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Norman Arthur Townsend was born in England 14 October 1940. He attended public school in England and received his undergraduate B.Sc. degree from the London School of Economics in 1962. In 1962 he moved to Africa, where his family was, and attended Makerere University in Uganda. From this institution he received his Postgraduate Diploma in Education.
Townsend came to Canada and obtained his Master's degree at McMaster University in Hamilton and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He doctoral thesis was written about "The social riverine agriculture of the Pokomo of north-east Kenya". He lived in a mud hut for two years and learned the language of the people he lived with. During his time at the universities he had work as a teaching assistant. He taught four years of high school in Kenya. He received a number of grants from various sources for research. He published "Lineage and generation in Pokomo Kinship" (1972), "A Note on Pokomo Beekeeping" (1972), and "Biased Symbiosis on Tana River" (1973). His Ph.D. thesis was finished in 1973. He started teaching Anthropology in 1977 at Trent University. He could read French and he could read and speak Swahili with a high degree of proficiency. He was married in 1969 to a Canadian and they had two children. Norman Arthur Townsend died unexpectedly on 30 August 1979.