When John Iliffe, who has died aged 87, wrote his book The African Poor: A History (1987), the continent was readily dismissed by many academics as a home of problems and poverty, with no intellectual depth. But Iliffe acknowledged no such limitations, and it came as no surprise that it won the African Studies Association’s best book prize, then known as the Herskovits prize.
In Iliffe’s view, people who are excluded from production, productive resources and land in otherwise land-rich economies are not just statistics who merely suffer. Their individual and collective struggles create a history of heroism and refusal to surrender. They also change social structures by their ambition to continue to struggle and perhaps one day to succeed.
The book’s account starts in Ethiopia in the 13th century and continues to the South Africa of the early 1980s. One of the problems of such a range is the sheer breadth and depth of a huge pluralistic continent. Iliffe was adept at archival research in German and French as well as in English, from missionary correspondence to more modern documents. He retrieved accounts by Africans themselves, and interviewed many.
Honour in African History (2005), with its analysis of kingship states and the less formal flatline societies, shows that common to both were clearly identifiable forms, and norms, of what in European history was called chivalry, and was passed down through family trees. This operated at both a heroic level, with a strong military background, and at that of the householder, maintaining community values.
However, the sense of nobility could also lead to a pride that was problematic. In his book The African Aids Epidemic: A History (2006), Iliffe explains why HIV/Aids was so devastating there: “Africa had the worst Aids epidemic, because it had the first epidemic established in the general population before anyone knew the disease existed.”
Iliffe delves into issues of shame, of loss of social face. “I’d rather die than admit in public I have this disease,” was a not unusual refrain – and indeed the denialism of the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, marked an attempt on behalf of Africa as a whole to avoid the stigma associated with the disease. In the case of South Africa, one estimate gave the resulting number of unnecessary deaths as 330,000.
It took the president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, to begin the public lifting of stigma when in 1987 he announced that his own son had died of HIV/Aids. Iliffe gives an empathetic rendition of the cultural and psychological aspects of what many dismissed as ignorance and stubbornness, pointing to the complex relationship between honour, shame and guilt in changing societies. East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession (1998) ends with an account of significant work done in studying and controlling the disease.
Iliffe’s Africans: The History of a Continent (1995) tells the story of survival in a hostile environment from the origins of mankind until the HIV/Aids epidemic. It also details how the outside world came into contact with the continent, often violently or exploitatively, both in terms of the impact and the African response.
Again, the sweep of literature that Iliffe cites indicates his assiduous prowess in reading and research. The PhD researchers whom he supervised at Cambridge credited him for his rigour and the care he took of their academic wellbeing and progress.
Iliffe never forgot his roots as a young researcher himself from 1965 in Tanganyika, which the previous year had merged with Zanzibar to form the nation of Tanzania. In his six years there he was a lecturer and then reader in history at the University of Dar es Salaam. He and his colleagues pioneered an approach to the historiography of Africa that began with the testimonies of Africans. At the start of the 20th century the region was a German colony, and the first two of Iliffe’s 10 books were Tanganyika Under German Rule (1969), the subject of his PhD, and A Modern History of Tanganyika (1979).
Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, John was the younger son of Violet (nee Thorpe) and Arthur Iliffe, a bank manager, and grew up in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire.
From Framlingham college in Suffolk he went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, gaining his first degree in 1961 and his PhD in 1965. At 1,046 pages his dissertation was so long by today’s standards that it played a part in the university’s capping PhDs at 80,000 words.
After his time in Tanzania, in 1971 he returned to Cambridge, now to St John’s College, with some time in the 1980s spent teaching in Malawi. Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1989, the following year he was appointed professor of African history at Cambridge.
Following his retirement as emeritus in 2006, he remained at St John’s, continuing with research and updating publications. His final book was Obasanjo, Nigeria and the World (2011).
Never a theoretician, Iliffe was a man of the field, analysing all that he saw and experienced. His work was regarded internationally as the model of what engaged research should be, in a way that would be difficult to sustain today.
His brother, Ross, predeceased him, and he is survived by two nieces and two nephews.
• John Iliffe, historian, born 1 May 1939; died 20 August 2026
