John M. Lonsdale (born 1937) is a British Africanist and historian. He is Emeritus Professor of Modern African History at the Centre of African Studies in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Trinity College there.[1] As a schoolboy, he spent three summer holidays during 1953-1956 in Kenya where his father had just taken a job.[2] He read history at Cambridge from 1958 through 1964.[3] In 1956 he started his national service as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles. His first teaching job was in Dar es Salaam in 1964.[2] Lonsdale studied the modern history of Kenya extensively and won the Outstanding African Studies Award of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom in 2006.[4]