It has been my good fortune to take part in half a dozen conferences focussed on African Studies - half of them international, half of them essentially yet in no way exclusively domestic - during the past twelve months. No less than three of these involved an anniversary input, not necessarily in the celebratory sense so much as in the straightforward chronological one. Having gained so much from this apparent ‘Have Paper, Will Travel’ commuter's circumjetification, I could hardly reject the Editor's invitition to contribute a personal account of the African Studies Conference landmarks of 1984/85 as viewed by merely one British participant.