China and Africa in the Middle Ages

With the present study I have endeavoured to reconstruct a chapter in the relations between Asia and Africa in medieval times. Its striking events—and in particular the Chinese naval expeditions to the Western seas and to East Africa in the early Ming period—merit a patient enquiry into their causes and their effects. It is my hope that the present work, offered to the Africanists of my country, may also find acceptance among Africans interested in Africa’s contacts with the outside world in pre-colonial times. .
I have no pretentions to invade the territory of the Sinologists and I am extremely grateful to them for the generous assistance they have afforded me. My thanks go, first, to Professor A. F. P. Hulsewé of the Sinologisch Instituut in Leyden; his authoritative and patient guidance has been of crucial value. I owe particular thanks to Dr. Lionello Lanciotti, Librarian of the Istituto per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente in Rome, for the assistance he has given me, and to Professor Joseph Needham of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
To many others, in Africa and Italy, I am sincerely grateful for suggestions and for documentary or other assistance and for unstinting  helpfulness on every occasion. Among these I would first thank Professor James Kirkman, Warden of the Coastal Historical Sites of Kenya and a prime authority on Kenya’s historical monuments and archaeology, for putting so much interesting and invaluable information at my disposal. I am also much indebted to Professor Neville Chittick; Mr. R. H. Carcasson; Mr. Stanley West; Mr. T. M. Unwin; Mrs. Mary Clifford; the editors of Tanganyika Notes and Records; Professor Th. Monod of the Institut Francais d’Afrique Noire in Dakar; and Mr. E. J. Brill of Leyden, the editor and publisher of T’oung Pao. I am also grateful to my friend Dr. Elio Venzo in Rhodesia for his kindly help, and to my friend Dr. MichelePirone for his ever-ready assistance from Mogadishu.