The history of African intelligence is a blindspot in general, I would say. Increasingly, historians have been mapping the activities of British and French intelligence services in Africa and Asia during the age of Decolonization, and there is more and more attention for how the US and Soviet bloc used Africa as their chess-board during the Cold War, but there is little attention for the history of African intelligence itself.

The one notable exception is perhaps the BOSS, the South African security service and its military counterpart. As the Apartheid regime has collapsed since the 1990's and South Africa has always attracted the attention of Western journalists and scholars, it is not a surprise then that quite a body of literature has been written on the various aspects of that regime, including its intelligence agencies. It is nevertheless telling that an entire series exists of ''Historical Dictionaries of...'' international intelligence, US intelligence, Russian intelligence, British intelligence, German intelligence, Israeli intelligence, Middle Eastern intelligence - but nothing yet on Africa, nor south-east Asia or South America for that matter.

However, the Cultural Turn is currently infiltrating the realm of Intelligence Studies this has led to the publication of Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere, Eds. Philip H. Davies and Kristian C. Gustafson. Davies is a specialist on British intelligence and has compared it extensively to American ideas and practices of intelligence and has since stressed the importance of culture in understanding intelligence and its differences from place to place. This publication contains articles on the intelligence cultures and histories from countries other than the US and UK, and features a chapter on the intelligence culture of Ghana, but it remains the only article in the book covering an African country.

The Historical Dictionary of Intelligence in similar fashion fails to include any source recommendations for African countries, having only to offer something on Kenya; David Anderson's History of the Hanged. This is however mainly a work about the struggle for independence than a history of post-Colonial intelligence in Kenya. In similar fashion, the much more recent Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies features 11 national case studies from across the globe, just none of them involve an African country. Usually, if non-Western and non-Soviet intelligence cultures are discussed at all, scholars tend to concentrate on a fairly narrow list of regional powers such as Iran, Pakistan, China, Japan, Israel and India.

Of course, archive and record-keeping do constitute a necessary factor to conduct serious research. The problem in many sub-Saharan and South East Asian countries is that archives tend to be incomplete, often due to climate conditions, and that there is still a large number of authoritarian regimes in those regions that make access to such archives difficult. If it wasn't for the brief period of utter chaos and complete geo-strategic confusion that occurred in Moscow in the early 1990's, much of what we know today from the KGB's archives wouldn't be known as the Russian government quickly came back on its post-Cold War transparency and closed them. This is a problem that, as you probably know, intelligence studies outside the Western world face almost everywhere. If democratic governments with established proceedures for declassification already dislike transparency, it can't be much better in the rest of the world where there exists mostly a mixture of hybrid, corrupt, or outright totalitarian regimes.

This is all I could find for you in such a short time, and it is really not much - so I took the liberty to describe the severity of the ''blind spot''. If anyone does have more suggestions, I too look forward to that.