BIEA DIRECTORS

Dr. Ambreena Manji 2010-2012

Ambreena Manji is Reader in the School of Law, Keele University, UK. She took up the directorship of the British Institute in October 2010 on secondment from Keele University.

In her writing, Ambreena’s takes a critical and interdisciplinary approach to law and seeks to place it in its wider historical, economic and political context. There are three major strands to Ambreena’s research. She has published widely on women’s land rights, on the history of African legal education, and on portrayals of law and African literature.

Since her doctoral research in Tanzania in 1997, Ambreena has written extensively on women’s land rights. A fluent Kiswahili speaker, her PhD research focused on the impact of AIDS on women’s relations to land in the Kagera region. Since then, her sustained engagement with land law reform in Africa has resulted in pioneering interdisciplinary publications that are widely cited in academic literature and by policymakers. In her work she has sought to advance understanding of the effects on women and on gender relations of the land tenure formalisation being advocated by donors of international development assistance. Her special areas of interest are Tanzania and Uganda.

Ambreena’s specialist knowledge of land tenure reform has led to invitations to teach at postgraduate level at the University of Melbourne and at Trinity College, Dublin. She has also been widely consulted on women's land rights, including by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation and by Oxfam. In 2010 her expertise was sought by the authoritative US newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, for an extended report on land and conflict in Africa.

Having written extensively on property formalization, Ambreena has recently begun to investigate new African mortgage laws. Based on a forensic study of key policy documents, her most recent writing shows how the idea of 'financial inclusion' is now central to international development. She argues that the promotion of lending secured on family land holds significant dangers for women and the poor, as the sub-prime crisis in the US has shown.

Ambreena’s research on the history of African legal education, which is carried out jointly with John Harrington of Liverpool Law School, has received funding from the Nuffield Foundation. Based on extensive archival research, this work has explored the founding of African law school in the immediate post-independence period, investigating the differing models of legal education that were promoted at this time and what they might tell us about the deeply political nature of legal training. Two major papers have been published in this area, the first of which investigated the emergence of African law as an academic discipline in Britain and the second, Lord Denning’s influence on debates on African legal education. A paper on the conflicts over legal education that arose in Ghana is currently in progress.

The third major strand of Ambreena’s research concerns portrayals of law in postcolonial African literature. As with all Ambreena’s research, her writing on law and literature seeks to demonstrate how the traditional boundaries between law and the humanities might be transcended. It asks: what might fictional portrayals of law and legal processes reveal about how law is understood by non-lawyers? What can we learn about non-state or informal law from the work of African novelists? Ambreena has published papers on the novels of the Chinua Achebe, Sembene Ousmane and Ayi Kwei Armah, and on the role of the cultural critic in contemporary Africa. She is currently planning a paper on law and language in Kenya and Ireland inspired by Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s recent reflections in ‘Something Torn and New’.

Prof. David Anderson 2009-2010

David Anderson filled the position of Acting Director at the BIEA from 1 October 2009 until the end of September 2010.   He took on his BIEA role during a period of study leave from the University of Oxford, where he is Professor of African Politics, Director of the African Studies Centre, and a Fellow of St Cross College. 

Professor Anderson’s long-standing interest in the history and politics of eastern Africa is reflected in a range of current research projects. His work on the transnational political economy of khat (miraa), The Khat Controversy, was published in May 2007.  He continues to work on the issue of khat consumption and marketing, and has recently completed a report on the social harms of khat for the UK government.  He has also written a number of articles, to be published over the coming year, on the history of khat prohibitions. 

Anderson continues to research and write on the theme of state violence and its consequences, and has recently completed a book examining Kenya’s post-electoral crisis of 2008.   Uncivil Society: Violence and Politics in Kenya will be published in 2010.  He also plans a collection of essays for 2010, taking up some of the still controversial themes surrounding the history of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion, about which he has written in Histories of the Hanged (2005). 

Anderson also participates in a number of collaborations with other Africanist scholars based at Oxford. With Dr David Turton, Dr Marco Bassi, and Dr Graciela Gil-Romera he is engaged in a research project on the history of environmental change in the Lower Omo Valley of southern Ethiopia. This project, funded through the AHRC ‘Environment & Landscape’ Programme, takes up themes Anderson first explored in his 2002 book, Eroding the Commons.  A monograph from this research, to be co-authored with David Turton, will be published in 2011. Anderson is an Editor of the BIEA-sponsored Journal of Eastern African Studies.

Professor Anderson is a very active graduate teacher and supervisor of doctoral students. Most of these students are drawn from the disciplines of Politics and History, but others are based in Anthropology or Development Studies. Over the past three years his students have undertaken research in a wide range of African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Sudan, Zambia, Malawi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, often working on themes relating to violence, conflict and post-conflict reconstruction.

