Brandenburg-Prussia was the last European power to enter the African trade in the seventeenth century. In an attempt to emulate the success of the Dutch West India Company, the Great Elector granted a charter to a newly-created company in 1682. It was known under various names--as the Electoral Brandenburg African Company, the Emden Company, the Brandenburg Afro-American Company, and (after the Great Elector's successor had made himself “King in Prussia” in 1701) the Royal Prussian African Company. By 1686 it had acquired a fort and two trading posts on the western Gold Coast and a fort on the island of Arguin (now part of Mauritania). Through an agreement with the Danish crown, it was also allowed to occupy a small part of the Caribbean island of St. Thomas and sell slaves there. Nevertheless, the company never really got off the ground, and from about 1698 onwards, as its fortunes steadily declined, its representatives in Africa were left more and more to their own devices. Lacking support from Europe, the last Brandenburg-Prussian Director-General abandoned the Gold Coast in 1716, and five years later Arguin was captured by the French.

In most respects the company was more Dutch than German. Its formation was the work of Benjamin Raule, the Great Elector's Dutch-born Naval Director; a large proportion of its capital, merchandise, and ships came from the Netherlands; and from about 1698 (if not earlier) the Brandenburg forts in Africa did more trade with Zeeland interlopers and English “ten per cent” ships than with vessels sent by the company. Furthermore, all but one of the Directors-General on the Gold Coast and Commandants at Arguin were Dutchmen (usually former servants of the Dutch West India Company), as were more than half of their subordinates. It is not surprising, therefore, that about three-quarters of the surviving records are in Dutch.

Archival research in the Equateur region of Zaire is a frustrating and often unsuccessful endeavor. Colonial documentation on a specific locality is seldom located in a central repository and items have been scattered throughout the region. What records are found are usually highly disorganized and partially decomposed. In many cases, significant sources have been lost or destroyed. With this bleak prospective, it is not surprising that historical research in this area has been very limited.

In contrast, a little known yet important source of historical and ethnographic material exists at the Missionnaires du Sacre-Coeur (M.S.C.) library at Bamanya, situated approximately ten kilometers from Mbandaka in the Equateur region. The library contains a wide range of both printed and archival material that has recently been organized and cataloged. Historians will find the archives to be of great interest and value, particularly for studies on the Nkundo-Mongo ethnic groups of the central forest region of Zaire.

On December 7, 1983, a group convened at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in Boston and constituted itself tentatively as the Committee for the Publication of African Historical Sources.

The initial convocation had been made by Harold Marcus and David Robinson of Michigan State University with a view towards constituting a US Committee for the Fontes Historiae Africanae, which is part of the International Academic Union and has been working on the publication of African historical sources for over twenty years. John Hunwick of Northwestern University, Director of the Fontes, explained his work over the last decade in supporting the publication of edited texts, translations, and commentaries through Fontes. Most of the publications have been in the Arabica series. Fontes has not had a national committee in the United States and the group was prepared to take the lead in constituting such a committee.

The Frazer collection at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, contains over 140 letters which Frazer wrote to the missionary anthropologist John Roscoe. Roscoe was with the CMS in Buganda from 1881 to 1909, and it was Frazer who first interested him in ethnographic work and guided his research. This led to the publication of The Baganda in 1911, the first, full-scale ethnography of an African society and an anthropological classic. Frazer's letters chronicle the close personal and professional relationship between the two men and shed considerable light on Roscoe's ethnographic work. It was Frazer who arranged for Roscoe to embark on the Mackie Expedition to Central Africa (Uganda) in 1919-1920, which resulted in the publication of The Soul of Africa (1922), The Bakitara or Banyoro (1923), The Banyankole (1923), and The Bageshu and Other Tribes of the Uganda Protectorate (1924). The collection also contains twelve letters from Roscoe. The correspondence indicates how highly Frazer valued Roscoe's ethnography and how important it was to Frazer's own work, especially to his theory of divine kingship as developed in The Golden Bough. Frazer corresponded with scholars, missionaries, colonial officials, and anthropologists around the world, and the collection may contain letters to other persons of interest to historians of Africa. The Frazer collection is open to scholarly researchers, and the Manuscript Cataloguer, Trinity College Library, Cambridge, CB21TQ, is most helpful in answering written inquiries.

The following items supplement my previous listing of serial indexes and bibliographies (HA, 10 [1983], 109-49). Then overlooked, they have since come to my attention. Most of them seem to fall well short of being current so that my earlier caveat regarding the possibility that some bibliographies may have ceased is all the more appropriate here.

AAN is published by the Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientique, 15 quai Anatole-France, 75700 Paris. It is largely a current affairs reference source and its “Bibliographie” is by far the most important one now available for North Africa, making its omission for my earlier list all the more embarrassing. The bibliography for 1980 (the most recent available) consists of 1645 items arranged under: Documents Généraux; Histoire; Politique Intérieure; Défense Nationale; Politique Extérieure; Economie; Enseignement/Culture/Religion; Questions de Société--Espace; Emigration. The arrangement is general, then geographical under each of these main classifications, with an author index following. There is extensive cross-referencing but no list of journals and newspapers consulted. Each item is coded, apparently to facilitate ordering photocopies from CNRS.