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Jean-Marie Derscheid As much as their kindness and generosity, [the help of Denise and Jean-Pierre Derscheid] in making available to me the papers of Jean-Pierre’s father, the late Jean-Marie Derscheid, deserves an acknowledgement which no words can properly express. My sense of gratitude to them, therefore, is also a reflection of the posthumous debt I—as well as any other scholar for whom the names Rwanda and Burundi mean anything—owe to Jean-Marie Derscheid, whose wide-ranging intellectual interests and life-time devotion to Africa are amply reflected in the collection of documents he has left to posterity, and on which part of this work is based. At one time Professor of Colonial Law of the Institut des Territoires d’Outre-Mer at Antwerp, Secretary-General of the Parc Albert, co-founder of the Institut International pour la Protection de la Nature, he combined the talents of the administrator, the meticulousness of the scholar, the zest and stamina of the explorer, to which he added, towards the end of his life, the gallantry of a ‘résistant de la première heure’. Until his decapitation by the Gestapo at the Brandenburg prison, on March 13, 1944, he was a leading figure of the Belgian underground—and had been entrusted with, among other things, the elaboration of a secret transmission code based on an adaptation of the Bantu and Sudanese languages (Preface: x). The following three guides to each of the three microfilmed Derscheid Collection reels were transcribed from a set of photocopied typescripts provided by Professor René Lemarchand. The original contains few diacritical marks, and none have been added with this transcription. Some corrections and notes were handwritten on the typescript provided and are incorporated here [within square brackets, like this]. This note is the only addition I have made intentionally to the guide. The UF George A. Smathers Libraries own the master negative microfilm, along with a positive copy. The existence of only four other copies of this film (at Michigan State University, University of North Carolina, Tervuren Museum, and “Africa-Library, Brussels”) have been identified. Professor Lemarchand, with permission from the Derscheid family, had the collection filmed privately in about 1965 from their original manuscripts in Brussels, Belgium. It should be noted that our library’s set is housed on four film reels rather than the three reels indicated herein. —Dan Reboussin, April 2002 A compiled guide to all 3 Derscheid Collection microfilm reels, formatted for printing on 36 pages (standard US letter size, 8.5" x 11"), is available in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format (81k): Derscheid.pdf |
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