Richard Rathbone

Richard Rathbone interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 14th January 2013

0:05:07 Born December 1942 at Richmond, Surrey; I know next to nothing about my father's parents or his family due to my mother's subsequent marriage which rather shut down my father's side; I was kept away from my father's kin; neither do I know anything about my mother's wider family except that they were Londoners; I knew my maternal grandparents quite well, a rather larger-than-life grandmother, and smaller-than-life grandfather whom she dominated and bullied; on class I would reckon they were lower middle class; my grandfather died when I was about six or seven, and my grandmother, when I was about nine; because my mother was for some period a single mother I got to know my grandmother particularly well; my father was killed in the war, he was a pilot, and I think I was about eight months old when he died; there were bits of memorabilia such as R.A.F. badges, all of which gradually disappeared when my mother remarried; I have no siblings; my mother died about twenty years ago; my father and mother were rather beautiful people - there are photographs of them being young and glamorous; they both worked for the BBC, he worked for the 'Listener' and she was a multi-lingual personal assistant; they had lots of glamorous friends in the BBC and lived on a houseboat in Teddington, so all rather raffish, bohemian and splendid; then, of course, he was killed so there was a romance for a schoolboy to latch onto; she went into a flat spin, which is quite a good metaphor for a pilot, and never went back to work after he died, and remained a pretty little woman; so far as her post-widowhood love life is concerned, I know very little other than a powerful romance with an American officer, but he went back to Richmond, Virginia; she remarried clearly not out of love but for money and security, which is blameless in a sense; she married a rich man much older than her who was very unused to having a child in the house; I was about eight or nine when this happened, and was already at prep school; he transformed my life in a very Hamletian way; he was a bully and hater of the kind of noise that children make and hater of all that children are - messy and so on - and I lived in terror of him, pretty much until his death; he died shortly after I got married in 1965

5:47:05 My mother had no experience of education; she wasn't a graduate; my knowledge of my father's interests was a store of books which I had, quite recherché when I was a child - translations, but quite a lot in French too - most of which disappeared under my step-father's aegis; he was a very jealous man and didn't like memorabilia around the place; there were a handful of dedications in books which were clearly from friends of his and a straggle of things like New Left book club editions, so he was certainly "there" but my mother was only glamorous and not much else; that was certainly so of that bit of her life; she liked music and was quite a decent pianist, but that was the limit

7:01:01 My first memory was being wheeled into an airing cupboard during an air-raid, and have attributed it ever since to my dislike of confined spaces, like aeroplanes and Eurostar; my biggest, most powerful emotional memory, must have been the celebration of the end of the war, my mother kneeling on the floor of the flat we lived in, her eyes pouring with tears, embracing me and telling me that my father wasn't going to come home; I am not sure whether I knew this at the time, but it was a wrenching memory; I went to a little Montessori school which was in a sense the making of me but also the destruction because they were very permissive of my not liking maths, which dogged me, because I wanted to be a scientist at one stage of my life; I read a lot and read very early, and I think that is quite common amongst only children; I was always at pre-prep school sitting in a corner reading anything and everything; I can remember reading Puck of Pook's Hill when I was very young and always liking historical fiction; I also remember drawing historical things, like knights in armour, from a very young age, and was always tickled by history; but of course, everything else was neglected, which was not a good thing

9:21:04 I went on to my father's old school as my mother had not yet remarried and was living on an R.A.F. widow's pension; this was Colet Court, St Paul's junior school, which was then in Hammersmith; I stayed there and went on to St. Paul's; my chief memory of prep-school was my mother's remarriage, and the world coming to an end in some respects as life began to be sad and a bit threatening; I was a day boy and began a rather disastrous course of escape and evasion exercises, courting the friendship of other boys by being funny; there was also the other propensity that I now see between need and greed, and became a very fat little boy; I ate because I didn't get enough cuddling; so I became a funny, I think much liked, fat boy; I also began to try and court affection and support at home by illness; it was a trick I learnt from my step-father who was a great blackmailer as a way of securing attention; I have a pretty strong memory of feigning illnesses in order to be looked after; I remember next to nothing about prep school in terms of the intellect other than quite enjoying music lessons, though I never learnt to read music or play an instrument, and enjoying always the English, humanities, side of education, and being always left behind in maths and science; I never ever caught up, which was a tragedy in some senses

12:06:00 I moved up to St Paul's with the same self-imposed disabilities of prep school, and was in the lowest classes for the first two and a half years of my career at St Paul's; I was an under-functioning little boy, and the big change occurred in my 'O' level year, when I spied on the Surmaster's (the deputy head master) desk - a very nice master called Alan Cook, whom I liked - and on his desk was a list of six or seven names of boys who were not going to get 'O' levels; my name as on it, and it was the first sort of slapping that I got, a recognition that not only was I bumping along the bottom but was probably going to fall through the hatch; I think I had already begun to realize that I was not very happy, that trying to make people who played rugby amused and to follow the fast set at school, really wasn't satisfying me at all; I was helped in that by two teachers, one was a rather remarkable teacher called John Usborne who introduced me to Coleridge and recognised that I liked poetry and novels, and gave me books to read; another was my house master, a man called Retallack (I think it is a Cornish name) who, rather oddly when I was about fifteen gave me a copy of Dubliners and said I would like it, and I did; he then started giving me volumes of poetry; both of them had seen something in me that was at least rescueable; the big influence on my life for anyone who did history at St Paul's, was a remarkable man called Philip Whitting, who was my history teacher; he was eccentric, often mad, but a quite extraordinary, brilliant, history teacher; the joy of Philip Whitting was that he was a numismatist, collecting Ottoman coins, and consequently knew a lot about the Ottoman Empire; it was the first time that I came across a history teacher who didn't work on the Tudors and Stuarts; that was tremendous because they had wonderful names, and lovely things in their hands like jewels and scimitars; I think it was partly through him that I came to start reading slightly odd things; 'O' level I survived and got into what was called a History Eight; I started reading peculiar things like Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough, and being rather excited by otherness; of course, this was not reflected in the syllabus; I did Henry II like everybody else, but began to get excited by history, but it was in a way too late and should have happened earlier; I was also taught by a rather remarkable man who had worked for the BBC, and went on to be and editor for Penguin, and ended up as Professor of History at Sussex, a man called Christopher Thorne, who died very young; he was another major influence on my life, and another person who believed in and encouraged me

