Historical dictionary of pre-colonial Africa

Robert Oakley Collins (April 1, 1933 – April 11, 2008) was an American historian of East Africa and Sudan. He published numerous articles and thirty-five books, including Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan (Yale, 1983), which was awarded the John Ben Snow Foundation prize for the best book in British History and the Social Sciences written by a North American. He worked as an adviser for Southern Sudan's High Executive Council (HEC) Regional Government in the early 1970s, Chevron Overseas Petroleum in 1981 to 1991, and the US Government. Collins authored many background papers on Sudan and the Middle East aimed at policymakers and, in 1981, he testified before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs. In 1980 he was awarded the Order of Sciences, Arts and Art, Gold Class, by Gaafar Nimeiry, the President of Sudan, for his long service to scholarship on the Upper Nile.