Anthony Kirk-greene
District officer in Nigeria who played a leading role in chronicling the history of the Colonial Service
ANTHONY KIRK-GREENE, who has died aged 93, served as a district officer in northern Nigeria for more than 10 years then played a key role in preserving the history of the Colonial Service in Africa.
A fluent author, said to write books and papers faster than his fellow scholars could read them, he became a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and the first holder of a university lectureship in Modern History of Africa. But it was his 10 years in the Colonial Administrative Service that, above all, fuelled his fascination with the district officers (DOS) who were the linchpin of the Empire’s complex, ramshackle collection of territories.
In two institutional histories, On Crown Service (1999) and Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1858-1966 (2000), Kirkgreene set out the context in which DOS worked. Then in Symbol of Authority: The British District Officer in Africa (2005), he drew on hundreds of published and unpublished memoirs of DOS and their wives, which he had originally gathered for a conference. He wanted, as he explained, to “put a human face” on his previous two books.
Many young recruits, Kirk-greene observed, were inspired to join the service by reading fictional accounts, in particular Edgar Wallace’s books on Sanders of the River. In situ, they generally acquired a strong sense of belonging, of representing the interests of the peoples of their districts.
Moreover, since they generally worked
on their own, without radio or television, as much as 50 or more miles from the nearest colleague, their ability to function depended on a mutual trust, even affection, between administrator and administrated.
It was this direct, close and generally easy association with their peoples, rather than status, that distinguished DOS most clearly from their Colonial Service colleagues in other positions – and from their counterparts in French, German, Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Instead of having to operate policies imposed by central government, British DOS were allowed to “get on with it” within a modest framework of well-established law.
Anthony Hamilton Millard Kirk-greene was born at Tunbridge Wells on May 16 1925. He won a scholarship to Rugby then served with the 8th Punjab Regiment from 1943 until Indian independence four years later. He was awarded a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, where he read French and German and played hockey for the university.
In 1950 he joined the Colonial Service, and after doing a “Devonshire” training course in economics, imperial history and comparative colonial policies, he arrived at Adamawa, in northern Nigeria, where his Resident told him that accountancy and typing skills would have been more useful. He had a conventional introduction to the job, going on three-week tours by horse or bicycle to see and be seen by his people, inspecting prisons and local government, observing sharia courts and learning Hausa.
His essays in the Journal of African Administration attracted notice and, as the imperial mission began to fade, he became an instructor on a course to train Nigerian civil servants at Zaria, which led him to become a founding member of Ahmadu Bello University after independence.
In 1967 Kirk-greene took up a five-year fellowship at St Antony’s College, where he taught on topics in African and colonial history for PPE and Modern History, and was later reappointed as a Senior Research Fellow until his retirement in 1992. In the early 1980s he directed the Oxford Colonial
Records Project at Rhodes House and later, as director of the university’s Foreign Service Programme, he accommodated the increasingly Africanist perspectives in British and American African Studies.
Kirk-greene maintained a strong network of colleagues in the US, Britain and Africa, and he and his wife Helen hosted a wide range of visitors from Nigeria at their home in Oxford, where he liked to greet them in their own tongue. In 2002, when the university established an African Studies Centre, a seminar room was named the Kirk-greene Room.
His books included a biographical dictionary of British colonial governors and several works on Nigerian life and politics. The Diary of Hamman Yaji: Chronicle of a West African Muslim Ruler (1995), which he co-edited with James H Vaughan, won the Best Text Award of the US African Studies Association. He also compiled several books on the Hausa language, in one of which “United Nations” was translated as “The Council to Sew Up the World”. His last book, Aspects of Empire, was published in 2012.
Kirk-greene was appointed MBE in 1963 and CMG in 2001, and listed his hobbies in Who’s Who as “reading, travel, controlled walking, wine tasting”. Despite encouraging many DOS to write about their experiences he was too modest to do so himself.
He is survived by his wife, Helen.
Anthony Kirk-greene, born May 16 1925, died July 8 2018