One of the problems encountered in doing many types of research on Africa is the absence of adequate bibliographical materials on maps. It is true that reliable maps at the desired scales do not exist for some features or areas of Africa. Often, however, the maps do exist but are so scattered through map files and journals and other publications that finding them is a research job in itself. Unlike the situation on books, periodicals, and journal articles, there are only a few references which deal with the nature and availability of African maps, and none of these cover all types of maps.

The range of subjects covered by maps, of course, is enormous--from natural features like the amount of rainfall or types of soils to cultural topics like population distribution, tribal areas, and agricultural products. The major purposes here will be to describe the common types of maps of Africa, to give some suggestions on their uses and availability, and to list a few references which give further information. The authors are making a survey of maps of Africa which is supported by the African Studies Center of U.C.L.A. and welcome this opportunity to call attention to the problems and scope of the project.

African studies in the USSR are at present concentrated in Moscow and Leningrad. The two centers have individual characteristics and, in the case of Africa, fairly defined fields of academic interests. Some introductory remarks on the disciplines concerned and on the general organization of higher studies in the Soviet Union will be relevant, before examining African studies in detail.

Regional studies have developed strongly inside the Soviet Union, first because the living material for such studies is within the confines of the state; secondly because a society which is consciously remolding its future to a specific pattern needs such basic knowledge, and thirdly because of a tradition in and love of the study of popular cultures going well back into the 19th century. Such studies cut across academic disciplines; field work is predominantly undertaken by “complex expeditions” which, to the core of ethnographers, add archaeologists, linguists, folk-lorists, art historians, and sociologists. Ethnography in the Russian sense is mainly concerned with material culture; folklore deals entirely with recording oral tradition and poetry. In a paper read at the VIth International Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnographers in Paris in June, 1960, Professor Tolstov, President of the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences, explained the Institute's academic conceptions as follows:-

The variety and volume of Africa-related record, archival and manuscript materials in the United States today are only partially known. However, in view of the extensive American commercial, missionary, philanthropic, scientific, governmental and other contacts with the African continent over the past three centuries or more, as well as the activities of manuscript collectors, the total is probably quite considerable.

Illustrative of what is already known to exist are the following descriptive entries adapted from a recently published general guide to the archival and manuscript holdings of American depositories: (1) papers of Zachary Macaulay--philanthropist, abolitionist, editor, and early Governor of Sierra Leone -- and his family, 1793-1888, 1014 pieces (in the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California); (2) archives of the American Colonization Society, including materials on Liberia, 1816-19 08, 626 vols., 32 boxes, and 4 bundles (in the Library of Congress); (3) papers of Edmund Roberts, merchant, diplomatic agent in the Far East and Africa, and negotiator of the 1833 commercial treaty between the United States and Zanzibar, 1805-36, 10 vols, and 5 boxes (in the Library of Congress); (4) papers of Richard Palmer Waters during his ante-bellum term as U. S. Consul in Zanzibar (in the Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts); (5) papers of Henry S. Sanford, Minister to Belgium, associate of Leopold II in connection with his Congo operations, and member of the American delegation to the 1884-85 Berlin African Congress, 1838-91, c. 10,000 pieces (in the Sanford Memorial Library, Sanford, Florida); (6) papers of John A. Kasson, politician, diplomat, and head of the American delegation to the Berlin Congress, 1877-1910, c. 1 200 items (at the Iowa State Department of History and Archives, Des Moines, Iowa); and (7) records of the foreign missionary activities of the Congregational churches (chiefly) in Angola, 1880-date, French Equatorial Africa, 1842-70, Liberia, 1834-42, South Africa, 1835-date, and Southern Rhodesia, 1893-date (among the materials deposited by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at the Houghton Library, Harvard University).