The city of Salem, Massachusetts, was a major port for American commerce to Africa for much of the nineteenth century. Even in the latter years of the century, when trade had moved to larger centers, the Salem men still played an important role in some African areas.

Due to the efforts of the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute, many of the papers relating to this American contact with Africa have been preserved. The collections include logbooks of vessels, merchants' account books, and letters to and from agents and captains.

The following pages briefly describe the materials relating to the history of Africa in the archives of the two Salem institutions. The list includes only those items of historical interest. (There are many logs of voyages to Africa of only nautical value.) It attempts to be complete, but no claim is made to having found every document of interest to the historian. Part of the contents of the archives remain uncatalogued and materials relating to Africa are occasionally uncovered under unlikely headings. Research for new sources is being continued.

The Project arose as a result of two informal conferences at Nuffield College, Oxford, arranged by Dr. Margery Perham and Dr. Frederick Madden. Those who accepted invitations to the conferences included members of British universities interested in Colonial (and particularly African) studies, members of appropriate Government departments, representatives of the Royal Commonwealth Society and former officers of the Colonial Service. Dr. Conrad Reining of the African section of the Library of Congress attended the second conference.

The second conference, in April 1963, heard a report from Mr. John Tawney, a former Administrative Officer in Tanganyika and Editor ofCorona, on his search for papers in private possession which were likely to be of value to British Colonial history. This work had been financed by the University's Beit Fund for an experimental period of six months, from the beginning of 1963, but after three months Mr. Tawney's report was sufficiently encouraging to arouse general support for the setting up of a special project at Oxford. Lack of funds, however, was an obstacle to the establishment of a formal organization until two generous grants breathed life into the proposal, one from Lord Boyd and the other from the African Studies Association of America. The grant from Lord Boyd was subsequently supported by the Goldsmiths Company and the Drapers Company.

During the summer of 1966 this writer had the opportunity to investigate the archival holdings of four European Protestant missionary societies. The purpose of this investigation was to gather information on Protestant missionary influence on the development of the Merina Kingdom of Madagascar. During the course of this research I found that these archival holdings were not only a necessary source for my limited study. The information contained in these depositories was also a valuable source of intelligence on almost every aspect of life and labor in Africa from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Unfortunately, these sources have not been used as extensively as they might be. In part, this is due to the limited scope of much of the missionary correspondence, and the awesome task of extracting what the secular historian would consider relevant from the writings of individuals whose dominant concerns were theological and often polemic.

Another, partial, explanation for the neglect of these sources --if one can use such a strong term -- stems from the general lack of information concerning these holdings and their availability to scholars. Although the most frequent users of the mission archives are missionaries themselves and church historians, the secular scholar is generally welcomed and eagerly aided by the professional staffs of the various institutions noted below. It is the intention of this brief article to indicate the location, facilities, and holdings of those four missionary archives which were used by this writer, and to furnish general information regarding other missionary organizations and depositories useful for the researcher.

Granville–Soundararajan, Harper–Nikeghbali–Radziwiłł and Heap–Lindqvist independently established an asymptotic for the even natural moments of partial sums of random multiplicative functions defined over integers. Building on these works, we study the even natural moments of partial sums of Steinhaus random multiplicative functions defined over function fields. Using a combination of analytic arguments and combinatorial arguments, we obtain asymptotic expressions for all the even natural moments in the large field limit and large degree limit, as well as an exact expression for the fourth moment.

Each century has its dominant themes, which invest with particular significance all the varied events and situations which are chronicled as history. As “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” dominated the eighteenth century, and slavery, abolition and emancipation agitated the nineteenth, so the liberation movement or decolonization is one of the outstanding phenomena of the twentieth century. Save for the great issues of communism versus capitalism, and the geopolitical and ethical considerations surrounding nuclear weapons and rocketry, no other issue has so captured men's imaginations and allegiance or wrought such dramatic transformation in the status and condition of peoples. The remarkable effect of this phenomenon can be demonstrated by reference to the continent of Africa alone, although the full significance and effect can be grasped only by appreciating similar transformations in Asia, in the Caribbean, and miscellaneous other places in the world.

For many decades prior to 1957, there had been only two independent states in the whole of Africa. The continent which had been the cradle of human civilization and enriched the cultures of many other distant lands and nations had seen its lights of freedom snuffed out one by one. My own country, in which the oldest surviving evidences of early human society exist, struggled valiantly but vainly to resist the tide of European imperialism which flowed irresistibly over Africa -- indeed over most of the world -- and was at its full flood during the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. Only Ethiopia, with its proud dynasty tracing its lineage backward through two thousands of years, and Liberia -- a symbol of the brave efforts of the emancipation movement -- survived the blandishments and violence of the imperialist forces. Those forces had signified their ascendancy in the Berlin Treaty of 1885, and for another three-quarters of a century the eclipse of freedom in this part of the world justified its description as “the Dark Continent.”

