Historical drama can be described as a form of drama which purports to reflect or represent historical proceedings. Since time immemorial writers have combined fiction and history in creative works. Lawrence Langner has ascribed the popularity of historical drama to the desire of the theatergoer to spend an evening in the company of kings, queens, and other historical personages; the opportunity to become familiar with far greater events than those which take place in the lives of ordinary people; and that historical plays recreate great deeds done by great personages in the past. Historical facts are then creatively adapted and made available in play form to the audience. Adaptation has been defined as “the rewriting of a work from its original form to fit it for another medium … The term implies an attempt to retain the characters, actions, and as much as possible of the language and tone of the original…” The history play is also defined as “any drama whose time setting is in some period earlier than that in which it was written. We can also go further to describe the history play as one “that reconstructs a personage, a series of events, a movement, or the spirit of a past age and pays the debt of serious scholarship to the facts of the age being recreated.

Judging from the foregoing, Akinwunmi Isola's play, Efunsetan Aniwura falls into the category of historical drama, treating as it does the story of the eponymous heroine who was the second Iyalode (queen of women) of Ibadan and who died on 30 June 1874. Prominent themes in Yoruba historical plays include war, conflict, and class struggle. Olu Obafemi has declared that the dramatization of the history, myth, and legends of the Yoruba community forms the bulk of the themes of Yoruba drama. These factors are vividly portrayed in Akinwunmi Isola's plays. Akinwunmi Isola is one of the most prolific playwrights who use their mother tongue to write plays in Nigeria. He is a Professor of Yoruba language and he uses the Yoruba language in writing his plays despite the fact that he is proficient in English and French languages.

In an earlier study I described the material on Morocco, the Saharan coast, sub-Saharan Africa, and the neighboring Atlantic islands, which appeared in Richard Hakluyt's collection of English voyages, in its two editions of 1589 and 1598-1600. Up to his death in 1616 Hakluyt continued to collect additional material for an intended third edition. This material passed to Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), an Essex and then London clergyman, who had already begun to collect and publish voyage material on his own account.

In 1613 Purchas published his Pilgrimage, which appeared again in progressively enlarged editions in 1614, 1617, and 1626. Pilgrimage presented a synthesis of contemporary knowledge of the outer continents, based on accounts of voyages and journeys to and descriptions of exotic lands, some of them published, others from manuscripts collected or inspected by Purchas, the whole notionally organized as a review of religious practices throughout the world. Although Pilgrimage cites a vast range of sources and sometimes quotes from them, the work is basically a summarizing of the sources in Purchas' own words. Of much greater interest, therefore, is Purchas' other major work, his masterpiece, his Pilgrimes, which appeared in 1625 in four very large volumes running to some 4000 pages. Pilgrimes is a collection of sources, on the model of Hakluyt's collection, though Purchas more frequently presents his sources in cut versions. The material covers voyages and journeys to all parts of the known world, and is not limited to English voyages--the major limitation being only the extent of material Purchas could lay his hands on.

Reliable data relating to Buganda's pre-1800 past has come to historians in the form of a thin trickle. Students of more ancient Ganda history have been compelled to rely on the accounts by literate Ganda composed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably the work of Apolo Kagwa. The effective usage of these accounts is fraught with difficulties, difficulties which are well-documented in the case of Buganda and which have been explored by, in particular, Wrigley, Kiwanuka, Rowe, and Henige. These writers have justifiably questioned the validity of such recorded political history. The idea that Buganda was governed by a Western-style royal dynasty, with a chronologically-structured succession list, was first put in writing by Speke, who provided the earliest such kinglist.

Over the ensuing forty years this kinglist was gradually lengthened and virtually set in stone, largely through the writings of Kagwa. The explanation of precolonial Ganda government in die terminology of Western constitutional monarchy doubtless served very well the purposes of the new colonial power, which was able to claim that it was merely backing up an extant political organization able to articulate the practices of ‘civilised’ governance. This arrangement also clearly suited the Ganda, as Wrigley and Twaddle have suggested. Both authors incisively argue that the Ganda kinglist was manipulated to meet the challenges of the colonial period.

