Pamphlets from the 1960s and 1970s, once dismissed as political ephemera, are reshaping how American historian Jeff Schauer thinks about decolonisation and the making of modern Africa. On his third visit to the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) Library in Uppsala, Schauer is finding material he believes could play an important part in a new book project.

Seated at a table in the NAI Library, Schauer, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, pulls out a small stack of thin, stapled booklets – publications produced by governments, parties and activists in Zambia, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe since 1980) and elsewhere during the turbulent decades after independence.

Schauer first visited Uppsala in 2022, after reading There Used to be Order, a book by NAI researcher Patience Mususa about life on the Zambian Copperbelt after the privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines. Mususa encouraged him to explore the library’s pamphlet holdings, which he returned to consult in 2023, and now has come to study again.

Schauer is an environmental, social and political historian of late colonialism, decolonisation and nation-building in eastern and southern Africa. This relatively late time frame and the angles of his research make NAI’s pamphlet collection interesting material.

At first, Schauer saw the pamphlets as minor sources – helpful for illustrating points in his research. Issues of Zambian youth science magazine Orbit gave him insights into children’s ecological thinking. Tourism brochures shed light on state efforts to reshape safari experiences. Pamphlets on Kenya’s trade policies offered a glimpse of how that country sought to link up with Zambia during the so-called Rhodesia Crisis, a political and military conflict that occurred from 1965 to 1980.

However, his philosophy in archives of any kind has always been to read broadly, deliberately going beyond the files that seem most important, Schauer explains. As he read through the NAI Library’s enormous volume of writing from successive Rhodesian and Zambian governments, as well as global supporters of decolonisation for their respective visions of change, a fascinating narrative about post-independence Zambia emerged.

“During the 1960s and 1970s there was enormous engagement with the process of ‘writing Zambia as Africa’. By this I mean that when commentators in Rhodesia, Zambia, Britain or elsewhere wrote about Zambia it was often with an eye to making a larger intervention about the nature of African culture, society, political economy and potential.”

The public-facing writing represented a real war of words that was not just about whether there was virtue or vice in the way that Zambia challenged settler colonialism in southern Africa, as it simultaneously engaged in nation-building of its own. It was also about what larger story Zambia’s trajectory after independence was seen to be telling about the future of Africa, Schauer says.

“So this is a project that was inspired by these pamphlets from 1960s and 1970s Africa, and is coming to revolve to a pretty significant degree around them – although, of course, they’re not the whole story. I’m hoping this will become a book.”

Schauer first encountered NAI’s collections in digitised form, using interviews from southern African liberation struggles as teaching materials. “They make excellent primary sources for students who are thinking through how and why global publics and institutions became invested in the struggles for freedom”, he says.

Schauer continues: “I will have 40 undergraduates this semester – studying everything from computer science to hospitality – who are reading them. Students have said these sources changed their perspective on how to be engaged with and impactful in the world.”

Schauer says he also loves the way the pamphlets offer students an accessible way into big historical questions. A few documents stand out – a pamphlet created by students in defence of their protests at the University of Nairobi; first president of Zambia Kenneth Kaunda’s “humanist handbook”, which is a kind of political version of the lifestyle genre; and a voter guide by pro-independence party the Tanganyika African National Union, with a Kiswahili history of democracy in Tanzania.

“Not every archival box contains fireworks,” Schauer admits, “but overall, the pamphlet collection has opened up whole new possibilities for me.”

Schauer is quick to credit the librarians for making the experience so smooth. “Accessible, functional libraries are made by great librarians,” he says. “Even as a short-term visitor, I’ve had excellent support – whether it’s help navigating the collections or being pointed toward new arrivals.”

With US funding for humanities research under increasing strain, Schauer says the NAI Library’s resources have become even more important. “It’s rare to find a collection that is at once eclectic and thematically coherent. For me, it’s been immensely valuable.”

TEXT: Mattias Sköld

NOTE: Rhodesia, when mentioned in this article, refers to the self-declared independent country without international recognition, that became the Republic of Zimbabwe in 1980.

NAI Library supports African studies far beyond the Nordic Africa Institute

With a unique collection and a broad mandate dating back to 1962, the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) Library serves scholars across the world. “Our raison d’être is actually to strengthen research on Africa generally, not only at the Institute but throughout different academic constituencies,” says Åsa Lund Moberg, head of the NAI Library.

The library’s social science collection is built with the Nordic academic community in mind, but the library actively welcomes scholars from other parts of the world. It is also open to the public. The digital collections are partly accessible from anywhere and visiting scholars can also take part in a library visitors’ programme. “We know that for some Africa-focused researchers, the NAI Library collection’s unique resources can contribute with a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle or inspire new research,” says Lund Moberg.

One example is the pamphlet collection, which consists of print ephemera, minor publications and grey literature. These materials have arrived at the institute through donations, acquisitions and exchanges with other institutions. Because such materials were often produced in small numbers, they are rare and are sometimes overlooked in traditional library systems.

“This type of less-disseminated material often provides perspectives that are new or additional to more mainstream literature. It is a type of material that is difficult to handle and integrate in library collections, and is therefore often lost at libraries over time,” Lund Moberg says.

She notes that visiting researchers often help librarians discover new dimensions of the collections. “The tourist brochures that [visiting US scholar Dr Jeff] Schauer mentions – we had not thought about them as a base for academic work, but rather as background material. His reflections highlight not only how researchers can interpret and use ephemera in different ways, but also the importance for special libraries to secure collections that can add perspective beside mainstream literature,” Lund Moberg says.

Another important resource is the web archive on liberation struggles in southern Africa and related solidarity movements in the Nordic countries, which contains more than 130 interviews with participants. Lund Moberg says she was excited to learn about how the archival material resonates with Dr Schauer’s students: “It shows that even though the liberation struggles took place a long time ago, they can still be a source of inspiration today.”

TEXT: Mattias Sköld