Our
information on the coast of East Africa dates back to classical Greek and Arab sources
and, from the sixteenth century, to the reports of Portuguese navigators. Occasional
news on the interior of East Africa, merely of a geographical nature, began to reach
Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century; its second half brought
in some reliable information of a crude ethnographic type, normally scattered
in the daily records of voyagers and explorers, colonial administrators and
missionaries. All of these were pioneers in their own ways, but very few had an
academic training. When based on firsthand knowledge, their information is
still priceless. Normally, however, their reports are uncritical, and even
valueless when dependent on hearsay evidence or distorted by stereotyped
prejudices. Only a few early twentieth-century sources are distinguished by their
accuracy and thoroughness as classics of the anthropological literature, such
as the monograph of Gerard Lindblom, a Swedish scholar, on the Kamba of Kenya,
and the two volumes on the Thonga of Mozambique by †H.A.Junod, a Swiss evangelist.
Both covered the entire spectrum of local culture, aiming at an encyclopedic
survey as required by the ethnographic method of the day.