16:42:11 In the sixth (at St Paul's eighth) form there was form teaching, and I still have Philip Whitting's notes, You were encouraged to go beyond text books and encouraged to go away and read “primary sources” and I think a lot of us did; there was also the essay tutorial in a little cupboard under the stairs which he inhabited, rather like a ship's cabin, in which he would tear you to pieces; the 'A' level year was only a year and not two as is normal, so you were expected to live in the library, and because it was an old school it was a very fine library, and we were encouraged to potter around it; to get involved with other things in school, but beyond some success in Debating Society- david Aukin and I were finalists in The Observer Mace competition, I was not really a participant; like Gareth Stedman Jones, I was a member of the Gallery Club; as we were a London school this meant we went to plays and occasionally read plays in a group; we had dinners and sometimes these were rather glamorous; I remember a wonderful one for Isaiah Berlin which was very inspiring and exciting, and another for Victor Gollancz who was an old boy of the school; it was a very exciting time in the mid to late fifties, as it was the beginning of "kitchen sink" drama, and the whole world was turning upside down; I think I did like the new rock of Elvis, but was much too shy to ever "cut a rug"; my presentation of self in everyday life was as a jolly chap, but the person I really was was much more reticent and nervous about the opinions of others, and particularly a problem that I would psychoanalyse in a way from childhood, an apprehension about the opinions and views of older males who were allocators of authority and value in my life, which was a sequence of people from my step-father onwards, to my supervisor and first employer; my step-father continued to bully me as I was penniless and in those days, when you went on to university, you were dependant on a parental statement to get a grant; I had a state scholarship of £50 a year at university, and nothing else, so I had to be "good" in order to get pocket money out of my step-father, and I found that very hard

20:46:14 I did not go through a religious phase at school; I have always been fascinated by it but was never caught up in it; I am a choral singer in retirement and particularly enjoy sacred Baroque music; I can feel the spirituality in it but it doesn't mean anything in terms of a belief in creation or a hereafter; I am the atheist side of agnostic and always have been, though I am very interested in the beliefs of others, especially as a West Africanist; my mother was an agnostic and my step-father was Jewish, and rather bigoted; he was mistrustful of gentile society, and given the proximate cause of their coming to this country, I can understand why; there was a great belief in the propriety of ritual on his part and that you maintained your dignity by observing things, and because I didn't I was bad, which I concede; he followed Jewish rites and I was pulled into this

23:32:07 I didn't really have hobbies; I had a bike which was very important to me as an escape mechanism, and I did cycle all over the place, mainly with friends; I fished a bit but not much; rather than hobbies I was always reading, rather obsessively; I was reading vast amounts of forgotten nineteenth century literature, lots of Thackeray and Dickens, enjoying and taking it seriously; unfortunately I started working seriously rather late as the game plan at St Paul's was that you spent your last year sitting for a scholarship to either Oxford or Cambridge; their advice to me was to put that off for a year, so instead of doing an entrance scholarship exam by my eighteenth birthday I was to take up a place at Queen Mary College in London, not least because of the contact between Philip Whitting and the then head of history there, the great Tudor historian, Bindoff; Bindoff’s son, Tom, was in my class; the plan was to go there for a year and then sit the appropriate exam, but within a week or so of my starting at the University of London, the School of Oriental and African Studies had launched a degree in history which had a very large element of African history in it; I started going to lectures by this strange pioneering historian, Roland Oliver and his colleagues, including John Fage, recently back from being head of history at the University of Ghana; I got tremendously excited by this brand of history that began with very early man; at this time they were digging in the Olduvai Gorge and it was becoming inescapably the case that we are all descended from people of Africa; Oliver actually brought back one of the hominid skulls on a flight from East Africa in a box; I suppose he was the first historian that I'd met who had dusty boots in a real sense; he knew a lot about early man; he read all the stuff and wrote a lot about archaeology, but also about historical linguistics, dendrochronology, but also knew a lot about nationalism; this great span of history was literally breath-taking and it wasn't Tudors and Stuarts; I got drawn in and at the end of the first year learnt that we might spend the second year in Africa, at the University of Ghana; the attraction of Africa was partly that it was new and that other people hadn't done it, but it actually chimed in with things I had liked when I was younger; it did chime in with Frazer and Jessie Weston, and with fiction like Mary Renault, it was about fire and god-kings, so very thrilling to be around the world of Agamemnon except it was hotter; then of course the prospect of going away to a place that I had become interested in meant that I was unstoppable and proved to be a very exciting formative experience

28:39:15 In terms of lectures we were able to go from one college to another; my first degree is from Queen Mary College, but I was a sitting tenant at S.O.A.S. and was allowed to take the year in Ghana; it was very much more expensive to fly in those days so it was stepping off the boat; we went first class from Liverpool on a boat that called in first at the Canaries, and the first smell of Africa, then Freetown in Sierra Leone, then Monrovia in Liberia, then at the newly-built port just east of Accra; the first experience was seeing the bush from the sea as Conrad described in Heart of Darkness; it was about smells and heat and sounds; I always associate the smell of burning charcoal and the sounds of chickens with village Africa; it was very exciting; the whole thing was a challenge, living in an African hall of residence, eating African food, being one of the very few white people on campus, other than faculty; it was actually in the countryside, although now Accra and the university are linked by a massive suburb, it was about 14km from the centre of town; it was not exactly in the bush, but when you went up the hill at the top of the campus, you looked at farmland all around; now it is just habitation, so rather sad; there were some very interesting people when I was there; the Institute of African Studies, where I spent more time than I should, was run by Thomas Hodgkin who was an exciting, charismatic figure, and round him were clustered a whole bunch of political refugees; the Vice Chancellor was Conor Cruise O'Brien who gave lectures which shocked me in their candour about how awful the United Nations was; the whole thing was just wonderful; I was lectured by some extraordinarily good historians there, including Adu Boahen and the great Jack Lander, for example; I took off at the end of May after the exams and hitch-hiked home alone; in those days I managed to get all my visas in one afternoon in Accra and they cost about five pounds, to places like Mali, which was tremendous; I went up the desert with the assistance of a Russian medical team who were going from Timbuktu into Algeria; in the course of this I went to places like Guinea, and lots of places that you wouldn't go to now; I met all sorts of people, was in prison for a brief while for taking photographs of a football match that happened to be on military land; I saw the great mosques in Timbuktu, in Djenné , the great fish market at Mopti, that was exciting stuff, all on about £25; unfortunately I did not keep a diary, and I had bought a cine camera but none of the film came out, which was tragic; I travelled with slaves, goats and women who were sold in markets, an extraordinary experience for a nineteen year old which has never left me; sadly I found when I got back that I felt more imprisoned; I'd lived in the open air and liked the desert and the Tuaregs; it was a bit like Lawrence of Arabia and all that; to suddenly be back in London with no money, dependent on a rather irascible, menacing step-father was not a great pleasure; then in 1963 I met my wife and that was the great change in a very positive way

34:30:13 I met Frances on the top of a bus and she looked like Juliet Greco; she was at Queen Mary College reading English, taught by some rather remarkable people, including Simon Gray; she was a highly imaginative, highly literate person, a lapsing Catholic, but the kind of person who knew lots of poetry and very civilised; our first date was a disaster as I had no money, so she paid for it; our second date was even more disastrous; we went to see an Iris Murdoch play, The Bell I think; as I was taking her home by tube, the door shut with me on one side and she on the other; we ended up living together and then getting married, and that is where, in many senses, competent adulthood began, with the strength of the backup of an intelligent, reliable, honest person, which was pretty much my first experience of that; thankfully it has gone one for nearly fifty years now; we have two children and two grandchildren - enough, in terms of the planet; Frances is a novelist; she was a school teacher until we had children, and then she started teaching dyslexic children; she did her P.G.C.E. thesis on autism, became very interested in dyslexia, and started to teach them; she then started writing and has written twenty-seven books, including the Virago biography of Christina Rossetti, two adult novels, a very nice volume of collected poetry - some of her poems have been set to music - but basically writes for teenagers; the house is very full of books and that is a pleasure for both of us; she writes as Frances Thomas; she has read just about everything that I have ever written and if there is any melody in what I write, it is down to her; she had been a great grammar coach and a great axer of my excessive adjectives; she is not really interested in what I do though there have been times when there are matches; for example, a wonderful play called Afore night come by a Alan Rudkin, which is a straight bit of anthropology, a very Yeatsian thing about killing someone in order to propitiate a harvest; it was a favourite play of ours which I liked because I was an Africanist and she liked it because she had read the Waste Land and understood all of that; thus there are bits of real harmony in terms of interest and I think she has enjoyed reading African writers but she has only been to Africa with me once

