Tom Lodge obituary
As a writer and academic, my brother, Tom Lodge, who has died aged 72, was an expert on the modern politics of South Africa. His many works included Mandela: A Critical Life (2006), a biography of Nelson Mandela that was described as “riveting” by Desmond Tutu and “authoritative and open minded” by the Economist.
Among his other books were Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (1983); Consolidating Democracy (1999); South African Politics Since 1994 (1999), and Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences (2011).
Tom was born in Manchester, to Roy Lodge, who worked for the British Council, and Vera (nee Kotasova), a Czech primary school teacher whom his father had met on a posting in Prague.
An early childhood spent in developing countries on the verge of independence stimulated Tom’s interest in colonial and postcolonial development. Thanks to our father’s work, as a family we moved to Nigeria in 1955 and from there to North Borneo, which became the state of Sabah in Malaysia in 1963.
After attending Bedales school in Hampshire as a boarder, in 1971 Tom went to the University of York, where he gained a degree in history and stayed on to do his master’s. He then joined the university’s newly formed Centre for Southern African Studies as a research fellow. This took him on a number of trips to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where in 1979 he secured a lectureship. In South Africa he also met Carla Grootenboer, a graphic artist, and they married in 1979.
Tom was awarded his doctorate in 1984, with a thesis on the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, and spent much of the next three decades lecturing at Wits. At the same time he played an increasingly prominent role in various anti-apartheid activities, appearing as an expert political witness for the defence in trials of a number of people accused of sedition.
This helped him gain the trust of leading figures in the African National Congress, and the insights they gave him enhanced the authority of his academic work. But there were other consequences: his office was burned down and he received death threats. As a result he moved to New York City in 1988, where he spent three years, working for the Social Science Research Council, distributing grants to worthy projects. But his heart remained in academia and he returned to Wits as a lecturer in 1992.
Eventually, in 2005, he left South Africa and took up the position of professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Limerick in Ireland, before becoming dean of arts there in 2012.
He retired to Saint Seurin de Prats, near Bordeaux in France, in 2021, but continued to travel to South Africa, where he served on a number of trusts and commissions. At the time of his death he was close to finishing a work on Walter Sisulu.
He is survived by Carla and their two sons, Kim and Guy.