Inside African Anthropology : Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters 9781107333390, 9781107029385

Citation preview

more information - www.cambridge.org/9781107029385

Inside African Anthropology

Inside African Anthropology offers an incisive biography of the life and work of South Africa’s foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual projects in southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s through a massive personal archive, the book offers insights into the personal and intellectual life of a leading African anthropologist. Beginning with her origins in the remote Eastern Cape, the authors follow Wilson to Cambridge University and back into the field among the Pondo of South Africa, where her studies resulted in her 1936 book Reaction to Conquest. Her fieldwork focus then shifted to Tanzania, where she teamed up with her husband, Godfrey Wilson. She later returned to South Africa to begin her teaching career at Fort Hare University and record her Tanzanian research. In the 1960s, Wilson embarked on a new urban ethnography with a young South African anthropologist, Archie Mafeje, one of the many black scholars she trained. This study also provides a meticulously researched exploration of the indispensable contributions of African research assistants and co-researchers to the production of this famous woman scholar’s cultural knowledge about mid-twentiethcentury Africa. Andrew Bank is Associate Professor and head of the History Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He has been commissioning editor of the journal Kronos: Southern African Histories since 2001 and is a member of the editorial board for the South African Historical Journal. Leslie J. Bank is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa. He is the author of Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City (2011). He is a member of the editorial board of the International Africa Institute’s journal, Africa.

Praise for Inside African Anthropology ‘In this provocative engagement with the legacy of Monica Wilson, one of anthropology’s most innovative pioneers, the contributors make a strong case for the enduring relevance of her scholarly vision – her insistence on the discipline’s relation to history, its unique understanding of ritual and symbolism, its potential for intimate collaborations across the lines of race, culture, status. In reflecting on why it is that subsequent generations have not fully appreciated Wilson’s genius, whether in Africa or beyond, the authors provide sharp insight into what her story tells us about how anthropology evaluates its own past, about how it often fails to recognise the many “unofficial” contributors – be they anthropologists or their various “assistants” – who have enriched its intellectual bounty.’ – Jean Comaroff, Harvard University ‘This book is highly informative on Monica Hunter Wilson, one of the most significant figures in African anthropology, who at great personal and intellectual costs opted to work from within as apartheid unfolded in South Africa and as some of her contemporaries relocated to universities in the UK and the United States. The book makes a compelling case for Monica Wilson’s achievements and stature as a distinguished and highly regarded ethnographer of social change in Africa; one who recognised and invested significantly in ethnography as co-production and co-implication through the close creative relationships she forged and maintained with her fellow African assistants in the course of her career as researcher and teacher. It is a major and welcome contribution to African anthropology increasingly in need of new approaches to its intellectual history, ones that show sensitivity towards processes of inter-dependence, intersubjectivity and reflexivity in knowledge production.’ – Francis B. Nyamnjoh, University of Cape Town ‘This book is among the best written volumes I have read. It uncovers an “unofficial” history of anthropology from South Africa. Each of the authors shows how anthropology emerges not just as an expression of theory or the genealogy of its leading figures, but through the unfolding of diverse lives. The most important relationships are between Monica and Godfrey Wilson and the black South Africans, Zambians, and Tanganyikans who engaged with them as informants, interpreters and clerks, but also as culture brokers, patrons and intellectuals. Monica’s liberalism and the context of segregation were always powerful influences, but as a study of lived relationships, Inside African Anthropology reveals the heterogeneity and negotiation in intellectual work.’ – Nancy Jacobs, Brown University ‘Combining critical intellectual history with biography, the chapters that make up this fascinating book remind us again that social anthropological scholarship has always been a “co-production”, no more so than in South Africa during the period of apartheid. Unusually, among her peers, Monica Wilson always acknowledged this fact – it was intrinsic to her life’s work as a scholar and dedicated teacher.’ – Megan Vaughan, Cambridge University

Inside African Anthropology Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters Edited by

Andrew Bank University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Leslie J. Bank University of Fort Hare, South Africa

International African Institute, London and

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107029385  C Cambridge University Press 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Inside African anthropology : Monica Wilson and her interpreters / Andrew Bank, Leslie J. Bank. p. cm. – (The international African library) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-02938-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Wilson, Monica, 1908–1982. 2. Ethnologists – South Africa – Biography. 3. Women ethnologists – South Africa – Biography. I. Bank, Andrew. II. Bank, Leslie John. III. Series: International African library. GN21.W49I57 2013 306.092–dc23 [B] 2012051626 ISBN 978-1-107-02938-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Figures Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Andrew Bank

page ix xi xiii 1

Part 1 Pondoland and the Eastern Cape 1 Family, Friends and Mentors: Monica Hunter at Lovedale and Cambridge, 1908–1930 Andrew Bank 2 The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and Her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–1932 Andrew Bank 3 City Dreams, Country Magic: Re-Reading Monica Hunter’s East London Fieldnotes Leslie J. Bank

37

67

95

Part 2 Bunyakyusa 4 Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers: Monica and Godfrey in Bunyakyusa Rebecca Marsland 5 Working with the Wilsons: The Brief Career of a ‘Nyakyusa Clerk’ (1910–1938) Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Timothy Mwakasekele and Andrew Bank

129

162

vii

viii

Contents

Part 3 Fort Hare and the University of Cape Town 6 ‘Your Intellectual Son’: Monica Wilson and Her Students at Fort Hare, 1944–1946 Se´an Morrow

193

7 Witchcraft and the Academy: Livingstone Mqotsi, Monica Wilson and the Middledrift Healers, 1945–1957 Leslie J. Bank

224

8 ‘Speaking from Inside’: Archie Mafeje, Monica Wilson and the Co-Production of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township Andrew Bank with Vuyiswa Swana

253

Part 4 Legacy 9 ‘Part of One Whole’: Anthropology and History in the Work of Monica Wilson Se´an Morrow and Christopher Saunders 10 Gleanings and Leavings: Encounters in Hindsight Pamela Reynolds Bibliography Index

