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Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize

The Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize of the African Studies Association is awarded annually at the ASA Annual Meeting to the author of the best book on East African Studies published in the previous calendar year. Initiated in 2012, the award was made possible by a generous bequest from the estate of the late Professor Kennell Jackson, the award honors the eminent historian, Professor Bethwell A. Ogot. The winner of the Ogot Book Prize is announced each year at the ASA Annual Meeting, where he or she receives an honorarium of $500. A list of the finalists for the Prize is published in the Annual Meeting program.

Eligibility

Scholarly works published in any country, in any language in the previous calendar year are eligible for the award. Edited collections, new editions of previously published works, bibliographies, dictionaries and works of fiction are not eligible. For the purposes of this award East Africa is defined to include the territories of present day Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Southern Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia (as constituted at independence), Djibouti, Eritrea, Mauritius, Comoros, & Madagascar.

For the purposes of this prize, scholarly works will be understood broadly to encompass works informed by an understanding of the scholarship in a given field or fields. In making its selection the prize committee will pay particular attention to significance, originality and quality of writing.

Nomination:

You must represent a publisher to nominate a book.

To nominate a publication, please fill out the nomination form below indicating the book title and author(s), publisher you represent, year of copyright (must be the previous calendar year), and email address. Please send one copy of each title to each committee member.

*Please also send e-copies to all committee members whenever possible*

Please contact the African Studies Association at members@africanstudies.org with questions.

Deadline: April 30, 2024. Nominations for 2024 are no longer being accepted.

2024 Committee

Kristen Phillips (Chair)
Paul Ocobock
Melissa Graboyes
Christopher Tounsel

Submit a Nomination to the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize

Kristen Phillips
Chair

Dept. of Anthropology
1557 Dickey Drive
Atlanta, GA 30322

kdphill@emory.edu

Paul Ocobock

Dept. of History
434 Decio Hall
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556

pocobock@nd.edu

Melissa Graboyes

Dept. of History
1288 University of Oregon
275 McKenzie Hall
Eugene, OR 97403-1288

graboyes@uoregon.edu

Christopher Tounsel

Dept. of History
University of Washington
318 Smith Boc 353560
Seattle, WA 98195-3560

ctounsel@uw.edu

Bethwell A. Ogot Prize Winners (2012-Present)

  • 2023

    Claire L. Wendland, Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles (University of Chicago Press)

  • 2022

    David L. Schoenbrun, The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930 (University of Wisconsin Press)

  • 2021

    Mai Hassan, Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya (Cambridge University Press)

  • 2020

    Elizabeth Giorgis, Modernist Art in Ethiopia (Ohio University Press)

  • 2019

    Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania (Ohio University Press)

  • 2018

    Getnet Bekele, Ploughing New Ground: Food, Farming, and Environmental Change in Ethiopia (James Currey Press)

  • 2017

    Bert Ingelaere, Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice after Genocide (University of Wisconsin Press)

  • 2016

    Elena Vezzadini, Lost Nationalism Revolution, Memory and Anti-colonial Resistance in Sudan (James Currey Press)

  • 2015

    J.J. Carney, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era (Oxford University Press)

  • 2014

    Shane Doyle, Before HIV: Sexuality, Fertility and Mortality in East Africa 1900-1980 (British Academy Press)

  • 2013

    James R. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Ohio University Press)

  • 2012

    Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Duke University Press)

About Jackson and Ogot

Professor Kennell Jackson, Jr.

The award was made possible by a generous bequest from the late Kennell Jackson, Ph.D., a historian of African history at Stanford University who passed away in 2005. Born in 1941, the son of a school teacher and building contractor, Kennell Jackson was educated in segregated schools in Farmville, Virginia. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Hampton Institute in 1962. He studied at the University of Ghana and at Cambridge University and earned his Ph.D. in African history from UCLA in 1972. His dissertation, “An Ethnohistorical Study of the Oral Traditions of the Akamba of Kenya,” was an ambitious, pioneering effort to reconstruct the deep history of a smaller-scale or stateless society using oral records. This work and the series of publications that developed from that research, including in particular his chapter in the influential collection, Kenya Before 1900 (1976) contributed to the broader effort, pioneered by that volume’s editor, B.A. Ogot, to decolonize East Africa’s history. Kennell Jackson joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor in 1969. In that role, he taught African and African American history to generations of students. A devoted student mentor, Jackson became the resident fellow Branner Hall, the university’s largest all-freshman dorm, a role he maintained until his death.

Professor Bethwell A. Ogot

At Prof. Jackson’s request, the award has been established to honor Dr. Bethwell A. Ogot, the distinguished Kenyan historian and public servant. B.A. Ogot was born in 1929 in Gem in western Kenya. He was educated at Maseno High School and at Makerere University where he studied mathematics and history. After teaching briefly at Alliance High School in Kenya he enrolled at the University of St. Andrews where he studied history and philosophy. He returned to East Africa as a history tutor at Makerere and then went to the U.K. to the School of Oriental and African Studies as a Ph.D. student. He then began his path-breaking work on Luo oral traditions, which resulted in his 1967 book, History of the Southern Luo. In London, he led the Kenya Students Association and provided assistance to Oginga Odinga and Tom Mboya in the 1960 negotiations leading to Kenyan independence. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was instrumental as a faculty member and chair in making the history department of the new University of Nairobi among the most prominent on the continent. As a scholar, teacher, research supervisor, mentor and colleague, Ogot did much to stimulate the rapid expansion of research in Kenya at that time. Among those to whom he provided guidance and inspiration was UCLA Ph.D. student, Kennell Jackson. Ogot was also the long-term president of the Historical Association of Kenya where he did a great deal to stimulate the publication of new research in the Kenya Historical Review, Hadith, and the Transafrican Journal of History. His edited collection, Zamani (1968) was a key text in the development of research and teaching on East Africa. Later he was instrumental in the creation and publication of the UNESCO General History of Africa. During more than four decades Ogot has taken a leading role in Kenya’s key cultural institutions, as a dean at the University of Nairobi, as director of the Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory, as professor at Kenyatta University, director of research at Maseno University College and then in 2003 as Chancellor at Moi University. In his career, he has served on a series of important official commissions and boards. In addition, he has been an influential and often controversial contributor to national debates about the role of Kenya’s past in its present and future. A Fellow of the Kenya National Academy of Sciences, in 2008 Ogot received the African Studies Association, Distinguished Africanist Award.