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.

When one contemplates the remarkable expansion in research interest in African phenomena among social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, the need for an up-to-date inventory of completed, continuing and projected research becomes increasingly apparent. Field research is costly; knowledge should be cumulative; reproduction ought to be systematic; and effective rapport with the human actors concerned should be scrupulously preserved. These and many other considerations dictate closer liaison among scholars everywhere in the organization and planning of future research on African subjects.

The purpose of this report is to provide a brief analytical survey of the character of research on Africa recently completed, or currently being pursued, by social scientists associated with European centers. There is, of course, a certain arbitrariness in focusing upon the state of research in European centers only, particularly in view of the very close organizational links between metropolitan institutions and associated research centers and institutes in the African territories. Moreover, as an increasingly greater proportion of the total research activity is being carried on by agencies established in Africa, a survey of the European centers provides us with only a partial picture of the overall dimensions of research sponsored and supported by the European countries concerned. In this report, however, space considerations unfortunately dictate this narrower focus upon the European side only.