Lionel Cliffe


Lionel R Cliffe was an English political economist and activist whose work has focused on the struggle for land rights and freedom in Africa, from the 1960s to the present. He was educated at King Edward VII grammar school in Sheffield and Nottingham University where he read Economics with Mathematics and Statistics. A conscientious objector, he avoided national service and instead worked for Oxfam in the late 1950s. In 1961 he went to Dar es Salaam to teach at Kivukoni adult education college. After undertaking fieldwork in Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, he came to the University of Leeds in 1978 where he worked to help develop what is now Leeds University Centre for African Studies and also the journal Review of African Political Economy and became Professor of Politics. In 2002 the African Studies Association of the UK marked his career with the Distinguished Africanist award.

Selected works