David C. Tambo is a historian of slavery in pre-colonial Nigeria, editor for the Nigerian oral histories of the Plateau History Project in the 1980s, former head of archives and special collections at Ball State University, and later director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.
[1] From 1975 to 1976, Tambo undertook doctoral (uncompleted) fieldwork on the economic history of Nigeria, in Vom, researching the interaction between the Jos Plateau people and the Sokoto Caliphate in the pre-colonial period.
He was head of archives and special collections at Ball State University.
[3] Later he was director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the Davidson Library, University of California Santa Barbara.
Tambo's archives of his visits to Nigeria for the Peace Corps and as an academic researcher are the subject of the Tambo Nigerian History Collection of the University of California, Santa Barbara where they are held in 7 cartons, 3 document boxes, and 104 audio cassettes, along with digital files.