Mikidadi wa Mafia

A biographical history by social anthropologist Pat Caplan, who began doing research on Mafia Island for her PhD in the 1960s and has returned for seven research trips across forty-five years. The book centres on Mikidadi Kichange, whom Caplan knew from 1965 when he was an adolescent and who treated her as his older sister until his death in 2002. Through regular letters he shared his education, training in forestry, national service, marriage, the birth of two daughters, the care of many children of relatives, his employment, and his founding of an NGO for the betterment of the island. Though Mikidadi never managed to return to full-time education as he had wished, he read widely in Swahili, English, and Arabic. Caplan frames this as biographical history: through the life of one ordinary person, she illustrates the profound changes that have taken place on Mafia Island, and in Tanzania, since independence.