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The Archives of Tropical Africa: A Reconnaissance1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Philip D. Curtin
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Extract

As African governments have become richer of late, they have become more interested in their past, and the outside world has become more conscious that there is an African past worth investigating. Out of all these tendencies, colonial governments and newly-independent states alike have begun to put their government documents in order and to open them for historical research. This process of creating regular archives in tropical Africa has moved fast in the last decade, and it is time to begin assessing the consequences—in terms of documents now physically available, and with a view to their possible value as sources for African history.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , January 1960 , pp. 129 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1960

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References

1 The following article is a by-product of a research trip in tropical Africa. For purposes of this survey, tropical Africa is taken to be the region bounded on the north by the Sahara, and on the south by the southern boundaries of the Belgian Congo and Tanganyika. I have visited most of the archives discussed, but I have not actually seen those at Bathurst, St Louis, Bamako, Niamey, or Monrovia. I should like to thank all the archivists who showed me their establishments and answered my queries, and the many scholars who supplied information. The secretariat of the Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa south of the Sahara has kindly let me see the results of a questionnaire they circulated to many of these same archives as part of a survey they will publish shortly. I should especially like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for supplementing a research grant from the Ford Foundation in order to make the present survey possible.