There seems little reason to doubt, and every reason to believe, that the recording of Buganda's more ancient past (for which there is no corroborating written source) was indeed often carefully engineered to produce the desired results. The attempt to ‘clarify’ local power struggles, the legitimization of particular claims to authority, and die opportunity to provide the world with the definitive account of one's own ‘national history’ (an opportunity, surely, which few could resist) were all factors which have combined to demand skepticism among historians concerning the historicity of ‘traditional’ accounts.

Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917-1983) is a definite turning point in African historical scholarship. West Africa (28 September 1957) appropriately called him “The Pioneer Historian.” Robert July credits Dike with being “responsible for many of the advances in historical scholarship that marked the two decades following the conclusion of the Second World War.”

Dike was born in Awka, Nigeria, on 17 December 1917. In 1933 he entered Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS), Onitsha, Nigeria. After three years at DMGS, Dike spent another two years at Achimota College in the Gold Coast. From Achimota he moved on to Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone. At the time, Fourah Bay was affiliated to, and awarding the degrees of, Durham University. This meant that through Fourah Bay, Dike took the B.A. (in English, Geography, and Latin) of Durham University. In 1943, he went home to Nigeria, but not to stay for long. In November 1944 he left, on a British Council scholarship, for the M.A. degree in History at University of Aberdeen. In June 1947 he graduated, taking a first-class honors (the best of his year) at Aberdeen. Four months later, Dike registered for his Ph.D. at King's College, University of London. Under the supervision of Vincent Harlow and Gerald S. Graham, he did a dissertation entitled “Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1879.” He earned his Ph.D. degree on 28 July 1950. With it he became the first African to “pass through professional training” in Western historical scholarship.

German voyages of ‘discovery’ and field research in that part of Africa which, politically or linguistically, has been subject to Portuguese influence in past centuries, and still is so—an area which therefore corresponds for the most part (and also sufficiently so) to present-day Angola—has so far received only sporadic attention in corresponding historical writings. Nor for the most part have they been taken into account as ethnographic sources, language barriers above all being responsible for this. This is hardly because they are negligible in terms of either their numbers or the information they contain. In the last third of the nineteenth century especially, west-central Africa, in which Portuguese had been a lingua franca for centuries, became a special area of attraction for German travelers. Admittedly, the published results are far from even. One, Augspurger's, is interesting above all for the early date of his report. The scientific reputation of others, like the Jaspert brothers, is extremely dubious. For yet others, like Baum and Jessen, ethnographic documentation was of only marginal interest. The greater part of Wilhelm's sketches have been lost.

On the other hand, one cannot write knowledgeably about the Loango coast without consulting Brun's and Pechuël-Loesche's reports. Any statement on northeast Angola in the last quarter of the nineteenth century will lose in value if one fails to use Pogge, Lux, Buchner, and Schütt. Studies on the Kisama without Mattenklodt or on the Cokwe without Baumann's great monograph would at best be a skeleton, at worst a distortion, in the context of what is possible.

Biography is on its way to enjoying immense popularity in the teaching of African history. A number of reasons account for this optimism. First is the current impetus from the postmodernist challenge of universalist and essentialist categories—with their emphasis on the individual and their exhaustive exposition of power and language. Second is the existence of massive research projects presently underway, together with the success of already published monographs. And lastly is the popularity and success that African novels have enjoyed in the teaching field of African studies and African history in particular. All three combined make us more sanguine.

The popularity of African novels lies in their ability to convey to the reader how a society might have functioned with or without a state. Since most often a novelist tries to recreate a historical moment, a novel becomes a pedagogical tool of what Klein has called a “reasonable representation of what society may have been like.” In the most popularly utilized novels, an individual is cast at the center of the unfolding story. Most often, the African novel concerns itself with the impact of colonialism and the transition from traditional to contemporary African realities. This is frequently done with the aim of conveying to the reader the processes of adjustment and the pros and cons of this adjustment.

As a must, there is a stern, often cold, and not very understanding colonial agent or agents. He is not alone, but is paired with a sympathetic and liberal missionary (although generally one who imparts conservative Victorian values).

