Le Centre d'Analyse Documentaire pour l'Afrique Noire was created in 1961 as part of the VI section (Division des Aires Culturelles, Centre d'Etudes Africaines) of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1965 it was joined with the Service d'Echange d'Informations Scientifiques of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, while retaining its organizational affiliations with the Centre d'Etudes Africaines.

We propose to present here the work accomplished at CARDAN since its founding, to define the tasks which it is proposed to accomplish in the years to come, and to inform researchers of the services which the Center can offer. We shall present successively the balance sheet of past years and the future program of CARDAN.

This is the second in a series of progress reports on African archaeology in the United States. These reports are being produced at the request of the Archaeology Committee of the African Studies Association as a means of indicating the nature and extent of current North American participation in this aspect of African research.

William Y. Adams of the University of Kentucky is leading an archaeological expedition to excavate the medieval Nubian village site of Kulubnarti in the Republic of the Sudan. The object of the expedition is to try to discover evidence of Islamization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- a historical problem which received almost no attention during the recent High Dam salvage campaign in Nubia. Work will be carried on from January to May 1969 under the direction of Dr. and Mrs. Adams with four student assistants and a labor force of 125. The expedition is sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, under a grant from the National Science Foundation.

I would like, first of all, to express my profound sympathy to Mrs. Ida Brown and the children of my former mentor, Professor William O. Brown. Also to the Center and this our University for the loss of its founder Director of the African Studies Program and pioneer scholar in the field of African studies. I feel very honoured indeed that I have been invited to give this memorial lecture.

I first met Professor William Brown in September, 1951 when, as part of a tour of European centres of learning with programmes on Africa, he came to the Department of Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University. As the Professor and the lecturer in the Department were both away, it fell to me to show him round the Department and talk about our work; but, as I had only just been appointed to the Department, we spoke more about Africa than about the Department's programme.

This acquaintance was deepened into a lasting friendship when, in the Spring of 1953, I had the privilege of entertaining him as my house guest when he visited Sierra Leone. In the evenings we spent together in Freetown, I got to know Bill Brown; I got to know him as a man dedicated to and genuinely interested in the advancement of Africa. His was not merely an antiquarian interest; nor was he only interested in the kinship structures and anthropological tidbits of the African societies. He saw the Africans as personalities, as human beings, pursuing the same goal as others, and wanting for themselves the same rewards out of life. Those were the colonial days but, even in those days, Bill Brown was already deeply interested in the development of the African countries into viable nation states. It is not surprising, therefore, that this Center, under his leadership as its first Director, did not develop any narrow parochial interest, but studied Africa from a broader dimension, giving equal importance to historical, economic, political, as well as sociological factors in the development of Africa from traditionalism to modernity.

Canadian scholars involved in African research have recently formed the Committeé on African Studies in Canada (Le Comite des Etudes Africaines au Canada). The founding meeting was held on November 30 and December 1, 1962, at McGill University. The conference decided to create a permanent bilingual organization. Professor Ronald Cohen of the Sociology Department at McGill University and Professor Donald C. Savage of the Department of History at Loyola College in Montreal were chosen provisional officers of the Committee. It was agreed to meet in six months' time for the formal adoption of a constitution.

The Committee undertook three major tasks. The first was to provide a forum for the exchange of information among Canadian Africanists. The Executive is exploring the possibility of an annual meeting at which members of the Committee and others could contribute papers. It was also decided to distribute the report of the conference as widely as possible and then to publish an annual newsletter. The newsletter will list new appointments in the field of African studies, new courses, major additions to libraries plus any other information of relevance to African research in Canada. It was also agreed that one of the first tasks of the editor of the newsletter would be to publish a list of the holding of African periodicals in Canadian university libraries. All inquiries concerning the newsletter should be directed to Professor Donald Wiedner, Department of History, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. The newsletter will appear in both English and French.

Anthropologists in the United States came relatively late to a concern with Africa. It was through the study of American Indians that anthropology developed in this country. This orientation was specified long before the discipline was a recognized academic subject. Thomas Jefferson recommended the study of Indian customs and languages, and through this study a reconstruction of Indian history. Albert Gallatin in the 1830's began to give to this goal the vigor he also gave to public life. Many others, whose reputations are associated with other fields, were “intelligent dabblers” (e.g. Henry Thoreau; cf. Lawrence Willson, “Thoreau: Student of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, LXI, no. 2 [April 1959]).

