Roland Oliver

Roland Anthony Oliver FBA (30 March 1923 – 9 February 2014) was an English academic and emeritus professor of African history at the University of London.

Biography Oliver was born in Srinagar, the summer capital of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the British Raj in 1923. Educated at Stowe School, he read English at King's College, Cambridge until the outbreak of World War II. He served as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park during the course of the war, and returned to the University of Cambridge to study history. His doctoral research was supervised by Norman Sykes.

In 1948, Roland Oliver joined the staff of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, where he was successively lecturer, reader and professor until his retirement in 1986. His appointment marked the beginning of the contemporary academic field of African history. The African History Seminar that he founded and chaired at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) became the most important venue for the advancement of the academic discipline of African history anywhere in the world, and has profoundly influenced all subsequent scholarship on the subject. The archive of papers presented at the seminar was later destroyed. In 1963, he carried out a survey of 250 working Africanist academics in the United Kingdom and founded the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) itself. He became its fourth President in 1966–67. He was among the founders of the Minority Rights Group in 1969.

Books The Missionary Factor in East Africa, 1952. Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa, 1957. A Short History of Africa (with John Fage), 1962, 6th edition 1988. Africa since 1800 (with Anthony Atmore) 1967. Africa in the Iron Age (with Brian Fagan) 1975. The African Middle Ages (with Anthony Atmore) 1981. The African Experience: From Olduvai Gorge to the 21st Century, 1991, Revised 1999. In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History, 1997.

Personal life His first marriage to Caroline ended with her death in 1983.