African Papers in the Southern Historical Collection, The University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill

Abstract

As foundation money for overseas research grows more difficult to obtain, historians of Africa will perforce seek archival resources closer to home. A rough listing of African materials in American archives has been published, the Handbook of American Resources for African Studies, but the catalog evidently relied in part on reports written by American archivists who had little or no training in African history. As a result many available sources have been inadequately described. Take the case of the Southern Historical Collection, a repository for private manuscripts at the University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill. Although several collections with African papers in this repository are briefly noted in the Handbook, there was no indication of important materials like the forty-page eyewitness description of the court of the Mijjerteyn Sultan written in 1878. Nor, for that matter, is this account noted in the unpublished description of the papers available at the Collection; in fact, even if a researcher should ask, the archivist probably could not readily locate the account unless the researcher already had a name and date for it.The Southern Historical Collection holds three kinds of documents relating to Africa: (1) The Khedive of Egypt hired several former Confederate officers to conduct mapping expeditions in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia when he began his military conquests to the south in the 1870s. These officers' papers consist of letters, diaries, and printed material concerning their explorations and their daily lives in Cairo. (2) Several groups of papers contain information on missionary activities, mostly by Episcopalians, in Liberia from 1829 to 1880, and (3)there are a number of scattered items in various collections, mainly travelers' accounts of brief visits to Africa.