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Sub-Saharan African History

General African Studies Sites | East Africa | South Africa | West Africa | Organizations

General African Studies Sites

• Africa Focus
  Online collection of over 3000 slides, 500 photographs and 50 hours of sound from 45 African countries. Emphasis is on contemporary Africa. Also see the Herskovits Library poster collection, Smithsonian's exhibit African Voices, Africana.com and the BBC's Story of Africa.

• Africa South of the Sahara: Selected Internet Resources
  Site maintained by the Berkeley-Stanford Joint Center for African Studies. Organized by subject and region, includes useful annotations. Also see African Studies WWW and African Studies.

• Internet African History Sourcebook
  Collection of primary and secondary sources dealing with the history of Africa.

Regional Sites

East Africa

• Images of Colonial Africa
  Collection of photographs taken by Laura Collins, a missionary in Kenya during the early 1900s. Maintained at Wheaton College.

• Sakuma Home Page
  Home page of the Sakuma Museum in Kisesa,Tanzania. Narratives and photographs focus on the culture and history of Tanzania.

South Africa

• ANC Historical Documents
  Collection of ANC (African National Congress) documents dating back to the 1950s including extensive listings of Nelson Mandela's speeches and writings plus documents from other organizations concerning apartheid.
• Digital Imaging Project of South Africa
  Project to digitize 35 anti-apartheid magazines published between 1960 and 1990.
• Labyrinth of East London Lore
  History of East London, a harbor town in South Africa. Includes an encyclopedia and essays on various topics and historic photographs.
• South African War Virtual Library
  Provides overview of the Boer War, biographies of participants, timeline and discussion of military aspects of the war. Also see the Anglo-Boer War Database and examples of British official documents dealing with concentration camps during the Boer War.

West Africa

• Digitized Colonial Picture Archive
  Searchable collection of more than 50,000 digitized photographs from the archives of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft. In German. Also see the Basel Mission Picture Archive which includes photographs of Africa and Asia taken between 1850 and 1950.
• Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
  "This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica."
• Voyages en Afrique
  Collection of 900 French texts, images and maps illustrating African exploration and colonial history.

Congo

• Congo Expedition May 1909 - November 1915
  American Museum of Natural History exhibit on the expedition includes texts (mostly scientific publications), maps, and images.

Ghana

• Cape Coast Archive
  Effort to "document the unique cultural landscape of the Cape Coast, Ghana region for the purposes of preservation and education." Site includes current and historic photographs. Also see Ghana and Holland, 300 years.

Liberia

• Liberia Roll of Emigrants, 1820-1843 and Census 1843
  Downloadable data providing names, ages, ships, etc. of immigrants to Liberia based at the University of Wisconsin.
• Liberian Letters
  Two collections of letters written by former slaves who settled in Liberia during the mid-19th century.
• Maps of Liberia 1830-1870
  Digitized collection of maps includes a timeline. Part of American Memory. For other historic maps of Africa see Castaneda Library and Exploring Africa.

Nigeria

• Early Mabila Documentation
  Digitized ethnological and governmental reports and letters dealing with the Mabila during the 1920s and 1930s. Also see the Virtual Institute of Mambila Studies
• G.I. Jones Photographic Archive of Southeastern Nigerian Art and Culture
  Archive of more than 300 photographs taken during the 1930s by G.I. Jones of the University of Cambridge.

• Daily Life in Sierra Leone: The Sherbro in 1936-37
  Exhibit of photographs taken by Henry Usher Hall in 1936-37 during an ethnographic research trip to Sierra Leone.

Organizations

• Africa Research Central: A Clearinghouse of African Primary Sources
  Directory of archives and scholars working on Africa.
• African Studies Centre
  Center at Leiden University includes a link to the African Studies Abstracts Online which indexes book chapters and journal articles.
• Harriet Tubman Resource Centre The centre "focuses on the history of the African diaspora and the movement of Africans to various parts of the world, particularly the Americas and the Islamic lands of North Africa and the Middle East."

Image: Detail from a 17th century map, Totius Africę accuratissima tabula.