Previous winners of the Distinguished Africanist award
2001 awards: Basil Davidson, John Fage, and Douglas Rimmer.
2002 awards: Lionel Cliffe, Eldred and Marjorie Jones and Shula Marks.
2004 awards: two eminent members of the African Studies community in
Britain, Roland Oliver and Terry Ranger
2005 award: Tony Kirk-Greene
2006 award: John Lonsdale
Basil Davidson
Basil Davidson's commitment, not only to the study of Africa, but to Africa itself and its peoples, is legendary. He was one of the first post-war journalists to begin serous and systematic reporting of African affairs, going for the stories which Africans themselves wanted told, rather than the stories colonial governments were telling. He was a radical, whose reporting on anti-colonial and liberation movements did a huge amount to interest the general public in Africa in the 1950s and 60s. He was also unusual, at that time, in the way he actively engaged with scholars in Africa as well as Europe and the USA, in a vigorous effort to establish and expand the new field of scholarship on Africa. Throughout a period of some fifty years reporting and writing on Africa, Basil Davidson has consistently spoken up for the interests of Africans and spread knowledge and understanding of Africa to a wide popular audience as well as to scholarly readers.
John Fage
John Fage was a founder of African Studies, and especially African historiography. He also played a key role in the establishment or consolidation of most of the institutions we now regard as the bulwarks of scholarship in and on Africa. He was the founding Director of the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham, from 1963 to 1984. He was founding editor, with Roland Oliver, of the Journal of African History (1960-73), the founding Honorary Secretary of the ASAUK (1964) as well as our President (1978-9). He was also a key figure in the IAI, and played a prominent role in public bodies where his ability to put an Africanist point of view was crucial. His scholarship laid the groundwork for almost all subsequent work on African history.
Douglas Rimmer
Douglas is well known to ASAUK members, both as a past president (1986-8) and also as Vice- Chairman of the RAS and Hon. Treasurer of the IAI. Throughout his career he has given unstintingly of his time and energy in serving the institutions that represent Africanist interests in the UK. He is also a distinguished scholar in the field of African economics. His work demonstrates an engagement with contemporary African issues of pressing concern. Though his field requires highly specialized technical expertise, his work has never been narrow: on the contrary, he has written on political economy, economic history, development and other issues in a humane and accessible way. He has also served as adviser to NGOs, governments and business, bringing an informed view of African issues to them and thus contributing significantly to the public visibility and usefulness of African Studies beyond the academic sphere.
Lionel Cliffe
Lionel was the Founder Editor of the Review of African Political Economy, the leading journal on radical political economy of Africa which for nearly thirty years has played a formative role in the discipline. Professor Cliffe’s many collaborative projects including fourteen books have been influential in both academic and political debates on Africa. His work has spanned Eastern, Central, Southern and West Africa, and has ranged from agrarian reform to conflict, humanitarian assistance and democratisation. Several of his books have remained key reference points for all scholars working in the area: notably the two influential volumes Socialism in Tanzania (1972, 1973), co-edited with John Saul; The transition to independence in Namibia (with Ray Bush) and Zimbabwe: politics, economics and society (with Colin Stoneman).
Eldred Durosimi Jones and Marjorie Jones
Eldred and Marjorie have together made an unparalleled contribution to the establishment of an Africanist literary criticism in Africa, Britain and worldwide. Eldred Jones was the author of Othello’s Countrymen (1961), an innovative contribution to Shakespearian scholarship, and many other influential works of criticism. He was the founder and, with Marjorie Jones, the editor for 35 years of the annual journal African Literature Today, which has played a crucial role in the consolidation and dissemination of African literary studies. Eldred and Marjorie Jones sit together on a Presidential Committee of professional experts for the reconstruction of Sierra Leone. Both have been active in peace-making initiatives and have remained in Sierra Leone at great personal risk when they could have taken prestigious appointments in North American or British universities. Eldred Jones became blind early in his career and Marjorie Jones’s contribution has been integral to his achievement.
Shula Marks
Shula has been described as “without doubt the greatest living historian of South Africa”. Until recently Professor of History at SOAS, before that Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, Shula Marks has been at the forefront of research into South African history for three decades, her most important publications including Reluctant Rebellion (1970), Ambiguities of Dependence (1986), Not Either an Experimental Doll (1987) and Divided Sisterhood (1994). She has also edited the Journal of Southern African Studies and the Journal of African History. She supervised numerous postgraduates, many of whom have gone on to distinguished careers themselves, and organised for many years the foremost research seminar in South African history outside of South Africa. She has transformed the way the academic community and the broader public have viewed South Africa’s past. Not only that, she has always been an engaged scholar, deeply involved in the struggle to understand South African society and to build a new society out of the past.