283 308

321 347

Figures

P.1 The making of a woman anthropologist: the studious young Monica Hunter at work in the Stanley Library, Girton College, c. 1929. page 35 1.1 A family wedding photograph taken on the front porch of the Hunter home at Lovedale in 1911. 42 1.2 Monica Wilson aged five. The photograph was taken during the family visit to England and Scotland in 1913, a year after the death of her brother. 43 1.3 Monica sent this postcard of Girton to her father with the comment: ‘This rather jolly view of “Emily Davis Court” where we play tennis in summer.’ 50 1.4 Portrait of Monica dating from her Girton College years. 51 1.5 Monica’s closest friend at Girton College, the Egyptian nationalist Munira Sadek. 53 1.6 Monica’s long-standing friend, the Communist Party of South Africa member Eddie Roux in his young days. 54 2.1 The map of Pondoland that featured inside the cover of the first edition of Reaction to Conquest (1936). 74 2.2 One of only two surviving photos of Monica Hunter in the field in Pondoland. Given the vegetation the likely setting is Mbotji and the photographer was therefore probably Michael Geza, her research assistant in Eastern Pondoland. 76 2.3 This is a recording of one of the many iintsomi (Xhosa traditional stories) written for Monica by Michael Geza. 87 2.4 The first of the page-spread features published in the Illustrated London News of 22 August 1936 in ‘appreciation’ of Reaction to Conquest. 89 3.1 East Bank at the outbreak of the Second World War. 103 3.2 Walter Benson Rubusana around the time he worked with Monica Hunter in East Bank. 104 3.3 A selection from the hundreds of fieldnotes that Monica recorded in East London. 109 ix

x

Figures

P.2 A gifted young fieldworker: Monica’s future husband Godfrey during his first five months of fieldwork in Bunyakyusa, September 1934 to January 1935. 4.1 Settlement of a dispute. The anthropologist (Godfrey Wilson) is sitting with the court. 4.2 Monica Wilson taking notes during an interview in Bunyakyusa, 1955. 4.3 Map of the Rungwe District in Bunyakyusa showing the three main fieldwork sites of the Wilsons. 4.4 Inside the small house at Isumba that was their ‘principal headquarters’. 4.5 Monica observing Nyakyusa girls washing clothes at the river. 5.1 Leonard Mwaisumo with his mother and two sisters, 1934. P.3 Monica’s first graduate student in anthropology, the late Livingstone Mqotsi (1921–2009) in June 2007. 6.1 Godfrey Wilson during the war. 6.2 Monica and the House Committee of the women’s residence Elukhanyisweni (Place of Enlightenment) at Fort Hare Native College, 1946. 6.3 Godfrey Pitje in his later years as a lawyer. 7.1 African Studies Department faculty and senior students, Fort Hare, 1946. 7.2 A gathering of Eastern Cape healers, East London, 1940. 8.1 Archie Mafeje (left) during his years at Healdtown Missionary College where he matriculated in 1954. 8.2 Monica (centre) and her colleagues at a Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) Conference in 1951. 8.3 Archie Mafeje (right) in Adderley Street, Cape Town, with fellow UCT student and anti-apartheid political activist Welsh Makanda, August 1961. P.4 Traces in the landscape: the trading store in Ntibane, Western Pondoland, then and now, the only remaining traces of Monica Wilson’s presence in the landscapes of Pondoland and Bunyakyusa. 9.1 Monica Wilson with Leonard and Betty Thompson, Lake Arrowhead, 1963. 10.1 Monica Wilson at Hunterstoun in the years of her retirement. 10.2 Monica Wilson on a hike during her retirement, with the Hogsback in the background.

127 131 132 135 146 153 171 191 196

205 215 233 238 260 261

265

281 293 316 319

Contributors

Andrew Bank is an Associate Professor and head of the History Department at the University of the Western Cape. His main publications are The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806 to 1834 (1991); Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek–Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (2006) and (with Keith Dietrich) An Eloquent Picture Gallery: The South African Portrait Photographs of Gustav Theodor Fritsch, 1863–1865 (2008). He is also the commissioning editor of Kronos: Southern African Histories. Leslie J. Bank is Professor and Director of the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa. He is the current president of the Anthropology Southern Africa Association and has published widely in the field of anthropology and development in southern Africa. His recent publications include Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City (2011), a major restudy of a classic trilogy in the urban anthropology in South Africa. Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Wits University. He teaches African, American and African American history. His research interests include Ndebele ethnicity, the history of radio in South Africa (mainly African-language radio stations of the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the African National Congress’s Radio Freedom) and the history of African research assistants and fieldwork in southern Africa. Rebecca Marsland is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She worked in Kyela District, Tanzania, for almost three years between 2000 and 2009; is currently working on a book called The Words of the People about tradition, mourning and moral debates among the Nyakyusa; and is writing further articles about the Wilsons’ fieldwork. She has also co-edited two volumes on medical anthropology with Ruth Prince: What Is Life Worth? (special issue of the Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2012) and Making Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives (Ohio University Press, 2013). xi

xii

Contributors

´ Morrow is Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Fort Sean Hare and a partner in Ngomso Research, Writing and Editing Service. Originally a high school teacher, he worked at universities and research institutions in Ireland, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and South Africa. He has published on aspects of the educational, religious, liberation and cultural history of Central and southern Africa. He is currently completing a biography of Monica and Godfrey Wilson. Timothy Mwakasekele is a project worker in Mental Health and a Masters student in Public Health at Glasgow Caledonia University in Edinburgh. He was born in the region where Monica and Godfrey Wilson did fieldwork in south-west Tanganyika. His interest in the history of social anthropology developed during a period of five years when he worked as a translator and research assistant for a social anthropologist doing fieldwork in this area. Pamela Reynolds is Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, and Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town. She is an anthropologist and has written five books on the ethnography of childhood and youth in southern Africa. Her most recent book, War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State, was published in 2013 by Fordham University Press. She is collaborating with the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town on a project on ‘The Figure of the Child in Africa’. Christopher Saunders is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. Educated at the universities of Cape Town and Oxford, he worked as a research assistant for Monica Wilson when she was preparing chapters for the first volume of The Oxford History of South Africa. His main interests have included southern African twentieth-century political history and historiography. He is now a research associate of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town. Vuyiswa Swana is the younger sister of the late Archie Mafeje. She worked as a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg until the late 1960s before serving as a health worker on the Johannesburg City Council. She and her husband Marshall have three sons and now live in retirement in Mthatha, Eastern Cape. She maintained close contact with her brother from shared childhood years in rural Thembuland through his years in exile and after he had returned to southern Africa in the early 1990s.

