JOHN FAGE and I met first in Cambridge in 1948 as graduate students at Cambridge University, each researching on topics in the history of the colonial period in Africa. Thereafter our ways parted. He became the first full-time history teacher at the recently founded University College of the Gold Coast. I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where my initial duty was to investigate what could be recovered of the pre-colonial history of East Africa that might be brought within the scope of academic study. We met next in 1952, when a London publisher suggested that we might join in writing a History of Africa in two volumes designed for the academic market. Following this initiative, we spent a fortnight of that summer, together with our wives and children, at my house in Buckinghamshire to discuss the possibilities, and this proved to be the beginning of a close professional collaboration which was to last for more than thirty-five years.