My husband Richard Rathbone, who has died aged 81, was for many years professor of African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (Soas).

He loved teaching, and was, one of his former students said, “a superb supervisor, prompt in reading what I wrote, his gentle and encouraging criticisms precise and pointed and always stimulating”. He travelled extensively over the years, spending time in Ghana and South Africa, and had fellowships at Harvard and Princeton.

Among his many books, Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana (1993) is probably the best known; it is an exciting and compelling story of a ritual murder in a Ghanaian kingdom. Richard also appeared on Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time programme, on the Berlin conference of 1884 and the “scramble for Africa”, on Radio 4 – a transcript of that programme is included in the book In Our Time, published in 2018.

Richard was born in Richmond, Surrey, to Eileene (nee Goodwin) and Harold Rathbone, who met when they both worked at the BBC during the second world war. Harold, who became a pilot, was killed in action. Eileene later married again, but Richard’s childhood was not a happy one.

He was educated at St Paul’s school, London, and went on to Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary University of London). He studied history, but was rather bored by the Tudors and Stuarts and found himself enthralled by the new courses in African history being offered at Soas under Prof Roland Oliver, and was able to attend lectures there.

He spent a year at the University of Ghana at Legon, and hitchhiked to exotic sites such as Timbuktu, in Mali. He completed his thesis, on the process of decolonisation in Ghana, in 1969, and soon after began teaching at Soas. We met at Queen Mary College and married in 1965.

In 2000, health problems led him to take early retirement, and we moved from London, where we had lived for many years, to mid-Wales. For some years, Richard worked as a visiting lecturer at the University of Aberystwyth. He was also a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

His greatest delight in these later years was his membership of a local choir – he had always loved music, but was too busy to pursue it when we lived in London. He finally succumbed to the cardiac condition that he had had for many years.

Richard is survived by me, a daughter, Lucy, and two grandchildren, Lily and Jacob. Our other daughter, Harriet, died in 2021.