ABSTRACT
For all but two months after returning from Lake Tanganyika we remained in Kampala, staying with Julie Larter in her long wooden bungalow at the back of Makerere Hill, which looked across a little valley filled with elephant grass to the great thatched cone of the mausoleum of Kabaka Mutesa's three most recent ancestors. As I see from our surviving letters, it was an immensely busy period. The negatives of all the documents we had photographed had to be developed in the stifling conditions of the darkroom lent us by the department of physics. We had the spools of recorded recitations in six different languages and hoped to find competent transcribers and translators among the students of the university. I knew by this time that these were likely to be of no more than marginal value as historical sources, but I understood that my linguistic colleagues in London would be interested in securing examples of oral literature, and this they most surely were. My search for the right helpers in this task brought us into contact with a number of highly intelligent African students, some of whom came and worked regularly with me in the house and stayed to talk freely about their aims and aspirations. The Uganda Society, which published a useful journal, invited me to take part in its programme of public lectures. And above all we now addressed ourselves in earnest to the secretariat archives in Entebbe.
