John Lonsdale (historian)

John M. Lonsdale (born 1937) is a British Africanist and historian. He is Emeritus Professor of Modern African History at the Centre of African Studies in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Trinity College there. As a schoolboy, he spent three summer holidays during 1953-1956 in Kenya where his father had just taken a job. He read history at Cambridge from 1958 through 1964. In 1956 he started his national service as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles. His first teaching job was in Dar es Salaam in 1964. Lonsdale studied the modern history of Kenya extensively and won the Outstanding African Studies Award of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom in 2006.