Acknowledgements

The essays in this volume are based on many years of collective, and often collaborative, research on one substantial archival collection, the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers (Wilson Collection). This Collection was donated by Monica Wilson’s two sons, Francis and Tim, to the Manuscripts and Archives Department of University of Cape Town Libraries from 1994. This is when the deposits became available to researchers for the first time. We are grateful to Francis and Tim Wilson for making these records accessible and for supporting our scholarly project from the outset. They played an active part in the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference held between 24 and 26 June 2008 at Hunterstoun in the Hogsback Mountains of the Eastern Cape, the place of retirement of Monica Wilson and of their family holiday home which was given over at this event to the University of Fort Hare as a Creative Writing Centre. They have kindly given us permission to reproduce the photographic materials from the Wilson Collection that feature here. The transfer of the Wilson Collection to UCT Libraries coincided with the appointment of Lesley Hart as head of the Manuscripts and Archives Department. Her deep and ongoing sense of commitment to the Collection has been evident from the time that she journeyed to the Hogsback in 2000 to collect a large body of documents to add to the substantial collection that had been transferred to UCT a few years earlier. She then began the long process of sorting these additional papers which Monica had archived in sundry cupboards, bookcases, shelving cabinets and trunks in the stone building that served as her library. Lesley delivered these papers by hand to the shelves of the metal sliding cabinets in the Manuscripts and Archives Department on the ground floor of UCT’s Oppenheimer Institute Building. She had already spent more than a year of intensive work compiling the 26-page index to the Collection which all of the authors in this volume have used as their point of access to the documents. More than fifteen years later she is still involved in indexing uncatalogued documents and has overseen the process of digitising the hundreds of negatives of fieldwork photographs contained in the Wilson Collection. We owe her a debt of gratitude for these years of labour. xiii

xiv

Acknowledgements

Isaac Ntabankulu has been the most generous of co-hosts at Manuscripts and Archives, taking an active interest in the research materials of Monica Wilson and effectively acting (for one of the editors at least) as an informal research assistant over a period of five years. He has fetched, delivered (and at times uncovered) documents for all the authors. He has photocopied materials for distribution to authors in more distant locations; translated sections of Xhosa text recorded by one of Monica Wilson’s primary research assistants in Western Pondoland; established contacts with friends of Archie Mafeje, her most celebrated anthropological collaborator; and willingly sourced new reviews of Wilson’s publications. He read the Eastern Cape chapters to check our Xhosa terms. Janine Dunlop has been another committed and engaging hostess at the Manuscripts and Archives Department over many years. She has kindly facilitated the process of scanning the visual images from the Wilson Collection that feature here. Andre Landman and Marjorie ‘Bobby’ Eldridge have also warmly facilitated our research in the Manuscripts and Archives Department. Thanks to all of them for making this research so pleasurable on a daily basis. In the latter stages of the project, we have benefited from readers’ comments and editorial interventions on successive versions of our draft manuscript. Deborah James made detailed and incisive comments and offered enthusiastic support. Two anonymous in-house reviewers, Nancy, Jacobs and Lyn Schumaker, provided constructive and creative engagement with the draft manuscript. Stephanie Kitchen of the International African Institute shepherded the manuscript through to publication with a combination of creative energy and common sense. She has also kindly made extensive last-minute edits to the book’s Bibliography. Priscilla Hall deserves special mention for cleaning up a messy document and re-energising the project at a flagging stage. She frog-marched each of the authors through two rigorous rounds of copyediting conducted under severe time pressure. She has touched up our text at points too numerous to mention, drafted fine summary paragraphs and kindly compiled the book’s Bibliography. Mike Kirkwood brought an enthusiasm for the manuscript, an engaging humour and a light touch to our final round of editing. Gerda Martin takes credit for compiling the Index. Thanks too to Shana Meyer for her endless patience and skillful work on layout and design. Andrew Bank gratefully acknowledges funding from the University of the Western Cape’s Arts Research Committee and South Africa’s National Research Foundation for field trips to the Eastern Cape and south-west Tanzania, and visits to the archives of women anthropologists. These organisations are not of course responsible for the ideas and arguments presented in his chapters.

Acknowledgements

xv

It would be remiss of us not to acknowledge the authors who have remained committed to the project, despite lengthy delays and ever fresh rounds of editorial demands. Se´an Morrow, who is himself working on a biography of Monica and Godfrey Wilson, deserves special mention. He has been a highly supportive travelling companion into the past. Photographer Rui Assubuji accompanied one of us (Andrew) on field trips in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa. We are grateful to feature two of his photographs here. It is, ultimately, because of the generous participation of these authors, and their willingness to engage and re-engage with their essays, that the book has taken on what we feel is a collective spirit, a sense of joint endeavour appropriate to its central theme: the co-production of social scientific knowledge. Andrew Bank and Leslie J. Bank January 2013

Introduction Andrew Bank

Monica Hunter Wilson (1908–1982) was a prominent figure in that pioneering generation of social anthropologists who began their careers during the interwar years.1 South African-born ethnographers played a leading, perhaps the leading, role in what has nostalgically been called ‘the Golden Age of South African Ethnography’ within the British functionalist tradition.2 Yet her contribution as an anthropologist has been recognised only partially, mainly because of the narrow retrospective criterion by which intellectual significance has typically been judged. In the standard narratives significance has been measured almost solely in relation to ‘theoretical innovation’ in what emerges as a story of stages of progress. Monica Hunter Wilson did make an important contribution to anthropological theory. She played a key role in reorienting the functionalist tradition away from the tribal study written in the ethnographic present towards the study of social change in Africa. Her foremost theoretical text, that short co-authored book The Analysis of Social Change: Based on Observations in Central Africa – written together with her husband, the anthropologist Godfrey Wilson, and published by Cambridge University Press in 1945 – was the first study to use ‘social change’ in its title. Partly because of its theoretical ambition, partly because of its war-delayed production, it had less impact on theory than its authors had hoped. It certainly had nothing like the long-term impact of that famous article in three parts, ‘The Bridge’, that had been published a few years earlier by her South African-born peer Max Gluckman (1908–1975). It is his extended ‘analysis of a social situation in Zululand’ that has come to be recognised as the moment when South African and African anthropology recognised the need to incorporate coloniser and colonised, European and African, into a wider, and what is now accepted 1

2

Thanks to Paolo Israel, Nancy Jacobs, Deborah James, Se´an Morrow, Pamela Reynolds, Christopher Saunders and Lyn Schumaker for comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Special thanks to my co-editor for detailed commentary and fresh ideas on numerous draft versions. W. David Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists 1920– 1990 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001 [1997]), 1.

