Research Guides: Sub-Saharan African History: Online Primary Sources

Digital Collections and Databases

African Online Digital Library
AODL is an open access digital library of African cultural heritage materials created by Michigan State University in collaboration with museums, archives, scholars, and communities around the world.

JSTOR Struggles for Freedom, South Africa
Covers: 1950s-. Offers a primary source collection on the complex and varied liberation struggles in Southern Africa, with an emphasis on Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The contents of the collection document colonial rule, dispersion of exiles, international intervention, and the worldwide networks that supported successive generations of resistance within the region. Included are periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial government commissions, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, out-of-print and other relevant books, oral histories, and speeches.
Black Women Writers
Covers: 19th century-. Offers fiction, poetry, and essays written by women from Africa and the African Diaspora. As with other Alexander Street databases, users may search by criteria such as keyword in text, author, title, time period, ethnicity of author, and more.
Black Short Fiction and Folklore
Covers: 1870-. Offers stories, folk tales, and other short works from Africa and the African Diaspora. Also offers complete runs of selected literary magazines, such as Kyk-Over-Al and The Beacon.
Black Thought and Culture
Covers: 1850s-. Offers non-fiction published works of leading African Americans, including interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and periodicals such as The Black Panther.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
Covers: 1500-1900. An archive of books, pamphlets, court records, and manuscript materials consisting of debates on slavery and abolition. Includes records from the American Colonization Society, from Oberlin's Anti-Slavery collection, from the American Missionary Society (Tulane), and records from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, Yale, Oxford, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and other archives.
Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade
Explore or reconstruct the lives of individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in the historical trade. Browse or search by person, place event, or primary source.

Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora
The images in Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. Our growing collection currently has over 1,200 images. This website is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World. To explore locations of images using the map above, please click the colored dots.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Documents more than 36,000 voyages, searchable by ship or captain name, point of origin, and destination. Also includes an African names database and a set of numberical estimates for slave trafficking in different eras.
AfricaMap
A repository of geographic data on Africa, historical and contemporary, using WorldMap open software.