The mission of Joseph Dupuis, sent as British Consul to Kumasi, the capital of Asante, in 1820, is well known, principally through his own journal of it, published in 1824. In addition to his negotiations with the Asante authorities, Dupuis collected information on Asante history, and on the geography not only of Asante itself but also of neighboring and remoter countries in the interior—the latter presented in Part II of his Journal, entitled “On the Geography of Western Africa” [I-CXV]. His principal informants on both Asante history and West African geography were African Muslims whom he met in Kumasi, and with whom he was able to converse in Arabic. The geographical information was transmitted in part in the form of Arabic manuscripts, some (or perhaps all) of which Dupuis presented, in transcription and translation, in an appendix of “geographical documents” [cxxiv-cxxxv]; but supplementary information was obtained orally in conversations, some passages from which Dupuis purports to reproduce verbatim [XLII-XLIV].

The information which Dupuis obtained can usefully be compared with similar (but, as regards the interior, generally less extensive) material collected by Edward Bowdich on an earlier mission to Kumasi in 1817. Dupuis himself was frequently critical of alleged inaccuracies and confusions in Bowdich's account, though not always with justification. It is noteworthy that he read over at least one section of Bowdich's account to his informants in Kumasi, to obtain their comments on it [XVIII]—an interesting illustration of the potential for interaction between written texts and oral information in Africa even in precolonial times, in a manner more complex than that of “feedback” from written into oral data most commonly discussed by historians.

The Luso-African [or Afro-Portuguese] ivories from West Africa include hunting horns (so-called “olifants” or “oliphants”), spoons, and lidded bowls (saltcellars) embellished with human figures and animals. These objects, first imported into Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have engendered debate over dating and provenance. While scholars agree that the early sixteenth-century pieces were produced by “Sape(s)” (or “Sapi”) artists from the Upper Guinea Coast (“Serra Leoa” in Portuguese sources), there is substantial disagreement whether post-1550 ivories came from “Serra Leoa” or Nigeria. This article argues for Serra Leoa, based on a methodological approach whereby Portuguese written documents, establishing the socio-historical context, and demonstrating continued production by “Sape” artists, are a necessary pre-condition to any stylistic comparison of objects.

One of the more striking recent trends in the study of African history has been the mushrooming of studies focusing on the “underdevelopment” of Africa (or some part of it) following the publication of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. Part of the appeal of the “underdevelopment” literature is that it stands the apologists for colonialism on their heads. Barely more than a decade earlier, as the 1950s were coming to a close, one could readily find settlers, shopkeepers, colonial bureaucrats, and others arguing that the mounting pressure for independence in sub-Saharan Africa should be resisted because European rule had brought “development” to the continent. It is not surprising, therefore, that after a decade of independence there should be a ready audience for the argument that colonial rule did not “develop” African economies but, to the contrary, actually “underdeveloped” them—and perhaps we should also not be surprised that “underdevelopment” is often not defined oris defined inconsistently.

The central focus of this essay will be the main difficulties of studying either “development” or “underdevelopment” and, in particular, the problems of determining the causes of either of these states at any given period in Africa's history. All the examples from the “underdevelopment” literature will be drawn from Rodney's book, primarily because the work seems representative of the growing body of literature on this subject and because it has been by far the most influential of the studies dealing with the topic in Africa. I would like to emphasize that in the following discussion my approach is more that of the economist than of the historian, a point which will be clearly reflected in the few points I have chosen for illustration.

This paper asks a methodological question: In what way can petitions written in the colonial period introduce us to the persona of the writers – that is, as against mainstream interpretation given to them as mere archival sources? Doesn’t the very nature of the petitions introduce us to the selfhood of those “caught up” in the often-mentioned “sophisticated” concepts of nationalism, politics, power, imperialism, urbanity, and colonialism? What, and how, do petitions tell us about the “interior version” of colonial society as seen in the individual? In an attempt at a deeper understanding of colonial Lagos, this paper examines an alternative feature of petitions as entry into the selfhood of colonial subjects rather than mainstream interpretations of the documents as qualitative exposition to “grand” historical phenomena. Selfhood as examined here is presented as it was constructed by petitions written in Lagos between 1940 and 1960 with a particular focus on three. Their deficiencies in “standards of grammar” notwithstanding, the words are also examined to allow for a demonstration of their qualities as texts: their meanings in singular and collaborative contexts, the gaps they exposed, the information they concealed, the disconnections in chronology they indicated, the “ethics” of grammar they “relegated” for more “substantial expose” of the self, the information they privileged the reader to hear, the identity they formed in the personas they constructed and the voice they generated. This paper suggests that these strands analyzed together affirm the textuality of petitions written by everyday people in colonial Lagos and that these point to the potentiality of such documents to further contribute to the substantial comprehension of the inner qualities of self-identity in Lagos and Nigeria’s colonial history.

