Participants in the International Conference on Manding Studies, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in summer 1972, were contacted to share memories of the event in recognition of its fiftieth anniversary and while such recollections could still be gathered. An event in honour of fifty years of kora music at SOAS was also documented, bringing the project into the present. The result was a lengthy special feature in MANSA Kibaru, the newsletter of the Mande Studies Association (MANSA), in early 2023. Given the strong positive response from the MANSA community, which has historically looked back to the 1972 conference as a predecessor, it was decided to revise the newsletter’s special feature as a separate publication. This is an account of the process of bringing the commemoration together, the key contributors, and the timing and connections that shaped the outcome. It provides details that do not appear in the published commemoration. Some questions at the beginning of the project were cleared up by the evidence and accounts gathered. The Manding Conference’s ‘filiation’ or influence is touched upon, including the founding of MANSA. The selective and incomplete nature of this ‘memory making’ initiative is acknowledged.

With which sources can we write environmental histories of mining and oil drilling in Africa? Paradoxically, the pollution and environmental disruption caused by extractive industries are at once omnipresent and difficult to trace. In documentary evidence, multinational companies are hesitant to disclose the full extent of their polluting activities. In order to understand how people living around sites of extraction make sense of polluted rivers or suffocating smoke, we argue that archives need to be pluralized. State and company archives can fruitfully be paired with newspaper collections, oral history interviews, cultural production (songs, poems and literary works) and photography. Using examples from Johannesburg, Mazowe, the Central African Copperbelt and the Niger Delta, we map sources and methodologies that might be employed to grasp people’s lived experiences of environmental change in localities of resource extraction.

At the University of Cape Town Libraries, the vast and valuable Special Collections Africana, rare books, government publications, manuscript and audio-visual archives were housed in the historic Jagger Library until 18 April 2021, when the building was razed by a runaway wildfire. With the reading room and galleries gutted by flames, and the basements flooded, the losses to the collection were extensive, representing a tragic and irreparable loss to South African research and historiography. While salvage and recovery efforts are ongoing, this article outlines what was lost by fire. It provides a snapshot of what was in the reading room at the time of the fire, and details the losses as far as possible – these include the prized published collections housed in the reading room and galleries, as well as the miscellany of archival materials situated on the tables and reserve shelving in the building at the time of the fire.

This note uncovers the role of John Langalibalele Dube in the making of Siliva the Zulu. Dube worked as an interpreter with Attilio Gatti and Harry Lugg of the Natal Native Affairs Department. The film’s idealized version of Zulu traditional life well served their interests on the local political scene.