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Reviewed by:
  • Africa: A Guide to Reference Material
  • Yuusuf S. Caruso
John McIlwaine . Africa: A Guide to Reference Material. 2nd revised and expanded edition. Lochcarron, Scotland: Hans Zell Publishing, 2007. liv + 608 pp. Index. $260. Cloth.

John McIlwaine, currently Professor Emeritus of the Bibliography of Asia and Africa at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College (London), has written many indispensable and award-winning reference works in African studies. Updating his 1993 guide to reference material, the latest of his print publications from Hans Zell Publishing represents an expertise developed "over 35 years of teaching courses related to area studies bibliography" (xiv). This annotated guide covers more than thirty-six hundred sources on the countries of Africa south of the Sahara published since 1938. Included are works in English and other European languages that met the main selection criteria of providing "factual data" and "rapid consultation": handbooks, yearbooks, statistics, directories, historical dictionaries and biographical sources, atlases and gazetteers, checklists, and field guides. The introduction and many of the annotations include citations and short quotations from review articles. For historians in particular, it is worth noting McIlwaine's own recommendation (xxv) to keep the first edition as a companion to the new guide, since the older version contains citations to imprints from before 1938, including those from the nineteenth century, and a thirty-page appendix on British colonial annual reports.

With the second edition comes the inclusion of new print publications, updates to older print titles cited in the first edition, and selected electronic resources available on the Internet and last verified in July/August 2006. There is also an expanded index, divided into author/title and subject sections, which complements the handy table of contents arranged by region, country, and type of reference work. McIlwaine has laudably chosen to include reference works on African climatology, geology, hydrology, zoology, and botany. These additions are particularly welcome at a time of increasing academic interest in African environmental issues. The revised twenty-page introduction and the first part, titled "Africa-in-General," with 789 entries divided into many subsections on "special subjects," will be invaluable for anyone wishing to become familiar with the key reference sources on historical and contemporary Africa as a whole.

Many researchers may still be disappointed if they are expecting to find an all-in-one, up-to-date handbook to Africana reference. As in the first edition, this guide does not include subject bibliographies, indexes, monolingual and interlingual dictionaries, travel guides, laws, treaties, or other text collections, or most general reference sources with global scope. Nonetheless, in the introduction McIlwaine admirably refers the reader to a few other major reference publications that deal with these types of sources (xxxi-xxxii). [End Page 234]

There are three major glaring drawbacks to what is offered in this guide. The first drawback is that McIlwaine has curiously decided to exclude reference works in the human medical sciences. Given the tremendous increase since the early 1990s in research on health and disease in Africa, especially on HIV/AIDS, malaria, women's reproductive health, and other topics in epidemiology, it would have been enormously beneficial to include entries for selected print and electronic statistical publications, such as those from the Demographic and Health Survey (www.measuredhs.com), the WHO Regional Office for Africa (afro.who.int), UNAIDS (www.unaids.org; www.unaids.org), national ministries of health, and major health NGOs for each country.

A second drawback is the conventional omission of North African countries from a reference guide on "Africa." McIlwaine's passing comment in the introduction about the prevailing division of "Middle East and North Africa" and "Sub Saharan Africa" in "many reference sources" (xxx) does not excuse this regrettable decision and only helps perpetuate what is now considered to be an archaic and unsophisticated view of Africa. Perhaps it would have been best to have referred to "Africa south of the Sahara" in the title.

The third drawback is the lack of an electronic version of the guide with frequent updates. Most of the guide's content, composed of annotated entries on print resources, will certainly serve the research community well for many years to come...

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