Memorial service for history prof
Prof Jeff Guy will be remembered at a memorial service in Musgrave on Saturday.
A MEMORIAL service of prominent Natal and Zulu historian, Prof Jeff Guy, takes place on 24 January at Campbell Collections, Marriot Road, at 2pm.
Emeritus professor of history at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Prof Jeff Guy passed away in London on 15 December while on his way home after visiting family and friends and delivering a series of successful lectures about Bishop Colenso.
Professor Guy was also Research Fellow at Killie Campbell Collections. Campbell Collections was like a second home to Jeff as he spent most of his time conducting research there. He was also a prominent member of the Killie Campbell Collections Advisory Board.
Many of those he touched including academics, former students, friends and the public are expected to fill up the garden at Campbell Collections on Saturday. The Royal House will also be sending a delegation to represent King Goodwill Zwelithini.
Jeff was born in Pietermaritzburg 13 June 1940. He studied history at the University of Natal in the 1960s. As apartheid tightened its grip on the country, a number of friends were detained under the 1967 Terrorism Act, or went into hiding. Due to this intolerant and intolerable political climate Jeff left South Africa for England in the late 60s. He worked as a school teacher in London and also enrolled for his PhD at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), studying under Shula Marks.
In 1971 Jeff married Naimi and returned to southern Africa, taking up a post as history lecturer at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland on the Roma campus in Lesotho where he worked for 14 years, teaching many South African exiles including former and current cabinet ministers. His children Heli and Joe were born at Roma. While in Lesotho, Jeff published his doctoral thesis (his doctorate was awarded in 1975) as The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom.
Other works include his celebrated study of Bishop Colenso, The Heretic, Remembering the Rebellion, the Zulu Uprising of 1906, Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal.
In the mid-80s Jeff took up a fellowship in Manchester, England, and then, on deciding to leave Lesotho, accepted a post as a history lecturer at the University of Trondheim in Norway.
In 1992 after the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC, Jeff returned to South Africa where he had been offered the professorship of history at the former University of Natal, Durban. His enthusiasm to contribute to the building of a new South Africa never waned.
