Robin Hallett, historian; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Teacher at the forefront of African historical studies
Gerald Shaw and Peter Sanders
Saturday March 8, 2003
The Guardian
The writer and lecturer Robin Hallett, who has died of cancer aged 76, was a
key figure in promoting African historical studies. While he found the
British academic establishment reluctant to accept the subject as
appropriate for undergraduate study, he was able to overcome this prejudice
while working in South Africa.
Born in Bihar, India, Hallett was the son of the governor of the United
Provinces, and grew up speaking Hindustani. Sent to school in England at the
age of six, he became, in his own words, an "orphan of the Raj", seeing his
parents only rarely. From preparatory school in Horsham, Surrey, he went to
Winchester College.
A year after his military service started in 1945, he was trained in
intelligence, and posted to Austria, where he met his future wife, Inge
Friedl. They were married in 1950, after Hallett had taken a history degree
at New College, Oxford, where his tutor was Alan Bullock.
Following a period as an extramural lecturer for the Workers' Educational
Association in the Potteries and Norfolk, in 1956 he went to Africa. He
taught at what was then the University College of Ibadan, in northern
Nigeria, and at the Niger College of Arts, Sciences and Technology, becoming
deeply interested in African history and affairs. From 1959, he spent two
years with the British Council in Dar-es-Salaam, in what is now Tanzania.
Returning to London, Hallett came across the unexamined records of the
African Association in the archives of the Royal Geographic Society. The
society invited him to edit the documents, and they served as a major source
for his first book, The Penetration Of Africa (1965).
That same year, Hallett was appointed to a research post at the Oxford
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, where he stayed for six years. He also
wrote on Africa in the University of Michigan's series of histories of the
modern world: Africa Before 1875 (1970) and Africa Since 1875 (1974). While
producing them, he suffered a series of retinal detachments, which left him
blind in one eye and with restricted sight in the other.
Brought up in a strong imperial tradition, and having worked in Africa in
the last years of the colonial regimes, Hallett could not align himself with
the more ardent anti-colonialists. He noted that the colonial impact varied
from society to society, and that the greater the number of newcomers - as
in South Africa or Algeria - the more disruptive it proved for local
communities. At the same time, he acknowledged the benefits of the colonial
pax that was established, and the positive development in medical services
and education.
At Oxford, however, Hallett found himself in a distinctly marginalised
position, and, in 1972, he moved to the University of Cape Town. There, he
joined Christopher Saunders and Eric Axelson, the eminent scholar of the
Portuguese in Africa, in developing African history as a major theme of
study.
Hallett regarded these years as the most rewarding of his life. In his
lectures, he sought to give students a sense of the range and dynamism of
African cultures. He wrote in a popular, accessible style, always with a
strong sense of moral purpose. Borrowing EP Thompson's celebrated phrase, he
said that he sought to rescue the exploited, the marginalised and the
alienated from "the enormous condescension of posterity".
Returning to Britain in 1978, Hallett settled in Church Stretton,
Shropshire, and became a regular contributor to liberal South African
newspapers. He paid his last visit to his beloved Cape Town in January 2001.
During his final illness, poems poured from his pen in a seemingly
unstoppable flow.
His wife died in 1996. He is survived by two daughters and a son.
· Robin Hallett, historian, born December 13 1926; died February 10 2003