George Shepperson

Shepperson was a pathbreaking historian of the African Diaspora, the history of the African peoples and their spread across the world and was awarded the ‘Distinguished Africanist’ award in 2007 from the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom. His research specialism was Malawian history, but he also wrote on African-American history (and was chair of the British Association for American Studies from 1971–74) and black British history (particularly relating to the black presence in Scotland. Many of his writings, including on John Chilembwe and the Chilembwe uprising, are seen as seminal contributions. Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising 1915 (1958) was one of the first scholarly works on African history and was widely read by African nationalists after its publication. Shepperson provided an account of his life as an Africanist historian as a contribution to The Emergence of African History at British Universities: An Autobiographical Approach (1995, edited by Anthony Kirk-Greene).

He was awarded the CBE in 1989 as chairman of the Scottish Committee of the Commonwealth Institute.

George “Sam” Albert Shepperson CBE (7 January 1922 – 2 April 2020) was a British historian and Africanist, noted particularly for his work on Malawian and African-American history. He was William Robertson Professor of Commonwealth and American History at the University of Edinburgh from 1963 until 1986. He was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1989.

George “Sam” Shepperson was born in Peterborough, Northamptonshire in 1922, the son of a fitter. He was educated at the King’s School, Peterborough, and read History and English at St John’s College, Cambridge. He completed his Certificate of Education after his war service. He was commissioned in the Northamptonshire Regiment in 1943, and was on secondment to the King’s African Rifles from 1943 to 1946 as an officer in the 13th (Nyasaland) Battalion, stationed in Kenya, Tanganyika, Ceylon, India and Burma. While stationed in East Africa he developed his interest in British imperial history and Africa. He began work teaching Imperial and American History at the University of Edinburgh in 1948 and was appointed to the William Robertson Chair in 1963, and retired in 1986. He had been a Visiting Professor at Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, Rhode Island College, what is now Makerere University and Dalhousie University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of York in 1987 and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University 1986–87. In 1990 he was named a Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland.