It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Professer Stephen Ellis, who died from leukemia on Wednesday.

Ellis was the author of a number of books including External Mission, a meticulously researched book into the secrecy of the ANC in exile published by Jonathan Ball Publishers in 2012.

External Mission won the 2013 Recht Malan Prize at the Media24 Literary Awards.

He was also the Desmond Tutu professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a senior researcher at the Afrika Studiecentrum in Leiden. Ellis has worked as the editor of the newsletter Africa Confidential and is also a past editor of African Affairs, the journal of Britain’s Royal African Society. In 2003-04 he was director of the Africa programme at the International Crisis Group. In 1997-98 he worked as a researcher for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

“I was very sorry to learn of the premature death of Stephen Ellis”, Tony Leon says. “He was a hugely important voice on South Africa’s much contested history and current events.

“I rate his work External Mission as simultaneously one of the most important lenses through which the current ANC government needs to be viewed, and also as one of the most under reviewed and less appreciated books on contemporary South Africa. It stands now as an intellectual monument to the author’s thoughtful scholarship and provocative analysis.”

Book details

• External Mission: The ANC in Exile by Stephen Ellis
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781868425303
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Image courtesy of African Studies Centre