AN OXFORD ethnographer who became an adopted member of an African royal family, has died at the age of 76.

Dr Alison Redmayne was well known for her work in Tanzania where she studied the Hehe and their neighbouring peoples.

Born in Birmingham on October 1, 1936, she attended Sherborne School for Girls before coming to Oxford to study modern history at St Hugh’s College, where she graduated in 1958.

She first went to Africa in 1961 as an associate of the East African Institute of Social Research in Uganda.

Her doctoral research was undertaken in Tanganyika during its transition towards independence and she returned to Nuffield College in Oxford to write her thesis on the Wahehe people, as they are known collectively in Swahili, which was published in 1964.

She returned to Tanzania, as it had then become, in 1965 to begin a second period of field work and this time she extended her research much more widely around the region of Uhehe.

She carried out careful research into the Hehe resistance and eventual submission to German military force in the 19th century and in order to conduct her research thoroughly she learned the local language and became fluent in Hehe.

During her time in Africa she produced a small but important body of published work, and tape-recorded a large corpus of oral tradition and musical performances in the field in both Tanzania and Nigeria.

Her study of the Hehe people led to her being made an adopted member of their royal family.

After returning to Oxford she was appointed lecturer in social anthropology in the University of Newcastle, a post she held for three years until 1970. In early 1971 she took up the post of senior lecturer in sociology at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, northern Nigeria.

She spent four years there, collecting data on the migrant Tuareg people and continuing the recording of traditional ceremonies and other performances that she had begun in Tanzania.

But by this time she was beginning to feel the effects of a form of blindness which effectively ended her professional career. She believed that she had contracted onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, while in Africa, but some of her doctors did not support this diagnosis.

She returned to live in Oxford, and although she continued part-time teaching at the university for a number of years, was unable to work with any degree of intensity.

Despite her struggles with ill health, she was always willing to assist younger researchers, as well as Tanzanian academics and students. She remained devoted to the people she had studied, and often visited Tanzania.

Dr Redmayne, who lived in North Oxford, died on February 20 and was buried at Wolvercote Cemetery last month. Arrangements are being made to catalogue and archive papers and other material relating to her life and work, to complement a collection in the British Library.

After retiring, Dr Redmayne became involved in campaigning on issues affecting the health service.

She did not marry and had no children.