A Tribute to a Great Historian and Africanist, Professor George Shepperson

Professor George “Sam” Albert Shepperson CBE (1922-2020) wrote the seminal Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising 1915 (1958). This is still the most extensive work on key Malawian nationalist John Chilembwe. He organised an uprising against imperial British rule.

Professor Shepperson’s Independent African was also one of the first scholarly works on African history. The latest edition of The Society of Malawi Journal (Historical & Scientific) pays tribute to the professor. Our director Muti Etter-Phoya contributed (take a look on page 16),

Over 50 years before the current movement to decolonise the curricula (against the far-reaching tangles of colonialism, imperialism and racism and how these have shaped academic knowledge and disciplines over the last two centuries), Shepperson’s seminal work has stood as a model for scholarship of a different kind. In Chilembwe, Shepperson would paint a nuanced portrait of a figure who story perhaps best encapsulated the “significant and dangerous consequences of cultural contract and conflict…an absorbing account of the complex titantic struggle between western imperialism and culture, and [African] integrity and self-respect on the other” (Franklin, 1959).

Check out the latest edition with many special, creative tributes to Professor Shepperson who helped change the way the story of African nationalists are told.