African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies

Michael Twaddle

The intensive study of African history at British universities was very much a consequence of the Second World War and the founding of universities in British colonial territories in its immediate aftermath. First in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sudan and Uganda, and later in Southern Rhodesia and elsewhere, scholars in newly-established history departments concentrated effort upon regional histories as well as the broader British imperial experience. This had been researched in Britain for as long as history had been a subject at university level.

In Britain, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) became the first university to teach African history. This was shortly after the Scarborough Report (1) recommended that greater attention should be paid to African as well as Asian and Slavonic areas in the light of the country's changing interests in the post-war world. As a result, SOAS advertised for a lectureship in the tribal history of East Africa and Roland Oliver applied for it successfully. In his autobiography,(2) Oliver relates how C. H. Philips, the dynamic head of the history department at the time, told him that 'tribal' was to be interpreted as regional as opposed to colonial history in practice – and Oliver's subsequent career was to be a brilliant application of this interpretation at both SOAS and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICS).

At ICS, Oliver attended seminars on African subjects arranged by ICS's first director, Sir Keith Hancock, as well as organising the African history seminar held there rather than at SOAS during its earliest years.

At SOAS, Oliver attracted a small but extremely talented staff. It is not possible to mention all their names here, but four must be noted:

Richard Gray, who published his seminal study of The Two Nations of Central Africa in 1960 (3) and followed it with a pioneering account of the History of the Southern Sudan 1839–1889 (4) in the following year, as well as supervising a growing number of research students.
Douglas Jones, who also supervised many outstanding doctoral theses, among them David Henige's analysis of oral traditions in Africa (5) and Nehemia Levtzion's account of the history of Islam in West Africa. (6)
John Fage, who co-founded the Journal of African History in 1960, co-authored the seminal A Short History of Africa (7) published by Penguin Books in 1962, and co-edited the eight-volume Cambridge History of Africa (8) between 1975 and 1986. He went off to found the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham University in 1964 and then make it, along with SOAS, Edinburgh and Oxford universities, another leading centre of African historical studies in Britain.
Shula Marks, initially a postgraduate student of Fage's after BA studies at Cape Town University, and subsequently a major force herself in the establishment of South African history as a serious academic subject in London. This she achieved through her joint lectureship and subsequent chairs at SOAS and ICS, not only supervising many doctoral theses presented to the University of London but also running a Southern African history seminar at ICS and acting for ten years as its fourth director.

ICS had been founded within the University of London in the late 1940s by enticing Keith Hancock from the Chichele Chair of Economic History at Oxford University with the offer of a secretary as well as a senate institute; he had been followed as head of ICS by Kenneth Robinson, a high official in the British Colonial Office immediately before, during and after the Second World War, who stayed for another ten years before becoming Vice-Chancellor of Hong Kong University, and then by W. H. Morris-Jones, professor of politics at Durham University, historian of the Indian parliament, and an enthusiast for all sorts of postgraduate and even post-professorial seminars at ICS.

All these seminars were based upon pre-circulated papers, distributed a week before being discussed, and typed up or photocopied for this purpose by secretaries in the history department at SOAS or by Sonja Jansen, for many years the seminar secretary at ICS. Nowadays bound copies of these papers are preserved in the archives looked after by the University of London Research Library Services (ULRLS) and constitute an important academic resource for future research in their own right. This is especially the case with seminars held during Hancock's directorship, when many British colonial territories were moving towards independence very rapidly and extensive notes were made of discussions during seminars sometimes attended by participants in these events as well as by historians studying them at the time.

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Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies, Report of the Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies (London, 1947).
Oliver, In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History (London, 1997).
Gray, The Two Nations: Aspects of the Development of Race Relations in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland (London, 1960).
Gray, A History of the Southern Sudan 1839–1889 (Oxford, 1961).
Published as D. Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford, 1974).
Levtzion, The Spread and Development of Islam in the Middle Volta Basin in the Precolonial Period (unpublished University of London PhD thesis, 1965).
Oliver and J. D. Fage, A Short History of Africa (Harmondsworth, 1962).
The Cambridge History of Africa, ed. J. D. Fage and R. Oliver (8 vols., Cambridge, 1975–86).

African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies

Michael Twaddle

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