Once upon a time, my brother was working in the Dominican library in Paris. This was in the early 1980s and he was doing research for his PhD - on the subject of baptism in the ninth to twelfth centuries. Another man often worked there and they would talk now and then but they never actually introduced themselves. The other man sometimes gave my brother a lift across town when they left the library. He seemed rather authoritative. One day he asked my brother, ‘Who are you working with?’ and my brother said ‘Jacques le Goff’, a very renowned medieval historian. ‘Ah, le Goff, yes, he's very astute’, the man said, and my brother thought my goodness, who is this man to pass judgement so confidently on le Goff. Another day, when the news was full of the Pope, John Paul II, coming to Paris, my brother asked the man if he was going to see the pope.

Many commercial and non-commercial initiatives regarding electronic journals have started in the last decade. They are, however/so widespread and ad hoc that a complete overview of all online journals is not possible. This paper offers a brief description of the current state of affairs concerning electronic journals from and about Africa and highlights some of the trends.

Paper journals have existed since 1665 when the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appeared in London and Le Journal des Scavans in Paris. A hundred years later more than ten scientific journals were available, mostly published by learned societies in Europe. And by 1850, there were well over a thousand journals with articles specialising in all different scientific fields from ethnology to medicine and geology to philosophy. By 1980 there were well over 180,000 different scientific journals.

According to estimates, Africa hosts about 2,000 of the approximately 6,000 languages of the world. This number makes the continent one of the hotspots of linguistic diversity. Essential description (i.e. grammars, dictionaries) and documentation (i.e. audio and video speech data and their annotations) is not even available for some of the largest among them. The overwhelming majority of African languages, irrespective of their endangerment status, have received only very little or no linguistic attention to date, despite the fact that many of them are spoken by millions as a first or second language. In addition, a large number of African languages are spoken by small-scale rural communities and can be classified as endangered on diverse grounds, ranging from displacement due to wars or climate change to rural exodus for socioeconomic reasons.

After more than four decades of obscurity, a collection of historical African newspapers and other materials is now being made widely accessible to researchers due to the efforts of Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow Janet Kaaya and the Center for Primary Research and Training in the Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections, at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). The Michael Lofchie Collection contains primarily pre-independence newspapers and other materials from Zanzibar, a Tanzanian island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. The collection holds about 120 volumes, covering 22 newspaper titles in various languages, including English, Swahili, Gujarati, and Arabic. In addition, the collection includes bulletins, journals, monographs, manuscripts, booklets, information sheets and minutes of meetings. The collection's depth and breadth reflect the socio-cultural, economic and political environments that prevailed in Zanzibar over the timespan of the collection, from 1909 to 1965.