CUL - Main Content

This website offers downloadable images, sound files, and other materials on Africa drawn from contributions by UWM faculty over the last 20-30 years.

This website includes a "directory of African activist archives" in the U.S. "[The project] seeks to preserve for history the record of activities of U.S. organizations and individuals that supported African struggles for freedom and had a significant collective impact on U.S. policy during the period 1950-1994."

"...founded in 1991, contains a collection of modern African music which is unique in Germany. It includes shellacs and vinyl-records, audio- and videotapes, CD’s and DVD’s."

Currently, a searchable database of holdings in North America. "Initially, this database ... will consolidate holdings information for collections in North America, but will later expand to include holdings in Africa, Europe, and elsewhere."

"The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University maintains a comprehensive collection of posters published in Africa and elsewhere. The posters provide a unique resource to carry on research in a broad range of disciplines by consulting the visual image created by governments (independent and colonial) and international agencies, as well as political, labor, social, religious, educational and cultural organizations. In the first phase of this web site, 77 posters, selected as a representative sampling of the collection, are available for searching and viewing." (***This special catalog of records also includes posters held by Michigan State University Libraries.)

The website provides general information about the center program, news about events, highlights from the visits by African presidents and others, a State of Africa Annual Report, and resource links on 13 African countries.

This site offers digitized works selected from the University's library, encompassing the Africana Digitization pilot project, offering free access to searchable online copies of published sources for West African history with a focus on the Atlantic Slave Trade era. The titles include:
-- Almada, Andre Alvares de, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea, c. 1594.
-- Alvares, Manuel, Ethiopia Minor and a Geographical Account of the Province of Sierra Leone.
-- Barbot's West African Vocabularies of c. 1680.
-- Fage, J.D., A Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa Published in European Languages.
-- Jesuit Documents on the Guinea of Cape Verde and the Cape Verde Islands, 1585-1617.
-- Jones, Adam. Raw, medium, well done: a critical review of editorial and quasi-editorial work on pre-1885 European sources for Sub-Saharan Africa, 1960-1986 (1987)
-- Lovejoy, Paul E. (ed.), Africans in bondage: studies in slavery and the slave trade: essays in honor of Philip D. Curtin...(1986)

The web site offers general information about the center, its staff, and the center's archive and library.
NOTE: The library includes a major Arabic language/Ajami script manuscripts collection.

A detailed finding aid for the collection which "documents the foundation and development of a U.S.-based organization dedicated to support of anti-apartheid and anti-colonial movements throughout Africa during the mid to late 20th century."

"A selection of images from the extensive photographic holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library. Images are drawn from several collections, including Richard U. Light and Mary (Light) Meader Collection, the Harrison Forman collection, and the Edna Schaus Sorensen and Clarence W. Sorensen Collection."

A companion web site to the AAM archival collection held by the Bodleian Library at Oxford, featuring excerpts in text, image, and video formats. "...tells the story of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement and its campaigns to support the people of South Africa in their fight against apartheid. The AAM also campaigned for freedom for Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola, and against South Africa’s attacks on its neighbours."

A catalog of West African Arabic manuscript collections from Kano--Nigeria at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois), from Ségou (Mali) at La Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), in Boutilimit and Nouakchott--Mauritania, Timbuctu--Mali, and Niamey--Niger. The ANMS database is searchable in English or in Arabic.

This site --in Portuguese-- provides descriptions of the collections and contact information only.
--Search for digitized historical documents: Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo

General information about the center, its director -- John Gray, and related links. "Founded in 1989, the Black Arts Research Center is an archival resource center dedicated to the documentation, preservation and dissemination of the African cultural legacy. Resources include some 2300 recordings, cassettes and videotapes, 1300 books and journals, 500 clippings files and a bibliographic database with more than 50,000 entries. These materials now offer one of the richest resources ever on the Black presence in the performing arts."

