The recent conference on the History of the Transkei and Ciskei held at the University of Rhodes, Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape, in many ways marked a new step in the development in South Africa of African studies in general and African history in particular. Out of a total of some seventy-five participants, more than half were historians, ten were anthropologists or enthnologists, and the remainder were drawn from a variety of academic disciplines including archaeology, economics, politics and medicine, and from the non-academic world, including representatives of some of the major museums and libraries. Sponsored by the Transkei and Ciskei Research Society, and organised by Robin Derricourt, a Cambridge-trained archaeologist at present working at the University of Fort Hare, the conference discussed a wide range of problems in the history of the area in the precolonial and colonial periods.