My father-in-law, Lawrence Vambe, who has died aged 102, was a journalist and historian who chronicled the history of Zimbabwe from the time of the arrival of the white colonists until the middle of the 20th century.

He was born in the village of Chishawasha in what was then Southern Rhodesia, where his father, Joseph, was a peasant farmer. Lawrence was born during an influenza pandemic, which killed his mother when he was a baby. He was taken into care by Jesuits who had a mission there. Lawrence attended Kutama College, where Robert Mugabe was also educated. Although Mugabe was seven years younger, the two became well acquainted when Lawrence returned as a teacher.

He had been destined for the priesthood and he spent three years at a seminary. However, he decided instead to become a teacher and travelled to South Africa to do his training at the South African Native College, which became the University of Fort Hare.

After teaching for around five years, he joined African Newspapers as a journalist in 1946 and rose to become editor-in-chief of the group in Rhodesia. As a result of his experience, in 1959 he was sent to London as the press attache of the embassy of the Central African Federation, consisting of what were then Southern and Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland (later Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi).

In the 1940s he had married Cathleen Rolands. He brought his young family of three daughters and a son with him to London, while their mother remained in Rhodesia. The marriage ended in divorce. A second marriage in London, to Kay Boyer, which also ended in divorce, produced two daughters.

Lawrence was a strong proponent of the Federation; but this was doomed when the Rhodesia Front, which was intent on white supremacy, came to power. When violence and repression broke out in Southern Rhodesia, he resigned his post to become, in 1962, an employee of the Anglo-American mining corporation. This employment lasted until 1970 and it took him to Salisbury (now Harare), to Lusaka and, finally, back to London.

It was in London that he wrote An Ill-fated People: Zimbabwe Before and After Rhodes (1972), which covered the country’s history from 1890 until the 1950s. A subsequent book, From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe (1976), updated the story.

With the advent of independence in 1980, Lawrence returned to Zimbabwe as a businessman and as an occasional journalist. His byline in the African daily paper was “Zingese”, which translates, by his own account, as madcap bumblebee. He wrote stinging and humorous political commentaries. Lawrence had high hopes for the future of his country at the time, but he became increasingly doubtful of the Mugabe regime.

In 2001, Lawrence returned to the UK to spend his retirement with his third wife, Mary (nee Fletcher), in Telford, in her home county of Shropshire. After Mary died in 2013, he came to live with my family in London.

A daughter, Patricia, predeceased him. He is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth (my wife)and Virginia, and a son, Lawrence, from his first marriage, and by two daughters, Antoinette and Janine, from his second marriage.