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DOI: 10.3366/E0001972009001302
On 27 February 2009 John Middleton died in New Haven, Connecticut, a week after falling and striking his head; he had never regained consciousness. He had taught a seminar on Africa at Yale University earlier on the day he fell. After his death Media and Identity in Africa (2009), a volume newly co-edited with K. Njogu, was published. So John died still teaching and creating and with future projects in mind. He never believed in retirement and this is certainly how he would have wanted to leave us.
John Francis Marchment Middleton was born in London on 22 May 1921. He graduated (majoring in English Literature) from the University of London in 1941. His first experience of East Africa was shortly after this when he served there for three years in the Army during the Second World War. He returned to Britain keen to become an Africanist. He studied anthropology at University College London, and on the advice of Meyer Fortes transferred to Oxford (Exeter College) where he got his doctorate in 1953. Evans-Pritchard was his supervisor, but it was clear that the greatest influence on his work was Fortes. The power and originality of John's dissertation lay in his views of how belief was used in local strategies for power and authority, which were traced through developmental cycles of kinship. His greatest achievement was Lugbara Religion (1960), based on his dissertation. This seminal classic was a tacit and powerful revision, even a rebuttal, of much of the work then going on at Oxford.1 John's other most significant books are The Kikuyu and Kamba of Kenya (1953), Land Tenure in Zanzibar (1960), The Lugbara of Uganda (1965), The Study of the Lugbara (1970), The World of the Swahili (1992), and (with Mark Horton) The Swahili (2000) - together with co-edited, pioneering collections of original essays such as Tribes without Rulers (1958) with David Tait, Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa (1963) with E. H. Winter, Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa (1963) with John Beattie, many collections of articles on Africa and social anthropology, and an encyclopaedia of African studies. He also published over seventy essays on African ethnography and social issues, and numerous reviews.
John became one of the most influential...