[Since 1981] "We use our mission to collect, preserve and celebrate the histories of people of African and Caribbean descent in the UK and to inspire and give strength to individuals, communities and society...At our HQ we run a series of gallery exhibitions, educational programmes and public engagement events. We provide free access to our unique set of archives, museum objects and reference library...
The BCA catalog contains over 3,500 records across 41 collections reflecting the history and presence of African and Caribbean communities in Britain. These include personal papers, organisational records, ephemera, photographs and periodicals, library references and the object collections."
--See especially: Collections

Very brief description and contact information. Search the CUNY--Brooklyn College online catalog.

Une petite archive de thèses et mémoires, en plus des articles qui sont parus dans deux revues du CAMES pour les pays du réseau universitaire francophone en Afrique

Le site Web est en français ou en anglais. "Le Centre Aequatoria est situé à Bamanya, 10 km de Mbandaka, où le fleuve Zaire traverse la ligne de l'équateur. Il consiste en une bibliothèque, des archives, un périodique (6000 livres et 3000 volumes de périodiques). La bibliothèque est spécialisée en linguistique bantu et histoire coloniale."

General information and select lists of recently acquired publications.

--Also known as "Colonial Film Database"
"This website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse for films by country, date, topic, or keyword. Over 350 of the most important films in the catalogue are presented with extensive critical notes...The Colonial Film project united universities (Birkbeck and University College London) and archives (British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum) to create a new catalogue of films relating to the British Empire."

"...a service that provides access to African research information produced in the Netherlands and elsewhere: details of Africa experts affiliated to Dutch and Belgian organizations; details of Dutch and Belgian development-related organizations, universities and research institutes; titles of published research on Africa in the Netherlands and elswhere; digital resources on Africa (full-text of publications, images and sound) in about 55 institutional repositories.

"Ce site est dédié aux archives coloniales de Côte d’Ivoire conservées à Abidjan aux Archives nationales de Côte d’Ivoire. Il est plus spécifiquement consacré à la série EE, c’est-à-dire au service des Affaires politiques du gouvernement colonial de Côte d’Ivoire."

"...developed by Chevening Research Fellow Oluwaseun Obasola in 2017 with support from Chevening and the British Library in the United Kingdom. DODRIA provides links to data portals, brief description of each portal, publishing organisations, areas covered and access policies (open, licensed and enclaved data) on available datasets from each country in Africa."

A detailed description of the collection at Durham University, UK. "The Archive was founded in 1957 to collect and preserve the papers of administrators and others who had served or lived in the Sudan during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. It contains official, semi-official and private papers which document in considerable detail the Sudan under Mahdist and Condominium rule for the period 1883-1956, with some material from the post-independence period. It includes a substantial quantity of papers relating to Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria andAfrican states bordering on the Sudan."

"L'EPA est un établissement universitaire de formation et de recherche spécialisé dans la conservation et la médiation du patrimoine culturel mobilier et immobilier à vocation régionale." Sur ce site, on peut apprendre les activités de l'école et les actualités culturelles, participer dans un forum, et trouver une liste de liens aux pages d'accueils de musées africaines et d'autres organisations.

Select "Advanced Search" or "Recherche détailée to look for open access, online full-text MA essays/mémoires de maîtrise from McGill University, Université Laval, & Université de Montréal...or journal articles published in major Canadian and French journals.

General information about collections and services; contact information; plus:
-- National bibliography of Ethiopia. (Online): 2005-2006 -- Addis Ababa: Ethiopian National Archives and Library Agency ; Ethiopia, Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

This searchable website offers acces to digitized books, maps, and other items held by many archives and libraries in the UK and Europe, as well as online exhibitions and blog articles.

The digital components of a larger repository of the Ford Foundation's International Fellowship program, 2001 to 2013. About 33% of the fellows were from Africa and the Middle East. "...a decade-long program that offered advanced study opportunities to more than 4,300 social justice leaders from the world’s most vulnerable populations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia."
--See also: Summary guide to the IFP Records at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscripts Library.
-- Plus: IFP Alumni Tracking Study, Report 1. (April 2016) 36 pages in PDF format (via Institute of International Education, New York, USA)

A digital library of government gazettes from 19 African countries, dating from the 1970s to the present.

