The political scientist uses oral testimony to record events which happened sometime not too long ago. He retrieves documents about events, usually from eyewitnesses but sometimes from descendants of eyewitnesses. Whenever a witness testifies to events and his testimony is recorded, the following sequence or chain between the events and the record of them has taken place:

The relation between the events and the events as described in the document has therefore undergone the following “distortions”: events--part of the events are perceived--part of the perception is stored in the memory of a man and colored by his personality--part of what is in the memory of the man is released and the release is colored by the interview. There is quite definitely a loss of information between the event and the record of it. There is also, and this is less obvious, quite an accretion to the record of the event by the reflections and the personality of the witness. The aim of the person who uses the record is to know what are the accretions and the distortions so that he would know what actually happened insofar as it is recorded. Critical analysis is the tool used to discover this. It can be made much easier if certain items of information besides the testimony and about it are available. It is therefore of great value to collect this ancillary documentation together with the oral testimony itself.

During 1963 and 1964 theAfricana Newsletter published regularly surveys of ephemeral material (party pamphlets, rare newspapers, constitutions, reports of congresses, trade-union literature, hard-to-find government documents) on Portuguese African nationalist movements, the Camerouns, Nigeria, and the Congo. This material was then filmed and deposited in the Center for Research Libraries (formerly the Mid-West Inter-Library Center), Chicago, Illinois, for use by members of the Cooperative African Microfilm Project (CAMP). The Editors of theAfrican Studies Bulletin would like to continue this program of locating, listing, and collating rare African ephemeral materials. Please send inventories of your collection to the Editors. The original plea by Immanuel Wallerstein to cooperate in this program is reprinted from theAfricana Newsletter:

All of us when we go to Africa acquire, sometimes systematically, more often haphazardly, mimeographed and printed documents which we store, often unused, hopefully to be used in the future. Scattered issues of journals, when added together, can make nearly complete collections.

I have certainly collected many odd items which are of little immediate use to me but which might be invaluable to someone doing particular pieces of research. I would hope that photostats of all these items could be collected in a central place and thus be available to all scholars.

The International African Institute is organising a seminar on the Emergence of New Social Classes and the Roles of Elites in Contemporary Africa, to be held from Tuesday, July 14, to Thursday, July 23, 1964, at the University of Ibadan by courtesy of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor K. O. Dike.

This will be the second in a new series of international African seminars arranged with the aid of a grant from the Ford Foundation; it follows the completion of a first series of four seminars in the years 1959-1961. The seminars are devoted to research problems of significance for further social, economic and educational development in Africa. An important aim is to provide opportunities for research workers and other scholars holding posts in various parts of Africa to establish closer contact with each other and with their colleagues overseas, and to exchange views on problems and methods of research.

There has been considerable discussion recently in recognition of the need to develop African studies in this country on a far wider basis than at present, where it is concentrated too narrowly in a few major centers of great academic strength. Such discussion has been exacerbated by the demands of Afro-Americans whose concern for African studies is not less significant for the debatable academic basis upon which it is posited.

The problem with all previous programs to inaugurate new African programs has been that they focused totally upon the training of faculty. There have been a series of summer courses, many of which have in themselves been of high quality and substantially imaginative. Yet they did little to innovate new programs on the campus, owing to the sluggishness of the administrative machinery or the relative indifference to the new faculty interest. The program which the African Studies Center at the University of California at Los Angeles planned for the summers of 1968 and 1969 attempted to remedy this deficiency. The project was financed by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare under National Defense Education Act funds and was organized and administered by Michael F. Lofchie and John F. Povey, themselves joint assistant directors of the UCLA African Studies Center.

Janheinz Jahn's Bibliography is the most useful reference work that bibliographers of African literature have yet produced. One may wish to quarrel with Jahn about his definition of “neo-African literature” or about some of the material he has chosen to include (e.g., unpublished manuscripts, sermons, travel books, political works, monographs) as well as some he has chosen to exclude (e.g., literary works by white African writers, collections of folklore), but one must applaud his thorough documentation and multilingual approach. No other bibliography of African literature has been so comprehensive and so accurate.

However, Jahn himself is aware that “there is no bibliography without gaps,” and he has invited others to help him “fill in these gaps and correct errors” (Jann, p. ix). It is hoped that the following list of additions and corrections will prove useful not only to Jahn but also to librarians, literary scholars, and other bibliographers. It is not to be taken as a complete list, for I have had neither the time nor the resources to check all of Jahn's entries or to search in more than a few libraries for missing titles. Of necessity my emphasis has been placed on materials written in European languages. I would encourage those who are aware of further errors and omissions to publish similar lists so that a more definitive bibliography of African literature can be prepared.

Given the fact that we are able to agree on a set of categories for the collection of material on early nationalist movements in Africa, it is necessary also to ask whether or not the form in which the material is gathered is important. Our answer would be: it is essential to the secondary analysis of the oral history material that it be put in such a form that “more than” and “less than” questions be answered by its use when material from one or more countries is compared with that from other areas. If in comparing data on early nationalism from one area with those of others we are not interested in saying area A has more of this or that than area B, then quantification serves no useful purpose. However, we would contend that such statements are crucial in several ways. First, they allow us to compare areas more precisely, and, secondly, such data allow us and others the privilege of utilizing them to test theoretical formulations already present in the literature. Thus, if African socialism, as many theorize, denies the usual Marxist statements that socialism originates from the alienation felt by political thinkers and the masses as a result of the industrialization of the society, then early nationalists, many of whom were socialists in orientation, should be compared so as to see whether they were in fact alienated from their society--who were more so, and where were the early natiionalist movements more and where were they less socialistic, and where were they more and less alienated. If the informants who can remember the early nationalist movements are available, then such questions can be answered when researchers are made aware that these data may have, eventually, to be coded into more than, and less than, categories.