an ignored but terrible chapter in the history of The Great War

In November this year we will remember the ending of the First World War, the Great War, the war to end all wars. We know it best through the remarkable artistic reaction to its brutality. From school onwards most of us have read the vivid poetry and prose of writers like Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and of course David Jones and Hedd Wyn. We have seen plays like ‘Journeys End’ and films like ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’.

Most of us think of the Great War in terms of the mud and blood of the western front. We tend to forget another campaign that took place over huge tracts of land and water in equatorial eastern Africa. Maybe we forget because it was a campaign whose artistic memorials are fewer and less forgivably, perhaps, we forget it because the majority of its victims both military and civilian were African.

In his talk Richard will be looking at that campaign not as a sideshow of the terrible slaughter on Flanders Fields but as another quite distinctive human disaster. To the relief of some and at the risk of disappointing others, his focus will not be much concerned with military detail but with the scale and nature of that disaster.

A report of the meeting by Clive Barrett is available to download.

Speaker biography

Richard was born in war-time London. His mother and father worked for the BBC. However, his father was an RAF pilot and was killed soon after Richard’s birth. His childhood and education were spent in and around London. In 1964 he began his research career at the School of Oriental African Studies where he worked under a pioneer historian of Africa, Roland Oliver. He was appointed to teach history there in 1969. He worked there until his early retirement in 2003. During that time he served as Chairman of the University of London’s Centre for African Studies and Dean of Postgraduate Studies and was promoted to chair in Modern African History in 1994. London life was episodically interrupted by a series of long research trips to Ghana which he had become excited by as an exchange student in the University of Ghana, Legon in 1963. A variety of fellowships took him for long attachments to universities in CapeTown , Johannesburg , Harvard and Princeton as well as for shorter periods to Bordeaux, Lesotho and Toronto.

He has been married to the writer Frances Thomas for many years and since he retired they have divided their time between London and rural mid-Wales. This is reflected in his current appointments as Emeritus Professor and professorial research associate at SOAS and as honorary professor in history at Aberystwyth University. He has served on the Council of the Royal Historical Society, most recently as one of its vice-presidents. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

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