This website provides information about the project, searchable inventory lists/finding aids for 30 collections--some digitized, including Liberian government archives, presidential papers, and related information. 'The collections include historical and ethnographic documents, newspapers, government publications, correspondence, books, journals, dissertations, maps, slides, negatives, photographs, audio & video tapes, etc.'
--See also: Liberian Photograph Collections, 1940s to present

General contact information and news of conferences, surveys, and projects of major African archives and national libraries.

General information, lists of services, news about activities and publications, guides to the collections and -- under construction: searchable databases.

The list of document titles and microfilm reel numbers; plus visitor information. "Syracuse University is one of two repositories of the microfilm collection of the KNA, produced in the 1960's through a joint grant with the National Science Foundation, the government of Kenya, and the Program of Eastern African Studies of Syracuse University (no longer in existence). The other collection is owned by the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago [See: Cooperative Africana Microform Project]. The documents include 157 microfilm reels...and a large number of microfilm reels of newspapers, journals, and papers of assorted associations."

"[The Center] is recognized as one of the world's largest and most comprehensive repositories for the documentation of the history and culture of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and other parts of the world. As one of Howard University's major research facilities, the MSRC collects, preserves, and makes available for research a wide range of resources chronicling the Black experience."

"...to make available selected newspaper clippings and some other resources dealing with contemporary Mozambican history and presented in a thematically organised form. A high proportion of this material is in Portuguese...organised by subject, each with its own page on this website, where each document is briefly referenced, with a link to a viewable or down-loadable PDF or JPEG file."

The site offers general information about the NASA and access to the various databases of the NAAIRS--National Automated Archival Information Retrieval System.

This site features general information for researchers/visitors, a few sample photos and other images, and recent news about the archives.

A report on a 2008 research tour of Islamic manuscript collections in Northern Nigeria.
--See also: "Modibbo Ahmadu Fufore collection" report and "Conservation in a Box: a Primer"

"...a free-to-use collection of print materials from Eastern Africa, and film and photo materials from Afghanistan, Bolivia, China, Kenya, and Taiwan. Norman Miller (1933-) is one of the first American field workers who spent long periods of time in remote regions of Kenya and Tanzania, beginning in the British colonial era."
--See especially: "Guide to The Norman Miller Archives at The Smithsonian Institution and at Michigan State University." Edited by Franny Eanet and Jessica Achberger. (2019) 74 pages in PDF format.

"PEMM, a digital humanities project, is a comprehensive resource for the 1,000+ miracle stories and the 2,500+ images painted of the Virgin Mary in these African countries, and preserved in Geʿez between 1300 and the present......You can also learn about over 950 Täˀammərä Maryam manuscripts, from over 100 repositories around the world...with access to 'digital copies'...including manuscripts from Princeton’s Rare Books and Special Collections."

The website of the archive of a local public television program (1968-1982), featuring a searchable program directory and an extensive digital gallery of sample film excerpts. "Say Brother is WGBH's longest running public affairs television program by, for and about African Americans, and is now known as Basic Black. Since its inception in 1968, Say Brother has featured the voices of both locally and nationally known African American artists, athletes, performers, politicians, professionals, and writers..."

A consortium of academic libraries in South Africa, providing central access to digital special collections: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University ; Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University: Archives and Exhibition Centre ; Rhodes University Archives ; Rhodes University Digital Commons ; Rhodes University: Cory Library ; Rhodes University: International Library of African Music (ILAM) ; Rhodes University: Margaret Smith Library ; University of Fort Hare Institutional Repository ; University of Fort Hare: National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre ; and, Walter Sisulu University.

The site provides free access to selected data on thousands of slave ship voyages; plus scholarly essays, illustrations, animated features, and maps. The latest version (2020) includes the "Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database" ; "Intra-American Slave Trade Database" ; "African Names Database" ; and, "Image Galleries". "[The database] is the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The Voyages website itself is the product of two years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade..."

SAHA was formed in 1988 by the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions to collect & preserve documents from the struggle against apartheid during the 1980s.

