In our continuing collaboration with the British Institute in Eastern Africa, we are pleased to release a collection consisting of over 1800 archival images, slides, notebooks, and documents collected by the late Neville Chittick during his field work and visits to Somalia in the early 1960’s.  These collections provide valuable and useful visual imagery with which scholars can conduct further research and investigation, as well as useful digital content to introduce these cultural landscapes and historic geographies to students and researchers who may never have an opportunity to visit Somalia.

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.”

In April 2010, Dr. Siro Masinde and Rahim Rajan visited Bayero University of Kano in northern Nigeria and to the University of Ibadan to provide two half day training workshops to faculty and librarians from the University, as well as dozens of faculty and librarians from neighboring institutions across northern Nigeria - including those from Zaria, Kaduna, Katsina, Maiduguri, and Sokoto. In total, over 100 faculty and librarians attended the two sessions. This training was generously funded by a grant to JSTOR from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Access to all JSTOR collections is freely available to all non-commercial institutions in Africa (this includes NGO’s, government organizations, museums, secondary schools, etc.) as part of JSTOR’s Africa Access Initiative.  We have recently loaded some photos from the recent workshops.  Safe and reliable supply of electricity and the exorbitant price of bandwidth were two leading obstacles, we were particularly heartened by the drive and ingenuity of the librarians and scholars to figure out ways to still make use of these powerful online educational resources.  They are making full use of whatever information they can access today and using that knowledge to create innovative solutions to solve these issues.

This weekend, scholars, archivists, librarians, and researchers from liberal arts colleges across the country will meet at Denison University, Ohio to promote the importance of the study of Africa in the United States.  Denison University has particular significance for the history of the founding of JSTOR (as some may already know).  Rahim Rajan is participating in an engaging session on Saturday afternoon on building courses on Africa in the Social Sciences and Sciences.  If you are planning on attending, please introduce yourself to Rahim.  Here is a link to the Africa Network website as well as this weekend’s program.  Hope to see you there!

Last week, Dr. Siro Masinde and Rahim Rajan conducted a series of training workshops to librarians, researchers, and graduate students from a range of academic and research institutions in  South Western Nigeria.  The workshop was held at the University of Ibadan - one of Nigeria’s oldest and most prestigious universities and centers of learning and research. The workshops were organized under the leadership and supervision of  Dr. Benedict Oladele, Chief Librarian of the University’s Kenneth Dike Library.  The workshops covered various fundamentals in the use of e-resources, while also providing these individuals with a deeper understanding of ITHAKA’s mission and range of activities.  These workshops were generously funded by a grant to JSTOR from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  The MacArthur Foundation has a number of philanthropic projects in Nigeria - more information about those initiatives is available here.