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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2010
When the Belgian Government was setting up the Archives Générales du Royaume, those papers held by three departments escaped centralisation, because they had already set up their own archival sections. These were the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defence and the Colonies. In the meantime the Ministry of Colonies has gone out of business, so that the papers it held came under the control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For a long time, the archives were kept in the magnificent eighteenth century building of the old Ministry of Colonies, 7 Place Royale. This was most convenient for researchers, since that building also contains the library of the Ministry, now renamed the Bibliothèque Africaine and kept well up to date, and the Centre d'Étude et de Documentation Africaine (CEDAF). Unfortunately, about a year ago, in the interests of bureaucratic tidyness the Archives Africaines, as they are now known, were moved into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2 Rue Quatre Bras. There they share a small but comfortable and quiet reading room with the archives of the host ministry itself. Facilities for photocopying and microfilming are available.
1. For these, see Peemans, F. and Lefèvre, P.Les Sociétés co-loniales beiges: archives et données bibliographiques (1885–1960)Google Scholar, Cahiers du CEDAF 4/5 (Brussels, 1980). It is unfortunately more probable that some of the companies whose archives are listed in this publication have meanwhile destroyed those records which would be of interest to historians. The mission archives and the depositors of the many private papers held in Tervuren have laid down differing conditions for scientific consultation.
2. For more detail, see Vellut, Jean-Luc, Guide de l'étudiant en Histoire du Zaire (Kinshasa, 1974).Google Scholar
3. It should perhaps be mentioned, and applauded, that in the 1960s and 1970s members of the history department of the University of Lovanium, Kinshasa and later of the U-niversité Nationale du Zaire, Lubumbashi, made a number of tours round the various district offices in Zaire, microfilming a large part of the papers they found there, and thus preserving them for posterity. A copy of some of the resultant microfilms, with a catalogue, containing some 20,000 exposures and dealing primarily with Shaba (Katanga) is to be found in the Bibliotheque Africaine, and also in the Memorial Library, University of Madison, Wisconsin and in the Library of the Universite Laval, Quebec.
4. Jean-Luc Vellut has made this point, citing Duby, George, in Enquètes et Documents d'Histoire Africaine (Louvain-la-Neuve), V (1983), iv.Google Scholar