39:09:09 I did my finals in history but did not get a very good degree; I was despairing about what I should do; Roland Oliver was by then the Professor of African History, the first in Britain, and the co-author of the Penguin 'History of Africa', which was the first big history of Africa of a modern sort; I have to admit I have never finished it as I found it tedious in the extreme, as has every student I have ever taught; he suggested I did research, which I wanted to do; unfortunately, still with that whipped cur quality that I brought with me from childhood, I did not have the nerve to say what I really wanted to do or who I intellectually was; he fobbed off on me a project that was half good; a big tranche of papers of the last Governor of Ghana had turned up, a man called Charles Arden-Clarke, and in return for writing his biography, a young scholar could work on these; it was a bit of patronage from Roland Oliver which got me back to Ghana for a wonderful eight months, interviewing all sorts of veterans of the nationalist struggle, which was fascinating; but unfortunately there were things that did not fascinate me, and the notion of writing a biography was one; I think I recognised very early on after the PhD, which I got, that the biography was beyond me; I was far too young to write a biography as I had no insights into him as a subject, he was just a big authority figure, and a lot of the biographical conclusions that I came to him about him were simply reductive, childish bits of pseudo-Freudian stuff; I didn't do the biography, but in the course of writing that thesis I suppose I became the person who probably knew more about Ghanaian nationalism and its relationship to the end of the British Empire than anybody alive; that was useful and always fascinating; I have all my notes of the interviews in ghastly handwriting as it was pre-tape days; I took far too few photographs and did little to technologically preserve things which, of course, will never happen again; I feel a great sense of loss about that; John Argyle, the anthropologist, said to me once that when he went back to the place he had worked on, it was a bus shelter; I think the devastating quality of that has been part of my life; going back to Ghana, to places where I had been to marriage ceremonies and so on, and finding they are now car parks or supermarkets - sad, in a way; the year after my PhD I got a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, where I was lucky enough to work with two other junior fellows, one of whom was Stanley Trapido who, I would argue, was the greatest nineteenth century historian of South Africa; he was a political refugee and turned out to be closely connected to Mandela, a brave and fine man - the novelist, Barbara Trapido's husband; the second JRF with me was Donal Cruise O'Brien who worked on Senegal, particularly on Islamic brotherhoods; the three of us were thick as thieves, lots of rugby matches and drinking; this was in 1967; after that year, I had a second year there as an assistant lecturer; in the course of that year I was not there very much as I was teaching at the University of Sussex, in the African and Asian school there, because of the illness of a man called Bernard Shaffer; I taught under the chairmanship of Colin Leys a considerable figure in African political science; it looked like I was going to become a political scientist but the teaching frightened me off that; it was very much rooted round things like Talcott Parsons, unreadable things which I thought had very little resemblance to reality, and were certainly very distant from romance; some of my decision to want to be a field-working scholar had a lot to do with F.G. Bailey who was in Sussex at the time, whose trilogy on Orissa remains the best reading I have ever done; the relationship with anthropology really began with an Indianist; Freddy was a very magnetic figure, very humane and down to earth, and had the quality of deflating theory which I read to some extent in Clifford Geertz; you do get the sense that somebody does actually know what a hut looks like; there was also in his work the sense of the absolute significance of politics, which then became an organizing principle in my own work; as a historian I am a political historian more than anything else; also, as an authority figure, he was a giggler, and those sorts of things that mattered quite a lot to me; he was a great university politician; he managed to find a sweet in Indonesia which was called a "bum", and the wrapping paper had BUM on it, and handed them round to anybody he considered to be a bad university man

47:24:23 My thesis was on the transfer of power in Ghana and was done before the thirty year rule so I didn't have access to to the public record in Britain, but had access to the most extraordinary run of material in Ghana, including all the cabinet papers of the 1950s; it was thrilling to have access to papers that were embargoed in Britain but on open access in Ghana; I saw things I shouldn't have seen, I suppose; I then wrote a thesis that I hope was halfway enjoyable, and then that became the ur-text for the documentary study that I did on the transfer of power in Ghana which came out in 1990; the Arden-Clarke papers were of great use as they were an insight into the strategies on either side; that the transfer of power wasn't the story of heroic nationalists on their own, but it was also the story of strategizing diplomats working their way out of empire with least damage to their interests; the interplay of that fascinated me and still does

