John Mccracken

Outstanding chronicler of Malawi who was as concerned with the colonised as the colonisers

JOHN MCCRACKEN, who has died aged 79, was the author of A History of Malawi 1859-1966 (2012), hailed as one of the best single-country histories ever to be written about any African nation.

Three years later, his Voices from the Chilembwe Rising, published by the British Academy and the Oxford University Press, probed the political sensibilities of Africans involved in the anti-colonial revolt of 1915, which produced widespread reverberations throughout the region.

It was the essence of Mccracken’s work that, along with other outstanding British chroniclers of eastern and southern Africa – such as Terence Ranger and John Iliffe – he pioneered an approach which was as concerned with the experiences of the colonised as with those of the colonisers.

The second son of two GPS, Kenneth John Mccracken was born in Edinburgh on July 1 1938 and brought up in Kelso in the Scottish Borders. He was educated at Sedbergh and St John’s College, Cambridge, where Harry Hinsley, a historian of international relations and formerly a Bletchley cryptographer, proved an important influence, and where the teaching of Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher shaped his approach to imperial history.

To complete his PHD, Mccracken worked in the mission archives of the

Free Church of Scotland. This study laid the foundations of his first book, Politics and Christianity in Malawi

1875-1940 (1977), which remains an essential text.

Turning down a post at Edinburgh University, Mccracken began his career in Africa in 1964 as a temporary lecture in the fledgling University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. His time in Salisbury, now Harare, included a night in gaol, spent after taking part in a peaceful protest against the decision of Ian Smith’s government to close the only newspaper sympathetic to African nationalism.

During a research trip made that same year to neighbouring Nyasaland, Mccracken joined the ecstatic crowds in the stadium in Blantyre on the day the country became the independent nation of Malawi.

In 1965 he went to the University of Dar es Salaam to join the group of brilliant young historians – the “Dar” school – who were developing what was recognised as the cuttingedge approach to African history, largely based on the experience of the indigenous population.

The years 1968 to 1980 found Mccracken back in Scotland as a lecturer at the new University of Stirling. His interest in Malawi, however, was not to be denied and, in 1980, at considerable financial sacrifice, he took up the post of Professor of History at Chancellor College, University of Malawi.

This was, for many Malawians, a dangerous time, with university staff struggling to keep social research afloat in a country that had fallen prey to President Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s brutal dictatorship. Mccracken navigated this environment with skill and integrity, while laying the foundations of two books and a string of ground-breaking articles. Younger colleagues, especially Malawian historians, recognised his passionate commitment to their academic development.

In Stirling Mccracken served at different times as head of the History Department and chair of the Board of Studies for Arts. He was also a founder and first director of the university’s lively inter-disciplinary Centre for Commonwealth Studies. His retirement in 2002 marked the start of the most productive period of his writing life.

A past president of the African Studies Association of the UK, he received its award of Distinguished Africanist in 2008. That year he returned to Malawi as Visiting Professor of History under the auspices of the Scotland-malawi Partnership.

John Mccracken had a great zest for life. A man of outstanding decency, kindliness, integrity, wit, he was wholly without pretension or condescension, firm in his convictions but always ready to debate sincerely held opinions. Shouts and loud splashings from his morning bathtub would indicate that a politician on the Today programme had come up with something particularly facile or duplicitous.

A generous host and a fervent, if often disappointed supporter of Scottish rugby, John Mccracken was a ruthless Monopoly player, while his rendering of The Wee Cock Sparra became an essential part of his family’s Christmas celebrations.

His first marriage, to Jane Purkis, ended tragically after only 10 months when Jane was killed in a road accident in Tanzania. His second marriage, to the Sunday Telegraph journalist Juliet Clough in 1972, proved an enduring love affair. They had a son and a daughter.

John Mccracken, born July 1 1938, died October 23 2017