Edited by Cameron Hu, Levi Thompson, Elias Saba, and Emily Drumsta: "Initiated in March 2011, Tahrir Documents is an ongoing effort to archive and translate activist papers from the 2011 Egyptian uprising and its aftermath. Materials are collected from demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and published in complete English translation alongside scans of the original documents [in Arabic]. The project is not affiliated with any political organization, Egyptian or otherwise."

General information about the National Archives of Tanzania, its organization, and services.
--See also: Conference papers -and- Reports, including: The National Archives of Tanzania Fifty Years After Wright’s Report on the Government Records and Public Archives of Tanganyika, (2012) By Charles Magaya and James Lowry.
Julius Nyerere: a biography (1961) by George Dunheved.

Remarquez: en raison de la capacité du serveur, il se peut qu'on attende un petit moment pour accéder aux documents. "La bibliothèque numérique comprend plusieurs collections de documents: les thèses et les mémoires déposés à la bibliothèque, depuis la création de l'université le 24 février 1957 ; des articles publiés par les enseignants et chercheurs de l'Université; des publications de l'Université; des Ouvrages rares et précieux."

The archival collections on Africa at Cambridge include selected issues of the Church Missionary Intelligencer, Donald Anthony Low Papers (esp. Uganda), Mary Margaret Louise Pirouet Papers (esp. Uganda), Cherry Gertzel (Uganda), G.I. Jones (Nigeria), and Eridadi M.K. Mulira Papers (Uganda). This web site offers mostly finding aids for each of these collections, digitized versions of the CM Intelligencer, as well as the Mulira papers, and links to other Africa-related distinctive materials discoverable through the university library's catalog.

"This department [at UCT] has an extensive collection of original research material relating to the political, social, cultural and economic history of the Western Cape. Subjects covered include art, music, education, literature and language, botany, politics and architecture." The web site includes online guides to the collections.

--See also: UCT Digital Collections, including:
"60 Years of the Black Sash" Exhibit (2017) ;
Kirby Collection of Musical Instruments ; African Maps--Jacobson Digital Africana Program

This site offers bibliographies and general information about some of the unique archival collections at the George Smathers Libraries, University of Florida: including those on Chad, Northern Nigeria, Dem. Rep. of Congo (ex-Zaire), Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

The web site for various historic manuscript collections and libraries....including The Killie Campbell Africana Library.

"...originates from Qur’anic manuscripts photographed by David Bivar in 1950s and donated to the SOAS Library in 2003. The initial collection consisted of four manuscripts represented by 230 folios in photographic and microfilm form, all subsequently digitised in 2005. In 2005-2007, in the course of fieldwork conducted by Dmitry Bondarev and Abba Isa Tijani in northern Nigeria, and in 2009-2013 by Dmitry Bondarev in Nigeria, Niger and the Republic of Chad, the corpus of digitised manuscripts was substantially increased to more than 5,000 folios."

The university scans and makes available on the Internet hundreds of seminar and conference papers, journal articles, selected books by UNN faculty, and UNN theses (primarily Masters' theses in various fields and some doctoral dissertations in the fields of Law or The Arts, from the 1980s to the present).

"The University established Historical Papers in 1966 in order to retrieve the rich historical heritage belonging to all South Africans. Today we house over 3000 separate collections of historical, political and cultural importance." The web site includes information about its collections, including: Papers of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1924-1977) and the Pan Africanist Congress ; South African History Archive; and the Records of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

A digital archive of knowledge production at the university, including conference papers, technical reports, and theses and dissertations.

The official web site --in English, French, and Portuguese-- for the archive of the famous French-born photographer Pierre Verger (1902-1996), who visually documented the peoples and cultures of West and Central Africa and the African diaspora in the Americas--especially Brazil--during the 20th century. The site includes an extensive online photographic collection, information about the foundation's cultural center and Verger's archive in Salvador, and a bibliography on Verger's publications.

A catalog of West African Arabic manuscript collections from Kano--Nigeria at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois), from Ségou (Mali) at La Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), in Boutilimit and Nouakchott--Mauritania, Timbuctu--Mali, and Niamey--Niger. The database is searchable in English or in Arabic.

This official site features general information for the visitor/researcher, with brief descriptions of the collections and a few photos.