49:04:15 On the student troubles of 1967 I was not in Grosvenor Square but I was on all the marches; I was by then very left-wing, influenced by people like Gareth Stedman Jones and Tariq Ali and people at SOAS like Fred Halliday and Ralph Russell; I read 'New Left Review'; I was very hostile to the Vietnam War; thought what was going on in Paris was pretty crazy but was, at the same time, broadly sympathetic; when I was appointed at SOAS in 1969, although I was on probation as all new appointees were, I visited SOAS students who had been banged up by the police for breaking down doors, and got hauled over the coals by the Director of the School, Phillips, who became a friend but was very threatened by the student insurrection of 69-71; SOAS was a strange mixture of officers' mess and high table, but also the civil service; of course, many of the Senior Common Room at SOAS when I joined had had distinguished, some quite hidden careers in the secret service, and were recruiters for it; some of them spoke languages that nobody else spoke and there was a slightly spooky element, a very male common room, with almost no women at all, and rather military in bearing and attitude; Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was a very senior figure at SOAS when I arrived; he went on to be Pro-Director of the School; he was always very distinguished in terms of manners, very aristocratic in demeanour; it was always charming to be called "My dear" by him; he was always gentlemanly, even when he disagreed with you, as he did very frequently with me and with other young turks; I never saw him lose his temper; the only time I ever saw him discomforted was that he quite liked looking at pretty girls, which I sympathise with; I saw him once eyeing a model on a photo shoot near Russell Square, and while watching her he walked straight into a parking metre; it destroyed the composure and dignity, and like a cat that falls down, he then pretended that he meant to do it all the time; one was very aware of the fact that he had been footnoted by Levi-Strauss, and was a very eminent and fine figure; I didn't realize until later in my career what a pioneering figure he was in terms of methodology, but I always liked him very much; he was a very decent man, and a nice person to work with and near; it was a small common room and everybody did know everybody else, and they were not all nice; I also knew his wife, Betty, a power; John Middleton and I knew each other very well, not least because his wife was a West Africanist, and very under-recognised scholar; John was a lovely colleague; because he was an East Africanist by research training, he and I complemented each other in lots of ventures; we were both very much involved in the early days of something called the Centre for African Studies, which I was chairman of for some time, and he was very active in making that work as an inter-collegiate venture; it was not just SOAS, but also the LSE and any other college, including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in its remit and membership; John's internationality was tremendously helpful, that linkage with the International African Institute was through John in part; I also had a relationship with people like Mike (M.G.) Smith at University College, and with Daryll Forde, of course; Forde was terrifying, one's bowels turned to water having to give a paper at University College; I just remember the back end of Barbara Pym as departmental secretary, who wrote about them without their knowing it, which was quite funny; Mike Smith was ferocious and very clever and I liked his work very much; the other anthropologists at SOAS were, almost without exception, people I liked; it was a prickly relationship between history and anthropology; Roland Oliver was my supervisor and then my boss; at the end of 1968 I was offered three jobs at once, in those days that happened, and Africa was beginning to be a burgeoning place of interest; I was offered a job at Sussex to teach politics, and I had done that and didn't like it much; I was also offered a permanent job at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, but that did not involve teaching undergraduates and I thought I would like to teach them; then the SOAS job in the history department which was then under the command of the formidable Bernard Lewis, the great Ottoman historian who was terrifying and very much like my step-father; that was in every sense a very good move for me and I stayed there for nearly forty years; there was always a pretence of competition between anthropology and history, and I recollect the sloganizing that went on, the allegation that anthropologists denied history, and that African anthropologists especially said that Africa had no history that mattered now, and the continuing myth that they were still un-reconstructed structural functionalists; I think that the anthropologists thought we were a bunch of people who were only interested in dates and facts, and things of that sort; none of this was true, but boths myths of each other; but there were a lot of very constructive partnerships, with people like David Parkin in particular; David was a lovely colleague, honest, straightforward and decent, but sometimes an over-rigourous man; I felt disappointed by the fact that he increasingly left the world that I could understand for a world of linguistics; I found quite a lot of what he was writing about in mid to later career really very difficult, and felt the loss in a very real sense; I got on better, in intellectual terms, with Abner Cohen, who worked on my side of the continent, and wrote about things that I did understand; David was however, an incredibly constructive colleague, a great institution builder, which I think is why he went to Oxford at the end, and a very good team player

59:06:22 I used to go to Mary Douglas's seminar with great regularity; I also went to the seminars run by Lucy Mair and Ernest Gellner at the LSE, all of which was pretty unnerving stuff for a young historian; but I recognised at an early stage that one of the great things about African history was that it could take in anthropology; if it didn't understand and bother about anthropology it was dead in the water, and in a way, rather unlike history was at that time, this was one of the great challenges and excitements; the problem with it, of course, was that mastery of another methodology and the literature around it, was immensely time-consuming; that was true throughout my career, of realizing there were things in more general history that needed to be applied in Africa, which then had to have work done on them; the examples being things like population history, family history, things that still interest me very greatly; but they had no literature in Africa and no evident methodology, so one had to think a lot about them through things like the industrial revolution or family formation in nineteenth century Provence, all of which was enormous fun and convinced me of one of the skeins in my conviction career was that African history was history; it was just a bit of history that was not European history, but then European history is not African history, and they require respect for one another; that was very much lacking at the beginning of my career; one of the thrills in African history in the early 1960s was that it was condemned; Roland Oliver had a tremendous struggle to get any African papers onto the history examination board as there were many members of the history board of the University of London who said that Africa had no history; history was about documents and there were not many documents in Africa that were not written by white people, and the ones written by white people were imperial history, and we had imperial historians; establishing the fact that there were other ways of coming to history through things like archaeology and anthropology, was a very real struggle and particularly when it came to establishing a special subject

1:01:54:12 The problem was that people were always trying to impose European models of history onto Africa; I took my own models from things I knew about but they tended to be out of the magical realist world of the classical Aegean, and to a certain extent I would continue to justify that; I don't think it is a complete aberration when one does look at the Peloponnese in the pre-Homeric period; there is a way in which you could quite usefully use Africa to think of some of the problems of scale; that is a side issue; the problem was that people found African history slight in comparison with European history, not only because of the absence of documentation - how can a pre-literate continent leave a historical record - but there was also an absence of ruins, its built environment was constructed with mud bricks and fell down for the most part, with some exceptions like Great Zimbabwe, so there is an absence of a tactile past that condemns it; the very demanding quality of what had become Western history by the 1960s did make Africa look threadbare; I don't know how many times I have had to answer the question what do you do, and to my answer that I am an African historian, ask whether they have any; what was so thrilling about African history was exactly that it could only be built by a kind of bricolage of a variety of disciplines; some of the disciplines were well beyond me like linguistic chronology, much of which does turn out now to have been a waste of time, but a lot of the archaeology is incredibly technical, increasingly statistical and difficult, but the rest of the stuff really was very exciting and that necessarily was derived from some kinds of European models; some of the European models are really pernicious; an example was the invention of Ashanti bureaucracy by Ivor Wilks, and this is based on some notion that Weber didn't really mean that bureaucracy was about offices and desks but about routines and institutions, and the Ashanti had a bureaucracy; given that the Ashanti were some of the most violent opposers of written education, the predecessors of Boko Haram, if you like, and against missions precisely for those sorts of reasons, is somewhat ironic; also, the periodization of African history, talking about the African Middle Ages as though it had any meaning at all in terms of African's own understanding of the past, I think always invited criticism that it is not really like European history, so not real history; I think from the beginning we should have been a little more self-assured about what we had, and a little more honest about what we didn't have; I think one of the damaging things at the beginning of my experience as a student was the claim that somehow oral tradition was exactly the same a written documents; oral sources are not the same, but we under-discussed that; it was left to an anthropologist who became a historian, Jan Vansina, to really think through some of that, than the way in which some historians were using oral sources and oral tradition as though they were an archive when clearly the are not; but that is challenging and exciting, and you are left with all sorts of considerations of what Africans think history is, which is an intriguing question

1:07:14:15 The important thing about African history is that it is the motherland of us all; it is a continent that had a history, and to pretend that it did not is a function of ignorance, and consequently it is worth recapturing and has moments of great significance and importance for us in understanding our own past too; the general sense that one has of an entire continent, and the people of that continent have been denied a history, by functions of eighteenth century science, by imperialism, by the obduracy of intellectual arrogance, is something that did need redressing; I should now be redressed by African's themselves but unfortunately, because of the political economy of education in Africa, it tends not to be being done; I still think that the history of an entire continent is something that historians must be aware of and thoughtful about, not least because there are things that appear to have happened in Africa which are very thought-provoking when it comes to other parts of the world; I suspect that it is the case that I was more sensitised to things like the history of the family, which strikes me of one of the great advances made in historiography in general in the late twentieth century, had something to do with the fact that we recognized that Africa was a fascinating laboratory for every kind of format one could think of in terms of kinship and family; as important is the fact that the people who live in these lived worlds have a very high degree of self-awareness, and are important to them; other things that excited me at the time I started was a recognition that Africa had a population increase rate that was higher than anything ever recorded anywhere, and had exceeded the Latin American examples, with cases of 5% per annum - huge - and the implications of that for the world is something that I don't think is a completely played out set of issues; I don't know why that should be so; in later life I have become intrigued by, and completely unsatisfied by the answers to, of what seems to be pretty evident profound spirituality of much of Africa; the absolute significance of forms of spiritual expression in Africa does seem to be much more significant than anywhere else I can think of in the world; it is not the recapturing of the deep past, it is something that is African in a profound sense, not least because it is very evident in the large African diaspora too; I am intrigued why that should be so

