When John Iliffe, who has died aged 87, wrote his book The African Poor: A History (1987), the continent was readily dismissed by many academics as a home of problems and poverty, with no intellectual depth. But Iliffe acknowledged no such limitations, and it came as no surprise that it won the African Studies Association’s best book prize, then known as the Herskovits prize.
In Iliffe’s view, people who are excluded from production, productive resources and land in otherwise land-rich economies are not just statistics who merely suffer. Their individual and collective struggles create a history of heroism and refusal to surrender. They also change social structures by their ambition to continue to struggle and perhaps one day to succeed.
