Editor's Note
Instead of featuring a destination, travelsrilanka this month looks at a people of African origin, the Kaffirs, brought to Ceylon to serve as slaves and soldiers by the Portuguese. In those days they had a fearsome reputation: the Portuguese commander at Malwana ordered a local person to be handed over to the Kaffir soldiers, who cut him up ion front of his wife and children and shared him among them for food. Nowadays, however, the Kaffirs live peaceably in the Puttalam district.

This issue has an accidental literary component, and a diverse one at that. The environmental aspect is represented by a review of conservationist Rohan Pethiyagoda’s to me, The History of Biodiversity Exploration in Sri Lanka, while lexicology makes an appearance with the definition of three exotic words from Sri Lankan English, jingbang, kottu, and lakh, mostly based on Micheal Meyler’s Dictionary of Sri Lankan English. There’s an interview with novelist Shyam Selvadurai of Funny Boy fame, who shifted from Colombo to Canada to pursue his incisive writing on Sri Lanka, and with Alexander McCall Smith of Botswana, creator of Precious Mamotswe and her No.1 Ladies Detective Agency, (Tears of the Giraffe, The Kalahari Typing School for Men, etc.) Lastly, there’s the retelling of a medieval Venetian tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, which induced Horace Walpole to coin the word serendipity.

That‘s not all, either, for there’s a review of a photo-collection by Sri Lanka’s, Dominic Sansoni, called Colour. It’s a photo-collection, true – and a magnificent one at that – yet it contains remarkable literary content in an introduction by Richard Simon, one of Sri Lanka’s most incisive writers.

Richard Boyle
Editor