1:11:45:10 On the current state of population growth, the data that J.C. Caldwell used in his work on population were mainly colonial censuses which were reasonably accurate; since then many post-colonial censuses have been so politicised that we really don't know; also we don't know how many people are leaving Africa because so much of it is illegal and undocumented; I think that the increase in population continues unchanged, but quite what the sources of it are, whether it is the push out of the countryside into towns - and Africa has many huge, rapidly expanding towns - I really don't know the answer to that; on family history and the work of Peter Laslett and others, it influenced me and another co-worker, Shula Marks - probably the most distinguished historian that I worked with, the great revisionist, Southern African historian; she and I worked closely together on a revisionist history, anti-liberal, seminar, which was I think in large measure a launch pad for the rather more robust Southern African history that dominates the stage; most of the people who are active in that world performed there first; she and I talked a lot about the impact of the histories of the other parts of the world and were very taken by Laslett and co. and also Jack Goody's thinking about how all of that worked out; we tried to create some sort of interest in the history of the family in Africa, staged a conference, and had a special number of the 'Journal of African History', which Shula and I wrote the introduction to, and were expecting lots of people to take up the challenge, but no such thing has occurred; both of us regard that as rather a tragedy, not least because within my own field work I have been very much aware of the absolute significance of the history of families, not just family, which echoes around almost every interview I have ever had; I suppose it has sunk as it is microcosmic, and that quite a lot of younger historians have tended to work on bigger subjects; there has been a seismic shift in Africa away from what allured me in the beginning, that it was the history of a continent; the number of people now doing pre-colonial history is minuscule, dwarfed by late twentieth century and early twenty-first century historians who work on proximately important things like famine, health, Aids - those sorts of issues; one of the great weakness of African history is that it has never focussed in on the absolute significance of doing your work in the vernacular; very few historians of Africa actually speak the languages of the places they work on, the argument being that the language groups are so small that you are wasting your time learning them; I think that is a very great difference between history and anthropology, and consequently there is a way in which the historiography has followed the languages, so where you get big language and big archive you will get more history written; there is very much less work on Portuguese Africa than there should be, and that is a great pity

1:17:41:09 Jack Goody's work has influenced me enormously; I have used his work as a teacher endlessly, and been stimulated by his work more than by any other scholar, both his work on literacy and illiteracy to begin with, then his work on technology, tradition and the state, which seemed to me the most important thing written about sequence and comparison since Engels, maybe, it has got that kind of profundity to it; the thoughtfulness of everything he has ever done has had a tremendous impact on me; his early ethnography is obviously very good but tends to be on parts of Ghana that I am not terribly interested in; in comparison with people who worked on those sorts of areas, like Rattray and so on, it is really impeccable; but he's always brimming over with ideas and has gone on doing so, and is a great facilitator and exciter of others, which is one of his great merits; he has been of great importance to me and my students, who have enjoyed his work

1:19:15:17 The book that I like most that I have written, and one that I enjoyed writing most, is Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana, which is essentially a detective story of a murder which may or may not have been a ritual murder in 1944, of a sub-Chief in the funeral ceremonies of a dead King; it was a good story and there was a lot of material on it that I unearthed in the archives; what was more significant was that many Ghanaians said it was a very important story, that you cannot possibly understand the motives of nationalism without thinking about this; I went away and worked on it and saw that it was a kind of peg to do things that seemed to have been neglected in the nationalist literature; the first was the significance of the countryside, and there was far too little written historically on what radicalism looked like there, what the passing of Ancien Regime meant; the other thing was the whole issue of traditional rule which to some extent the nationalist literature had seen as Ancien Regime and consequently doomed, as a doomed dyad of colonial rule itself, and that it would die; it manifestly had not died, and what was exciting about being in Ghana was that every day in the newspapers there were stories about chieftaincy; this was very much not a dead institution, but one that people were still fascinated by unless editors had got it badly wrong; so it was really a book about modernity in a way; there were some haunting images of for example the mausoleum in which the dead body was contained, and I spent a lot of time working physically in the area around it; it was a mausoleum that in 1944 was crossed by the first telegraph line in that part of West Africa, and about two miles away from a railway line; I loved the juxtaposition of a place where these things were going on side by side; similarly the ceremony where the ritual murder might or might not have occurred was one that was literally within listening distance of a Presbyterian church service in honour of the dead man; I liked those combinations of things; so it was a book about royalty and the death of royalty, about the nature of village politics and state politics, up-country, which had very little to do with trade unions and the sorts of things I had worked on before; that led on to the second book which was in a sense a follow-up, which was a broader discussion between nationalism and chieftaincy which I hope recast the nationalist movement in Ghanaian terms of suggesting that part of what it was about was the destruction of rural, ascribed hegemony, it was about destroying chieftaincy, which I hope I showed happened, that's what it did progressively between the nationalist party's first success in 1951 and it's being booted out of office in 1966; that in those fifteen years it effectively destroyed and institution that still had resources, and institutional ability, methods and a good deal of support, but was crushed; I found that an intriguing story and have continued to find it so; what is very weird for me is that having tried to recast bits of African history away from its urban focus into a more rural one, in a bizarre kind of way the new Africa is sporting more and more chieftaincy; chieftaincy is being reinvigorated in the new democratic states of Africa in a big way, including, amazingly, South Africa, where chieftaincy is being respected and put in place in constitutional terms, as responsible, respectable, voices of and authentic, non-European derived kind of government; it is being respected by N.G.O's, government bodies outside Africa, as the channels through which you can push aid; so the revival of chieftaincy is fascinating for me; it is not dead, as I try to argue; but I am also interested in the ways that chieftaincy isn't just political; that is something that I wish I had had more time to do, and had more physical ability to have done more field work; I remain very interested in the spiritual necessity [,] as seen by participants, of chieftains in the maintenance of spiritual order, the order of ancestry and so on, and that goes back to the family history issue; families aren't just people who are alive, but also people who are dead, and that was always apparent to me from interviews; that had a bearing on space, and how house space was seen - sort of Marc Bloch stuff

1:25:42:02 As Western ideas of democracy are now being shown to be possibly not universally applicable, in Africa chieftaincy might be a way of governing as long as one sees that it is nothing like chieftaincy of the past; I am very struck by a wonderful video that I have of a very important Ashanti first fruits ceremony in Ghana, which took place in 1993, in which the Chiefs on parade on this great day of glitter, bling and gold everywhere, I know most of them and the vast majority are cardiac surgeons and accountants, so there is a way in which Chiefs are very different kinds of figures; when working in the Kingdom where I did field work for some time, I was always struck by how they dressed in clothes similar to those we know from the nineteenth century, in kente cloth, which is very much like a toga, very beautiful with gold thread in it, but almost invariably they had Ray-Ban sunglasses and Rolex watches that gave the game away; I love those juxtapositions

