>> Talia Lieber: My
name is Talia Lieber,
and I am from Rockville,
Maryland.
I am a graduate student at
the University of California,
Los Angeles in the department
of Art History studying
African art.
This summer I worked
in the African
and Middle Eastern
Division working
with the African poster
collection under the supervision
of my project mentor
Laverne Page.
Under charge of the African
section of the African
and Middle Eastern Division
is reference, bibliographic,
and collection development
for 51 countries
in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The African poster collection
is made up of 684 posters
from the African continent.
My project was to organize
and document a selection
of these posters as we
locate them in storage
and to facilitate their
initial digitization, metadata
and proper housing so that they
may be accessible to scholars,
researchers, and the
public in our reading room.
The posters in the collection
range in subject matter,
with images and messages related
to African politics, boycotts,
elections, public health
campaigns, education,
sporting events, calendars,
demographics, and more.
For example, the poster at
the bottom left was sponsored
by the Workers' Party
of Ethiopia and is one
of several publications in the
library's collection produced
by the party's Propaganda
and Culture Committee
to mark the 10th anniversary of
Ethiopia's revolution in 1974.
Printed as a part
of the announcement
of the National Sports Festival,
the chromolithograph
depicts three runners
in the foreground sprinting
on a track before a
crowd of spectators.
The Amharic script
refers to the year 1976
in the Ethiopian calendar.
In addition, the African section
features a growing informational
collection of posters.
The poster in the upper
left is from Botswana.
Although it is in the African
section poster collection,
the poster is housed in the
Prints and Photographs Division.
Here we see examples of four
postage stamps depicting
children playing with
traditional toys of Botswana,
including carved forms
in the shape of cattle.
This color screen print,
second from the bottom left,
is from Monrovia, Liberia,
now held in the Prints
and Photographs Division, and
it features the national flag
of Liberia, which was founded by
a group of free people of color
and formerly enslaved
people primarily
from the United States.
The flag is identifiable
by the single star
and resembles the U.S.
flag in its design.
Finally, the two posters in the
bottom right contain no imagery,
only words signifying
anti-apartheid sentiments
of activists and sympathizers.
The black-and-white poster in
the lower right was printed
as part of a solidarity campaign
supporting the liberation
of South Africa and Namibia.
The poster to next to it, to the
very left, was featured as part
of an exhibition curated by
Library of Congress staff
at the White House on April 2nd,
1999 during the Millennium
Lecture series,
hosted by President Bill Clinton
and First Lady Hillary Clinton,
the night when Elie Wiesel,
a Holocaust survivor,
Nobel Laureate and the author
of "Night," gave the speech
"The Perils of Indifference."
The poster serves
also as a decal
in that it contains an
adhesive on its reverse side
so that it can be stuck
onto a wall or vehicle.
The poster appears
as a warning sign,
cautioning approaching viewers
of South African
goods contaminated
with the violence of apartheid.
These images exemplify the
kinds of materials held
in the African section
poster collection.
Through this project as part
of the Junior Fellows Program,
it is our hope to contribute
to organize and examine
and continue to write
about these posters
to create more opportunities
for scholarship
about the African continent
and the African diaspora.
I am eager to support this
project at the Library
of Congress that enables
scholars from around the globe
to access these important
materials for their research
and for members of the public
to see firsthand the kinds
of stories and images
embedded within them.