The gold mines of Kilo-Moto are located at the extreme northeast of Zaire. They include two centers of mining operations: the gold mines of Moto in the District of the Upper Uélé and the gold mines of Kilo in the District of the Kibali-Ituri. Gold was discovered there in 1903, and the mining of gold began in 1905 in Kilo and in 1911 in Moto. The local management of the gold mines of Kilo is located at Kilomines or Bambu; and that of Moto is at Watsa.

From 1905 to 1919 Kilo-Moto was a colonial state corporation and gold was mined by the colonial administration. The mines were organized into a special service depending on the Department of Public Works in the Ministry of the Colonies in Brussels. In Africa, the Governor-General and the Governor of the Province Orientale (now Haut-Zaire) were responsible for the implementation of colonial regulations in the gold mines. Africans were recruited from the rural areas by the colonial administration to work for the gold mines.

From 1919 to 1926 the gold mines of Kilo-Moto were organized into an autonomous colonial state corporation managed by a Board of Directors in Brussels, appointed by the Minister of the Colonies. The service of the gold mines then moved from the Ministry of the Colonies to a separate building and this marked the beginning of the constitution of the Archives of Kilo-Moto. The headquarters of Kilo-Moto since 1937 have been located at 1, Place de Luxembourg in Brussels. From 1926 to 1967 Kilo-Moto was a private corporation, and the Management Committee and the Board of Directors of the private company have always operated from the same building.

There is no other theme in precolonial Benin Kingdom studies around which so many lances have been broken as that of consolidation of the present-day Second (Oba) dynasty and the person of its founder Oranmiyan (Oranyan in Yoruba). The main reason for this is the existence of considerable disagreements between numerous Bini and Yoruba versions of the oral historical tradition. Besides this, the story of Oranmiyan is one of the Bini and Yoruba oral history pages most tightly connected with mythology. This fact becomes especially important if one takes into account that the oral tradition is no doubt the main (though not the only) source on the consolidation of the Oba Dynasty in Benin. The key point on which different Bini and Yoruba traditions openly contradict each other, and which scholars debate, is the origin of the Dynasty. Who initiated its founding: Bini or Yoruba? Was it a request or a conquest? Are the characters of the oral tradition relations historical figures? Finally, what were historical, sociocultural, and political circumstances of the Oba accession?

If one disengages from details, three groups of traditional versions that describe the origin and life of Oranmiyan (including its period connected with Benin) can be distinguished. These groups may be designated as the Yoruba one, the Benin “official” (i.e., traditionally recognized by Oba themselves and most widely spread among common Bini) and Benin “apocryphal” traditions. In the meantime it should be borne in mind that Bini and Yoruba native gatherers and publishers of the oral historical tradition could influence each other. For example, the Yoruba Johnson could influence the Bini Egharevba, while the latter in his turn could influence another Yoruba, Fabunmi, and so on.

Probably the most popular and most frequently-recited oral tradition in all of Senegambia and somewhat beyond is the epic of Kelefa Saane. From southwestern Guiné-Bissau to Bondu on the middle Senegal, griots regularly play the tune of “Kelefa” on their harp-lutes as they sing the familiar refrains:

The war was a disaster.
There was no one who could take
Kelefa Saane's place.…
Wounded men
Crawled back
To Niumi. …
Ah, the nobles are finished
War has finished the nobles…

Such epics have captured the attention of African historians since early in the years of professional interest in the continent. Over the last decade historians have made fresh examination of oral data and their use in reconstructing the African past. One volume of essays, The African Past Speaks, edited by Joseph C. Miller, assesses problems associated with analysis of these traditions. In his introductory essay Miller makes a point that most of the authors of subsequent chapters reinforce. It is that many forms of oral traditions are sociological models of the societies they come from. The structure and content of a narrative, Miller asserts, often provides insight into the nature of a particular society at some point in the precolonial past. Conversely, knowledge of the structure of the society in which traditionists tell the narrative helps one evaluate the narrative as a historical source.