1:27:29:05 The last thing I worked on was with a young colleague who used to be my student, John Parker, which was in the Oxford University Press series of short introductions; this was A Very Short Introduction to African History; since then I have been thinking about biography, and to think about what African biography might look like, and what I didn't like, stimulated in part by John Iliffe’s life of Obasanjo , which I reviewed for The Contemporary Review] it is a wonderful, dutiful, scholarly life which is lifeless in my submission, and I wondered what it was about what I wanted about the biography, what I expected, which seemed very difficult to squeeze out of African stones, and whether it is that we have very different ideas about life, and what a life should look like, or how you can reclaim a life in literary terms, but also to realize that those lives are different, that relationships with parents that are so central to our own understandings of biography are not very African ways of looking at childhood, for example; the whole notion of childhood begins to interest me more and more, thinking of Esther Goody's work on fostering which is very exciting in those terms; some of those things are exercising me at the moment and I think I am working up to something on that

1:29:33:08 Music has always been important to me as a listener but not as a doer; my wife got fed up with me saying that I wished I could make that noise, and fobbed me off with five singing lessons; I discovered I could sing, I learnt to read music and did exams to grade six, and I now do quite a lot of choral singing and enjoy that enormously; I am also Chairman of the Mid Welsh Chamber Orchestra, which is a professional orchestra, so I listen to a lot of music and have a lot to do with musicians, and I find it a very fulfilling and important part of my life; I sing a lot of Baroque music, but also love Fauré, Britten, Poulenc and so on; I do listen to music while working, but usually to pacify myself and calming me down; I see things when I hear music, and quite a lot of the things I see are African, but sometimes closer to home; there is a Shostakovitch quintet which someone once said was a soundtrack to the Holocaust and I was very taken by that as an image, so there are things that I listen to that are soundtracks to things I have seen, or have worked on; I think I have a rather filmic sense of the past which is quite a negative, bad thing to have; I like writing; I write on the computer now, and I suppose it comes as an utter relief from the past; I was recalling to a young colleague that I had typed up my own thesis in three copies, with onion skin copy paper in between, and of course, every error has to be rubbed out with an eraser; the sheer agony of that, so being able to do it with a keystroke is heaven; I do like to be able to work things over and over; I care about style and hope that I write with a little bit; one thing that I would say about African history in general is that it has tended to be stodgy, and I can't look back at much of what I have read that has made me feel carried away by the prose, with one or two exceptions; it is partly because it is a very defensive field, always covering its back against accusations that it is being patronising, which is a pity; a sadness is that the great struggle that I saw with my predecessors, like Roland Oliver and Philip Curtin, to attempt to validate African history to a world of historians who didn't really believe there was any, is now something that is being lost again, because of the underfunding of institutions which say that the funding of African history is less important than other trendy things that will bring in students; I think there are fewer historians of Africa in Britain now than there were twenty years ago, which I find a depressing thought.

APPENDIX BY PROFESSOR RATHBONE

[Written in April - May 2013, after the interview]

As I suggested in the interview, the birth and early childhood of the academic study of African history were troubled as well as being exhilarating. Although some senior figures in university history departments welcomed new developments, many were obstructive and were so for a variety of reasons. The struggle for institutional and canonical acceptance contributed to the character of the field in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of those formative influences were entirely positive: the sense of being part of an albeit lightly persecuted minority made for a crusading camaraderie which is unusual in the academic snake-pit. Opposition to the project had, however, some less admirable effects.

Insecurity can generate prickly defensiveness and I think many of us were too prone to write-off all gainsayers as unimaginative conservatives at best and reactionary racists at worst even if some their criticism was not without justification. The propensity to find obstructive, sneering malice in our opponents owed something to the sense of being embattled but it also owed much to the fact that we were not a random sample of formally qualified historians. The gestation of African historical studies in the universities occurred within a particularly vivid conjuncture. It was a natural companion to the rapid rise of African nationalism and the decline of European tropical empires. While nationalist ideas had swirled around the African continent for decades, those ideas were transformed into active popular movements after 1945. These looked increasingly as though they might prevail not least because the colonial powers, weakened by a World War and now overshadowed by two super-powers, each in different ways opposed to colonialism, seemed either unable or unwilling to resist what came to be called decolonisation. The deeper and more detailed history of the continent was naturally a significant element in a core nationalist argument revealing gradually as it did the richness of a past in which Africans had successfully governed one another before the rude intervention of European powers.

Accordingly one of the attractions of this new field of African history was that it was inherently anti-colonial and hence somewhat subversive, a fact that did not endear it to those scholars and others who did not share in the wider ambition of ending colonial rule. The recruits to African history’s ranks were therefore mostly radical, more often than not left-liberals and almost universally deeply sympathetic to the struggle for independence. Such radicalism wasn’t solely generated by gauchiste political persuasion; some notable figures in the early days of African historical studies had become attached to Africa, excited by its past and enthusiastic about its future through their involvement with agencies of those Christian churches which were active in Africa. Lastly, Britain’s attempt to modernize colonialism after 1945 included the setting-up of universities in many of its African territories. The teaching staff of their history departments, both British and increasingly African, were hugely important cheer-leaders for the new field; gradually as British teaching staff were replaced by a new generation of African post-doctoral scholars, returning British scholars, pioneers in African historical field work and in African archives such as John Hargreaves, John Fage, Sam Shepperson and somewhat later, Terence Ranger, John Iliffe and John Lonsdale were to become prominent members of the university community of historians of Africa in the United Kingdom.

Mutual concerns and a degree of shared political attitudes made for an amicable as well as an exciting collegiality but it was perhaps rather too close to being like the paranoid family in conflict with the rest of the world or more generously perhaps, being rather too congenial and too un-self-critical. Looking back on the 1960s and early 1970s especially, there was, I think, a discernible tendency to reconstruct not THE African past but an African past which was eventually satirized as “Merrie Africa” by my near contemporary both at school and university, Tony Hopkins. The temptation to segue from a present sympathetic affection for Africa and Africans to the suggestion of a past which maximised its undeniable and considerable achievements whilst being more silent about less admirable aspects of the past, things which are present in the histories of all of our ancestors such as violence, gender inequalities and cruel irrationality, is evident. We were all deeply and rightly committed to revising the all too prevalent view of Africa’s past as being at best “the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes”, a view advanced by the influential historian Hugh Trevor Roper first in 1963 and re-presented in Past and Present (42) in 1969. While there was abundant evidence to show just how absurdly ignorant Trevor Roper’s - and others’ - posturing was, much of the counter-argument sought to propose that the history of Africa was not only not “barbarous” but that it was also far more like the better-known histories of Europe than conservative scoffers like Trevor Roper had suggested. There was an implicit fear that even if it was conceded that Africa had a past, then that past ran the risk of being seen as exotic or as Trevor Roper, in a rather gentler mood, had suggested, “picturesque”.

