In the Realms of Gold

Over the last 50 years, Roland Oliver has been both a witness to the post-colonial history of Africa and a pre-eminent scholar of the continent's precolonial history. Oliver was a young Cambridge graduate in 1947 when he took a groundbreaking new position at the University of London, which wanted someone to research, and eventually teach, the pre-colonial history of Africa. Seeking from the outset to establish a unified conception of African history free from European frameworks, Oliver eventually - with his colleague John Fage - wrote the influential "Short History of Africa", founded the "Journal of African History" and co-edited the eight-volume "Cambridge History of Africa". "In the Realms of Gold" is Oliver's account of his life and work. He writes about the circumstances of his early life that shaped his education and outlook: his childhood on a river houseboat in Kashmir, the influential teachers and friends met at Stowe and Cambridge, and his service in World War II as a cryptographer in British Intelligence, where he met his first wife, Caroline Linehan.
His interest in church history while at Cambridge led him to study the historical effects of Christian missionaries in Africa, and thus his career began. The core of the book is Oliver's account of his research travels throughout tropical Africa from the 1940s to the 1980s; his efforts to train and foster African graduate students to teach in African universities; his role in establishing conferences and journals to bring together the work of historians and archaeologists from Europe and Africa; his encounters with political and religious leaders, scholars, soldiers and storytellers; and the political and economic upheavals of the continent that he witnessed.