LINKS: RESEARCH & ANALYSIS
The British Institute in Eastern Africa in Kileleshwa, Nairobi promotes research in the humanities and social sciences in the East Africa region; it has one of the nicest libraries in Kenya, and the Annual Lectures at the British Academy in London by the Director of BIEA are worth being invited to.
The premier body in London for analysis about Africa is the Royal African Society. Its online publication African Arguments is a rich source of information and argument. The RAS also publishes the academic journal African Affairs.
The African Studies Centre at Oxford is a focal point for inter-disciplinary research on Africa at Oxford and holds regular seminars and workshops, primarily for its graduate students and researchers.
There is no satisfactory online Kenya bibliography, but there is an extensive bibliography of publications in the humanities for the Kenya coast that has about 15000 titles from the middle of the nineteenth century to the year 2000. There is also a useful online bibliography on the South Asian diaspora and East Africa that was last updated in 2002.
The Kenya Indexing Project provides a search index of newspaper articles in 4 Kenyan English language newspapers between 1986 and 2000; copies of the actual articles can then ordered from their website.
Published in 1991 but immensely valuable to researchers is the self-explanatory Guide to Archives and Manuscripts Relating to Kenya and East Africa in the United Kingdom by Ann Thurston, who once worked at the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi. A review of this publication by historian Professor David Anderson gives an idea of the scope and value of this work.
The Kenya National Archives is one of the most highly regarded public archives in Africa, particularly for its records from the colonial era. Many colonial era records were copied for a major project undertaken with Syracuse University in the mid-1960’s and the copies migrated to Syracuse in 1966 and 1967; details of their holdings are available online here and here.
There is also the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA Kenya) and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) that publishes an annual Economic Survey.
One of the leading private universities in the country is the Business School at Strathmore University that also has short term programs targeted at executives, and business specialists.