Much has been written about the East African coast, probably more than about any other part of Eastern Africa if not about Africa as a whole. Why then am I adding to this already long list? What skills, expertise or insights might I hope to add to those of my venerable predecessors like Burton, Coupland, Freeman-Grenville, Gray, Kirkman, and Chittick among others? In short, what does this new work represent considering all that already has been said about the coast?

As a personal contribution, Horn and Crescent represents a major component in a broader continuum of about fifteen years of study, plus ten years of writing about Swahili history. In one sense, then, it might be understood within this context of on-going personal intellectual growth and change. More specifically, as a research project it is the product of several rethinkings and two periods of field research: fifteen months during 1974–5 spent in Kenya and the United Kingdom where field interviews and archival research were conducted, and another ten weeks during 1984 when additional fieldwork was done in Zanzibar.

As a contribution to coastal history, I have no illusions that what I have written is ‘definitive’. Nor does it represent any major breakthroughs from the standpoint of the sources used. Yet new material has been presented based upon my fieldwork (and to a lesser degree that of others), and it is the synthesis of past research along with the presentation of this new material that I feel merits publication in book form.