The European-derived populations of the United States and of South Africa have comparable situations in that each has in its own back yard, so to speak, a number of “laboratories” for the study of societies and cultures other than their own. Anthropology in each country has developed in relation to these opportunities and challenges, but in South Africa it came at a very much later period.

Americans were, in fact, among the catalysts of the development of anthropological thought in the nineteenth century, but they were scarcely cognizant of Africa. Insofar as African ethnography was developed in the nineteenth century, it was done by Europeans. The commercial, colonial, and missionary interest of European countries helped to direct the attention of anthropologists in those countries toward Africa, but also of course to Asia, Oceania, and elsewhere. In toto, Africa was less cultivated at that period than were other major areas.

About 1960, the study of West African history took a new turn as historians became aware of the interest and value of Islamic sources for their work, particularly manuscript materials in Arabic. To be sure, the use of Arabic sources for the history of West Africa is nothing new: in 1841, W. Des-borough Cooley published his The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained; or, an Inquiry into the Early History and Geography of Central Africa. But Cooley's pioneering book was discounted by later British and American writers on Africa as the work of an eccentric. In the 1880's and 1890's, many of these writers were spellbound by their vision of what Christianity might do for the African, while others were preoccupied by what they deemed to be the morally indefensible activities of the Muslims as slave-raiders and traders in West and East Africa. As late as the 1930's, the well-known British anthropologist C. K. Meek indicted Islam in northern Nigeria when he wrote: “The institution of slavery is a pivotal feature of Islamic society, and we are justified with charging Muhammadanism with the devastation and desolation in which Northern Nigeria was found at the beginning of this century.” Other writers, like Sir A.C. Burns for Nigeria, and A. W. Cardinall and W. E. F. Ward for Ghana, dismissed the Islamic side of West African history in few words, or gave it no mention at all. There were other reasons for this lack of emphasis. In northern Nigeria, for example, many British officials were apprehensive of an outbreak of “Mahdism” among the Muslims; and very frequently, French officials looked on Islam as a rival political system, dangerous and potentially subversive.

In the summer 1963 issue of Africana Newsletter (pp. 38–39), I reported on the then sad state of public records in the Gambia. Since that time the Gambian government has acted to preserve and catalogue the materials which prior to independence had been so carelessly handled. This reconstruction was made possible by a substantial gift by Nigeria on the occasion of independence. With these funds a trained Library Records Officer, J. M. Smyth, was brought from the Colonial Office to Gambia. From November 1965 to February 1966 he planned and did the preliminary work necessary for a functioning archive. Before he left Gambia the bulk of collecting, sorting, and cataloguing had been done and the framework for future growth had been created (see Smyth’s Report, Sessional no. 10, 1966).

The National Archives of Tanzania (Idara ya Kumbukumbu za Taifa la Tanzania) were established on 28 August 1965. Since this date energies have been directed toward building an efficient archival service: better storage facilities have been acquired, trained Tanzanian personnel have been hired, and there is now seating space for ten researchers. The most significant development from the historian's point of view has been the recent organization of the German records into a concise and convenient index catalogue.

In June 1967 the West German Government Technical Aid Program sent Mr. Peter Geissler, an Archivinspektor at Hessiches Staatsarchiv, Marburg, on a two-year project to reorganize the German records. Mr. Geissler is already familiar to historians of the American Revolution for his research on the Hessian troop records at Marburg. In Deutsch-Ostafrika the old German Registry System (renewed in 1902 and in effect until 1916) had been utilized in numbering the various files. A still extant two-volume Registry lists all the documents in existence before the First World War, but many of these have since been lost, eaten by white ants, stolen, or destroyed. It is evident that only a few records concerning district political administration have survived, while land, legal, mission, public works, and education files are among the most complete. The files have been divided into two main groupings: (1) the old German Registry and other German Government Administration (G 1 - G 65); and (2) Private Archives (G 66 - G 86). Each file card contains both the new “G” number and the old German Registry designation. In addition Mr. Geissler has performed a painstaking task in listing on each card some of the outstanding names, places, etc. mentioned in the particular file.