We have spent much of today talking about refugees in southern Africa, refugees who have been spawned by the war in the sub-continent, which has produced its toll of misery and suffering and death. By and large, we have been talking about people who have been displaced from their homes as a result of war and political upheaval, though sometimes it is difficult to separate out the political from the economic. In an immediate sense, of course, South Africa has also generated its political refugees - the thousands of children who fled Soweto after the massacre of 1976 were but the last and the most numerous and most dramatic of the recent refugees to have fled from South Africa for overtly political reasons - some to join the liberation movements and fight from outside, some simply to escape the fate they feared if they remained behind.

As Ian Colvin observed in his classic Introduction to Sidney Mendelssohn's South African Bibliography, the first recorded voyage round the Cape (by Bartholomew Diaz in 1487) took place at about the time that printing was being ‘invented’ (that is, re-discovered and developed) in Europe. Yet it was not until 1910, more than four centuries later, that the, first comprehensive bibliographical record relating to Southern Africa appeared in print. The almost ‘onlie begetter’ of this seminal work was the elder son of a comparatively impecunious liberal Jewish Rabbi, a mid-19th century immigrant to Britain from Germany, albeit a collateral descendant of the distinguished philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Sidney, brought up in the West country, followed his father to Kimberley soon after the latter had taken up his appointment as Minister to the Jewish Congregation of the small diamond-field town in 1878.

The Mill Hill Missionaries (more properly, the St. Joseph's Society for the Missions) was established in 1866 by Fr. Herbert Vaughan, later Archbishop of Westminster. The first missionary field of the society was among the blacks of the American South. However, the major missionary effort of the Mill Hill missionaries has been Africa. In 1894 the Vicariate of the Upper Nile was organized and encompassed the whole of eastern Uganda and western Kenya including Kampala and Busoga. This was divided in 1947 into the Vicariates (later dioceses) of Kampala and Tororo, and later the diocese of Jinja was. formed from Kampala. In western Kenya the Mill Hill missionaries received the Prefecture of Kavirondo in 1925 and this later was divided into the dioceses of Kisii, Kisumu, Ngong, and Kakamega.

Since the introduction of a national orthography in 1972 books and articles by Somali authors have been finding their way on an increasing scale into library catalogues in universities and centres of learning outside Somalia. Somali author entries are likely to present some difficulty for cataloguers and library users not acquainted with the Somali cultural background, and these brief notes are offered in the hope that they will be of some use to them.

As in many other Muslim countries, surnames are not normally used in Somalia. Instead, a person is identified by a sequence of names which begins with the given name, followed by the name of his or her father and sometimes also by the name of his or her grandfather. This is reminiscent of the system used in Arabic, except that the words corresponding to ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ are omitted.

It is becoming realised increasingly that the study and collection of historical children's books is an important facet of bibliographical studies (Library Trends, Spring 1979, was devoted entirely to this area of interest). The Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) has recently set up a small special collection of boys adventure stories set in areas in which the School has special interest and published between the middle of the last century and the outbreak of the Second World War.

These were the books that were introducing Africa and Asia to the school boys who were to become the colonial administrators and business men responsible for overseeing our dual mandate.