Library Guides: International Studies: Africa

Introduction

The sources below provide broad, top-level coverage of African affairs. However, there are many country-specific resources freely available online. Most countries will have national archives with some digital collections, and they will almost all have online news organizations, government websites, and much more.

Data and Statistics

African Development Bank Data Portal
Economic data on many African countries.
UN Economic Commission for Africa StatBase
An internet based platform for compilation and dissemination of data on various socio-economic indicators on African countries.
DataFirst
DataFirst is a research data service dedicated to making South African and other African survey and administrative microdata available to researchers and policy analysts.
Afrobarometer
An African-led series of national public attitude surveys on democracy and governance in Africa
African Population & Health Research Center, Inc.
APHRC is a leading pan-African research institution headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, that conducts high quality policy-relevant research on population, health, education, urbanization and related development issues across Africa.

The Slave Trade

Voyages : the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Includes four databases which contain records of nearly 35,000 separate slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866. Voyages database: search for information on specific voyages or sets of voyages; Estimates database: use the interactive estimates page to analyze the full volume and multiple routes of the slave trade; Images database: a collection of scanned documents, maps, and illustrations; African Names database: identifies over 67,000 Africans aboard slave ships, using name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation.
Slavery and Manumission Manuscripts of Timbuktu
Documents regarding slaving through Timbuktu.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
Digitized collections of images relating to the African slave trade and slave life in America.

Primary Sources

African Online Digital Library
The African Online Digital Library (AODL) is a portal to multimedia collections about Africa. MATRIX, working in cooperation with the African Studies Center at Michigan State University, is partnering with universities and cultural heritage organizations in Africa to build this resource.
Aluka
Collections of primary sources housed within JSTOR.
Africa Focus: Image and Sound Collection
This online collection is maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. It contains digitized images and sounds of Africa contributed over the years to the African Studies Program of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
African Activist Archive
U.S. archives of history of U.S. activism and support for African independence from colonialism: 1950-1990s.
South African History Online
Cultural, political, economic online resources.

Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966 This link opens in a new window
The documents in Confidential Print: Africa begin with coastal trading in the early nineteenth century and the Conference of Berlin of 1884 and the subsequent Scramble for Africa.
Apartheid South Africa, 1948-1980 This link opens in a new window
Apartheid South Africa makes available British government files from the Foreign, Colonial, Dominion and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices spanning the period 1948 to 1980.
Frontier Life: Borderland and Colonial Encounters This link opens in a new window
This digital collection of primary source documents helps us to understand existence on the edges of the anglophone world from 1650-1920. Discover the various European and colonial frontier regions of North America, Africa and Australasia through documents that reveal the lives of settlers and indigenous peoples in these areas.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
The content in the Nineteenth Century Collections Online is sourced from the world's preeminent libraries and archives and includes monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages. The library has access to eight collections:

Asia and the West
British Politics and Society
British Theatre, Music, and Literature
Europe and Africa, Colonialisms and Cultures
Children's Literature and Childhood
Religion, Reform, and Society
European Literature, the Corvey Collection, 1790-1840
Women: Transnational Networks
Border and Migration Studies Online This link opens in a new window
Border and Migration Studies Online is a collection that explores and provides historical background on more than thirty key worldwide border areas, including: U.S. and Mexico; the European Union; Afghanistan; Israel; Turkey; The Congo; Argentina; China; Thailand; and others.

Secondary Sources

Africa Portal Library
A digital library of over 3000 books, journals, and documents related to African policy issues; a directory of experts; plus, current news analysis and opinion articles.
(Centre for International Governance Innovation, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda; South African Institute of International Affairs, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Connecting-Africa
Connecting-Africa is a gateway to African research information and materials produced worldwide. It provides access to 61471 publications from 93 repositories as well as information on 1354 Africa experts (researchers, policymakers, development practioners) and on 890 organisations (research or development-related institutes with expertise on Africa).
Africa South of the Sahara
Compilation of secondary and primary sources about Sub-Saharan Africa, curated by Karen Fung at Stanford
Internet Library: Sub-Saharan Africa
The internet library sub-Saharan Africa (ilissAfrica) is a portal that offers an integrated access to relevant scientific conventional and digital information resources on the sub-Saharan Africa region. Information scattered on private or institutional websites, databases or library catalogs are brought together in order to facilitate research.
Institute for Security Studies
Think tank that analyzes current events in Africa.
Centre for Policy Studies
Originally founded in 1987 at the University of the Witwatersrand, the CPS became an independent research institution in 1996. Research reports, policy briefs, policy--issues & actors, and the newsletter "Synopsis" are available in downloadable PDF format from this African policy think tank's web site.

Index Islamicus This link opens in a new window
International classified bibliography of publications in European languages on all aspects of Islam and the Muslim world.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Includes journal content, primary sources, images, and more across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
Beginning August 1, 2024 Artstor's content is now accessed on JSTOR.

Search Guides

International Studies

Introduction

Data and Statistics

The Slave Trade

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources