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
