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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Readers of this journal will surely be familiar with the excellent research collection of published materials on Africa held in London by the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). This remains the foremost collection of its kind in Europe, and has long been widely used by visiting scholars from all around the world. But it is less well known that the library also houses a substantial and rapidly expanding collection of primary source materials, many of which relate to the history of Africa. This brief report on the archives and manuscripts relating to Africa housed in the SOAS library offers an introduction to this collection, along with an annotated listing of current holdings. With the exception of one or two of the larger items, the majority of the archive materials on Africa have been relatively little used by scholars to date, and it is to be hoped that the publication of this report will encourage greater use of this increasingly important collection.
The library has collected manuscripts in various African and Asian languages since its inception in 1916, but it is only since 1973, when a new purpose-built library was opened, that the School has begun to take in deposits of modern archives and to build up its collections of manuscripts relating to Africa and Asia. Since then the collection has developed considerably, the principal focus being upon the records of missionaries and missionary organizations, of humanitarian groups and non-governmental organizations and those who worked with them, and business records and the papers of those involved in business.
1. Jean, and Comaroff, John, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, I (Chicago, 1991)Google Scholar, provides an example of recent work that has used the papers of both the LMS and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. John Iliffe used LMS and Methodist Missionary Society sources in his Famine in Zimbabwe, 1890-1960 (Gweru, 1990).Google Scholar
2. For the last example, see Clarence-Smith, W. G., “African and European Cocoa Producers on Fernando Poo, 1880s to 1910s,” JAH 35 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. Only a portion of this primary material is reported in Hake's book, African Metropolis: Nairobi's Self-Help City (Brighton, 1977).Google Scholar