Exoticism, what I suppose we would now call “otherness” was too close to “savagery” for comfort; consequently too much of the early general literature deploys a language which flattens the exciting particularities of Africa’s past. So much of that early literature routinises the elusive and that which is hard to comprehend for those outside the immediate culture. In some cases it appears to have avoided making eye-contact with such matters For example while there is an abundant bibliography on the fate of the two major world religions which are now so firmly embedded in Africa, there were and still are remarkably few books which could be seen as attempts to present histories of African “traditional” religions. In its early days African history was for the most part notably thin on what we might regard as religious history and intellectual history. It was instead a child of its time, a historiography dominated by political history and especially a political history which suggested both past greatness and, more recently, dignified histories of “resistance” whose protagonists were sometimes quite explicitly presented as the ancestors on the family trees of modern nationalist parties.

This tendency was in part the consequence of the close relationship between nationalism and the development of the new field of African history. Our relationship to nationalism was in some cases manifest in our close personal relationship with African nationalist politicians, an intimacy whose root causes are obvious; politicians found the growing revelations of research-based history to be strong ammunition whilst historians, and I must include myself, enjoyed the door-opening privileges which can arise from being known to be a friend of the powerful. The 1950s and 1960s were an extraordinary time in Africa where scholars including scruffy if interested research students, hardly the glitterati, had easy access to those who were about to rule or already ruled large, modern states. That however is an aside. More importantly there was an undoubted tendency to adopt some of the ambitions of nationalism within scholarly accounts in a teleological fashion. Some of those ambitions, such as liberation from alien over-rule, continue to strike me as unarguable. More troubling from an historiographical point of view, however, was the implicit project of “nation-building”.

With few exceptions the nations which nationalists had come to control or still sought to liberate were colonial creations; pre-colonial polities were sometimes incorporated within colonial states and as often actually straddled distinct colonial borders. At the time most social scientists seemed to agree that the enlargement of scale implicit in “nation-building” was an unarguably good thing; innumerable books were written about the importance of overcoming the impediments to the creation of new national identities and of stressing the virtues of economies of scale. There was, in much of the commentary, an inevitability about all of this. Historians contributed to this teleological assumption by writing national histories of what were commonly called “new states”, some of which were considerably less than a century old, and began their accounts with early man. That mattered less perhaps than the implicit assumption that post-colonial “nations”, the constructs, after all, of recent colonial cartography, diplomatic contingency and subsequent institution-building, constituted something like a “natural order”. For those enthused by the idea of Pan-Africanism, an admirable idealistic ambition consistently undermined by the meaner realities of national politics, the post-colonial nation-state was merely the penultimate stage; these stages were, however, regarded as progressive and seen as steps upwards. But lost in all of this was the uncomfortable truth that the borders of modern African states were not, for the most part, derived from those of historical polities or cultures. Nationalism was uncomfortable with these other often multiple and always deeper often ancient histories because their particularity appeared to undermine the integrity of the hard-won independent nation state. To talk-up these exciting histories appeared to some to be siding with the fissiparous and treasonous subversion of “tribalism”. This tension was to matter greatly to me when I came to try to write a history of just such a pre-colonial state embedded within the modern nation state of Ghana, a history of which provided a very different narrative which jarred with that of the orthodox nationalist historiography of Ghana.

While the relationship between nationalism and historiography is something of a caricature, it was enough of a problem to lead to an important debate inaugurated by the publication in African Affairs – which, with Alison Smith, I then edited - of an article by Donald Denoon, (an historian) and Adam Kuper (an anthropologist) which attacked what they called “nationalist historiography”. The article provoked lots of support and as much anger but it was an important corrective at an important moment. By 1970, many Africans were themselves questioning the bona fides of the nationalist elite who in many parts of Africa had been a ruling elite for many years with what dispassionate observers had to conclude were mixed results. It would be foolish to credit a single provocative polemic as the cause of the emergence of more critical and divergent historiography of Africa but, looking back over the literature, the 1970s do seem to have constituted the moment when scholars involved in African historical studies seem to have become confident enough to, amongst other things, fall out with one another and to do so publicly.

The wider literature in the 1970s also suggests a very healthy retreat from and then a re-evaluation of some of the sillier propositions which had been advanced in the very early days of this new field. For example, the notion that oral tradition could have been both transmitted without alteration through generations and that it could be regarded as attempts to chronicle past events took a battering; some of that is evident in the revisions made in 1985 by Jan Vansina to his 1965 publication on oral tradition. But more generally no serious historian of Africa would have claimed by the end of the 1970s that oral tradition could bear the same kind of critical examination that written documentation invites. At a less specific level, “Merrie Africa” appeared with less and less frequency from the late 1970s. It faded like the Cheshire Cat and did so at exactly the same time that African Studies entered a new, less exuberant phase, a period of gloom that is widely called “Afro-pessimism”.

Another and probably less obvious tension which can be traced back to the early days of the field is that between the pioneers of African history and established scholars in the field of what is often called Imperial history. So far as Britain was concerned, African historical studies in the university first saw the light of day in SOAS, a college of the University of London. In the 1950s and 1960s, London University’s History School was an impressive inter-collegiate affair. Undergraduate students could technically attend lectures and tutorials at any constituent college, providing them thereby with an extraordinary choice of courses given that the School comprised well over 200 academics. The management of this enterprise was controlled by a Board of Studies which scrutinised and then authorised – or rejected - proposed courses and which controlled the immensely complex examination system. This then was the immediate arena in which a thoroughly unconstructive war of attrition between the leading figures in the history of Africa then based at SOAS and historians of the British Empire mainly based at the sister college, King’s College, took place. The grounds for this were obvious enough. Imperial history had for decades been the only available route into the history of Africa and Africans. Books and courses called “the British overseas” or “European activities in Africa” abounded providing very scholarly but somewhat monocular accounts of the history of empires and imperial settlement based entirely upon metropolitan sources and being relatively un-concerned with what came to be called “the African point of view”.

With hindsight it is obvious that a perfectly good deal could have been struck to the mutual benefit of not only the individuals concerned but also to the more precious goal of wider historical understanding. The tensions between the two fields should have been constructive and could have led to collaboration in the form of, for example, published collections and conferences. Instead hostilities broke out. There were personalities involved; Roland Oliver disliked Gerald Graham, the then Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s, and Gerry Graham disliked Oliver. Graham endeavoured to obstruct Oliver on the Board of Studies; political necessity required that Oliver built alliances against Graham. The upshot was entirely regrettable. For decades, no imperial historian attended SOAS’s weekly African history research seminar, the first such seminar in the world, and no Africanist historian attended the several imperial history seminars at King’s or the Institute of Historical Research despite the once strong – and excellent - London tradition of attending seminars held in other colleges, which by way of valuable comparison often dealt with subjects away from one’s individual specialisms. Au fond there was, one supposes, a mutual suspicion about the capacity of either field to steal one another’s clothes. This was however dignified by constructed disapprovals with accompanying mythologies. Africanists regarded imperial historians as hopelessly reactionary apologists for empire who ignored the histories of the subjected. From the other side of the barricades, Africanists were regarded as Johnny- come- latelys, would be trendies who made bricks without straw, fabulists who made elaborate historical narratives out of scant evidence and prejudice rather than analysis.