Justin Willis, 2006-2009

Justin Willis was seconded to the position of Director from the University of Durham, in the United Kingdom, where he is Reader in History. Justin has a long involvement with BIEA, having been a graduate attachee in 1986, and Assistant Director from 1989 to 1997.

Justin has a long-standing interest in the history and culture of the Kenya coast, and particularly of the Mijikenda; his first book (Mombasa, the Swahili and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford, 1993)) was an examination of labour migration and ethnicity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has also worked on ethnicity in north-eastern Tanzania and pastoralist-agriculturalist relations in south-western Uganda. From 1997 to 2000 he undertook ESRC-funded research on the social history of alcohol in East Africa (published as Potent Brews (Nairobi and Oxford, 2002)). From 2001-2006 Justin's teaching and research focussed on the modern history of Sudan, and particularly on the nature of governmental authority there. While at BIEA Dr Willis conducted a number of research projects, most notably a cultural history of elections in eastern Africa.

Paul Lane, 1998 - 2006

Paul Lane joined the Institute shortly after completing a period of teaching Archaeology and Museum Studies at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, and before that at the University of Dar es Salaam. At both institutions he was instrumental in helping establish and consolidate degree programmes in Archaeology.

His main research interests encompass the historical and maritime archaeology of eastern and southern Africa, and the transition to farming in these same regions. While Director of the Institute, he carried out his own research on the transition from hunting and gathering to farming in northern Nyanza Province, Kenya and on the historical archaeology of Luo settlement in the same area. He also collaborated with Dr Bertram Mapunda (Archaeology Unit, University of Dar es Salaam), on the causes and origins of soil erosion in the Kondoa District of north-central Tanzania, and worked with Dr Kennedy Mutundu (Kenyatta University), Dr Robert Payton (University of Newcastle), Professor David Taylor (Trinity College Dublin), Dr Carolyn Thorp (Witwatersrand University) and Dr Benjamin Smith and colleagues (Rock Art Research Institute, Witwatersrand University) on an interdisciplinary study of Landscape and Environmental Change in Semi-Arid Landscapes of East & Southern Africa, with particular reference to the Laikipia Plateau. He finished his contract with the Institute at the end of September 2006, after eight years as Director. He now runs a Marie Curie research group, funded by the European Union, on the Historical Ecology of East African Landscapes based at the Department of Archaeology, University of York in the UK.

John Sutton, 1983-1998

As a research student attached to the Institute in its early years, John Sutton worked on the Iron Age archaeology and history of East Africa under Merrick Posnansky, and published his revised doctoral thesis on the archaeology of the Western Highlands of Kenya in the Institute’s Memoirs series. He subsequently held teaching and research positions at the University of Dar es Salaam and at universities in West Africa, maintaining an active interest in the East African Iron Age and in agricultural history and archaeology. As Director of the Institute, he initiated new research on the remains of irrigation systems of former agricultural communities, notably at Engaruka in the Rift Valley of northern Tanzania and Nyanga in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. While in post, he also helped establish a programme of archaeological investigation of the emergence of complex societies in the interlacustrine region of East Africa, of which his excavations at Ntusi in Western Uganda (later in collaboration with Andrew Reid) formed an integral part. Among other activities during his tenure of the Directorship, he oversaw the Institute’s move from Chiromo Mansion to its current premises in Kileleshwa, and began a more active programme of popularising the work of the Institute - of which his overview published as A Thousand Years of East Africa, has played an integral part.

Neville Chittick, 1961-1983

Neville Chittick was appointed the first Director of the Institute in 1961, a year after the Institute had been formally inaugurated. Immediately prior to this he had been the first Conservator of Antiquities in what was then Tanganyika. His principal research interest was the pre-Portuguese coastal archaeology of eastern Africa, and particularly the influence of Islam and maritime trade on the formation of Swahili identities. He conducted extensive excavations at the southern Swahili town of Kilwa, with its celebrated architectural remains, the results of which were published as a two volume report in the Institute’s Memoirs series. His work at Kilwa and related sites on the southern coast and islands continued till the mid-1960s, after which he turned his attention to Manda, an early northern Swahili town located in the Lamu archipelago in northern Kenya, and various sections of the Somali coast, including the important 1^st century BC to 5^th century AD sites at Ras Hafun. Between 1972-74, he directed excavations at Aksum in northern Ethiopia, focussing in particular on the residential and burial areas associated with the elite. Unfortunately, the 1974 Revolution in Ethiopia and subsequent events curtailed further work at Aksum for the next two decades. The results of Chittick’s research were nevertheless written up and published posthumously by Stuart Munro-Hay in the Institute’s Memoirs series.