Many of us who served in West Africa, and in particular those with Nigerian
experience, will know the high esteem in which The Nigerian Field was held (and still
is, for the journal continues to this day). Literally, as the journal of the Nigerian Field
Society, its principal focus was on flora and fauna, with a special interest in field
observations; and so it published numerous, valuable articles on, to select topics
almost at random, elephants, snakes and leopards, birds, bats and butterflies, fish,
frogs and flowers, and every kind of West African shrub and tree. At the same time,
and perhaps less obviously. The Nigerian Field provided an important outlet for
interesting, first-hand articles on culture and history - for example, canoes on Lake
Chad and the Imo River, local architecture and proverbs, dance festivals and musical
instruments, and the memoirs of tin-mining pioneers on the Plateau or German
legacies in the Cameroons. There was, too, a good number of authoritative accounts of
historical events.
Over its lifetime, the Field comprised over 20,000 entries by authors such as M. D. W. Jeffreys
and G. I. Jones, A. F. B. Bridges and R. W. J. Keay, and those stalwart "founding
fathers", as it were, K. C. Murray, D. R. Rosevear and E. F. G. Haig.
This is a first-class publication and should do much to make The Nigerian Field
more widely recognised and more accessible as the scholarly source it has long
deserved, but has too modestly not allowed itself, to be.
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