<killick@u.arizona.edu>


Robin Hallett, who died in England in mid-February at
the age of 72, played a major role in establishing the
teaching of African History at the University of Cape
Town in the early 1970's. Chris Saunders wrote this
week (in an obituary in UCT's campus newspaper) that
Robin accepted an offer from UCT because he "felt
marginalized at Oxford, and was too unconventional to
be appreciated elswhere in British academe". He was a
truly inspired lecturer, and the enthusiasm of the
students was such that what had been a year's visiting
lectureship at UCT was repeatedly renewed, keeping him
and his family in Cape Town throughout the 70's.

I was one of many who fell under his spell. At the time
I was half-way through an undergraduate degree in
geology, and it was by chance that a friend dragged me
along to one of the infamous Saturday afternoon teas
that Robin and Inge Hallett used to hold at their house
in Rondebosch.  No stronger beverage was served, but
the conversation alone was intoxicating, and by the
second or third visit I had switched my major to
African History. Patrick Harries and Chris Saunders
were other habitues at the Hallett tea, circulating in
an ever-changing cast of varied skin tone, language,
profession and political orientation.

In the 1980's the Hallett family returned to England,
but Robin, then in his fifties, was unable to find
academic employment. His prose, in contrast to that of
most academics, was crisp, concise and vivid, and for
the remaining years of his life he eked out a
precarious living as a freelance journalist, writing on
Africa for a number of papers, including regular
columns in the Cape Times and the Natal Witness.

The best-known of his seven books is his two-volume
history of Africa (Africa to 1875: a Modern History,
and Africa since 1875: a Modern History) published by
the University of Michigan Press in 1970 and 1974
respectively. His output was all the more remarkable in
light of the fact that his eyesight had failed by the
late 1960's. He had no sight at all in one eye, and so
little in the other that he could read only with a
magnifying glass and the paper held within a few
inches. For this reason he could not read lectures.
Nevertheless, he could keep an audience transfixed for
an hour or more, never pausing for recall.  He was a
superb lecturer - thirty years on, I think that of all
those that I have heard, I would give only Steven Jay
Gould a higher rating.

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