Located in the small town of Alice in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, the University of Fort Hare (UFH) was established in 1916 and for many years was the only institution of higher education in sub-equatorial Africa which was open to black students. Therefore, among Fort Hare's alumni are well-known African nationalists and politicians such as Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki of the African National Congress (ANC); Robert Sobukwe, who founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC); Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP); Eluid Mathu, who was the first African member of the Kenya Legislative Council,;President Robert Mugabe and Herbert Chitepo of Zimbabwe; Prime Minister Ntsu Mokhehle of Lesotho; former Prime Minister Fwanyanga Mulikita of Uganda; and many others. While Fort Hare was taken over by the apartheid government in 1959 and incorporated into a network of ethnic universities within the homeland system, from the 1960s to early 1990s various banned liberation movements were active on campus and students periodically clashed with security forces. As a result, “[i]t is thus not surprising that with its venerable history of resistance and struggle, the UFH was chosen to be the repository of most of the archives of the Liberation Front.”

During the past few years of researching in Eritrea I had the chance to discover an important but little known source for the history of colonial Eritrea that the government that came to power in 1991 is evaluating: the regional archive of Addi Qäyyeh. This archive is in the main town of an area of the Eritrean highlands, Akkälä Guzay, and comprises a large number of documents on Italian colonialism. This documentation is exceptional; indeed, the great bulk of such documents remain in Italy, conserved in the unexploited Archivio Eritrea within the Ministerio degli Affari Esteri in Rome. To my knowledge the regional archive at Addi Qäyyeh is the only remaining colonial source in Eritrea, if we exclude some minor religious archives, and its interest is unquestionable.

As noted, the main sources for colonial Eritrea are in Italy. The documents in the Archivio Eritrea amply testify to the importance of this material. This deals with colonial papers, inquiries, historical and geographical documentation, anthropological materials, and adminstrative papers—altogether, a large amount of material as yet little utilized by scholars. The colonial history of Eritrea remains in many respects a very poor field of study, and recent work has considered only a few documents in this rich collection. However, the Archivio Eritrea is not exhaustive—a complementary source offers a different set of materials amenable to historical study.

Many documents preserved at Addi Qäyyeh have the same importance and share many subjects with those in Rome, while others are unique. Here I would just like to mention briefly some of the latter, and offer general information to intending historians of colonial Eritrea.

Towards the end of 1886 four missionaries set foot on Cameroonian soil in the harbor of Douala. They were representatives of the Switzerland based Basel Mission (BM) who had arrived to take over from the pioneers of Christian mission work in Cameroon, the British Baptists, two years after this part of west-central Africa had been brought under German colonial rule in 1884. Their challenge was founded on the key objectives of consolidating and expanding the web of christian communities which had been established along the Atlantic coast north of the Wouri estuary.

Today, just over 110 years later, traces of the Basel Mission's enterprise are widely spread over the Anglophone South West and North West Provinces of Cameroon. These remnants of the past have been partly reshaped to suit the specific patterns of church activities and administration among their African target groups; partly they have been effaced through the erosive impact of time. But only partly, for numerous episodes and aspects of this chapter on religious and social history are well documented both in substantial collections of records and in several publications.