In Memoriam: Ralph Austen, Professor Emeritus of African History, African Studies, and the College

This tribute is dedicated to Ralph Austen, Professor Emeritus of African History, African Studies, and the College, who passed away this past weekend.  For the University's remembrance, see the piece in UChicago News, Ralph A. Austen, historian of Africa and a ‘scholar’s scholar,’ 1937-2024.

A service in Ralph Austen’s honor was held on Wednesday, 28 August at 10AM at KAM Isaiah Israel, 5039 South Greenwood Avenue. 

Austen was a gifted thinker and mentor who will be remembered for his curiosity, generosity, and intellectual capaciousness. Austen produced a prolific and expansive scholarly corpus over his career, one that was animated by a persistent focus on the dynamics of historical change in Africa and their relationship to wider, global processes. This concern resulted in path-breaking studies in the fields of economic, imperial, and cultural history; comparative analyses that brought Africa together with Europe and India; and examinations of an array of geographic regions, including Tanzania, Cameroon, the Mande world of West Africa, the Saharan desert, and the Atlantic world. On the University of Chicago campus, Austen played a key role in establishing, more than forty years ago, one of the first workshops devoted to interdisciplinary graduate student training. Since its founding, the African Studies Workshop has served as a vital nexus of debate and discussion for generations of students and faculty from disciplines across the Social Sciences and Humanities.  Austen remained a core member of that workshop well into his retirement. 

When he arrived at the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor in 1967, Austen was the first tenure-line historian of Africa to be hired by this institution. His recruitment reflected a growing recognition by mainstream history departments that the African continent could and should be studied not only through the matrices of culture and ethnography, but through systematic investigations of change over time. This thinking was fortified by the imperatives of independence: as African countries threw off the yoke of colonial rule in the 1960s, intellectuals and politicians sought to understand European colonization and its legacies, as well as the enduring and specific impacts of African social and political processes. Austen made this case explicitly in his first monograph, which opened with the observation that Africa possessed a history “apart” from its conquest by European powers, a history that is critical to the “emergence of independent African nation-states” and rooted in “a long and rich precolonial African past.” Austen concluded by observing that the political project of independent Tanzania depended “not only upon the actions of Tanzanians in the present, but also on their understanding of the past.”  (Northwest Tanzania Under German and British Rule, 1968, 1, 257.)

Austen’s research on colonization in German and British East Africa served as the basis for an ever-widening series of historical investigations. He undertook a study of the Duala coastal peoples in Cameroon and their role as brokers of politics and trade on the Atlantic coast over three hundred years. He brought attention to the trades in enslaved Africans that traversed not only the Atlantic Ocean, but the Sahara and the Red Sea – and he also considered the ways that enslavement has been commemorated and memorialized in different times and places. He undertook a continent-wide examination of the tensions of economic development and dependency, and he charted the workings of technology and disease in both facilitating and impeding European ambitions on the continent. The operations of colonial bureaucracies also drew focus. Austen argued against presumptions of their fixity or coherence, noting their vulnerabilities to shifting resources, personnel, and policy, as well as the force of social, linguistic, and political context. Austen’s embrace of interdisciplinarity perspectives, particularly those of Anthropology, helped him to author a trailblazing comparison of gender, capitalism, and moral economy in Europe and Africa. 

Austen also brought to bear his historical acumen on sources that had typically been the domain of ethnographers and folklorists Through his work on figures such as Sundiata, the hero of the Mande world who is credited with founding the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century, Austen helped to show how epic traditions constitute artifacts of memory, change, and performance, and serve as windows onto modes of historical consciousness. These oral histories, and their relation to the tangled colonial roots of ethnography, also brought into Austen’s intellectual orbit a figure who is at once towering and enigmatic, Amadou Hampâté Bâ. This former colonial official, scholar, and memoirist from what is today the country of Mali inspired several of Austen’s articles and projects in his later years.

Austen’s willingness to move, adapt, and learn was supported in part by formidable linguistic skills: Austen spoke and read German and French fluently, and he developed what he described as a “moderate command” of Duala, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swahili. He also traveled widely. The most significant voyage took place early in his life, when Austen was a small child and he and his family fled from Nazi Germany. As a young man, Austen wanted to return to Europe for a visit, which he achieved by taking a job on a cargo ship that was staffed by a crew of men from all over the world. His next major transoceanic trip came after his arrival at the University of Chicago, when, in 1969-70, Austen moved his wife, Ernestine, and young son, Jake, to Nigeria. There, he took part in a faculty exchange with a fellow historian, Professor Joseph Adebowale Atanda, of the University of Ibadan. During that year, Austen and Atanda traded not only professional and pedagogical responsibilities, but also their offices, houses, and personal cars.

Austen earned the admiration of his colleagues because of the ease with which he could engage diverse intellectual realms: he could weigh in on the global history of capitalism, argue about classic texts of political economy, parse the nuances of West African epic oral traditions, and assess African cinematic productions. Throughout his career, Ralph replied readily to correspondence and emails, from students and faculty alike, giving feedback on draft manuscripts with speed and care. He loved to meet with colleagues for a mid-day meal and a chat, for which he would bring his brown bag lunch. He was an active and appreciated member of the Mande Studies Association, and regularly joined that group for conferences and activities in countries in Europe, the United States, and West Africa. 

Austen and his wife of fifty-six years, Ernestine, often opened their home to visiting students and scholars. Their two sons, Ben and Jake, grew up in Hyde Park, attended public schools, and graduated from Kenwood Academy. Like their father, each has pursued a career that involves writing, argumentation, and analysis. Ralph spoke proudly of his daughters-in-law, Danielle Austen and Jacqueline Stewart (who is also a faculty member at the University of Chicago), and of his grandchildren: Maiya, Lusia, Noble, and Jonah. In his spare time, Ralph participated in study groups and helped to organize lectures at his synagogue, KAM Isaiah Israel, and he also taught English to recent immigrants with the Hyde Park Refugee Program. 

Many colleagues here on campus and beyond will remember with great fondness Ralph’s committed presence in the African Studies Workshop. In recent years, he typically arrived to the workshop wearing his bright yellow windbreaker and carrying his white bicycle helmet under his arm. He brought unrivaled depth of knowledge, and a frank and warm inquisitiveness, to our conversations. In that setting, as with so many others, he will be acutely and sorely missed. 

-Emily Lynn Osborn, Associate Professor of African History, African Studies, and the College