ABSTRACT
In the three years after October 1960 our postgraduate research work in African history at SOAS really came of age. We took in five new doctoral students in each of those years, and they came from ten countries. Only two of the fifteen were British. Of these David Birmingham came to us with a first degree from the University of Ghana, where his father Walter Birmingham was a professor. While in Ghana David had been fired with an interest in Portuguese sources for West African history, and he soon settled down to work on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Angola. 1 He later became our colleague for several years before going to a chair of modern history at the University of Kent at Canterbury. The other British recruit, Tony Hopkins, came to us from Queen Mary College in our university, where the Tudor historian S. T. Bindoff had advised him to “try something new, like African history.” Hopkins was a delight to initiate because, having had no previous contact with the subject, he insisted on reading almost everything before committing himself to study the emergence of African merchant families in nineteenth-century Lagos. He was the first of our English research students really to bury himself in African family papers, which he located while living in a hired room in a Yoruba family compound, studying the inscriptions in the cemeteries, and following up the names in the local telephone directory. He made his early career at the University of Birmingham and wrote a famous book, An Economic History of West Africa (1973), on the economic history of West Africa before becoming the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge.
