Born in King William's Town in 1945, he studied first in the Lovedale High School and after in the University of Fort Hare.
Because of apartheid he left in the 1960s South Africa for England, and thanks to a scholarship went to Keele University where he obtained a first class degree in economics, history and politics.
In December 1996 he had been offered the most important position in the South African university system, the vice-chancellorship of the University of the Witwatersrand, but was forced to turn down the offer in January due to a cancer that brought to his death in Rochester on 12 August.
The study obtained the Johannesburg Sunday Times' Book of the Year Award.
His last major work was Limits of anarchy: intervention and state formation in Chad, written in 1996, which examined Chadian modern history with the intention of exploring the dilemmas that involve "fictive states", i.e. countries which have to endure a fitful existence between too much and too little government.