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The Society of Malaŵi Journal

REMEMBERING GEORGE SHEPPERSON
John Lonsdale

I first met George (I never got to call him Sam) at Makerere University in
1962. I was then a Cambridge PhD student working on the colonial history of western
Kenya which, until 1902, had been part of Uganda. So, I was in Kampala partly to
visit the Entebbe archives, partly to meet my local supervisor, Fred Welbourn. George
was at the Welbourn’s, for lunch or tea, I can’t remember which. He was visiting
Makerere in some temporary capacity. I was looking for advice on sources, being
especially bewildered by the number of independent African churches in western
Kenya. Fred also had an interest—and with Bethwell Ogot would soon publish a
study of two churches, A Place to Feel at Home. But it was George who told me to
get out my notepad and be prepared to write! Somewhere I still have the page on
which I noted some dozen or more titles of books mostly about small and obscure
sects in the United States. I can still remember the enthusiastic energy with which
these titles poured from him: he must have been in the middle of his research for that
incomparable saga, Independent African, a volume that deserves at least as well as
any other and more than most produced before or since to be a true classic of African
historiography. George also gave me a critical summary of every film then being
shown in Kampala’s cinemas.
In more recent years my wife and I visited him in Orton Wistow,
Peterborough, not as often as we would have liked. Until a couple of years ago he
remained as enthusiastically full of stories and information as when we first met him
all those years ago. I had done my national service in the King’s African Rifles, in a
Kenyan not a Malawian battalion, but that gave us much in common. His love and
admiration for his old comrades shone through in all that passed between us. A lovely
man and a great historian.

John Lonsdale is Emeritus Professor of Modern African History, Cambridge.

Archive Images No: 7

Lt. George Shepperson, KAR, Jorhat, Assam, early 1945.

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