ABSTRACT
In September 1965 I was a young postgraduate student setting off for East Africa to begin fieldwork on Mafia Island off the southern coast of Tanzania. It was not my first visit to this area. In 1962, I had spent a summer vacation in East Africa, travelling from Entebbe in Uganda (where a £60 return charter flight from London deposited me) to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania by a circuitous route, taking in northern Uganda, Nairobi, Mombasa and Zanzibar. My ultimate destination was Kilwa Kisiwani, a small island off the southern coast of Tanzania, which, during medieval times had been an important and wealthy town. Because I was doing a degree in African Studies which consisted mainly of anthropology and Swahili at London University, my tutor had arranged with an archaeologist friend of his, who was conducting a ‘dig’ on Kilwa, that I work there as an assistant, and so improve my Swahili.
