ARD would like to join the many other Africanist sources in regretting the death at 54 of Professor Michael Crowder, at a time when he might have expected to be at the height of his intellectual and scholarly powers. None of those present will have forgotten his impassioned address as the featured speaker at SCOLMA's Annual General Meeting in 1986 when he mourned the lack of books in African libraries (published in ARD 41, 1986, 1-6 as ‘The book crisis: Africa's other famine’) and was accorded immediate and vigorous applause at the end of his speech. During his life he held academic posts at Columbia, Berkeley, Ibadan, Ife, Ahmadu Bello, Zaria, Lagos, and Botswana. In 1985 he returned to England and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in the University of London, where among many other activities he was appointed General Editor of the new project for publishing documents on the decolonisation of Empire.