A valuable manuscript collection relating to the study of Ghana has been donated to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University by Professor Emeritus Ivor Wilks, who was Northwestern's Melville J. Herskovits Professor of African Studies from 1984 until his retirement in 1993.
The core of the collection is some 12,000 cards that form the primary database of the Asante Collective Biography Project (ACBP). These cards document items of biographical information drawn from a wide range of published, archival and oral sources. They included material in English translation from Akan, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, and Hausa texts. The purpose of the Asante Collective Biography Project is, first, to provide a readily accessible source of information for the student of the Asante past, and, second, to lay the foundation for a future Dictionary of Ghanaian National Biography. Provisional steps towards this latter objective are found in the ACBP's journals Asante Seminar (1975-1976) and Asantesem (1977-1979).
The Asante Collective Biography Project was launched by Ivor Wilks in 1972 in collaboration with Dr. Thomas McCaskie, at the time a Northwestern history graduate student now on the history faculty at the University of Birmingham. Major funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities between 1976 and 1979. Many graduate students in Northwestern's History Department worked on the project, both contributing data to it, and using data in it in their research. A number of them now hold senior academic posts in universities and continue to publish on the history of Ghana.
Professor Wilks joined the Northwestern History Department in 1966. He had previously held positions as Research Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Simon Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Manchester, Assistant Director of Research in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and Senior Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the author of many books and articles including Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge Press, 1975) which won the African Studies Association's Herskovits Award in 1976.
The Asante Collective Biography Project Archives are available for use by all qualified researchers in the Herskovits Library.