1

2

Inside African Anthropology

as more modern, ethnographic framework. Gluckman later credited his one-time mentor Isaac Schapera (1905–2003) as the joint founder of this ‘one-society school’. I will challenge this androcentric narrative later in this introduction. For the moment I am interested in making a case for broadening the criterion by which significance may be judged, and presenting an argument for seeing Monica Hunter Wilson as an even more significant figure based on this wider conception. To begin with, we should note that, like these famous male peers who worked from Manchester and London respectively in their mature years, she was an internationally celebrated scholar. Her global reputation was built on an impressive body of ethnographic work on the Pondo of South Africa and the Nyakyusa of south-west Tanganyika. Her four highly detailed ethnographies, all discussed below, were published between 1936 and 1959 by Oxford University Press in association with the International African Institute, and all but the last of these was reissued. Her best-known monograph remains that ‘precocious’ classic Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa, which first appeared with a glowing foreword by the former (1919–24) and future (1939–48) South African prime minister Jan Smuts when she was just 28 years of age.3 Recently it has been republished in a fourth edition as part of the International African Institute’s ‘Classics in African Anthropology’ series.4 It has been praised widely over the years, whether by ‘the founding fathers’ of British functionalism in the interwar years, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, leading African nationalists and intellectuals like Oliver Tambo and A. C. Jordan, or latter-day social historians and novelists in quest of information about the history of African sexuality.5 Jonny Steinberg, for example, describes it as ‘one of the finest ethnographic monographs ever penned in South Africa’ and demonstrates the continued relevance of its arguments about African culture.6 3

4

5

6

‘Precocious’ was the term used by the editors of the festschrift published in honour of Monica Hunter Wilson after her retirement. See Michael Whisson and Martin E. West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 3. Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1936; Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1961, 2nd edition; Cape Town: David Philip in associations with Rex Collings, London, 1979, 3rd edition; Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African Institute, 2009: Classics in African Anthropology Series, 4th edition). Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African Institute, 2008: Classics in African Anthropology Series, 4th edition), 1–3. Jonny Steinberg, The Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey through a Great Epidemic ( Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008), 242. Strictly speaking, it was typed up in Cambridge in 1933 and reworked in Lovedale in 1934.

Introduction

3

She then published, after an extended delay associated with the tragic suicide of her husband in May 1944, a celebrated trilogy of monographs based on some fifty months of joint fieldwork, one of the most extensive periods in the field on record.7 Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa AgeVillages came out in 1951 and was reissued in an American paperback second edition in 1963. Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa appeared in 1957, followed by Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa in 1959, the former being reissued by Oxford University Press in 1970.8 She also published at least two dozen articles during these, her most productive years as an ethnographer.9 Collectively her ethnographic writings made a substantive contribution to cross-cultural understandings of religion, ritual, symbolism and social change in both South and Central Africa. It is no coincidence that it was to Monica Wilson that Victor Turner dedicated his landmark study of symbolism published some years after her trilogy.10 She also made a decisive contribution to African history, especially during her later years (see Chapter 9). International public recognition came in the form of a Rivers Memorial Medal for Fieldwork awarded by the Royal Anthropological Society in 1952, a Simon Biesheuvel Medal for Research granted in 1965, an invitation to deliver the Scott Holland lectures in Cambridge in 1968 and, in the very last years of her life and to her great joy, admission to the British Royal Academy. Our book makes the case that her importance relates as much to the nature of her engagement with African anthropology ‘from the inside’, as to the status of her texts within an international scholarly community. There are three ways in which the following essays recommend that we should think about Monica Hunter Wilson as a scholar who worked from ‘inside African anthropology’, the description we chose for the book’s title. First, as highlighted in Chapter 1 (see also Chapters 6 and 9), her

7

8

9 10

This is according to J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Wilson [n´ee Hunter], Monica (1908–1982)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Thanks to Rebecca Marsland for alerting me to this reference. Monica Wilson, Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1951; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, 2nd edition); Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957; London: Oxford University Press, 1970, 2nd edition); Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959). Two decades later she published a fourth and more historical monograph in the series: Monica Wilson, For Men and Elders: Change in Relations of Generations and of Men and Women among the Nyakyusa-Ngonde People, 1875–1971 (London and New York: Africana Publishing Company for the International African Institute, 1977). See Chapter 5 in this collection for a list of her ten articles on the Nyakyusa, and the Bibliography for other essays. Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1967).

4

Inside African Anthropology

missionary background and schooling gave her a detailed knowledge of an African language and culture (Xhosa) from her childhood, as she herself would emphasise in late-life reminiscences where she identified herself, in the first instance, as ‘a daughter of Lovedale’.11 This set her apart from all of her contemporaries in the British functionalist tradition, including all of her South African-born peers (Schapera, Gluckman, Meyer Fortes, Eileen Krige, Jack Krige, Ellen Hellmann) and Hilda Kuper (born in Bulawayo). Second, Monica made a courageous decision to work as an anthropologist from within Africa with the coming of apartheid. This was, as Se´an Morrow shows in Chapter 6, despite numerous highly prestigious job offers abroad, including approaches from Oxford and Cambridge. Her conscious choice to live and work as a social anthropologist committed to political change from within a country whose oppressive racially structured system of government made it a pariah state did have serious implications for her career. There is little doubt that she often felt an intense sense of intellectual isolation and that she would have gained much by relocating and becoming more closely integrated into the emerging international scholarly community of social anthropologists – as, say, Max Gluckman did when he took a post at Manchester University in the late 1940s, or as Isaac Schapera did when he took a position at the University of London in 1950, or as Hilda Kuper did when she left South Africa to take up a post at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1963.12 The costs were personal as well as intellectual, something that tends to get obscured in the reminiscences of her former students who have been wont to present her as something of an Iron Lady, a woman fighting prejudice, intellectual sloppiness and bureaucratic inefficiency with stern and often steely demeanour. I am equally struck by the image of a vulnerable Monica Wilson presented by one of her many close friends from her undergraduate years at Girton College, Muriel Bradbrook, who had also enjoyed an impressive career as a writer and academic. Bradbrook remembered her friend, most of all, for the depth of her commitment to human rights in Africa, reflecting that she was ‘too sensitive to be called fearless’ and remembered that, ‘When in the seventies she stayed with me [in Cambridge], I could hear her crying out in her sleep very pitifully’.13 11

12

13

Monica Wilson, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa, 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1973), 6. Significantly, her women peers, Eileen Krige and Ellen Hellmann (and Hilda Kuper for a time) did remain in South Africa during the apartheid era, but they did not have quite the same international recognition. Transcript of a recording of Muriel Bradbrook, 1989, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, on the theme of ‘Strong-minded Dons’. On her commitment to human rights

