It is a high honor to be with the distinguished Africanists who form the African Studies Association.

Five years ago, you had the vision to recognize that what most people then thought was esoteric learning about a dark continent was, in fact, the essential understanding which would permit the people of America to live fruitfully with one of the most dynamic movements in world history.

This unique position in the intellectual world gives you not only an unusual opportunity to influence the events of your time, but a heavy responsibility to make certain that the fruit of your labors is of the very highest quality. Though I am but a neophyte in the field, I know many of you well enough to appreciate your recognition of and devotion to this awesome trust.

The first of a series of meetings at which material concerning the current status of social research in Africa was considered, was opened by the chairman, the editor of the African Studies Association's forthcoming volume on this topic. At this plenary session John Fage, of the University of London, spoke on recent developments and trends in African history, Arthur Schiller of Columbia University on law, and Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University on linguistics.

Taking historical studies on Africa from their beginning, Dr. Fage indicated that there had been a continuous output of historical material relating to Africa from the time of Herodotus up to the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the writing of African history ceased to be respectable. One reason for this was a change in the character of historical research, with great emphasis being placed on written sources. By comparison with the western world, Africa was deficient in written history and records, and the attitude that Africa therefore had no history came to prevail. This attitude was not unconnected with the supremacy of Europe, with the feeling that Europe would have to civilize Africa, and it was considered that the study of Africa was the job of the ethnographer rather than the historian. Secondly, there emerged a new branch of historical enquiry, that of colonial history in Africa, with its emphasis on European rather than African activities. The result was that academic historians had no contact with Africa. In fact, however, historical materials on Africa did exist, and in ignoring them the historian had simply left the field to anthropologists, or to amateurs. Anthropologists established a close association with Africa but were little concerned with the past and suspicious of “conjectural history.” Their concentration on simple societies and the relative lack of attention given to political structures kept the social anthropologists from developing too close an interest in African history.

The Schomburg Collection is a library of special materials devoted to Negro life and history. It is international in scope covering every phase of activity of peoples of African descent. It ranges from early rarities to current materials on happenings from Tennessee to Timbuctoo. The Collection is mainly based on Arthur A. Schomburg's distinguished private library of rarities and treasures which was purchased from him and presented to the New York Public Library by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1926. However, a year earlier the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints had been established in the One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street Branch of the New York Public Library meet the neighborhood demands for books by and about Negroes.

In 1959 the Libraries Committee of the African Studies Association undertook a survey of holdings of Africana in American Theological libraries. The official approval of both the American Theological Library Association and the Catholic Library Association was received and inquiries were sent to a selected group of libraries in each Association. The main purpose was to ascertain the location of significant collections of printed material and to uncover, if possible, unknown or unrecorded manuscripts.

In discussing these three papers as they relate to history, it is an essential starting point to realize that the discipline of history is changing and has changed considerably in the last quarter century. History began as an account of the great deeds of our own ancestors, a record of the past that was essentially a backward extension of our own group personality. It long ago outgrew its concern with our tribal past and came to be concerned with the past of other peoples who share our Western culture. More recently, historians have become increasingly concerned with the past of other cultures as well. Some remnants of the older historical tradition are still around, but broadly speaking history now can be defined as the study of change in human society.

With this shifting focus inside the discipline itself, some of the barriers that used to surround history have also begun to disappear. One of these barriers was a distinction between history and pre-history, made according to the kind of evidence that each used. Historians worked with documentary evidence, leaving the pre-historians to worry with the kind of problem that could be solved only through the combined use of archaeology, oral tradition, linguistic evidence, and the like. In African history no such distinction is possible, and it is now generally abandoned. Documentary evidence about the history of Africa south of the Sahara begins about the ninth century, but it has to be used alongside non-documentary evidence. Documentary evidence, used by itself, only begins to tell the whole story when we come to the twentieth century, and even here it overlaps with the oral evidence of people still alive. African history is thus dominantly a history based on mixed data. The old line between history and pre-history is no longer useful, and theJournal of African History recognized this fact when, for convenience, it set a new division between history and pre-history at the beginning of the Iron Age — a date which will, of course, be somewhat different for different parts of Africa.