I offer here a theory of “cultural convergence,” as a corollary to Darwin's natural selection, regarding how slave Creoles and culture were formed among the Gullah and, by extension, supported by other examples, in the Americas. When numerous speakers from different, and sometimes related, ethnic groups have words with similar sounds and evoke related meanings, this commonality powers the word into Creole use, especially if there is commonality with Southern English or the host language. This theory applies to cultural features as well, including music. Perhaps the most haunting example of my theory is that of “massa,” the alleged mispronunciation by Southern slaves of “master.” Massa is in fact the correct Bainouk and Cassanga ethnic group pronunciation of mansa, the famous word used so widely among the adjacent and dominant Mande peoples in northern and coastal west Africa to denote king or boss. In this new framework, the changes wrought by Mandinka, the Mande more broadly, and African culture generally on the South, are every bit as significant as the linguistic infusions of the Norman Conquest into what became English.

Twentieth-century historians of the Fon kingdom of Dahomey have been blessed with an unusually rich and accessible body of primary source material. Published in English and French by a succession of visitors to the kingdom, this literature includes references to Dahomean affairs beginning as early as the seventeenth century and continuing with regularity through its conquest in 1892/93 by the French. The accounts, however, are fullest in number of writers and in detail of observation for the period of the reigns of kings Gezo (1818-58) and Glele (1858-89).

European observers of the Dahomean polity approached the state for a variety of commercial, religious, and political reasons, but typically they were permitted to visit the capital, Abomey, only in conjunction with the major cycle of annual ceremonies, Xwetanu. Because Xwetanu -- or Customs, as the ceremonies were dubbed by the Europeans -- ranged in duration from several weeks to several months, travelers drew their information about the kingdom from the advantageous point of a relatively long period of time spent in close observation of the court at what was unquestionably the most important period of the year. Fascinated and sometimes repelled by the sights they witnessed, they set down their own observations, describing land forms and economic activities, court life and ceremonial, and officers and institutions of the state.

As heavily as historians must rely on orally-derived data for their study of the African past, historians of Oceania are far more in thrall to such materials in attempting to reconstruct the history of the various Pacific island groups. Although archeology and historical linguistics can sometimes help to provide broad sequences and interrelationships as well as evidence concerning origins, neither can, of course, provide circumstantial local detail or close dating. Oral traditions, often supported by genealogies of sometimes extraordinary length and complexity, have been collected in all parts of the Pacific almost since the time of Cook, but the latter part of the nineteenth century was a period of particularly feverish activity. The result is a vast body of material, much of it still in manuscript form. Of this corpus far more relates to the Maori people of New Zealand than to the inhabitants of any other island group.

In the course of the first half of this century a homogenized orthodox view of New Zealand's more remote past developed -- an interpretation based on three pivotal events, each of which came to be dated calendrically by means of Maori genealogies. The first was the arrival of the “discoverer” of New Zealand, one Kupe, who was dated to ca. 950. Then, two centuries later, came Toi and his companions. Finally, so this version goes, the so-called Great Fleet, comprising about seven large canoes (the number varies slightly) arrived in about 1350, and New Zealand began to be well and truly peopled by Maori.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the events, forces, realities, challenges and opportunities with which the Bafokeng community in the vicinity of Rustenburg was confronted during the course of the nineteenth century, especially with regard to the loss of their land and the way they responded to this dispossession. Much of the groundwork for their subsequent successful acquisition of land was laid during this period. These successes—and the good fortune of the Bafokeng that rich platinum deposits were later discovered on the land they obtained in this way—elevated them to a prominent position at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The status of the Bafokeng was emphasized when the former South African President Nelson Mandela, the Home Affairs Minister Mango-sutho Buthelezi, the South African first lady Zanele Mbeki, and the Lesotho Queen Mother were among the guests at the coronation of Leruo Moletlegi as kgosi or chief of the Bafokeng in 2003.

The dispossession of the land of the Bafokeng by white settlers from the end of the 1830s and the Bafokeng's attempts to regain this land should be seen against a number of important nineteenth-century trends. Firstly, there was the forfeiture to the white settlers of large tracts of land claimed by indigenous communities in European colonies in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. In southern Africa white settlers seized no less than 40. million hectares of land up to 1860 and another 107. million hectares during the next hundred years. A second important trend was the mineral revolution in the interior of southern Africa. Thirdly, the settlement of a large number of missionaries among African communities in this period also influenced the dynamics of the dispossession and acquisition of land.

