In 1982 Carol Dickerman and David Northrup published a useful article on Africa-related archives in Belgium. Their work was limited, however, to two public institutions in Brussels which, in the past 12 years, have moved and grown. What is needed now is a more up-to-date and comprehensive list of Belgian public and private collections with historical or ethnological archives concerning Africa.

In Belgium such archives are unfortunately not grouped in one place, but are spread over a dozen public and private institutions according to their nature—diplomatic, military, religious, ethnological—or origin. Thus the foreign researcher who attempts to find these archives must often undertake trying adventures, and once they have succeeded, they still must obtain numerous authorizations to use reading rooms and to consult and photocopy documents. Thus this paper aims to list the different Belgian institutions with major archives, to indicate what is available in their collections, and to describe how to gain access, in the hope that foreign researchers will be able to benefit fully from the archival riches of Belgium.

The Africa-related documents in Belgian archives and libraries mostly concern Central Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, some collections are relevant to Belgian African politics in general and to Leopold II's expansionist aims in other parts of the continent.

This paper highlights a rich source of history of the cultures of foreign peoples hitherto referred to little by academics—the archive and library of the Berlin Mission Society, now the Berliner Missionswerk. It will discuss the immense opportunities that the library and the archives offer for academic research. It is not intended to be a history of the Berlin Mission Society or its institutions but will rather suggest initial points of interest for further investigation. I shall also refer to the present state of research in both history and anthropology of foreign peoples based on an assessment of the materials available in the mission societies in the former German Democratic Republic. This paper then is less a contribution to theoretical problems than an attempt to draw the attention of historians, anthropologists and others to the resources of the Berlin Mission Society.

In the street called Georgenkirchstrasse, No. 70, in East Berlin, opposite the fairy tale Fountain of Friedrichshain and the famous park, is the Berlin Mission House, built in 1873—the location of the Berlin Mission Society, founded in 1824. Until 1991 the latter was called the Ecumenical Missionary Centre/Berlin Mission Society (Ökumenisch-Missionarisches Zentrum/Berliner Missionsgesellschaft).

As one of the largest missionary societies, its missionaries have worked since the mid-nineteenth century in South Africa and later in China and East Africa. In the long history of the Berlin Mission many printed and unpublished texts, as well as drawings, maps, and photographs were collected. The archives retain 270 meters of file. There are also the records of other missions, as well as the largest specialist library for missions and ecumenical movements (50,000 volumes and scholarly papers) in the former GDR.

In the summer of 1992 I was fortunate enough to visit two large collections of photographs for the purpose of African historical research.Muse and subject of this essay, these collections are housed in the library of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (hereafter FCO) and the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society (hereafter RCS), both in London. Although comparable in some respects, the two contrast sharply in styles of organization. It is this contrast which motivates the present writing, as it illustrates certain effects of the organization of collections on the usefulness of photographs as historical sources, and it leads as well to some reflections on the nature of historical evidence and visual images.

Both the RCS and the FCO have substantial holdings of photographic materials which should be of interest to Africanist historians generally. The size of the RCS collection has been variously estimated at between 45,000 and 70,000 photographs, while that of the FCO is approximately as large. In both cases, the researcher must make an appointment to see the collections, and neither is open to the general public. At the time of this writing, the FCO, having moved to a new location, has closed its photo collection, with no plans to reopen in the near future.

Specialists on Nigeria will find that the FCO and RCS each have over 30 albums relevant to this country's history. The FCO has somewhat larger Nigerian holdings, while the RCS collection will be of greater interest to historians of Sierra Leone and other West African countries. The Nigerian materials in the FCO are generally older, many falling roughly between ca. 1890 and ca. 1920, while the RCS holdings tend to concentrate on the mid-twentieth century. The FCO's Nigeria albums are approximately equally divided between the northern and southern portions of the country, while those of the RCS focus more heavily on northern Nigeria.

Our [documentary editors'] duty is to present the record, the documents, with a disinterested devotion solely to the document. We search for these documents in order to create an historical record….Our duty…is to present the record, whether we approve of it or not.