Introduction

5

Third, and this is the burden of our case, she was a highly skilled collaborator, one who forged close, creative relationships with African research assistants and African researchers throughout her career as a researcher and teacher. These relationships began during her intense decade of fieldwork in the 1930s, first in Pondoland and East London, then in Bunyakyusa. Here her experiences were not too different from those of her peers who did fieldwork in southern and Central Africa around this time. They too forged close relationships with African interpreters in the field as Lyn Schumaker has forcefully demonstrated in the case of Max Gluckman in his later years as director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in Northern Rhodesia.14 It is her relationships with African students at Fort Hare Native College and the University of Cape Town (UCT) – the dimension of her work that we explore in Part 3 of this volume – that make her contribution arguably more unusual. It has long been recognised that she was a dedicated and highly successful teacher, training new generations of social anthropologists and social scientists in southern Africa. Her mentorship is associated especially with her extended period as chair of the Social Anthropology Department and head of the School of African Studies at UCT between 1952 and 1973. The talented students whom she trained during these decades included, in roughly chronological order, Berthold Pauw, Max Marwick, Peter Carstens, Peter Rigby, Archie Mafeje, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff and Martin West. After her retirement she supervised Colin Murray and Pamela Reynolds, author of the concluding chapter of this volume. Her impact went well beyond social anthropology, as her son Francis, a highly respected and influential economist on whom she had a deep and lasting intellectual impact, has recently noted: ‘There were archaeologists, including Glynn Isaacs and Carmel Schrire; lawyers such as Godfrey Pitje and Fikile Bam; theologians such as Axel-Iva Berglund; and many others, including, informally, Victor Turner and Rhys Isaacs.’15 The influence that we track most closely, however, is her role as a trainer of, and collaborator with, young black anthropologists. She played a hitherto unrecognised role in fostering what might be described as a vibrant insider ethnographic tradition in South African anthropology of the mid-twentieth century, one which developed during a period in which

14

15

see also James G. Ellison, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: Anthropology and Social Justice’ in Monica Wilson, Reaction to Conquest (Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African Institute, 2008: Classics in African Anthropology Series, 4th edition), 26–49. Lyn Schumaker, ‘The Director as Significant Other: Max Gluckman and Team Research at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute’ in Richard Handler, ed., Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 91–130. Francis Wilson, ‘An Appreciation’, 19.

6

Inside African Anthropology

African anthropology more generally was highly cosmopolitan.16 It is in uncovering these collaborative relationships with African researchers – most notably Godfrey Pitje, Livingstone Mqotsi and Archie Mafeje – and the sometimes hidden ethnographies that were produced from them, that our study most profoundly challenges the sometimes essentialised retrospective construction of ‘colonial anthropology’ as the products of white outsiders studying African subjects. What these in-depth case studies of collaboration reveal, with their detailed attention to the complexities of social relationships and identities inside African anthropology during successive phases of the career of a single anthropologist, is that cultural knowledge production was much more complex than simple dualistic models allow. It is too often assumed that the standard format of the functionalist ethnographic study and the colonial contexts in which they were carried out implies that social anthropologists did broadly similar things in broadly similar ways in producing knowledge about bounded African ‘tribes’. What these case studies demonstrate is that Monica Hunter Wilson was just one of a wide cast of characters working from ‘inside African anthropology’ in Pondoland, Bunyakyusa, Middledrift and Langa across three decades, and that there was an enormous diversity of practice and approach, of subject positions and points of entry into the discipline – in all, a complex range of motivations and forms of dialogue about culture. The extent of African involvement and the complexity of these social identities and relationships question the utility of catchall conceptual categories like ‘colonial anthropology’ or ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’.17 Our book thus seeks to strike a balance between, on the one hand, a rigorous and much fuller archivally based reassessment of the scholarly contribution of a woman who was possibly the most significant South African-born social anthropologist of the twentieth century and, on the other, uncovering for the first time the life histories and intellectual contributions of a succession of African ‘interpreters’ (broadly defined) who worked with her ‘inside African anthropology’. This concept developed out of a centenary conference on Monica Hunter Wilson held between 24 and 26 June 2008 in the Hogsback, Eastern Cape. The conference 16

17

For an evocative sense of this cosmopolitanism, see Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills and Mustafa Babiker, eds, African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2006). Other African anthropologists associated with this insider tradition include Z. K. Matthews and Absolom Vilakazi, both of whom are mentioned in later chapters. Roger Sanjek, ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and Their Ethnographers’, Anthropology Today, 9, 2 (1993), 13–18. I have changed my own view of such concepts in relation to thinking about Hunter Wilson’s research since publishing Andrew Bank, ‘The “Intimate Politics” of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and Her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–1932’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34, 3 (2008), 557–574.

Introduction

7

brought together generations of her former students, from the late Livingstone Mqotsi, the first student researcher whose work she supervised in the mid-1940s, to Pamela Reynolds, who worked with her on a doctoral study in the last years of Monica’s life. The conference was opened by the highly lucid 86-year-old Mqotsi, who offered a moving tribute to the woman who had been his mentor all those years ago. Having passed through many phases of a life in politics and education within and beyond South Africa (see Chapter 7), he spoke most eloquently of how he had come to appreciate the profound impact that Wilson had exerted on his intellectual development from his first year at Fort Hare Native College. The conference also showcased the work of different generations of scholars, most of whom are historians or anthropologists, who were involved in a sustained and ongoing engagement with the documents contained in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers (Wilson Collection) at UCT. Before revealing some of the riches in this collection and explaining its history, I reflect on the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the concept of the interpreter in African studies, on the ways in which our book seeks to challenge the standard male-dominated narrative about the history of anthropology in South Africa referred to above, and on the specific contribution that each of the chapters makes to furthering understanding of the collaborative relationships forged by one woman scholar inside anthropology in South and Central Africa. The Interpreters Our inclusive use of the concept of ‘the interpreter’ takes its cue from a public lecture that Monica delivered in Grahamstown in 1972, the year before her retirement. She began by pointing out that the first interpreters in the southern region of our continent were Africans, not colonists. These were the bilingual Christian converts who had learnt literacy and communicative skills on mission stations and then worked as translators. On the mission station of Lovedale where she grew up, there were generations of such interpreters in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They included Jan Tzatzoe, Tiyo Soga and ‘the next generation [who] came from Fingo families, men like the Jabavus and Makiwanes – but there were also Xhosa proper like John Knox Bokwe and other Sogas besides the original Tiyo, who were orators and writers in both English and Xhosa.’18 Social anthropologists and missionaries were the heirs of these African interpreters, with their concern ‘to mediate ideas, law, custom, 18

Monica Wilson, ‘The Interpreters’, Third Dugmore Memorial Lecture (Grahamstown: 1820 Settlers National Monument Foundation, 1972), 8–9.