Readers of Leslie Bessant's article in HA 24 (1997) on the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) might have been alarmed by one of the photographs opposite the opening page, which depicted an archive in a state of advanced decay. If they had expected the photograph to be a pictorial representation of the current condition of NAZ, they would have been disappointed. The photograph was taken in the Sāo Tomé e Príncipe archives and accompanied a short note detailing the recovery work undertaken in those archives to make them usable. NAZ is a flourishing national archive which is a pleasure to work in, staffed by professional and conscientious personnel, but it is also bearing the brunt of cuts in funding and government suspicion of researchers. I worked intensively at NAZ for nine months in 1994-95, and again for five months in 1996. This paper is by way of an informal engagement with Bessant's article; in it I aim to sketch out my own reminiscences of NAZ and also address some of the issues which face overseas researchers in Zimbabwe.

Bessant spent a sizeable part of his article discussing tea, and the notions of privilege associated with tea at NAZ. Tea under the flagpoles became an institution for me. Not only was the tea absurdly cheap (Z$0.40/US$0.04 in 1994, rising to Z$1 a few months later), but the break was a useful refueling exercise during grueling days looking at dusty files. Rather than fading in significance as Bessant suggested, tea was extremely prominent in the day of the typical researcher. Tea was also the best way of networking with other scholars in the Archives, and almost all the useful conversations I had there revolved around the tea break—which sometimes became the lunch break if debates were intense. I made many professional contacts and personal friendships over tea at the Archives.

Scepticism has fairly consistently had a bad press from those in a position of authority. The usual reasons for its disrepute are not themselves particularly reputable. They generally include at least the following claims: scepticism is a negative philosophy and hence incapable of making positive contributions to humanity, science, or religion; sceptics are nihilists who wreak havoc on social structure, science, and religion; and, though scepticism can on occasion be beneficial, the idea that we do not know anything is preposterous. These attitudes are widespread in the general populace but less common in the scientific community, where various ideas such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or Einstein's theory of relativity have made scepticism more acceptable. Although the usual reasons listed above might be remotely accurate representations of dogmatic scepticism, they completely misrepresent Pyrrhonic scepticism, that form of scepticism which has had most influence on Western civilization.

The position taken here is that Pyrrhonic scepticism need not be considered primarily a philosophical position. Historically, it was set forth as a philosophical position but only because philosophy once encompassed all of humanity's attempts to arrive at knowledge. Today, when science has primary claim to including under its roof most of our attempts to wrest knowledge from the world, Pyrrhonic scepticism is more approp-priately viewed as a scientific position having general implications for scientific research.

It is ironic that negative attitudes towards scepticism continue, since the dramatic historical failures of social structure, ethical beliefs, and human progress have been due to dogmatic pretensions of one sort or another, not to scepticism. This is not by chance. Scepticism is, after all, difficult to use as the justification for authority, obedience, or power.

During the past few years of researching in Eritrea I had the chance to discover an important but little known source for the history of colonial Eritrea that the government that came to power in 1991 is evaluating: the regional archive of Addi Qäyyeh. This archive is in the main town of an area of the Eritrean highlands, Akkälä Guzay, and comprises a large number of documents on Italian colonialism. This documentation is exceptional; indeed, the great bulk of such documents remain in Italy, conserved in the unexploited Archivio Eritrea within the Ministerio degli Affari Esteri in Rome. To my knowledge the regional archive at Addi Qäyyeh is the only remaining colonial source in Eritrea, if we exclude some minor religious archives, and its interest is unquestionable.

As noted, the main sources for colonial Eritrea are in Italy. The documents in the Archivio Eritrea amply testify to the importance of this material. This deals with colonial papers, inquiries, historical and geographical documentation, anthropological materials, and adminstrative papers—altogether, a large amount of material as yet little utilized by scholars. The colonial history of Eritrea remains in many respects a very poor field of study, and recent work has considered only a few documents in this rich collection. However, the Archivio Eritrea is not exhaustive—a complementary source offers a different set of materials amenable to historical study.

Many documents preserved at Addi Qäyyeh have the same importance and share many subjects with those in Rome, while others are unique. Here I would just like to mention briefly some of the latter, and offer general information to intending historians of colonial Eritrea.