For many months now, e have been working to enhance resources forAfrican Studies in the JSTOR Archive, and soon you will see more journals relevant to African Studies available in JSTOR.  JSTOR has also recently launched an online survey about African Studies.  The purpose of the survey is to receive and evaluate important feedback from all segments of the African Studies community about our collection development efforts and to learn how we can better serve the global African Studies community in the coming years.

The link to the survey is: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7NGS3HN

Please take a few minutes to fill out this survey and share the link with colleagues who would like to participate in giving feedback to JSTOR.  Thank you in advance for your cooperation and assistance.

Basil Davidson, a notable British journalist, historian of Lusophone Africa, and activist passed away last week.  The UK’s Guardian paper published an extensive obituary.  One of his many accomplishments was to be one of the first Western journalists to accompany the MPLA guerrilla movement in Angola, fighting to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule, as well as his coverage of subsequent liberation movements and civil strife in Eritrea.  From 1969 – 1985 he served as President of the UK’s Anti-Apartheid Movement, publishing a series of articles in the New Statesman exposing the horrors of the apartheid system and causing him to be banned as a “prohibited immigrant” from South Africa.

JSTOR’s Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa collection includes numerous full text examples of Basil’s work such as some important monographs, pamphlets, and articles that he authored.  The JSTOR archival collections also contain a fascinating record of his scholarly publishing as well as critical readings of his own texts and ideas.  A fascinating life that contributed much to our contemporary understanding of Africa, but perhaps even more important, an excellent example of an individual who pursued social justice on the continent and the expansion of human awareness about Africa’s complexities and rich cultures and histories.

JSTOR has a long history of capacity building through education and outreach on the African continent, including previous stops in

• Ibadan (University of Ibadan) and Kano (Bayero University), Nigeria
• Nairobi, Kenya (for both a symposium and a GIS workshop)
• Dakar, Senegal (for eLearning 2009 Conference related workshops at Cheikh Anta Diop University)
• Tunisia and Egypt (training workshops at IHEC and Tunis El-Minar Universities, Cairo and Ain Shams University)
• Accra, Ghana (for eLearning 2008 and training workshop at the University of Ghana, Legon)

To see these materials, please click here.

This collection provides us with a rich glimpse of various monuments, urban, mountainous, and coastal environments, as well as religious monuments (of various faith communities) prior to the destructive civil wars that began in the 1970′s and that continue today. It is by no means hyperbole to mention that some of these sites and places may not exist today, or 40 years from now.

Somalia has a rich and interconnected history with the Indian Ocean and the East African coast – surely one that even predates the arrival of Muslims. JSTOR’s archival collections include a number of fascinating articles relevant to this collection including one by Dr. Mark Horton that explores trade and other connections between medieval East Africa and the Indian Ocean, and another by Dr. Felix Chami that provides an overview of archaeological surveys and expeditions along the East Africa coast.   There are also excellent articles that describe the arts and cultural contributions of Somalia in particular.

For example, this description of Mogadishu from an article in the journal African Arts by Mary Jo Arnoldi precedes an excellent introduction of material culture and art objects from Somalia:

“Mogadishu, now the capital city of Somalia, was one of the first Muslim settlements on the East African coast and its first secure harbor. Though it had been settled long before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, this expansion made it an important commercial center for the trade of cloth, ivory, hides, slaves, spices, cattle and porcelain with merchants from Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Indonesia and China. Ibn Battuta in 1331 writes of Mogadishu as an enormous sized town over which presided the Sultan or Shaikh. Mogadishu was for a while in the sixteenth century under the control of the Portuguese and then fell under the suzerainty of the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1871.”