Chandler - Capt. William Hichens was assigned to the Intelligence and Administrative Section of British East Africa in the 1920s. He liked to hunt and often volunteered to do control work, shooting man-eating lion and leopard. In the course of his travels he developed an interest in what is now called cryptozoology, and collected stories of weird animals from the local inhabitants. He published some of these as reports in several magazines, some written under a pseudonym because of the secret nature of his military work.

His collected papers are in SOAS, London: William Hichens, of whom we have no certain date of birth, was in East Africa during the first decades of 1900 as an employee of the Kenya colonial administration.   While based there he began collecting Swahili manuscripts, and he edited many of them.   His collection of manuscripts, dating 1792-1943 (some undated), was gathered thanks to his collaboration with scholars like Sir Mbarak Ali Hinawy, Liwali of the Coast, Muhammad bin Abu Bakr Kijumwa of Lamu, and Alice Werner, herself a Swahili manuscripts collector. Hichens' interests included the history of the Swahili poetry.   He produced a manuscript bibliography of Swahili poets with relevant poems, some of which he translated and published himself at his Azania Press.   He also compiled a biography, with poems, of the famous Mombasan poet Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy (Johannesburg, 1940).   His other publications at Azania Press include 'The Azania classics' (1932-34) edited with Alice Werner, and 'The Advice of Mwana Kupona upon the Wifely Duty' (1934).   His interests also touched upon the history of the East Africa Coast. Hichens died in 1944 in Mombasa, Kenya.