Cynthia Brantley graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas, Austin in 1965. After spending nine months on a Rotary Fellowship to an international graduate school in Ibadan, Nigeria, she was admitted to the graduate program at U.C.L.A. in African history where she earned a Ph.D. in 1972. In the same year, she joined the UC Davis Department of History as an assistant professor in African history.
Cynthia was the first woman hired in a tenure-track position by the Department of History. In addition to courses in African history, she agreed at the department’s request to teach the first course offered at UC Davis on the history of women in the United States. Because no textbooks were yet available in this field, Cynthia developed her own primary source materials and attracted so many enthusiastic undergraduates that the department sought and obtained in 1973 a tenure-track position in U.S. women’s history.
This expansion both enabled Cynthia to increase her course offerings in African history and provided the basis of what would become the Department's graduate program in Cross Cultural Women's History (currently Cross Cultural Women's and Gender History), of which she was a founding member. Her support for women at UCD extended to her service on numerous faculty committees. These included a committee that designed an inter-disciplinary Women Studies program at UCD (now the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) and a committee that led to the creation of the Women’s Resources and Research Center on campus.
Cynthia’s research in the field of African history resulted in two books. Her first book, The Giriami and Colonial Resistance in Kenya, published by UC Press in 1981, analyzed the resistance in Kenya’s coastal hinterland of a Bantu-speaking ethnic group, the Giriama, to British attempts in 1912 to recruit them to work as wage-laborers in British-owned plantations along the coast. Although armed only with bows and arrows and easily defeated by British troops, their lack of centralized political or religious organization made the imposition of foreign administration difficult. Not only did very few Giriami became wage-laborers, but the coastal plantations failed as economic enterprises. As Cynthia concluded, the British won the war, but their victory was hollow.
Her second book, Feeding Families: African Realities and British Ideas of Nutrition and Development in Early Colonial Africa, published by Heinemann Press in 2002, demonstrated her versatility as a scholar. Using abundant and technically complex archival data from British nutritional projects in its colony of Malawi, Cynthia analyzed the extent to which Africans drew on rich cultural traditions in their efforts to meet their nutritional needs. She also highlighted gendered aspects of feeding families and showed that the conclusions British nutritionists derived from their surveys were misleading, both in terms of what was needed and what could be accomplished. Her papers are archived at the UC Davis Library.
After the history department recruited a second historian of Africa, the history department established a PhD program in African history in 1998, and Cynthia mentored several graduate students who are now professors of African history at other universities. She continued as well to mentor undergraduates in the field of African history, earning a Chancellor’s Award for Mentoring Undergraduate Research.
Cynthia retired in 2009 and passed away in 2018. She is remembered with admiration by her colleagues in the Department of History, whether still active or retired, not only for her research accomplishments and teaching ability but also for her compassion and generosity. She was exemplary in every way.
Written by Ted Margadant and William Hagen, retired professors in the History Department