Mark Horton is a Reader in Archaeology at the University of Bristol. He has conducted research in both Kenya and Tanzania since 1980, and directed excavations at Shanga in the Lamu archipelago and on the islands of Pemba, Zanzibar and Tumbatu. Between 1984 and 1987 he was a Research Fellow at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and from 1987 to 1992 directed a project that investigated the origins of East African Islam for the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

John Middleton retired in 1991 as Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at Yale University, after also teaching at the University of London, New York University, and elsewhere. He has carried out anthropological research in Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana. He worked in Zanzibar in 1958 on land tenure among the central Swahili (published as Land Tenure in Zanzibar, 1961) and later in the 1980s among the northern Swahili of the town of Lamu in Kenya to make a general ethnography that was published in 1992 as The World of the Swahili. His other books include Lugbara Religion (1960) and he was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia of Africa South of the Sahara (1997).