The Swedish Africa Company (Svenska Afrikakompaniet, SAK) was a chartered trading company which conducted a limited and short-lived trade in the middle of the seventeenth century. Its political and economic significance for Sweden itself was negligible, and in West Africa the Company was one of the smallest and shortest lived of trading companies. At first glance, the SAK appears to be merely a historical curiosity and therefore outside the interest of scientific research. Yet closer examination reveals that the Company was actually quite profitable. An understanding of how t i achieved its success will surely add to our knowledge about European trade in West Africa.

African history was really born on a specific date and its parent was Prof. Phillips, then heading the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), in London. It began when the learned Collins and Asquith commissions advocated the upgrading of schools in four different parts of the continent (Nigeria, Ghana, Sudan and Uganda) to University College status whereupon the Colonial Office looked for a university in Great Britain to guarantee programming and quality and passed that job unto the University of London which in turn promptly passed much of the burden unto SOAS. Although no funds were attached to this Phillips accepted and eventually did get funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to the greater glory of SOAS. Meanwhile however he had visited East Africa and he had been struck there in 1947 by the absence of ‘native histories’ such as one finds so thickly on the ground in his usual playing ground India. He decided to hire an historian of Africa who would both supervise the development of history departments in the new colleges and work to remedy this lack of local history.

In the summer of 1992 the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London hosted a workshop that deserves the interest of the readers of Itinerario. It was a workshop on missionary archives exclusively meant to explore the rich potential of these missionary sources for social science research. The initiative for this two-day study-conference was taken by the historian David Arnold and the archivist Rosemary Seton, both of them associated with SOAS.

In 1961, when the Union of South Africa became a republic, I wrote in ‘Interpretations and Trends in South African Historical Writing’: ‘The Afrikaner had won the constitutional struggle against the Briton but at the very moment that he was about to reap the rewards of his victory in a new Republic, he stood confronted with the challenge of a non-white majority, threatening to deprive him of his gains […] A national myth has already become established - that South Africa is an innocent nation and the victim of attack in an evil world, and that attempts to solve the racial problem by territorial divisions or separate development are “misunderstood”.’