Jamie Bruce Lockhart (B.A. Cantab, 1963), the author of this collection of documents, is a former British diplomat who first took an interest in pre-colonial West Africa when serving in Lagos, Nigeria in the late 1980s. A reading of Captain Hugh Clapperton’s Journal of a Second Expedition…, London, John Murray 1829, led him to follow in the footsteps of the Scottish explorer cross-country from the coast to the desert’s edge and from Lake Chad in the East to Borgu in the West. He also identified in detail the route taken by Richard Lander when he sought to return to the sea by way of Opanda and the lower Niger after Clapperton’s death in 1827.
Bruce Lockhart, who was brought up by the Scottish borders and spent six months as a student on Lake Huron, took an interest in the Scottish traveller’s upbringing and early life in the Royal Navy, when Clapperton worked his way up through the ranks to command lake schooners on the Great Lakes at the end of the War of 1812.
The author’s aim to write a biography, however, was deflected by the discovery in the early 1990s of two previously unpublished diaries of Clapperton’s travels in Africa in 1822-1827, one in The National Archives, London and the other in the Brenthurst Library, Johannesburg. These he transcribed and edited or co-edited, with the encouragement and help from several scholars in the field of West African studies, for publication in three volumes between 1996 and 2004. Background studies led Bruce Lockhart to take a wider interest in the pre-colonial history of the region including the central Sahara and Sudan and in particular in the interface between Europeans and the populations of the interior in the first half of the nineteenth century. He is the author of a number of articles on Clapperton’s travels and has contributed to the discussion on methods of transcription of 19th-century journals of travel. His biography of Hugh Clapperton appeared in 2007.
Lockhart, J.R.B., ed., Clapperton in Borno: journals of the travels in Borno of Lieutenant Hugh Clapperton RN, from January 1823 to September 1824, Westafrikanische Studien, Bd 12, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, Köln, 1996
Bruce-Lockhart, Jamie and John Wright, eds, Difficult and Dangerous Roads, Hugh Clapperton’s travels in Sahara and Fezzan, 1822-25, Sickle Moon Books, with Society for Libyan Studies, London, 2000
Bruce Lockhart, Jamie and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds, Hugh Clapperton into the Interior of Africa, Records of the Second Expedition, 1825-1827, Brill, Leiden, 2005
Bruce Lockhart, Jamie, A Sailor in the Sahara: the life and travels of Hugh Clapperton, Commander RN, I.B .Tauris, London, 2008