Roland Oliver
Professor Roland Oliver was throughout his long career an eminent researcher, writer, teacher, administrator and organiser, who had a profound effect on the development of African Studies in the UK. His influential Oxford History of East Africa and, in collaboration with John Fage, the Cambridge History of Africa, were produced in a decade between the late 70s and late 80s. These histories recognised and celebrated the long, rich history of a continent which for the first half of the 20th Century was previously thought by historians to have only a history ‘created’ by white travellers, administrators and settlers. Many young African students on the continent were excited to be introduced to their history through these histories. In his long career at SOAS since 1948, he nurtured a generation of African historians and was very active in the institutional development of African Studies. Over his long career he worked with the Institute of Race Relations, the British School of History and Archaeology (latterly the British Institute of East African), the African Education Trust, the Royal Africa Society and the Africa Centre. He founded and edited for many years the Journal of African History. In 1963, he carried out a survey of 250 working Africanist academics in the UK and founded the African Studies Association itself. How appropriate and well deserved that now the Association should honour him as a Distinguished Africanist!
Terry Ranger
Professor Terry Ranger is an academic of distinction, with many accolades to his name, who has made a lasting impact on British African Studies. He was the first Africanist Fellow of the British Academy and has held chairs at UCLA, Manchester and Oxford. He was a prolific scholar with a number of seminal publications to his credit. As an historian, he has made important contributions to a wide range of critical debates and important issues. To name but a few: challenging colonial historiography, contesting Marxists ‘radical pessimists’, identity issues including the invention of tradition and the imagination of ethnicity, and engaging with post-colonial discourse theory. He was also an active figure in the institutional development of African studies in three continents: UK, USA and in Africa. Amongst activities too numerous to enumerate in the UK, he was critical to the development of the Journal of Southern African Studies. In Africa, he was a founder member of the University College in Nyasaland, a pioneering history professor at the University of Dar es Salaam and currently Visiting Professor to the University of Zimbabwe. He has been actively engaged in the public arena in Africa, especially in Zimbabwe.
Tony Kirk-Greene
Tony Kirk-Greene’s distinguished career began in 1950 in the colonial service in Nigeria – Adamawa, then Borno, and then at the Institute of Administration in Zaria both pre- and post-independence. Ahmadu Bello University appointed him as its founding Reader in Government in 1961. He has remained a figure well-known and much respected in Nigeria ever since those days. Following the first military coup of 1966, he returned to England and secured a Senior Research Fellowship at St Antony’s College in Oxford where he has continued his long association with Africa and with Nigeria in particular.
His publication record is prodigious, ranging from works on Hausa, to public administration, African politics and history, and to Commonwealth history more generally. He is a one-time President of this Association and a Vice-President of the Royal African Society. A fuller picture of the range and nature of his publications and associations is to be found in the Festschrift for Tony that was edited by Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan and published by Macmillan in 1993.
Tony is held in high esteem across the whole range of African Studies, but he is equally the object of great affection among many, and this is due to the constancy of his warm encouragement and unflinching support for generations (and there are many generations now) of colleagues and students, both at Oxford, in the UK more widely, and in Nigeria. His generosity of spirit, his wit and his impish sense of humour have endeared him to all who meet him. His commitment to teaching and his financial generosity in funding first a Junior Research Fellowship at St Antony’s and then a Lectureship have contributed to the making of a stream of UK-educated and, by now, internationally-based cohort of leading Africanists.
John Lonsdale
John Lonsdale's work has been absolutely foundational in four major areas. First, John's original and pioneering scholarship has deeply shaped our understanding of African nationalism. Where scholars of the 1960s were preoccupied with tracing the connections between nationalist parties and earlier forms of political protest, John focused on the non-elite, popular roots of nationalism.
Second, John's work has helped scholars reconceptualize the African colonial state. Scholars of the 1970s were pre-occupied with underdevelopment, with the search for the roots of Africa's economic dependency. In contemporary analyses colonial states were seen as functional extensions of metropolitan capitalism. John's work, in contrast, illuminated the partial autonomy of colonial states, showing how local officialdom navigated the contending demands of metropole, capital, and African locality.
Third, John's most influential area of investigation has been into the history of ethnicity and tribalism; here he has single-handedly rehabilitated an entire field of inquiry. Earlier generations of scholarship had treated ethnicity as an unfortunate remnant of an earlier political order. John's early work on ethnicity challenged this orthodoxy by highlighting the modern roots of African tribalism.
Last, but not least, is John's current research, on Jomo Kenyatta and the making of modern Kenya, similarly promises to open up new avenues of scholarly inquiry.
John has additionally made major contributions to the study of South African history, to the understanding of Luo identity, to the periodizing of post-World War II government policy in east and southern Africa, and to the study of African Christianity.
Like a good pioneer, John has opened up paths for development and cut back thickets of misunderstanding. Many of us work in the fields of knowledge that John has cleared. Hundreds of undergraduate students have sat with him at Trinity College, where he has taught for three decades. He has served on editorial boards for several important journals. He has acted as president of the ASAUK and as vice-president of the Royal African Society. And he has tutored dozens of graduate students, who today occupy the highest levels in academia and politics.
