Leroy Vail (August 5, 1940 – March 27, 1999) whose birth name was Hazen Leroy Vail, was an American specialist in African studies and educator who specialized in the history and linguistics of Central Africa and later extended his interests to Southern Africa. He taught in universities in Malawi, Zambia and the United States and his research in the first two countries inclined him toward the view that Central Africa underwent a period of underdevelopment that began in the mid-19th century and accelerated under colonial rule. After his return to the United States, he cooperated with Landeg White on studies of colonial Mozambique and on the value of African poetry and songs as a source of oral history.
Early life, education and family
Hazen Leroy Vail, known throughout his adult life as Leroy Vail, was born in Boston, Massachusetts on August 5, 1940, to parents of Canadian origin. His father, Hazen Claude Vail, from Belleisle, New Brunswick, moved to Boston as an adult and his mother, born Mary Teresa MacLean in Cape Breton Island, arrived there as a young girl. He had one younger brother, born in 1943.
Leroy grew up in the Allston neighbourhood of Boston, where he attended local public schools. In 1952, he was admitted to the Boston Latin School, graduating in 1958, and then entered Boston College to study Classics, but he changed to studying history after taking a sophomore course on medieval Europe, and graduated magna cum laude in history in 1962.
Vail attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, intending to study British imperial history under Philip Curtin. However, he quickly moved to the comparative tropical history program led by Curtin and Jan Vansina, where he studied African history and historical linguistics. He was awarded an M.A. in History in 1965, after which he was involved in Bantu language research at Madison, in its newly founded Department of African Languages and Literature.
Leroy married Patricia Ann Horochena, who held a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1967. In 1988, she and Vail took a Zambian girl, Sharon Mulenga, into their home as their daughter. Patricia Vail died on 26 February 2007.
In 1996, Vail suffered a massive heart attack but recovered and returned to work. However, he was later diagnosed with lymphoma which, in the autumn of 1998, spread uncontrollably. He died at his home in Concord on 27 March 1999.
Academic career
In Africa
Vail was awarded a one-year traveling fellowship by the University of Wisconsin in 1967 and decided to undertake research in Malawi. He became a Lecturer in History in the newly founded University of Malawi and remained there until 1971. After leaving the country, he became a fierce critic of the regime of its first president, Hastings Banda.
In 1967–68 Vail began linguistic research among the Tumbuka people of northern Malawi, publishing his first article, The Noun Classes of Tumbuka in 1971 followed by later ones reinterpreting Tumbuka history and examining the operations of Portuguese companies in the lower Zambezi Valley of Mozambique. He returned to in Madison in 1971 to complete his doctoral thesis Aspects of the Tumbuka Verb, which was accepted in 1972. He was unable to obtain an African history post in North America, so returned to Africa in 1973 as senior lecturer in history and African languages in the University of Zambia, remaining there until 1978. During his time at this university, he organized an undergraduate course in African Languages and a Masters course in African History, and published several important articles on the history of Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique.
In the US
Vail returned to the United States in 1978, and was visiting Associate Professor successively at Virginia for the 1978–79 academic year, UCLA, for 1979–80 and Ohio for 1980–81. He then gained a Research Fellowship on the Yale Southern African Research Program in 1981-82, returning to Virginia for the 1982–83 academic year. Meanwhile, his first book, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique which he co-authored with Landeg White, was published. Its history was based on archival material and also on African women's songs that recorded the African suffering caused by Portuguese rule in the Lower Zambezi. In 1983, he organized a symposium for historians and anthropologists of southern Africa that investigated the historical nature of African ethnicities in a landmark collection, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa.