My former doctoral supervisor Andrew Roberts, who has died aged 87, was one of a now almost-vanished cohort of scholars whose imagination was captured in the 1960s by the possibilities of studying African history.
Andrew spent much of the 60s as a researcher in Africa, including time at the University of Dar es Salaam – a noted centre for new work on African history – and the University of Zambia in Lusaka. In the early 70s he took up a post as lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (now Soas University of London) and remained there until his retirement as a professor in 1998.
Andrew was born in Newcastle upon Tyne. His mother, Janet Adam Smith, was a writer and literary editor; his father, Michael, was headteacher of the Royal grammar school. Andrew went to Westminster school in London, after which he did national service in Ghana, where his main role was to prepare soldiers for the upcoming independence celebrations and where his interest in African history began.
Afterwards he gained a degree in modern history at Cambridge University and, disappointed by the limited opportunities to study African history in the UK, moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US. There the historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina had just begun to recruit young scholars to pursue pioneering work on the oral tradition and history of Africa.
Andrew’s consequent doctoral research on the Bemba, which became the book History of the Bemba: Political Growth and Change in North Eastern Zambia Before 1900 (1974), was inspired by the urge to counter the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s jibe about the impossibility of studying Africa’s past.
Innovative in his insistence on the possibility of writing African history from oral sources, Andrew took a rigorously unsentimental approach that was not always well-suited to the debates that came to divide the new field of African historical study.
While some looked to African history for a “usable past” that would help in the task of nation-building, he was sceptical of attempts to cast the states that gained independence in the 60s as historical “nations” – as he made clear in his 1976 book, A History of Zambia.
In his emphasis that Africans were not simply historical victims, Andrew found that he was not only battling a European academic establishment, as for radical historians the emphasis on what came to be called African “agency” could read like an attempt to shift the blame for historical injustice away from colonialism.
By the time he left Soas Andrew had become a rather marginal figure in a field of academic study that he had done so much to consolidate. He retired gracefully to pursue his other interests, which included opera, photography and art.
He is survived by three siblings, Henrietta, Adam and Johnnie.
