Rodney Davenport, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 90, was a leading South African historian whose book on South African history was required reading for a generation of scholars and students in South Africa and abroad.

A professor of history and head of the department at Rhodes University for many years, he put his academic expertise to practical use as a Grahamstown city councillor and anti-apartheid campaigner, playing a vital role in stopping the forced removal of African communities from the town.His greatest work, South Africa: A Modern History, was a major contribution to South African historical scholarship and widely prescribed as a textbook.His constant updates and revisions ensured its continuing relevance. When a fifth edition of the book was published in 2000 he used the royalties to establish a history scholarship at Rhodes.First published in 1977, it was hailed as "the first really viable modern survey of South African history since the works of CW de Kiewiet and Eric Walter".Most South African history before Davenport wrote his book was examined from the perspective of white South Africans. He brought the viewpoints of African people onto centre stage.Copies of his book were passed around among political prisoners until they were no more than bundles of pages.Davenport was born in India on January 5 1926. He called himself a "child of the Raj", a sad reference to fact that he was, to all intents and purposes, an orphan from the age of six when he was sent away from his parents to England for his schooling.He was a pupil at Rugby when at 14 he was sent to South Africa, where his mother had family, to escape the wartime bombing of Britain.He matriculated at St John's College in Houghton and went to Rhodes University in 1943 where he took his BA degree with distinctions in history and French before joining the South African artillery in Italy at the tail end of World War 2.He returned to Rhodes in 1946 and completed, with distinction, his master's thesis on Responsible Government in Natal from 1880 to 1882, which indicated a developing interest in the social and political history of South Africa.He then went to Oxford where he read theology and toyed with the idea of becoming a priest before switching to history.An irregular churchgoer who described himself as an agnostic, saying he pleaded ignorance on the question of God, Davenport nevertheless enjoyed belting out hymns and wrote a history of Christianity in South Africa.After Oxford he taught for some years in Britain and then lectured at the University of Cape Town while completing a doctorate on the Afrikaner Bond. His lectures on its leader, "Onze Jan" Hofmeyr, were reportedly spellbinding.In 1965 he returned to Rhodes, became professor and head of history in 1976 and introduced African history into the syllabus.He was a close friend of anthropologist Monica Wilson and contributed to the Oxford History of South Africa, of which she was the co-ordinator.Davenport had a utilitarian view of history, believing it should be put to good use. "History is the best safeguard against the 'con men' in public life," he said.It was in this spirit that he provided Margaret Ballinger, member of parliament for Africans in the Eastern Cape, with ammunition to use against apartheid architect HF Verwoerd. He also put his knowledge of historical precedent at the service of the defence in the Rivonia trial, briefing it on when it was just to fight a guerrilla war.His work as a historian made him an authority on urban legislation and land tenure, and he used this knowledge, combined with the impeccable logic he owed to a classical education steeped in Latin and Greek, to thwart government attempts to deprive the inhabitants of Fingo Village in Grahamstown of freehold title to their property, which they had held since 1854.He co-wrote a book called The Right to the Land and campaigned actively for the country's only non-racial political party, the Liberal Party, and when government policy banning mixed-race parties killed it off, for the Progressive Party.He was a spokesman for the South African Institute of Race Relations and the Civil Rights League.Davenport was a visiting professor at some of the world's leading universities including Rochester, Cambridge, Yale, Wesleyan and Trinity College, Dublin.He is survived by his wife Betty, a courageous member of the Black Sash in the worst days of apartheid, and three children1926-2016..