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African Studies Home: Primary Sources
What are primary sources
Primary sources provide first-hand testimony of immediate evidence concerning a topic under investigation. They are created by witnesses who experienced the events being documented or recorded. Examples of primary sources are: letters, diaries, speeches, newspaper articles, autobiographies, oral histories, government and organizational records, statistical data, maps, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, advertisements, and artifacts.
International African Institute
- International African Institute RepositoriesA list of known repositories within the African continent, compiled by the International African Institute.
Primary Source Research Databases
- Chatham House Online ArchiveContains the publications and archives (1920-2010) of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the independent international affairs policy institute founded in 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference.
- Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966“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.”
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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.
- From Slavery to Freedom: the African-American Pamphlet Collection 1824-1909 (Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress)Presents 397 pamphlets from the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1824 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington. From Slavery to Freedom complements African-American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907.
- House of Commons Parliamentary Papers
Working documents of the British government for all areas of social, political, economic and foreign policy, showing how issues were explored and legislation was formed. With all collections available, HCPP includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present, with supplementary material back to 1688. HCPP delivers page images and searchable full text for each paper, along with detailed indexing.
- Liberation Movement in Africa and African AmericaComposed 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.
- LLMC-DigitalLLMC is a non-profit cooperative of libraries dedicated to preserving legal titles and government documents, and making copies inexpensively available digitally. It provides an archive of scanned copies of a variety of documents published by federal and state governments, donated by member libraries. Coverage varies. Some foreign and international jurisdiction documents are included.
- Slavery, Abolition and Social JusticeDesigned as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, brings together documents and collections covering an extensive time period 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is being given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today.
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade DatabaseProvides data on over 35,000 slave ship voyages which forcibly carried over 10 million Africans to the Americas from the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries. You can search for particular voyages, use the African name database of 67,000 names, view and even create maps, retrieve numerical data, read explanatory essays, and find and use lesson plans.
- 16th-Early 20th Century Maps of AfricaThis collection features digital copies of 113 antique maps of Africa and accompanying text dating from the mid-16th Century to early 20th Century.
- African Activist Archive ProjectThe African Activist Archive is preserving and making available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s.
- Researching Africa at The National ArchivesBritish government documents relating to the history of Africa. Now available for viewing at The National Archives.
- Slave VoyagesThe Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world.
Guide to Archives and Manuscripts Relating to Kenya and East Africa in the United Kingdom by ISBN: 090545099XPublication Date: 1990-11-01
A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles Relating to Africa by ISBN: 0720121671Publication Date: 1993-10-01
Cooperative Africana Microform Project
- Cooperative Africana Microform ProjectCAMP's microform and digital collections form a large pool of historical, political, linguistic, economic, and geographical data and primary source materials not available elsewhere. Many of the sets contain archival material or large collections of material that do not lend themselves to traditional analytic cataloging. Many of these sets have Collection Guides to help scholars locate specific material of interest to their research.
- Center for Research LibrariesCAMP materials may also be accessed through Center for Research Libraries.
Posters and Photographs
- Africa through a lensAfrica through a lens is a set of thousands of images taken from a broader photographic collection of Foreign and Commonwealth Office images, held at The National Archives UK.
- Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British EmpireThis website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse for films by country, date, topic, or keyword. Over 350 of the most important films in the catalogue are presented with extensive critical notes written by our academic research team.
- The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960The Winterton Collection includes about 7,610 photographs organized in 76 separate albums, scrapbooks or loose collections. The photographs depict life, primarily in East Africa, between about 1860 and 1960.
- The International Mission Photography ArchiveThe International Mission Photography Archive offers historical images from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections in Britain, Norway, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the United States.
- Pieter Boersma Photograph CollectionThis collection is comprised of a selection of photographs of Southern Africa taken by Dutch photographer Pieter Boersma.
- Posters from the Herskovits LibraryThese posters represent a sampling (approximately 600) of our growing collection of over 4000 Africana posters housed at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The subjects covered here include politics, health, religion, liberation struggles, art exhibitions, and social issues.
- Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African DiasporaThe images in Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. Our growing collection currently has over 1,200 images. This website is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.