I was pleased to be asked to give the after-dinner talk at your Golden Jubilee Conference, since it means that I will have gone full circle in my SCOLMA involvement. As a keen and young(ish) new member of the SCOLMA Committee I was invited to spend 18 months as joint organiser of what I think remains the largest event that SCOLMA has yet hosted, the 1977 Bibliography Conference marking fifteen years of SCOLMA's existence and a decade since the International Conference on African Bibliography held in Nairobi, 1967. As I became a SCOLMA office-holder there were keynote addresses and Chairman's concluding remarks. Soon after my retirement, for your 40th anniversary conference (in this same venue), Pat Larby and I were invited to perform a brief warm-up act to set the scene before the serious contributions began.