless, the Société and individuals in the Statistique Générale de France did succeed in pressing for the creation in 1922 of the Institut Supérieur de Statistique de l'Université de Paris (ISUP), but the lack of means at the institute made it virtually impossible for it to meet its training objectives.

Since all of today's trained African historians took up their burden in the 1960s or later decades, it is gratifying to be an untrained African historian who began in the 1950s, inasmuch as my early career can now be immodestly presented to younger researchers as historical documentation. This thought has arisen when reading in HA 18 a contribution by Simon Heap on the Nigerian National Archives at Ibadan. The archive's inspired founder, Kenneth Onwuka Dike, being long dead, a note on the history of the archives, or rather on its prehistory, can be offered from probably the Only Survivor.

The archives for Northern Nigeria, including not only the area north of the Niger and Benue rivers but also present-day Kwara, Kogi, and Benue states, is located at 29 Yakubu Gowon Way, Kaduna, in the heart of the busy central commercial and administrative district of the town. The Kaduna branch of the Nigerian National Archives has a large, comprehensive and unique collection of official papers of the British colonial and Nigerian independence periods; papers of native and local authorities; and newspapers, magazines, and other publications, as well as Arabic manuscripts. The archives is open on weekdays only. From Monday to Thursday its hours are 8:30 to 2:30, while on Friday there is a shortened day: 8:30 to 12:30.

No documents will be produced from the repository within one hour before closing time. In 1991 240 visitors made some 800 visits to the Kaduna archives. On each visit, the visitors' book must be signed; signing out at the end of the day is also obligatory. Use of the archives requires the purchase of a searcher's registration card costing 10 naira ($1.00 or 50 pence) for students, 25 naira for others. The card is valid for the other National Archives branches at Ibadan and Enugu and lasts for that calendar year. Renewals are carried out in subsequent years. Photocopying facilities are available, give excellent reproduction, and are cheap—50 kobo (5c/3p) per exposure for students, one naira for other researchers.

Towards the end of 1964 a campaign was launched by the University of the Orange Free State to collect political documents dating back as far as 1902 throughout South Africa. It was an attempt to gather all politically relevant documents still in private possession under one roof in a centrally situated place of safekeeping, where they could be arranged systematically and made available to researchers. The success of this venture and the rate at which political documents poured into the then Political Archive undeniably proved the need for such a center in South Africa.

It soon became clear that the function of the Political Archive extended beyond the mere collecting of documents. Scholarly interpretation of the material, the introduction thereof to the public and the stimulation of contemporary history were urgently necessary. This led to the establishment of an Institute for Contemporary History in 1970, formed around the nucleus of the Political Archive.

The second volume of Haile Sellassie's autobiography had scarcely been out a few months when it fell into oblivion with the emperor's deposition in September 1974. For Ethiopia Haile Sellassie's removal was a defining event, and the accompanying tattoo sought to characterize the emperor's reign, indeed all prior history, as a failure. As Haile Sellassie became an unperson in the Ethiopia of the 1970s and 1980s, his policies remained unstudied as the background to the unfolding political events. There was much that confused me: it was obvious that life had been more satisfactory in Ethiopia during his regime than later, and that educated Ethiopians during the last fifteen years of the emperor's reign had talked optimistically about the future, a quality lost in the mayhem of the period from 1974 to 1978. As Mengistu Haile Mariam lurched from crisis to crisis without solving the country's many problems, I concluded that thoughtful people would want to know why and how Haile Sellassie had been able to keep the country relatively peaceful, while providing a statesmanlike leadership that had been creative and reassuring. This certainty led me to undertake a biography of the emperor.

Nearly a decade has passed since Carol Dickerman wrote about the high points and practical considerations of working in this most important archival collection. With some recent changes at the Archives and the mere passage of time, an update is warranted.

In August 1991 the longtime archivist, Father René Lamey, stepped down after decades of dedicated stewardship over a vast and growing collection of materials generated by the White Fathers since their founding in 1868. His encyclopedic knowledge and willing assistance to scholars will be missed by those who know him. Yet he has been replaced by Father Francois Renault, a scholar and archivist who knows the collection extremely well. Father Renault is more than familiar with the methods of African social scientists. He took a Doctorat d'Etat in history from the Sorbonne in 1971 and has spent some 12 years teaching at the Université d'Abidjan. He has published five books with foci on the Arab slave trade and is working on a sixth, which is to be a biography of the Order's founder, Cardinal Lavigerie. The fact that Father Renault is himself a productive scholar makes the task of explaining research strategies that much easier.

History in Africa a publié une note sur les Archives des Missionnaires du S. Coeur à Bamanya, Zaire. De fait il s'agissait des archives du Centre Aequatoria: “A little known yet important source of historical and ethnographic material.” Depuis lors (1984) beaucoup a changé au Centre Aequatoria. L'auteur de l'article, S. Nelson, a donné un bon résumé et une assez exacte évaluation de nos archives. Mais entretemps, elles se sont encore enrichies et contre son attente, elles ont été microfilmées sur place: “Microfilming may be done with prior permission, but film processing should not be attempted in Zaire.”

L'évolution et l'enrichissement des archives Aequatoria se situe dans les matières suivantes et ils proviennent principalement du transfert des documents que le Père Hulstaert conservait dans sa chambre.

[1] Documentation linguistique. Originaux et copies dactylographiées et corrigées des enquêtes linguistiques mongo y sont intégrées. Il s'agit de la notation sur base des formulaires de l'IAI-Londres et de formulaires de sa propre composition (120 phrases) d'environ 300 dialectes. Seuls 32 en ont été publiés. A compléter par plus de 1500 pages de vocabulaires comparés dans les mêmes dialectes. 5 études, dont une de 750 pages, de dialectologie mongo comparée, inédites en font partie. Une série de récoltes de morceaux de littérature orale est présentée par environ 1500 pages. J'estime que seule la moitié en a été utilisée pour publication. Les plus anciens documents datent de 1927. Les exemplaires imprimés mais annotés et corrigés par Hulstaert de ses dictionnaires et grammaires ont été intégrés dans nos archives. La préparation de la traduction de la Bible à trois reprises est d'une importance certaine pour l'étude de l'évolution de la langue (1936-45; 1950-1960; 1975; 1987).