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Archiver > VAIL > 2004-05 > 1085003254


From: "Robert Vail" <>
Subject: FW: bio
Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 17:49:37 -0400


Can anyone out there make a link to this branch of the Vail family? I don't
have it in my database.

Robert S. Vail
Titusville, FL


-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Vail [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2004 2:55 PM
To:
Subject: bio

Hazen Leroy Vail was born in Boston, August 5, 1940. His father, Hazen
Claude Vail, who had left a Depression-broken small farm in Belleisle,
New Brunswick, to seek his fortune here, was a Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company salesman. Leroy's mother, Mary Teresa MacLean Vail,
come as a girl with her family from Cape Breton Island to Boston, had
worked at Harvard, as a maid at the new Kirkland House. In 1943 the
Vails had another son, David.

Growing up in Allston, Leroy attended the old Washington and Andrew
Jackson public schools. His teachers told his parents he was very
bright, and should become a teacher. For his high grades and entrance
examination scores, he was in 1952 admitted to the Boston Latin School,
and in 1958 graduated, honored for his grades and "exemplary conduct and
fidelity." He then entered Boston College, in Classics, but thanks to a
sophomore course on medieval Europe turned to History, and in 1962, a
big, burly, ruddy boy, impeccable in manner, reserved, but exuberant
over Wagner and Mahler, graduated magna cum laude in History.

On his B.C. mentor's advice, Vail proceeded to graduate school at the
University of Wisconsin to study British imperial history under Philip
Curtin. But he quickly found the most intellectual excitement in
Curtin's and Jan Vansina's new "comparative tropical history" program
("Compswamp"), and plunged into the booming fields of African history
and historical linguistics with these two pioneering scholars for his
teachers. Awarded his M.A. in History in 1965 and an NDEA Fellowship, he
pursued African Studies in Madison's new Department (the first and still
the only one in the Americas) of African Languages and Literature, deep
into Bantu structures. In 1967, two months after his father died, Leroy
married a graduate from Madison, Patricia Ann Horochena, at his mother's
church, St. Anthony's in Allston, and on a one-year traveling fellowship
the two left for his research in Africa, in old Nyasaland, the new
republic of Malawi. There he became Lecturer in History at the new
national university, where he would stay four years.

This was a tremendously gripping time in Central and Southern Africa.
Revolutionary wars of liberation were underway in Angola, Mozambique,
and South Africa; another was about to start in Rhodesia. At a (later
famous) congress of African historians in Dar es Salaam in 1965 Terence
Ranger had declared a new scholarly agenda, independence from colonial
conceptualizations, primacy of African perspectives. In 1967-68 Vail
began his research in northern Malawi, among the proud, "dispossessed,"
"atrociously" (his words) exploited Tumbuka people, learning their
language and perspectives. In 1969 he presented his first paper at an
international conference, a masterly, British-, missionary-, and
chief-debunking reinterpretation of Tumbuka history. In 1971 he
published his first article, "The Noun Classes of Tumbuka." By then
Tumbuka elders judged that not even the Livingstonia mission's legendary
founder had spoken their language as well as Vail did.

Back in Madison in 1972 for his dissertation, "Aspects of the Tumbuka
Verb," he took his Ph.D., but discovered the American demand for
historians of Africa had crashed. He therefore returned to Africa, this
time to Zambia, where at the national university he served as Senior
Lecturer in History and African Languages, 1973-78. Besides organizing
the university's M.A. program in history and its B.A. program in African
languages, he published six major historical articles on Malawi, Zambia,
and Mozambique.

He and Patricia returned then to the United States, he as visiting
associate professor at Virginia, 1978-79, UCLA, 1979-80, Ohio, 1980-81,
then as research fellow at Yale, 1981-82, at Virginia, 1982-83.
Meanwhile his first book appeared, co-written with the poet Landeg
White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique, a history rigorously
argued from archives, brilliantly and beautifully drawn from African
women's songs of Portuguese rule and African suffering and survival in
the Lower Zambesi, 1800-1975. It remains "the outstanding book on the
country's history." No less significant was the conference he organized
at Charlottesville in 1983, for the leading historians and
anthropologists of southern Africa to demonstrate the historical nature
of African ethnicities.

Visiting associate professor of History at Harvard the spring term
1984, Vail received his first regular American academic appointment here
that fall as associate professor of History. We were lucky. For six
years he alone carried Sub-Saharan African history for us, a learned,
articulate, incisive, powerfully attractive and effective teacher,
meanwhile made the Charlottesville conference into a landmark
collection, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, and was given
tenure here in 1990. Since 1988 he had fatherly responsibilities too,
for a Zambian girl, Sharon Mulenga, whom he and Patricia had taken into
their home as their daughter. His and Landeg White's second book then
appeared, Power and the Praise Poem: rich, dazzling proof for Southern
Africa that oral history was real history, popular songs a poetically
licensed, historical criticism of power. Teaching generously, chairman
of the Committee on African Studies, 1990-95, Vail fought hard for an
African Studies center, failed, but helped develop our Africa Humanities
Program. Among many professional and public services was his duty as a
U.N. monitor for the Malawi elections in 1994.

By 1996, his creativity ever richer, he had four books in progress, on
"ethnogenesis" in modern Togo, spirit possession in Malawi and Zambia
since 1850, a dictionary of Lakeside Tonga, and ideophones (not
Indo-European, but important in African languages) as stylistic devices
for proverbs. He then suffered a massive heart attack. He recovered: his
enormous dignity, quiet wit, good sense, the twinkle in his eye, and his
powers of mind, the discipline of research, interpretation, listening to
language, its voices, parts, lilt, rhythms, meaning. And he got back to
work, with Patricia in their garden of violets and orchids, alone in his
study on his books, foreseeing beyond them a grand argument on gardens,
nature preserves, game reserves, and human Africa.

In the fall of 1998 lymphoma grew in him, uncontrollably. He died at
home, in Concord, March 27, 1999.

Respectfully submitted by:

Emmanuel Akyeampong

K. Anthony Appiah

Joseph C. Miller (Virginia)

John Womack, Jr., chairman








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