Equatoria Province is the southernmost province in the Sudan. The province contains six districts, with each district having its own District Administration Archives situated in the District headquarters. Bigger towns or villages in the province have in addition their own Rural Council Archives arising from the Town Councils established in the late 1940s. There is normally only one Town Council in each district, situated in the town of the District headquarters. In some places the District Archives and the Rural Council Archives consist of files and boxes in different corners of the same storeroom and administered by the same clerk.

The administration and filing systems have been inherited from the Condominium Period (1898-1956). Condominium administrative papers and public documents are thus incorporated in the papers used by the present administration. There is no sharp division between pre- and post-indepandent administrative papers; both are written in English (with a little interlude of Arabic in the 1960s) and many of the pre-independent files are still in use. In both the District and Rural Council Archives some of the files not in use are “closed.” At the time of my visit the Sudan Government had just started to bring in the closed District files to Juba, where they are under the care of the Southern Regional Ministry of Information and Culture. The open District files are under the District Commisioner, from whom permission to consult them must be obtained.

After the establishment of the new Southern Regional Government in 1973, administration at the provincial level was changed. The Condominium papers from Equatoria Province were closed and made the responsibility of the Regional Ministry of Information and Culture. Thus the Condominium Archives at the Province level are not incorporated into the present administration files to the same extent as they are at the District and Town level.

Before I came to Conakry I had been warned that the archives were in poor condition, had suffered damage from the elements and from the termites, and were not well maintained. One scholar who worked here in the 1960s spoke not only of termite damage but of chickens and goats wandering through. To my pleasant surprise I have found that the archives are fairly extensive, that they are in relatively good condition, and that they are being maintained as well as can be expected. The locale is not an ideal one, though its location on an exposed point of land near the sea makes for pleasant breezes and good cross-ventilation. There is no control of either temperature or humidity in the building. While some dossiers are partially damaged, I have not seen one that is not usable. My biggest problem has been the handwriting of the clerks and administrators who made copies of correspondence in local registers.

The original work of organizing the archives was done by Madeira Keita, the R.D.A. leader, who worked here during the early 1950s. The classification system he set up was maintained by Damien d'Almeida, who published a repertoire in 1962. The repertoire is fairly detailed and it notes when a dossier or a register is in poor condition. The classification system is sound, though occasionally one finds documents, reports, and correspondance grouped together in a haphazard manner. The problem was more the sloppy recordkeeping of the colonial administration than the work of the undermanned archivists. In general, I have been to find what I have wanted and the organization has been very useful. The present archivist, Moctar Ba, is competent and seems conscientious.

The Norddeutsche Mission archives are located in the Staatsarchiv of Bremen, that is, the archives of the Staat or province of Bremen in West Germany. The headquarters of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (the North German Mission Society) is also in Bremen, but their historical archives were given to the Staatsarchiv in the late 1960s because the mission no longer had space to store them properly. The Norddeutsche missionaries were active the Ewe areas of eastern Asante, the Gold Coast, and Togoland from the 1840s to the present. Consequently the material has great potential use for the west African historian. To my knowledge the archives have been used previously by Arthur Knoll (before the material was indexed and sent to the Staatsarchiv) for his Togo Under Imperial Germany 1884-1914 and by Peter Bühler in “The Volta Region of Ghana, Economic Change in Togoland 1850-1914,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California-San Diego, 1975). I feel, however, that these books and my own research in the archives barely touch the surface of the Bremen data.

The Staatsarchiv is open to the public, though I believe it is considered polite to write in advance and introduce yourself. The address is as follows:

Herr Director

Staatsarchiv Bremen

Präsident-Kennedy-Platz 2

2800 Bremen 1

West Germany

You should bring some evidence of institutional affiliation. I obtained the permission of the Norddeutsche Mission before going to the Staatsarchiv but I believe this is not necessary.

The Staatsarchiv file number for all the mission material is 7,1025. The index for this classification is approximately twenty pages and is divided into five quite unequal parts: Neuseeland (a brief attempt at missionary work there); West Africa; Die Missionare; Heimat; Bildarchiv.

The following inventory of eighty-five reels of microfilm represents a selection of documents which relate to West Africa from the State Archives of Denmark. The documents date from 1624 to 1823, though the majority of them originated in the eighteenth century. They were taken from three major classes of records in the Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen: the West India and Guinea Company (Vestindiskguineisk Kompagni), the Guinea Company (Guineisk Kompagni), and the Various Records from Guinea (Diverse arkivalier fra Guinea). The West India and Guinea Company and the Guinea Company (or, more specifically, the Royal Chartered Danish Guinea Trading Company) were two of the most important companies involved in the West African trade in the eighteenth century. However, there was another, the Royal Danish Baltic-Guinea Company, which received a charter in 1779. Unfortunately, its records have not survived. Most of the documents in this collection are written in Danish, but some are in Dutch since many of the Danish Guinea Company's employees were Dutch.

The West India and Guinea Company (1671-1755) archives consist of three groups of material: company records in Copenhagen, records sent to Denmark from the Government on the Guinea Coast (1698-1754), and accounts sent to Denmark from the Guinea Coast (1698-1754). The company records in Copenhagen, inventory numbers 28-483 (reel numbers 1-27), consist mainly of letter books of the Board of Directors and incoming and outgoing letters and documents. Records in the second group, inventory numbers 880-890 (reel numbers 27-33), include Minutes of the Council at Christiansborg and journals, letter books, and court records. The third group, inventory numbers 891-932 (reel numbers 33-50), consists mostly of account books, cash books, and ledgers.

The papers in this collection were generated by Rev. Vernon Anderson, a Presbyterian missionary who served in the Belgian Congo. Born in Illinois in 1896, Anderson was raised in Alabama where he attended the Alabama Presbyterian College. After graduation he continued his studies at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, from which he received his B.D. degree in 1920. Anderson joined the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and assumed a post with that mission in the Kasai Province in 1921. The earliest Presbyterian missionaries to work in the Congo had established a station at Luebo in 1891. Their missionary efforts were concentrated among the Bena Lulua of the Lulua river valley. Anderson, however, was sent to the station of Bibanga situated near the Lubilashi river in the area southeast of Luebo. Bibanga lay within the broad area between Lake Tanganyika and the Kasai river in which the Luba live. The Baluba have been separted into two groups--the Baluba-kasai and the Baluba-katanga--by one present-day scholar. The Baluba-lubilashi are a subgroup of the Baluba-kasai.

Anderson was one of the first missionaries to work among the Baluba-lubilashi, from 1921 to 1946. In addition to his duties as a missionary he spent a considerable amount of time studying Luba society, in part through the collection of primary data from informants. From this material he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation entitled Witchcraft in Africa: A Missionary Problem and received his degree in 1942 from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Another project to engage his scholarly interest in the Luba was the revision of an early Tshiluba-English dictionary.