Basler Afrika Bibliographien

Who We Are & What We Do

The Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB) is a centre of documentation and expertise on Namibia and southern Africa, located in Basel, Switzerland. The institution comprises an archive, a specialist library and a publishing house. The BAB are also organising scholarly, cultural and socio-political events.

Its books and documents on Namibia are of international renown, and are known among experts as the most comprehensive documentation outside of Namibia. Among its holdings is a collection of rare books with volumes on Africa going back to the 16th century, a large collection of African posters and extensive historical archives of images, sound recordings, manuscripts and ephemera. Its collections are complemented by scholarly publication activities.

The archive and library may be searched online and consulted on site. Specific research requests are expertly addressed by a team of scholarly staff. Publishing house titles may be ordered online.

The BAB was founded by Carl Schlettwein in 1971, and has been under the auspices of the Carl Schlettwein Foundation since 1994. It is an associate member of the University of Basel’s Centre for African Studies (CASB) and regularly offers courses at the Department of History. The BAB works closely with the Swiss Society for African Studies (SSAS) and the network of European Librarians in African Studies (ELIAS). It maintains strong ties with archives, libraries and research institutes in southern Africa.
For more information, please visit https://baslerafrika.ch/

Cover photo: snippet from the cover of Always Something Else: Urban Asia and Africa as Experiment by AbdouMaliq Simone (Carl Schlettwein Lecture 9, Basler Afrika Bibliographien 2016). Street scene in Kankan, Guinea (photograph taken by Till Förster, 2012).