In June of this year, the Royal Geographical Society will be sending a team led by John Walford, head of modern records at the Public Record Office, to examine the condition of the Zanzibar Government Archives and to make recommendations for their future care. Mr. Walford carried out a similar UNESCO sponsored survey of the Kenya National Archives last year. This year he will be looking at documents which not only push back by several decades the period for which records are available for East Africa as a whole but which present different technical problems. The records themselves constitute a small collection, totalling about a thousand linear feet, but their size bears little relation to their importance.

Zanzibar, with the rest of the East African littoral, was part of a declining Arab empire when, toward the close of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese began their conquest of the area.