Mustafah Dhada was born and brought up in Mozambique. After elementary and middle school education, he studied comparative theology, Islamic jurisprudence, formal logic, Hadith, Sufi doctrine and practice, and comparative mysticism. He arrived in England on August 16, 1972, at 2:30 pm, after a brief stint in Lusaka, Zambia, studied Anglo-Saxon literature, world history and British government and politics at Cambridge Tutors College, and was admitted to the School of African and Asian Studies at Sussex University in 1974, where he continued his interest in fine and performing arts, while developing skills in wood engraving, pottery, and choral music. He also learned to sculpt and play the medieval recorder, which “I no longer have, mercifully! I was bad at it.” He graduated from Sussex in 1977 and then did fine arts at a sculptor’s atelier in Levallois-Perret, northwest Paris. But his first love was history. To this end he was admitted to Oxford in 1977, and did his doctorate in African history, while seated at St. Catherine's College, which was then headed by its Founding Master, the historian Allan Bullock, author of Hitler: A Study of Tyranny. Oxford sharpened his historical skills in a variety of fields, from Balkan nationalism, Islamic history, the formative period, to African oral historiography and research methods in the African liberation ephemera. “My first three years were intense and challenging. Get it written, not right!" said Wilfrid Knapp, one of his college mentors. After the doctorate, Dhada served ten years in academic administration as Dean of Arts and Sciences, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies, Dean of Extended Education, and Associate Vice President for Academic Programs, in a tenured capacity as professor of African and Middle Eastern history. He continued to write, sculpt, sketch and occasionally paint and exhibit, since leaving Oxford in 1984. “My artworks urge you to touch and feel the bronze pieces. I want my viewers to see with their hands by touching, preferably with their eyes closed.” For photo images, you are encouraged to visit https://www.pinterest.com/mdhada/dhada-artwork/ or https://www.flickr.com/photos/dhada/ where you will also find a quick write-up of his sculpting career. His 1987-2017 portfolio of selected scholarly and creative works include four monographs, six book chapters, seventeen juried articles, eighteen book and film reviews, four non-juried articles and texts, fifty-two juried papers and presentations, ten special academic reports on strategic planning, student enrollment and retention, curriculum design, and endowment funding, seven juried sculpture exhibitions, 23 sculpture works, over 2500 sketches, and drawings, and over five million dollars in grants and contracts. His book The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu In Colonial Mozambique, 1960-2013, (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017), won the American History Association’s Martin A. Klein Award for the most distinguished scholarly text in African history in 2017. “The genius of Dhada’s meticulously researched, the multi-layered account is twofold,” said the Klein jurors. It “places the grisly massacre in historical context… expands historical knowledge and perfects methods to produce a definitive social history of Wiriyamu.” https://ces.uc.pt/en/agenda-noticias/destaques/2017/mustafah-dhada-distinguido-com-o-premio-martin-a-klein. He is also a recent winner of the Best Research and Creativity Scholar at CSUB 2020-2021. https://www2.calstate.edu/csu-system/faculty-staff/outstanding-faculty/Pages/Dhada-Mustafah.aspx. The first book, Warriors at Work was reviewed as a landmark study in the field of Luso-African revolutionary warfare, a vigorously revisionist work grounded in archival sources. Dhada was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Asiatic Society. He is now, he says, “quill poised” to begin work on a new monograph, The Voice-Digger Beneath The Wall of Silence: A Historian In Colonial Africa, 1951-2020.
Read full bio