Research Guides: African History: Primary Sources

African History
- Secondary Sources
- Primary Sources

Primary Sources in African History

These databases and web pages will help you to locate primary source materials for your original research in African history.

Africa South of the Sahara: Selected Internet Resources
Africa South of the Sahara: Selected Internet Resources is an annotated directory of online resources about Africa maintained by the Stanford University Libraries.

African Newspapers, Series 1 This link opens in a new window
Provides access to almost 70 newspapers published between 1800 and 1922 in Sub-Saharan Africa. Content features English- and foreign-language titles from countries including Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
AllAfrica This link opens in a new window
Contains articles from 100 news publications throughout Africa and other news sources both inside and outside Africa.
ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
Database of archival collection descriptions, including historical documents, personal papers, and family histories around the world

British Documents on the End of Empire at the Public Record Office (BDEEP)
Search results for digitized versions of the guides to the British National Archives collections on the end of the British Empire, hosted by the University of London.
Digitale Sammlung Deutscher Kolonialismus
Digitized documents on Germany's colonial empire hosted by the University of Bremen. Website and documents in German.

Empire Online This link opens in a new window
Spanning five centuries, and charting the rise and fall of empires around the world, Empire Online enables students and researchers to explore colonial history, politics, culture and society. With primary source material from American, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, German and British perspectives, Empire Online provides varying points-of-view for comparative research. Documents from Africa, India and North America are also featured.
HathiTrust digital library This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Current UO students, faculty and staff should log into HathiTrust as the "University of Oregon". Additional functions, such as the ability to download the whole book are available only to users of member libraries. Using HathiTrust.
International Historical Statistics This link opens in a new window
Collection of statistical data from around the world, covering a wide range of socio-economic topics.
The collection includes data on the Americas and Europe, but also hard-to-find data on Africa, Asia and Oceania.

KovsieScholar
KovsieScholar is a digital service of the University of the Free State (South Africa) that collects, preserves, and distributes open access digital material, including digitized historical primary sources.
Directory of Open Access Repositories
OpenDOAR is the quality-assured global directory of academic open access repositories. It enables the identification, browsing and search for repositories, based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.
ResearchSpace (University of KwaZulu-Natal)
ResearchSpace is the institutional repository of the University of KwaZulu-Natal which was developed to increase the visibility, availability and impact of its research output. It was also created to disseminate and manage digital materials created by researchers of the institution, including some digitized primary source collections from the UKZN Library.
Slave Voyages
This website provides access to data about the transatlantic and inter-American slave trades culled from archives throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Sources on German Colonial History online
Frankfurt University Library digitized some of the books and journals originally collected by the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft). The journals Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, Amtlicher Anzeiger für Deutsch-Ostafrika, Amtsblatt für das Schutzgebiet Deutsch-Südwestafrika, Amtsblatt für das Schutzgebiet Kamerun, Amtsblatt für das Schutzgebiet Togo and several books including even a colonial cook-book are available online.
UCT Libraries Digital Collections
UCT Libraries Digital Collections represent a selection of material available through University of Cape Town’s archival holdings, primarily held in UCT Libraries Special Collections, but also gathered through academic field recordings, primary data collation and UCT departmental collections.
UnisaIR (Unisa Institutional Repository)
The Unisa Institutional Repository (UnisaIR) is an open digital archive of scholarly intellectual and research outputs of the University of South Africa. The UnisaIR contains and preserves theses and dissertations, research articles, conference papers, rare and special materials and many other digital assets.
University of Pretoria Institutional Repository
An open access electronic archive collecting, preserving and distributing digital materials created, owned and hosted by the University of Pretoria, including many collections of digitized primary source materials.
WIReDSpace
Wits Institutional Repository on DSpace is the institutional repository of the University of the Witwatersrand, including many digitized primary source materials in open access.
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.

HistoryMakers This link opens in a new window
World Heritage Sites: Africa This link opens in a new window
World Heritage Sites: Africa links visual, contextual, and spatial
documentation of African heritage sites. The collection includes more
than
50,000 photographs, 3D models, GIS data, site plans, aerial and satellite photography, images of rock art, excavation reports, manuscripts, traveler's accounts, historical and antiquarian maps, books, articles, and other scholarly research.

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