8

Inside African Anthropology

symbolism’. In her view the ‘essential qualities’ of the ‘true interpreter’ were the ability to listen and to ‘establish trust’ in conditions of underlying suspicion (see also Chapter 10). Youth could be an advantage. She then pointed to recent anthropological studies in Africa and beyond that had explored the role of intermediate individuals and social groups. Here she mentioned work on headmen in Central Africa by the scholars of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), the studies in Mexico by the sociologist Eric Wolf and his coining of the concept of the ‘cultural broker’, as well as Clifford Geertz’s research on Muslim teachers in Javanese villages who acted as mediators between the local and the outside world.19 She also mentioned the ‘brilliant’ work of Elizabeth Colson on patron–client relations in Zambia, suggesting that the ‘patrons’ in her study resembled ‘cultural brokers’.20 Women played an important role as mediators, especially in South Africa where many were employed as domestic servants.21 This interest in intercultural and interpersonal relations was unfashionable in southern African studies of the later 1970s and 1980s, but there has been an explosion of literature on interpreters during the last decade. The first of her cast to attract renewed attention were British missionaries. Here the work of her former students Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff on missionaries working among the Tswana, published in 1991, provided one of the fullest attempts to apply anthropological concepts to the missionary encounter in southern Africa.22 The work of social anthropologists as interpreters came under increasing scrutiny in the wake of anthropology’s self-reflexive turn, and the history of social anthropology has now emerged as a dynamic subfield in southern African studies. This literature has a biographical slant, partly because the main source materials are either monographs or private papers of individual anthropologists. Patrick Harries’s incisive analyses of the intellectual milieu and interpretations of Tsonga culture by the Swiss missionary ethnographer Henri Alexandre Junod (1863–1934) and his peers is the closest we have come to ‘anthropological biography’,23 a field that has long flourished 19

20

21 22

23

See Max Gluckman, J. Clyde Mitchell and John A. Barnes, ‘The Village Headman in British Central Africa’, Africa, 19, 2 (1949), 89–106; Lloyd Fallers, ‘The Predicament of the Modern African Chief: An Instance from Uganda’, American Anthropologist, 57, 2 (1955), 290–305; Eric R. Wolf, ‘Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico’, American Anthropologist, 53, 6 (1956); Clifford Geertz, ‘The Javanese Kijaji: The Changing Role of a Cultural Broker’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2, 2 (1960), 228–249. For a recent collection of essays reappraising and revisiting the work of Elizabeth Colson, see Chet Lancaster and Kenneth P. Vickery, eds, The Tonga-Speaking Peoples of Zambia and Zimbabwe (Lanham, MD: University Press of America). Monica Wilson, ‘Interpreters’, 14. Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991). See also Vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (1997). Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007);

Introduction

9

in the United States in particular.24 Other recent scholarship has dealt with late-nineteenth-century ethnographic research in the region with extensive literatures on the Zulu cultural studies of the Natal government administrator and oral historian James Stuart and his research assistants25 and on the /Xam and !Kung collaborative research of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd.26 There have also been detailed studies of missionary and official government ethnography,27 the complex and changing role of

24

25

26

27

Patrick Harries, ‘Field Sciences in Scientific Fields: Entomology, Botany and the Early Ethnographic Monograph in the Work of H. A. Junod’ in Saul Dubow, ed., Science and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 11–39. The bibliography of book-length biographies of American anthropologists is a long one. To give a selection of recent biographies of female anthropologists, see Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008); V. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (London: Virago Press, 2003); R. Fardon, Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography (London: Routledge, 1999); Judith Schachter Modell, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); for earlier autobiographies of women anthropologists, see Hortense Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966); Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972); the essays in Peggy Golde, ed., Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1970). For an edited collection of biographies of women anthropologists internationally, see Ute Gacs, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre and Ruth Weinberg, eds, Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Greenwood, 1988) and in a regional context, see Nancy J. Parezo, ed., Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). Autobiographies and biographies of anthropologists in the British tradition are thinner on the ground; for an inspirational biography of the early years of Bronislaw Malinowski, see Michael W. Young, Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004). Colin Webb and John Wright, eds, The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples, vols. 1–6 (Pietermaritzburg: Natal University Press, 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 2001, 2012); Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998), Chapter 4; Ben Carton, ‘Fount of Culture: Legacies of the “James Stuart Archive” in South African Historiography’, History in Africa, 30 (2003), 87–106; Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’, History in Africa, 38 (2011), 319–342; John Wright, ‘Ndukwana kaMbengwana as an Interlocutor on the History of the Zulu Kingdom, 1897–1903’, History in Africa, 38 (2011), 343–368. Andrew Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek–Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006); Pippa Skotnes, ed., Claim to the Country (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2007). For a recent intellectual biography of Wilhelm Bleek’s daughter Dorothea Frances Bleek, see Jill Weintroub, ‘A Working Life: The Linguistic and Rock Art Research of Dorothea Frances Bleek (1873–1948)’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010). A conference entitled ‘The Courage of //Kabbo’ at the University of Cape Town in August 2011 pointed to the continued dynamism of the Bleek-Lloyd-San studies. David Maxwell, ‘The Soul of the Luba: W. F. P. Burton, Missionary Ethnography and Belgian Colonial Science’, History and Anthropology, 19, 4 (2008), 325– 351; Ann Wanless, ‘The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Fourie Collection of Khoisan Ethnologica’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2007).

10

Inside African Anthropology

photography in the construction of anthropological knowledge,28 and the highly productive cultures of work that developed at anthropological research institutes, notably the RLI in Central Africa, but also the East African Institute for Social Research at Makerere University.29

The ‘Official’ History of Anthropology in South Africa It is no surprise that the ‘official’ history has been overwhelmingly maledominated. This applies not only to physical anthropology, where women were on the margins,30 but to social anthropology, a discipline in which they played a central if not leading role in the region. The bias is well illustrated by the way the influential standard overview, David HammondTooke’s Imperfect Interpreters, creates its canon.31 The founder figure in this official version is that author’s former supervisor Isaac Schapera, who had been trained by the two ‘founding fathers’ of British functionalism, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who ‘established’ the discipline of social anthropology in South Africa during his five years at UCT between 1921 and 1925, and Bronislaw Malinowski, whose seminars Schapera had attended in London between 1926 and 1928.32 Schapera developed the new discipline when he took up a post initially as a researcher and then in 1934 28

29

30

31

32

Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes, eds, The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998); John L. Comaroff, Jean Comaroff and Deborah James, eds, Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007); see also Rui C. de N. Assubuji, ‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography: Monica Hunter Wilson’s Photographs in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa, 1931–1938’ (unpublished M.A. mini-thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010). James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001); Jan-Bart Gewald, ‘Researching and Writing in the Twilight of an Imagined Conquest: Anthropology in Northern Rhodesia, 1930–1960’, History and Anthropology, 18, 4 (2007), 459–487; David Mills, ‘How Not to Be a “Government House Pet”: Audrey Richards and the East African Institute for Social Research’ in Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills and Muftafa Babiker, eds, African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2006), 76–98. For an all-male cast of physical anthropologists and their contribution to scientific racism in twentieth-century South Africa, see Saul Dubow, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995). W. David Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists, 1920– 1990 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001 (1997), 2nd edition). His analysis of the contribution of women scholars in a field in which women were very well represented is effectively confined to one out of the book’s nine chapters (Chapter 3: The ‘Great Tradition’: The Ethnographic Monograph) and no more than twenty of the 190 pages in the main text (Agnes Winifred Hoernl´e, 35–38; Monica Hunter Wilson, 77–83; Eileen Krige with Jack Krige, 84–87; Hilda Kuper, 88–90; Ellen Hellmann, 143–144; Mia Brandel-Syrier, 155). The classic text setting out the case for the theoretical revolution of these two founding fathers of British functionalism is Adam Kuper, Anthropologists and Anthropology: The

