Guides: History: History of Africa

Resources for the History of Africa

Books on the History of Africa will be located on the 6th Floor of the University Library:

History of Egypt (Including Ancient Egypt): DT43-154 (6th Floor)
History of North Africa: DT160-330 (6th Floor)
History of Central Africa: DT 348-363.3 (6th Floor)
History of East Africa: DT365-469 (6th Floor)
History of West Africa: DT470-671 (6th Floor)
History of Southern Africa: DT1001-3415 (6th Floor)
- South Africa: DT 1701-2405 (6th Floor)

Ebook Central
ProQuest Ebook Central (formerly ebrary and EBL) is a multidisciplinary collection of ebooks from numerous academic publishers. Visit the help page. NOTE: Titles can be dropped by the publisher without prior notice.
EBSCO eBooks
This collection includes over 8,000 ebooks covering a range of academic topics. Watch a how-to video.
Gale Ebooks
The GVRL collection includes encyclopedias and other reference works supporting a wide range of academic disciplines.
Humanities Ebook (ACLS)
The Humanities Ebook collection includes nearly 4000 ebooks. Subject focus is the humanities disciplines and area studies.

Journal of African History

Global Newsstream (US & International Newspapers)
Full text access to hundreds of U.S. and international newspapers, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, and Wall Street Journal.
Times (London) Digital Archive (1785-2014)
Complete digital edition of The Times (London) newspaper. Use keyword searching and hit-term highlighting to retrieve full facsimile images of a specific article or a complete page. To search full-text, change drop-down box from keyword to "text." The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. Funded by the History Department.
New York Times Historical (1851-2020)
The New York Times (1851-2020) offers full page and article images with searchable full text.

African Digital Online Library
This website contains links to a wide range of African oral histories, from different parts of the continent.
16th to 20th Century Maps of Africa
This is a digitized collection of 113 maps from the 16th through early 20th centuries of Africa.
Rwandan Genocide Archive
This archive contains over 8,000 photographs, videos and documents (from newspapers to declassified files to materials from the International Tribunal Court for Rwanda) related to the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi.
South African Historical Papers Online
This is an extensive set of digitized collections (from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg) of documents about South African history, ranging from the 18th century to the 20th century.
Winterton Collection of East African Photographs 1860-1960
This collection (through Northwestern University) Includes over 1,700 photographs showing life in East Africa from 1860-1960.
South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission
This site offers full-text access to records of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee (and is a joint effort between the Historical Papers Archive of Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg and the South African History Archives Project). It contains great primary material about human rights abuses and apartheid in South Africa from 1960 to 1994.
Digital Innovation South Africa
This is a digital archive of materials related to South African history, particularly the struggle against apartheid.
African Studies Collection
This collection (UW-Madison) is mostly useful for the digitized versions of 16th and 17th-century Portuguese travelers to Africa.
Livingston Online
This digital archive (partially maintained by UCLA) contains PDFs and other images of the famous 19th-century Scottish missionary David Livingstone’s letters and other writings.
African Times
The African Times was a newspaper published by English-speaking elites in Cape Coast (now Ghana) in the 1860s and 1870, during the period when that region became more closely integrated into the British Empire. This collection is hosted by San Francisco State University.
Basel Mission Archives
This is the digital portal for the archives of the Basel Mission, an inter-denominational Protestant missionary society (originally founded in 1815) that trained missionaries and established centers of its own in Africa and Asia. The digitized collections mostly included images and maps.
Liberian Letters Collection
This small collection includes letters from formers slaves who settled in Liberia in the mid-nineteenth century.
Onitsha Market Literature
This site consists of stories, plays, advice and moral discourses published primarily in the 1960s by local presses in the lively market town of Onitsha, an important commercial site in the Igbo-speaking region of southeastern Nigeria.
Emory University Slave Voyages
The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world.
African Activist Archive Project
The African Activist Archive (also listed above under American history), maintained by Michigan State University) is preserving and making available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s.
African History Sourcebook
A subset of texts derived from the three major online Sourcebooks from Fordham University's History Sourcebook project: Internet Ancient History, Internet Medieval History, and Internet Modern History. along with added texts and related web resources. On this site historical sources on the history of human societies in the continent of Africa are presented, when available, without making prejudgements about what is "African".
Zamani Project
The site features Geographic Information Systems and 3D models of archeological sites in places such as Ghana, Mali, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa. Other interesting features include panorama tours, laser scans, and the possibility for exploration of a virtual world. A project of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Acknowledgement

This page includes resources from the "African History Primary Sources" guide by Texas Tech University