Robert Carl-Heinz Shell

Professor Shell delivered papers on several topics but notably on slavery, Islam and HIV/AIDS. In September 2004 he delivered the keynote address at the AGM of SANTA (SA National Tuberculosis Association) in Port Elizabeth, South Africa with a talk entitled "Infectious diseases in South Africa: HIV/AIDS and TB, some statistical trends". He has also appeared in Washington, D.C., where he addressed both the House Select Committee on African affairs and the House Select Committee on International Relations on the global Aids pandemic.

Professor Shell obtained his undergraduate and Honours degrees at University of Cape Town in the 1970s. He then went to the U.S. to complete his master's degree at University of Rochester and in 1986 he completed his PhD at Yale University. For his doctoral studies at Yale, completed in 1986, Shell wrote the dissertation entitled "Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1680–1731" under the advisership of famed South African historian, Leonard M. Thompson

Robert Carl-Heinz Shell (31 January 1949 – 3 February 2015) was a South African author, scholar, and professor of African Studies. He was born in the Cape Province of South Africa and lived in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. After the fall of apartheid he returned to South Africa. Toward the end of his life he lived in the Western Cape with his wife Sandy Rowoldt Shell, who is the head of the African Studies Library at University of Cape Town.

"Robert Shell's account is slightly different. He argues that Christianity's change of heart only applied to baptized slaves, and the issue of whether slaves should be baptized was very contentious as late as 1618 when it was raised at the Synod of Dort, the last meeting of Protestant theologians from Great Britain and the Continent. Although the delegates could not agree on a single policy, Shell maintains, their writings ended or limited the trade in Christian slaves.[17]