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Shepperson Memorial

GEORGE SHEPPERSON

David Killingray

My copy of Independent African carries my signature and the date 1967. I
bought the book in York where I had just arrived with my wife and children after two
years teaching in a secondary school in Dar-es-Salaam. I had gone to Tanzania partly
because I wanted to teach African history. Looking back, I am rather surprised that I
had not bought Sam and Tom Price’s book when it was first published. But it was
worth waiting for. If this was the new path of African history – and two years of
reflected exposure to the ‘Dar-es-Salaam school of history’ was an additional
intellectual stimulation – then I wanted a share in it.
It was some time before I met Sam. I can remember the circumstances, but
not where it took place. Possibly in Edinburgh, certainly at either an annual
conference of the African Studies Association of the UK or a conference on African
history. Whatever, by then I had registered as a part-time PhD student at SOAS,
working on a thesis on the colonial army in the Gold Coast. This was not Sam’s
‘country’, but he had served in Africa, India, and Burma with African troops of the
King’s African Rifles, and he was an obvious person with whom to talk. That first
meeting was an opportunity to spell out what I had in mind for my research, largely a
social history of African soldiers in one British colony during the first half of the
twentieth century. Sam was enthusiastic for what I planned, eager to give his advice
and ready with encouragement. Our paths crossed at other conferences and on one
occasion he told me he would be delighted to be the external examiner for my thesis.
That was not in my power to decide, but I could, and did, firmly recommend that he
was the pre-eminent historian of Africa to take on that task. I fear the thesis was
longer than it should have been, earning a negative comment from the internal
examiner, but Sam, so I was subsequently told, said it was ‘a splendid piece of work’.
I had a good ‘viva’, an exchange of ideas between two scholars and an aspiring one.
Thereafter, Sam showed an interest in what I was writing, sent notes of
encouragement, and helped further hone my academic curiosity on the transAtlantic
African Diaspora. Even before he retired and moved to Peterborough, every time we
met Sam would tell me that he was not well and had this and that pain. After a bit, I
realised that probably this was his way of explaining why he was not as alert as once
he had been. His pointed conversation and ready grasp of detail denied this, as did his
Christmas cards, invariably accompanied by a drawing and one of his poems. On one
visit to see him in Peterborough, he talked of his collected materials stored in the
garage which ‘I will show you someday’. He never got round to doing so. Those
valuable sources are now deposited in the University of Edinburgh archives, a
demonstration of Sam’s devotion to the sources that he collected and used as an
historian to interpret the history of Africa and the primacy he attached to them for use
by other scholars. It was an example that I have copied.
From time to time, I sent Sam copies of articles and chapters that I had written,
always received with critical but encouraging responses. Since the mid-1990s my
attention has turned increasingly to an area of research which Sam had largely
pioneered, the African Diaspora in what many now frame as the ‘black Atlantic’.
Thank you, Sam, for being a source of support and encouragement, for sharing your
skills and knowledge so generously, and continuing with your enthusiasm for Africa
well into your nineties, a shining example to those now sliding down the octogenarian
slopes.

Emeritus Professor David Killingray, PhD, BSc (Econ), PCCE (York).
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