Introduction

11

as professor and head of social anthropology at UCT. He was effectively the pioneer fieldworker there, as his first field trip to Mochudi dates to October of 1929, and he continued to revisit his field-site during university vacations across two decades. Winifred Hoernl´e’s earlier fieldwork in the Northern Cape and German South-West Africa in 1912–13 and 1923, as well as her thoroughly collaborative work with Radcliffe-Brown in the 1922–25 years, get short shrift.33 Schapera’s Tswana monographs of the 1930s and 1940s are seen to have set the bar for ethnographic work in the region. He is also identified as the central figure in the institutional development of social anthropology, given his role as leader and mediator of the Inter-University Committee for African Studies founded in 1932 that served as a bridge between English and Afrikaans ethnographic traditions in South Africa. Above all though, he led the breakaway from the narrow ‘tribal’ model of Malinowski by insisting on the inclusion in anthropological research of ‘the missionary, trader and administrator’, along with ‘the chief and the magician’. The South African male anthropologists’ volte-face on theory was taken forward by Max Gluckman, who, as noted above, credited Schapera as his main source of inspiration.34 Gluckman’s famous series of essays on the building of a bridge in Zululand has been seen as the symbolic moment when the island-based functionalist model was laid to rest.35 Gluckman also later revolutionised the understanding of group identity by shifting the focus, along with his Jewish male colleagues Abner Cohen, Clyde Mitchell and A. L. Epstein, from an older, bounded cultural concept of ‘tribe’ to a modern and still current one of ‘ethnicity’

33

34

35

British School, 1922–1972 (London: Routledge, 1973). Henrika Kuklick makes a persuasive case for W. H. R. Rivers having a stronger claim to the title. Henrika Kuklick, ‘Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology’, Isis, 102, 1 (2011), 1–33. For an alternative view of Hoernl´e’s contribution to fieldwork and anthropological theory, see Peter Carstens, ‘Introduction’ in Peter Carstens, Gerald Klinghardt and Martin West, Trails in the Thirstland: The Field Diaries of Winifred Hoernl´e (Cape Town: UCT African Studies Centre, 1987), 1–15; for an account showing the changes and ambiguities in Hoernl´e’s racial views, see Kelly Gillespie, ‘“Containing the Wandering Native”: Racial Jurisdiction and the Liberal Politics of Prison Reform in 1940s South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37, 3 (2011), 499–515. See Max Gluckman, ‘Anthropology and Apartheid: The Work of South African Anthropologists’ in Meyer Fortes and Sheila Patterson, eds, Studies in African Anthropology: Essays Presented to Professor Schapera (London, New York and San Francisco, CA: Academic, 1975), 21–40. See also the essay in this collection by Meyer Fortes, ‘Isaac Schapera: An Appreciation’, 1–6. For a powerful case, see his three-part essay ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’ published in Bantu Studies between 1940 and 1942, ‘a landmark in South African social studies and the foundation text of what later became known as the Manchester School of Social Anthropology’. See Hugh Macmillan, ‘Return to the Malungwana Drift: Max Gluckman, the Zulu Nation and the Common Society’, African Affairs, 94 (1995), 39–65; Max Gluckman, ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Zululand’, Bantu Studies, 14 (1940), 1–30; 147–174; ‘Some Processes of Social Change Illustrated from Zululand’, African Studies [formerly Bantu Studies], 1 (1942), 243–260.

12

Inside African Anthropology

in which identities were seen as fluid and situational.36 These were the two primary contributions from South Africa to the British functionalist tradition. The official story goes on to tell of how English and Afrikaner traditions of anthropological writing diverged with political change in southern Africa and especially with the coming of apartheid. Isaac Schapera left and a generation of young scholars, black and white, followed his example. Within South Africa the volkekundige [tribal studies] tradition flourished at Afrikaans universities and served as ideological justification for apartheid. This too was an emphatically male-dominated field. Here the main figures were Nicholas van Warmelo of the Native Affairs Department, who began his work in the interwar years,37 and then Werner Eiselen, whose anthropological research would later become tailored to apartheid racial ideology. The tradition was developed by Eiselen’s male students: P. J. Schoeman and P. J. Coertze, and then his son R. D. Coertze.38 Even the growth of new branches of social anthropological research at English universities in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century is associated almost exclusively with the work of men, notably the urban anthropology of Philip Mayer and the Marxist influenced expos´e anthropology of John Sharp and Andrew Spiegel.

An ‘Unofficial’ History of Anthropology in South and Central Africa Our study might be read then as a sounding into the ‘unofficial’ history of anthropology in South and Central Africa. We borrow this concept from Louise Lamphere’s presidential address at the 100th American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington in December 2001.39 Lamphere used the occasion to reflect on how and why new generations of social anthropologists revise their history. ‘Whose work gets taught and how it is connected to other traditions is critical in the

36

37

38

39

Hugh Macmillan, ‘From Race to Ethnic Identity: South Central Africa, Social Anthropology and the Shadow of the Holocaust’, Social Dynamics: Special Issue: Essays in Commemoration of Leroy Vail, 26, 2 (2000), 87–115. For a case study of van Warmelo’s relationships with the African interpreters who gathered the texts on which he based his tribally-ordered ethnographies, see Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, ‘“Colonial” Experts, Local Interlocutors, Informants and the Making of an Archive of the “Transvaal Ndebele”, 1930–1989’, Journal of African History, 50 (2009), 61–80. See Chapter 5, this volume. For an early essay on the volkekundige tradition, see Robert Gordon, ‘Apartheid’s Anthropologists: The Genealogy of Afrikaner Anthropology’, American Ethnologist, 15, 3 (1988), 535–552; for a recent history of the intellectual development of Werner Eiselen, see Cynthia Kros, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). Louise Lamphere, ‘Unofficial Histories: A Vision of Anthropology from the Margins’, American Anthropologist, 106, 1 (2004), 126–139.

