ABSTRACT
My memories of Nehemia go back to 1962, when he came to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London University as a doctoral student after taking two earlier degrees at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was already a competent Arabist, well trained in both the written and the spoken language, and it was a time when most people with these qualifications would have sought a topic for research in the history of the Maghrib; but Nehemia was already clear that he wished to work on the spread of Islam in some part of Africa south of the Sahara, and in due course he settled on the northern province of Ghana and the adjacent parts of Burkina Faso, Togo, and Benin. He spent a full year of field research, interviewing more than a thousand informants chosen from the Muslim clerics of the region. I particularly remember a long talk I had with him during a visit to Ghana in 1964, when he told me that it was his command of Arabic which had aroused the welcome which he had received from these clerics, most of whom knew little Arabic themselves but had a great respect for the language of the Koran. This had made them willing to entrust him with their family genealogies and other traditions, which had enabled him to work out the chronology of Muslim settlement in each ethnic division of his field.
