Primary Sources - History

Comprehensive list of sources compiled by Yale University.

Links of texts documenting the history of Africa from Fordham University.

This site “presents more than 8,000 pages of original essays, primary documents…as well as secondary sources and original maps.”

Collections from the University of Florida.

For more than six hundred years, Timbuktu (Mali) was a significant religious, cultural, and commercial center, was famous for educating important scholars who were well known throughout the Islamic world. These ancient manuscripts cover every aspect of human endeavor and are indicative of the high level of civilization attained by West Africans during the Middle Ages They provide irrefutable proof of a powerful African literary tradition.

On this site you will find videos relating to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi enriched with synchronized transcripts, searchable index terms, and maps. Videos include testimonies of Genocide survivors and perpetrators, Gacaca Justice System court proceedings, and remembrance ceremonies.

Collection of digitized documents from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Images and transcriptions of David Livingstone’s diary of his five months in Central Africa with the Nyangwe.

The archive preserves and makes accessible a set of linguistic field notes recorded by Eleanor Vandevort, who was a missionary in the South Sudan between 1949 and 1963.

YouTube video presented by Jenny Orme, Diverse Histories Specialist at The National Archives, from a broader photographic collection of Foreign and Commonwealth Office images, held at The National Archives, UK.

Assembled by the British collector Humphrey Winterton over about 30 years, the collection depicts the breadth of African experience; documents African life; European life in Africa in all its manifestations; and the African landscape, in particular as it changed over time. Included are photographs showing the building of East Africa’s railways, the growth of its urban centers and the development of European colonial administration. The photographs extensively document rural life as well as the travels and work of European colonial officials and private businessmen.