African Studies: Primary Sources

Primary source collection on European colonial expansion across the African continent, 1870-1914, sourced primarily from British and French archives and libraries.

Primary source collection from The National Archives, UK for the study of the apartheid, South African politics, trade relations, international opinion and humanitarian issues. Includes diplomatic dispatches, institutional records, biographies of prominent personalities, press reports, correspondence, books, maps, statistics, reports, analyses, and ephemera.

Archnet is an global open access multimedia library on the built environment of Muslim societies.

“Provides scholars with unprecedented electronic access to the United Kingdom’s Colonial, Dominion and Foreign Offices’ confidential correspondence relating to Africa between 1834 and 1966. This resource provides researchers with a searchable collection of scores of official documents covering almost the entire period of European conquest and colonisation of Africa. The early stages of imperial expansion and indigenous resistance in the interior of western and southern Africa, the European scramble for the continent in the late nineteenth century and the expansion of settler colonialism in southern and eastern Africa are all covered.”

Covers 500 years of the rise and fall of empires, this features a wide variety of material, including exploration journals & logs; correspondence; periodicals; diaries; government papers; missionary papers; travel writing; slave papers; memoirs; fiction; children's adventure stories; folk tales; exhibition catalogs; maps; marketing posters; photographs; and illustrations, with many in color.

Materials in these collections comprise American diplomatic, foreign policy, and intelligence documents drawn from the United States archives. These materials present a Western view of Africa in the context of colonial occupation, neocolonialism, and Cold War competition.

Governing Africa contains primary source documents mostly derived from a series of annual reports and accounts sent to the British Government by its colonial administrations in Africa. The featured collections cover British colonial administrations that reigned during the 19th and 20th centuries, and include content on 13 colonies: Ghana, Togo, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Uganda. Apartheid era South Africa is also covered extensively in the papers of journalist Colin Legum and materials from political parties on both sides of the racial and ideological divide. Included are official statistics on colonial Africa, 1821-1953 and documents on colonial law in Africa, 1808-1966.

Composed of FBI surveillance files on the activities of the African Liberation Support Committee and All African Peoples Revolutionary Party; this collection provides two unique views on African American support for liberation struggles in Africa, the issue of Pan-Africanism, and the role of African independence movements as political leverage for domestic Black struggles.