Christopher Fyfe (9 November, 1920 - 26 August, 2008) was a Scottish historian most noted for his work on Sierra Leone.
Christopher was born in England to a family of Scottish ancestry. His father moved to Ontario where he became principal of Queen's University. The family subsequently moved to Aberdeen, where his father played a similar role at Aberdeen University.
Christopher attended Oxford University, but his studies were interrupted by a spell in the Army as a gunner. After graduating he became a school teacher in Düsseldorf
However in 1950 he was invited by his brother-in-law to organise the Sierra Leonean archives. After two years as the government archivist he moved to London, then Bristol and Belfast and spent ten years working on his seminal History of Sierra Leone (1962). He modelled his 852-page text on Ulysses writing it as a single block of text. When the publisher demanded chapters, Fyfe merely inserted numbered breaks.
Following the appearance of his book, Fyfe took up a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh in 1962, at newly founded Centre of African Studies. He became a reader in 1964, retaining this position until his retirement in 1991.
He edited the Journal of African History and regularly revised his lectures in light of the latest trends in historical research. He published a further book, on James Africanus Horton, the first African graduate of the University of Edinburgh.
Fyfe produced a shorter history of Sierra Leone which became a school text book in Sierra Leone. He became a mentor to many younger Sierra Leonean researchers some of whom became key figures in the intellectual establishment of Freetown and, later, in exile.