While this caricatures a situation that has changed positively and radically over time – Peter Marshall and Andrew Porter who were both to hold the Rhodes Chair were and are my close colleagues and good friends, it remained the case that imperial history was held at arms length rather than being engaged with; and the quarantine was extended in some cases to include scholars who chose to work upon histories of colonialism as though being interested in, for example, the history of colonial institutions necessarily implied an unhealthy concern with the activities of white men and an indifference towards the experiences of Africans. There was a lingering and entirely unjustified suspicion about the intentions of imperial historians.

Empires, imperialism and colonialism were, from the Africanist point of view, unequivocally bad things and, illogically, it followed that those who studied them were somehow up to no good; it was an entirely illogical position because, inter alia, there was a perfectly good tradition of red-blooded anti-imperialist imperial history but, more importantly, a great deal of imperial history was outstandingly good and helpful to those of us trying to decode “the imperial moment” in Africa. It wasn’t just a constructed aversion to imperial history that risked distorting the shape of African historical reconstruction. The distortion included the tendency to telescope colonial experiences so that it became commonplace to extrapolate from singular and particular conjunctures; the colonial experience of, say, Uganda, might be assumed to have been very similar to that of anywhere else in Africa. A further consequence was the loss of a sense of the dynamic of colonial rule so that in too much Africanist historical writing, colonial rule was barely periodized – as it was in the beginning, is now, so to speak; consequently it had a flat quality which ignored the fact that everywhere and at every time colonialism was a process. Colonialism and its practises became depicted as simply and unvaryingly malignant. Partly as a result of this, we lack, with some notable exceptions, a solid corpus of work on the institutional histories of colonial Africa. The particular ways in which justice systems, police forces, medical services, educational systems and so forth emerged remain unanswered questions for many colonial states; this hampers not only historical understanding but also a better informed grasp of the nature of modern African states whose institutions these are.

This relative unwillingness to explore these aspects of the 20th century history of Africa in favour of concentrating upon the overdue and exciting narratives of liberation contributed to a tendency to regard African opponents of colonial rule as noble resisters and those who welcomed or profited from colonial rule as “collaborators”, a simplistic and value-laden as well as a toxic taxonomy. Similarly this rather monocular approach has resulted, in far too many general works, in an assumption that conquest was the only route to colonial control. There has been a tendency to marginalise or ignore the fascinating stories of the fragility of early colonial rule, the moments in which colonial powers were only one of several competing, and of course African, political forces in a given region.

Our early discomfort with the chronicling of colonial rule contributed to an inward-looking reticence when it came to inter-continental comparison. Again, a more open engagement with the work of imperial historians might have been beneficial as the concerns of many of the best imperial historians are not confined to the experiences of one continent; a marvellous example of just that is Jim Belich’s fine global history of white settlers, Replenishing the earth. That wider conspectus offers up not only the chance of comparison but also sharpens the sense of what it is that is particular or universal about this or that aspect of the history of Africa. We might, for example, have benefitted from a greater awareness of the histories of the Americas in both pre-Columban and colonial times, which a closer involvement with imperial historians might have sparked off..

For some historians, colonial records were themselves profoundly suspect. Some Africanist historians eschewed the use of colonial records to the point of not consulting the metropolitan national archives almost as a matter of principle. The argument went that sources dealing with Africans in such archives and collections were written by European colonialists; their understandings of Africans and African processes were indelibly and fatally tainted by ignorance at best and by the distortions attendant upon the colonialists’ racist and exploitative intentions at worst. Accordingly these records were virtually worthless. All that could be relied upon to reconstruct the African past were African sources and the neutrally scientific evidence provided by, for example, archaeology, linguistics or climatology. This might read like caricature but this is replaying real conversations with, thankfully, a few rather than many historians of Africa. That position was, of course, profoundly silly not least because a good deal of the ethnographic observation and analysis in “colonial sources”, for example, was ultimately the work of literate Africans, District Clerks, chiefs, court clerks, even if it was finally signed- off as “my own work” by this or that District Official. Few colonial officers had enough linguistic ability and few of them had spent enough time resident in the regions described in such detail to have written such material un-aided. And in some cases they lacked the intelligence to write the abundant and often rich material I have spent a lot of my research career working over. Like all sources, these were shaped, even deformed, by basic needs and wants; the old questions about sources remain relevant - who were they written for, who read them, what were the expectations placed upon the writer and readers, what was outcome the writer sought to achieve - and it is one of the historian’s task’s to parse, to analyse, to filter and fillet such material so that bias and misinformation become as apparent as the unarguable gems of reliable information. All of us were eager to hear “the African voice” and careful listening had and still has the potential to unearth a great deal of that in the colonial archives.

Although disinclination to engage with such material was a characteristic of some but by no means all Africanist historians, there was a more widespread tendency to regard all colonial activity as a priori malign from top to toe. In this respect African historical studies, a field which emerged as we have seen, in part as a radical development in the wider ambit of historical study was and still can be strangely old-fashioned in its propensity to be judgemental; most historians of my generation and those we went on to teach had learnt to despise the older habits of triumphalism and the allocation of innocence and blame when dealing with historical processes; this was, after all, the essence of anachronism and ahistoricality. I am certainly no apologist for empire or imperialists but continue to think that it is more scholarly to come to conclusions on the basis of evidence than from a priori assumptions. As someone whose initial emotional attraction to African historical studies had a great deal to do with its inherently anti-racist stance, I am distressed to encounter a good deal of often explicit essentialism when it comes to dealing with colonialism; some historians of Africa appear to be comfortable with what feels very much like an inverted “Orientalism”, namely an “Occidentalism” which trots out unqualified over-simplifications like “The West”, “the French” or “Europeans” and appears to be not much interested in the beliefs, ideas, intentions let alone the variety of those who attempted to control much of Africa for a century. Historical Africans deserved to be regarded, as I hope they now are, as thinking, feeling individuals whose place in the history of the world we are beginning to understand; we are now much more acutely aware, for example, of the role of Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, to use John Thornton’s words. Africans have now been rescued, I hope, from the condescension of being regarded as either insignificant masses or as undifferentiated victims. But we will fail to understand the colonial period until we take the “imperial dimension” and its sources more seriously, something to which I feel sure the best younger historians of Africa are committed. The colonial period was much more interesting and much more complex than an extended unvarying calamity. A more comprehensive engagement with the work of those described as imperial historians might produce much more satisfying histories which in no sense “let the colonialists off the hook”; David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged for example combines a fine examination of Kikuyu politics in the 20th century with a detailed, dispassionate analysis of the brutal British colonial regime in the 1950s. Such work demonstrates that colonialism was not just something that happened to Africans; it was a set of processes in which Africans were involved. As we become more engaged with untangling all of that, historians of Africa stand a very good chance of illuminating what successor generations will see as one of the dominant themes in 20th century world history, namely the establishment and eventually the termination of empires in Africa.