The three ages of African studies reference works

Abstract

The following reflections came to mind during my work in 2005 and 2006 on producing the revised 2 edition of my Africa: guide to reference material (Lochcarron: Hans Zell, 2007), hereinafter referred to as my Guide. They also draw upon and recommend for further reading a number of perceptive articles that have been published on Africanist reference works in the last few years. The emphasis, as in my Guide, will be on reference material other than bibliographies. I have already written in these pages about African studies bibliography (McIlwaine 2001) and Peter Limb in last year’s volume gave an elegant ‘state-of-the art’ account of this field (Limb 2006). The introduction to my Guide argues that while bibliographies of Africa are comparatively well covered by existing lists such as J.D. Pearson, World bibliography of African bibliographies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) and Yvette Scheven, Bibliographies for African studies, 1970-1985 (Oxford: Hans Zell, 1988) and Bibliographies for African studies, 1987-1993 (London: Hans Zell, 1994), coverage of other categories of reference works is much less readily available. This lack of coverage is something that both editions of my own work and Al Kagan’s Reference guide to Africa: a bibliography of source, 2 ed., (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005) seek to remedy. The question that needs to be asked, of course, is: what is meant by ‘reference works’? The term is vague, especially when one has specifically excluded bibliographies. The two main defining characteristics are, firstly, that such sources are concerned primarily with providing factual data, rather than interpretation, and secondly, that their arrangement is intended to facilitate rapid consultation, rather than requiring the whole text to be scanned to locate facts. Such tidy guidelines are easy to draw and impossible to maintain. As I note in my Guide, perhaps the first ‘reference work’ for Africa that would come into many minds would be Lord Hailey’s An African survey, discussed further below, which is a volume that accompanies its extensive factual data by equally extensive comment and interpretation, and that is arranged as a straightforward monograph with chapters, rather than having a quick-reference structure. It is also, of course, wrong to suggest that collections of factual information imply no interpretation: the very process of selection of what data to include and what to exclude, and how they should be presented, obviously involves interpretation. The first edition of my Guide had no limits on the date of publication of titles included, and indeed contained many references to sources published in the 19 century. The new 2 edition only includes material published since 1938 (the year of Lord Hailey’s African survey) but this decision was taken simply to