In March 1962, France and Algeria, parties to seven years of conflict, agreed upon the need to destroy an illusion. For more than a century Algeria had been regarded as an integral part of metropolitan France, despite the patently non-Gallic character of its indigenous population. Bloody insurrection and the realization in France that the Mother Country could not undo the wrongs of previous generations brought the illusion into disrepute; it was interred in July 1962 with the acquisition of full independent status by Algeria. This separation restored France to a reasonable semblance of well-being; Algeria, on the other hand, suffered a far less happy fate.

At independence Algeria found itself on the threshold of renewed conflict. The principals in this second act of violence were not the European settlers (colons) who had dominated Algeria's political life for generations as baronial overlords. The vast majority of settlers, approximately 850,000 out of a total of one million, had scuttled and run out of fear of vengeful retribution by Algeria's nine million Muslims. Nor were the half-million French soldiers remaining on Algerian soil participants in the new drama; the overwhelming majority were anxious to depart this melancholy land without molestation. The principals were the founders and leaders of the Algerian revolution, men who, at the hour of triumph, fell into disagreement over the distribution of power and ignored a more compelling imperative - - the rehabilitation of a wartorn society.

The Comoro Archipelago is situated at the head of the Mozambique Channel, midway between Cape Amber and Cape Delgado. The largest of the four islands, Great Comoro (or Grande Comore), 175 miles from Mozambique, is the northernmost island in the group. Mayotte (or Mayotta), the first of the islands to become a French colony, and the southernmost in the group, is the closest to Madagascar. To the northwest of Mayotte is Anjouan (or Johanna), referred to by authors, both ancient and modern, because of its fertility, as the “Pearl of the Comoro Islands”; immediately to the south of Great Comoro, and almost parallel with Anjouan, is Mohilla (or Moheli), the smallest island in the group.

The population of the islands is a mixture of African, Arab, and Malagasy, numbering over 170,000 people, with the heaviest concentration on Anjouan. The exportation of agricultural products has always been the chief industry of the archipelago. Its location at the head of the Mozambique Channel, and the wide range of food products available, made the Comoro Islands a popular supply stop for ships bound for India and the Far East via the Mozambique Channel; for the ships of the British antislavery squadron; and for whalers fishing in the southern Indian Ocean. European technological progress and the opening of the Suez Canal combined to render this function obsolete. During the last half of the nineteenth century, Mayotte, which became a French colony in 1841, was a moderately successful sugar colony. Plantations were also opened on Anjouan and Mohilla, but it was not until after the establishment of a French protectorate over the other two islands in 1886 that plantation economies and new crops were introduced to the rest of the archipelago. Ylang-Ylang, a perfume essence, is the major export crop; sisal, vanilla, cocoa, and coffee are also exported. Coconuts are the only export commodity which has survived from the precolonial economy.

In October 1968, the University of Ghana commenced an extensive program in African archaeology. Graduate students from overseas are eligible to enroll for courses at the University, though no scholarships are presently available for non-Ghanaians.

The Department of Archaeology of the University of Ghana was established in 1951 under the professorship of A. W. Lawrence. It presently has a senior teaching establishment of four together with a curator and two senior research fellows under the chairmanship of Professor Merrick Posnansky. The Department has a small specialist library, a museum, laboratory, dark room, workshops, and a team of trained technical staff.

Most of the Department's research work is normally conducted in the dry season from November to May each year. In the past Professor Oliver Davies, author of the Quaternary of the Guinea Coast (1964) and West Africa before the Europeans (1967), conducted extensive fieldwork relating to the Stone Age and neolithic periods of Ghana's past and made large surface collections from all parts of Ghana which provide a rich topographical source of information on archaeology in Ghana. The Department has conducted extensive excavations in Ghana and its research fellows are presently engaged in writing up the results of the Volta Basin Research Project, in which more than thirty sites have been excavated since 1963 in advance of the formation of a large lake consequent upon the construction of the Volta Dam. The majority of the excavated sites have been of Iron Age date. In September 1968, Mr. C. Flight commenced a new season of excavations at “Neolithic” rock shelter sites at Kintampo, where occupations and burials dated to the middle of the second millennium B.C. were uncovered in 1967. Other excavations conducted during 1968 included work by Mr. D. Calvocoressi at the funerary terracotta site of Ahinsan and by Mr. Duncan Mathewson at the seventeenth-century A.D. Gonja site of Jakpasere. In 1969 a training excavation will be conducted at Elmina on the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century A.D. town in the vicinity of the Portuguese castle.