Stephen Ellis

Stephen Ellis (13 June 1953 – 29 July 2015) was a British historian and Africanist whose research focused on post-colonial West Africa and South Africa. He was a former editor of Africa Confidential and African Affairs, a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre Leiden, and a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Life and career Ellis was born in Nottingham, England on 13 June 1953. At the age of 18, he volunteered as a secondary school teacher in Douala, Cameroon. Upon his return to England, he studied modern history at St. Catherine's College, University of Oxford and obtained his doctorate there in 1981. In 1979 and 1980, he was a lecturer at the University of Madagascar, while conducting research for his doctoral thesis on the history of Madagascar.

From 2003 to 2004, Ellis was Director of the Africa program of the International Crisis Group, where he expanded the group's reporting on Nigeria and South Africa. In 2008, he was invited to act as an expert witness at the opening of Liberian President Charles Taylor's trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Hague, and then to give expert testimony at the Sierra Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was an advisor to the West Africa Commission on Drugs, chaired by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, in 2013 and 2014.

Ellis was married to fellow Africanist Gerrie ter Haar. He died on 29 July 2015 in his home in Amsterdam, having been diagnosed with leukaemia three years earlier. His last book, This Present Darkness (2016), was published posthumously and studies the nature and origins of organised crime in Nigeria. In 2019, Ellis's professional archive was donated to the African Studies Centre in Leiden.

Controversies

South Africa While at Africa Confidential, Ellis reported the first accounts of mutinies in the Angolan camps of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the South African ANC, as well as a detailed account of the detention of Pallo Jordan by the ANC's internal security wing, Mbokodo. but Ellis's claim about Mandela was ultimately confirmed true by the SACP itself, following Mandela's death in 2013.

Liberia Ellis's The Mask of Anarchy (2001), about the Liberian civil war, was shortlisted for the African Studies Association's Herskovits Award, which construed Liberia as a prime example of a "failed state" in Africa and argued that such states should be brought under a new form of international trusteeship.

Thesis 282 pages. Preface by Faranirina V. Rajaonah.

167 pages. Copyright 1997.

Second edition, revised and updated with a new preface. First edition was at London: Hurst, 2001.

. Foreword by Max du Preez.