Recollections of Robert O. Collins

I first met Bob Collins in my second year of graduate study at Yale University. We were both aspiring Africanists and students of Harry Rudin, who, while still regarded as the Yale history department's primary scholar in European diplomatic history, was advising a growing group of PhD candidates studying the history of Africa, a coming and important field at the time. Professor Rudin, whose nickname was "Black Harry," presumably because of his gloomy countenance, was in fact a cheerful teacher and scholar and one of the favorites of graduate and undergraduate students alike. Bob had arrived from Oxford University and an extended research stint in Sudan. He was already a legend among fellow students and the history faculty at Yale, not merely because he had written what was then the longest undergraduate senior history thesis at Dartmouth University (well over 250 pages) but also because of his exploits in the Sudanese archives, still largely untouched by scholars (save, of course, for P. M. Holt, who had organized them and was in the process of composing his history of the Mahdist period in Sudan). Bob, whose collection of Africana would soon become famous, already had in his possession an immense amount of Sudanese documentation, the result of his indefatigable efforts to search out all Sudanese materials wherever they might exist and photograph everything that could possibly interest him.

Bob had won a Marshall Fellowship to study at Oxford and arrived at Yale far ahead of the rest of us in terms of his preparation for writing a thesis. Not surprisingly, then, he breezed through his course preparation, his qualifying examinations, and the writing of his dissertation, the research for which he had accomplished while gaining his MA degree at Oxford University. The dissertation when finished required no additional work before publication. Yale University Press published it, virtually unrevised, in the Yale Historical Publications series. This was a singular accomplishment, not merely because the Yale history series published only one or two theses every five years, but also because Bob's thesis was the first in the series that dealt with African history. Yale University Press did not hold to any by then outdated prejudices that there was no such thing as African history, but for the rest of us neophytes it was nearly impossible to get theses in African history published right away because the field had such demanding language and field study requirements. The book, the title of which is Southern Sudan, 1883-1898, was published in 1962 and dealt with the Mahdist influences on the south of what became the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan as well as the growing involvement of the European powers in Sudanese affairs as the conquest of this part of Africa loomed large in international affairs.

Students of Harry Rudin were first and foremost trained as diplomatic historians, and the early books that Bob published dealt primarily with European diplomacy involving Sudan. Titles such as King Leopold, England, and the Upper Nile (1968), also published by Yale University Press, had a bias in favor of European actions over African agency. But make no mistake about Bob's devotion to Africans and the African continent. Bob was a devoted Africanist. Everywhere he went (and he started out at Williams College before moving on to the University of California at Santa Barbara) he took pride and delighted in introducing the first courses in African history and ensuring that his courses covered the entire time span of the continent's rich history and demonstrated that Africans had made their own history, even in important ways within the colonial period.

In 1967, I had the pleasure of coauthoring with Bob a brief general history of Egypt and Sudan in a series edited by Robin Winks of Yale University and published by Prentice Hall under the series title Nations of the World. Bob's section on Sudan was superb, for he was at his best summarizing complex historical developments, capturing the excitement of the past, and demonstrating that human beings made their own history rather than having it made for them by complex, barely understood...