The Regional Archival Center at Tamale contains extensive documentation on the former Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, which today make up the Northern and Upper Regions of Ghana. The bulk of the records relating to the colonial period are held in the main repository in Accra, but any scholar working on a northern topic should plan to visit Tamale. While there is a tendancy for “older” (i.e., pre-1940 materials) to be in Accra and for more recent items and Native Authority records to be in Tamale, there is no hard and fast rule, and many exceptions and duplications exist.

There is no catalog for the collection. Accession lists for the seventeen classifi¬cations employed are quite helpful, but they are often somewhat sketchy and sometimes give little indication of the actual contents of a file or the time period which it covers. Following is a list of the classifications, together with titles of selected files, to illustrate their extent and the types of material they contain.