A 1929 image of Melville Herskovits and the objects he collected from Suriname. Courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Collection.
View the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Collection >
Melville Herkovits and the Library of African Studies
Most serious scholars of Africa are familiar with the name Melville J. Herskovits and Northwestern's Library of African Studies, which is named after him.
Known by anthropologists and students of Africa as one of the first scholars to study and recognize the importance of the African heritage of black people in the New World, Herskovits was a member of Northwestern's faculty from 1927 until his death in 1963.
In 1928, he founded the University's anthropology department and, two decades later, founded what is now the University's internationally renowned Program of African Studies (PAS). He also provided much of the stimulus for the African library collection that officially opened in 1954 within Deering Library.
A Vision for Northwestern's African Library
From the time he arrived at Northwestern, Herskovits made a point of developing close relationships with University librarians and encouraged them to buy books on African history and ethnography. He dealt frequently with rare book collectors in search of volumes on slavery, African American history, and other topics.
Upon the death of Franz Boaz, the founder of the discipline of anthropology and Herskovits's mentor at Columbia University, the Northwestern professor facilitated Northwestern's purchse of Boaz's intellectually rich, private library.
For Herskovits, the establishment of the Program of African Studies was incomplete without the establishment of a library of Africana. In 1948, librarians at Deering began identifying all African-related books and printed materials and creating a special library for them.
In his five-year report on the Program of African Studies, Herskovits proudly noted that holdings in Africana numbered over 8,000 volumes and that the library "subscribed to over 125 publications dealing with Africa and not including a small but representative sample of newspapers."
The Herskovits Library of African Studies Today
Herskovits would be astounded to see the library now, housed on the fifth floor of University Library. It contains 245,000 bound volumes and subscribes to 2,500 periodicals and journals. Its rare book collection includes more than 3,500 titles, including early accounts of European explorations of the African continent.
In addition to videos, movies, and television programs made in or about Africa, the library boasts an extensive collection of ephemera, maps and posters, electronic resources for the study of Africa and 12,500 books in 300 different African languages.
It is not so much a collection as the completeness of its collecting that is so astounding, says David Easterbrook, Curator of the Library since 1991.
To illustrate how complete the library's collection is, Easterbrook related a story about a Northwestern visit by Nigerian author Wole Soyinka some years ago.
The Nobel Prize-winning writer was giving an informal lecture on campus before giving a gala reading at the Art Institute that night. At Northwestern, he mentioned, as an aside, that he'd forgotten one of the books he was planning to read from later that day.
"It was one of his earliest publications, a book only published in Nigeria and out of print even there," recalled Easterbrook. The curator trotted to the Herskovits Library, quickly found the book in question, and gave it to Soyinka at the conclusion of his campus talk.
"He was absolutely amazed that we had a copy," added Easterbrook.