Dr Marion Wallace

Dr Marion Wallace is a historian of Africa, as well as a curator and library & archives specialist. She was Lead Curator of African Collections at the British Library until 2022. Her current research focuses on African language print cultures in the mid-twentieth century, and UK legacies of enslavement.

Marion’s principal specialist area is the history of Namibia. Her PhD is in the history of health and medicine in Namibia, and in 2011 she published a History of Namibia, a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2012 which has become the standard general text on the subject.

She is also particularly interested in the history of West Africa, curating a major British Library exhibition, ‘West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song’, in 2015–16. She also works on Black British history and culture, and in 2020–2021 co-curated the BL exhibition ‘Khadija Saye: in this space we breathe’, works by the young British–Gambian photographer Khadija Saye.

Marion is a member of the Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies and the Development Officer of SCOLMA (the UK Libraries and Archives Group on Africa).

Research interests:

History of Namibia; history of West Africa; African languages and publishing; Black British history and culture; library and archive matters relating to Africa, including cultural property and decoloniality.

Selected publications

Books

Marion Wallace with John Kinahan (2011), A History of Namibia From the Beginning to 1990 (London: Hurst).

Augustus Casely-Hayford, Janet Topp Fargion and Marion Wallace (eds) (2015), West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song (London: British Library).

Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace (eds) (2014), African Studies in the Digital Age. DisConnects? (Leiden: Brill).

Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester, Marion Wallace and Wolfram Hartmann (eds) (1998), Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment, 1915–1946 (London: James Currey).

Articles

Marion Wallace (2022), ‘The British Library’s Collections of African-language Publishing’, African Bibliography, Research and Documentation, 1, 31–46.

Kadija Sesay and Marion Wallace (2022), ‘Reflections on “Khadija Saye: in this space we breathe”’, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, 9.

Paul Naylor and Marion Wallace (2019), ‘Author of his own Fate? The Eighteenth-Century Writings of Ayuba Sulayman Diallo’, Journal of African History, 60, 3, 343–377.

Marion Wallace (2015), ‘Personal Circuits: Official Tours and South Africa’s Colony’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 3, 635–652.