Il me restait à décrypter ces pages, écrites en lignes serrées par crainte de manquer de papier, très fréquemment raturées, surchargées au point de devenir presque illisibles, et à en faire une édition critique avec les notes et commentaires nécessaires…

Claude-Hélène Perrot and Albert Van Dantzig have remarkably little to say about their modus operandi in this long-awaited edition of Marie-Joseph Bonnat's account of his at times enforced stay at and around the court of Asante from 1869 to 1874. Scattered comments stimulate us to infer that the former was largely responsible for the text and the latter for the apparatus. Beyond that, they devote only a few sentences to discussing the ways they went about their business of producing the text published here and, it must be said, what they say there is by no means particularly encouraging for those who might have been expecting a diplomatic text edition:

Dans le travail éditorial, dont résulte l'ouvrage présenté ici, si aucune coupure n'a été pratiquée, nous avons effectué quelques aménagements: la ponctuation a été revue, les incorrections grammaticales éliminées, de trop longues phrases ont été portagés, des prépositions supprimées. Le parti que nous avons pris est sans doute discutable.

A few years ago I was reading a doctoral dissertation concerned with the history of São Tomé, when one particular word fairly leapt off the page. It came at the end of an episode telling how a particular ethnic group on the island today had arrived there. The story told how a number of Angolan slaves, later called Angolares, were shipwrecked just off the coast of São Tomé in 1544 (or 1554), “though (of course) no accurate date or account of the circumstances exists.” The survivors swam to shore and moved into the bush “building there a series of small villages called Quilombos.” It was that word, “Quilombos,” that made me jump to attention, for it is a very important word in Angolan history and a written record of it from either 1544 or 1554 would be sixty to seventy years earlier than the hitherto first-known mention of the word. If it were true, profound revisions to the accepted political history in Angola during the sixteenth century would be called for, and even the chronology of the onset of the Lunda (Ruund) kingdom far inland would have to be revised.

The aim of this note is to attract attention to a new venture in scholarly publication—Beatrix Heintze's Alfred Schachtzabel's Reise nach Angola, 1913-1914. Und seine Sammlungen für das Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Rekonstruktion einer Ethnographischen Quelle (Köln, 1995), the first issue of Afrika Archiv, a new series to be devoted to text editions. That this is not to be confused with an ordinary text edition is already intimated by the work's title, which translates as Alfred Schachtzabel's Voyage to Angola, 1913-1914, and his Collections for the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Reconstruction of an Ethnographic Source. In other words, it speaks of a “reconstruction” and “a source edition,” not “text edition.” As well, Heintze is described as the author of this book rather than the editor. Yet she presents the work as a new kind of edition—the “integrated edition of sources.”

Heintze is an experienced text editor, having published both a voluminous conventional collection of documents and a set of ethnographic drawings. Yet when she examined the surviving documentation pertaining to Schachtzabel's expedition in Angola, she became convinced that a standard edition of all his work would be unwise. The unpublished materials at hand are too disparate and slender.

The first generation of history students from Africa to graduate from British universities inevitably had to face extended examinations, with specialized papers largely centered on European history. When Kenneth Onwuka Dike arrived in Aberdeen University in 1944 he had already contended successfully at Fourah Bay College with the Durham syllabuses for the General BA. Now, however, thanks to the goodwill of Professor J. B. Black (best known as author of The Reign of Elizabeth in the standard Oxford History of England), he obtained permission to sit what was probably the first examination on the history of tropical Africa to be set by any European university.

In a lecture delivered almost thirty years later Dike recalled:

cautiously approaching my Head of Department, the late Professor J B Black, and mildly protesting that of the thirteen final degree papers I was required to offer in the Honours School of History, not a single paper was concerned with the history of Black people. I requested that in place of the paper on Scottish constitutional law and history, which I found intolerably dull, I should be permitted to offer the History of Nigeria. The old professor took off his glasses, uttered not a word, but from the way he looked at me demonstrated that he was not a little shocked by my temerity, nevertheless, and after a series of animated discussions, the Department of History, to its great credit, accepted my proposal. Since there was no one competent to teach Nigerian history at Aberdeen, they sent me to Oxford during the summer months to study under Dame Margery Perham and Professor Jack Simmons.