Introduction

13

shaping of anthropology for the next generation.’ She presents a powerful case for the creative contribution of women and minorities to the history of social anthropology in the United States through the transformation of field research, the evolution of more dialogic forms of ethnographic writing, and the links they established between anthropology and political or social activism.40 Where Lamphere could identify 25 years of scholarship on women and minorities in the United States, which we can now extend to 35 years, fuller recognition of the contributions of women and African scholars in southern Africa anthropology is in its infancy. We highlight the role played by one woman. A wider-reaching ‘unofficial’ history would have to include a reappraisal of Monica Wilson’s marginalised peers including Winifred Hoernl´e, Eileen Krige, Hilda Kuper and Ellen Hellmann,41 a fuller recognition of the collaborative contributions of Iona Mayer, a systematic reassessment of the contribution of Audrey Richards and of the longest-living anthropologist of their generation, Elizabeth Colson, and also of the work of subsequent generations of women anthropologists in the region – as well as the hidden ethnographies of the African ethnographers, some of whose works we bring to the fore here. Lyn Schumaker has drawn attention to ‘the feminisation of social anthropology’ in the interwar years. She argues that: ‘In many ways the history of anthropology in the twentieth century has been the story of women’s entry into the discipline and the interaction of this phenomenon with anthropology’s defining methodological moment, the emergence of participant observation fieldwork.’42 She points out that women opened up significant new fields of research which, in the case of Africa, included Audrey Richards’s work on nutrition, beginning in 1930. She urges us to pay attention not only to women’s ethnographies, but especially to their contributions to changing fieldwork practice. Once we explore, in a closely historicised way, the ongoing constructions of knowledge about African cultures at the field-sites themselves, there will be a clearer sense of the methodological contributions of women in the development of the discipline. The ways in which we do this in relation to one leading woman researcher are explained in the subsection below. 40 41

42

Ibid., 126. There are recent signs of interest in reappraising their works but only in relation to specific aspects rather than in general overview: for a reading of the later fictional writing of Hilda Kuper as protest literature, see Kerry Vincent, ‘Literature as Laboratory: Hilda Kuper’s Factional Representations of Swaziland’, African Studies, 70, 1 (2011), 89–111; for an argument on the contribution of Ellen Hellmann’s ethnographic photographs of Rooiyard and Johannesburg townships, see Marijke du Toit, ‘The General View and Beyond: From Slum-Yard to Township in Ellen Hellmann’s Photographs of Women and the African Familial in the 1930s’ in Patricia Hayes, ed., Gender and History, 17, 3 (Special Issue: Gender and Visuality) (2005), 593–626. Lyn Schumaker, ‘Women in the Field in the Twentieth Century: Revolution, Involution, Devolution?’ in Henrika Kuklick, ed., A New History of Anthropology (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2008), 277–293.

14

Inside African Anthropology

Our study takes seriously her recommendation in that pathbreaking social history of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa, that we think of social anthropology as a practical activity in cultural contact zones, as the many things that anthropologists – in our case Monica Wilson and her interpreters – do when in the field. These activities include not just the main business of negotiating, interviewing and recording, but all manner of mundane, everyday matters from organising domestic space (whether tent or house) to the personal, sometimes even ‘intimate’, conversations with employees, research assistants or informants. This ‘view from the tent’43 heightens our appreciation of the experiential aspects of anthropological research and the extent to which Africans contributed to what she terms ‘the co-production of scientific knowledge’.44 Schumaker questions the appropriateness of Sanjek’s concept of ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’,45 something that is taken up in Chapter 2 of this collection, an essay on Monica’s research relationships in Pondoland in 1931 and 1932 that I had published in 2008 and that we decided to republish here (Chaper 2) despite my changing view of the utility of the concept. She rightly argues that ‘a simple model of exploitation’ fails to take enough account of the ‘assistants’ own agency in fieldwork’, of their own motivations, something which other recent scholars have evocatively termed their side in ‘the bargain of collaboration’.46 Our preference has been to acknowledge that there are a range of terms which can be used in different cases and contexts. These include the catchall terms like ‘interpreter’ and ‘intermediary’, more formal descriptions like ‘research assistant’ and ‘researcher’, and those concepts like ‘indigenous anthropologist’ and ‘intellectual’ that make greater claims for contribution. 43

44 45 46

Lyn Schumaker, ‘A Tent with a View: Colonial Officers, Anthropologists, and the Making of the Field in Northern Rhodesia, 1937–1960’, Osiris, 11 (1996), 237–258. For an excellent critique of the general concept of ‘colonial science’ based on a case for the complexity of colonial knowledge production in mid-twentieth century tropical Africa across a wide range of fields, see Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). For a case for complexity, though here with particular attention to diverse European traditions rather than the extent of internal critique of colonialism within the British tradition, see Helen Tilley with Robert Gordon, eds, Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 1–22; 227–259. Roger Sanjek, ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and Their Ethnographers’, Anthropology Today, 9, 2 (1993), 13–18. Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 12–13; Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Robert L. Roberts, ‘Introduction’ in Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

Introduction

15

Our investigation of African interpreters working with Monica should also be read in relation to the emerging genre of biographies of African interpreters. Megan Vaughan’s work on the writings of Kenneth Mdala, a Yao ‘native clerk’ from Malawi, has obvious resonance here. There is little doubt that Monica and Godfrey Wilson and their first Nyakyusa research assistant Leonard Mwaisumo (whose biography and research contribution to the Wilsons is detailed in Chapter 5) would have known Mdala in his years between 1916 and 1943, when he worked as a clerk at the government boma [administrative centre] in Tukuyu. She shows how he tirelessly promoted the ethnic claims of a Yao lineage within the newly instituted system of indirect rule. His outpourings on the subject unsettled even the British colonial officials who read his missives. But Vaughan also locates this idiosyncratic life story within a deep history of the region. She demonstrates that Mdala, while so unusual on one level, was but one among a generation of young men trained in Nyasaland who migrated through the region and used their literacy to promote their ambitions.47 A biographical approach towards the activities of ‘native clerks’ and other African ‘middle men’ is applied in colonial contexts across Africa in the volume of essays edited by Benjamin Lawrance, Emily Osborn and Richard Roberts entitled Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa. They make a forceful collective case for the significance of the hidden story of African employees in the colonial administration of Africa. Colonial rule in Africa went beyond ‘the thin white line’, that surface scattering of white officialdom. It was for the most part the work of ‘a vast cohort’ of African ‘collaborators’, a term they recast in relation to the concept of bargaining.48 The essays develop this general theme in relation to particular careers and life histories. Roger Levine’s essay – on a nineteenth-century evangelist rather than an administrator – analyses the translation work and cultural negotiations of the Xhosa man-between Jan Tzatzoe, who served as an interpreter for successive missionaries on the Cape’s eastern frontier and was mentioned in Monica Wilson’s 1972 Grahamstown lecture. In his book-length study Levine goes on to make a case for Tzatzoe’s articulation of a distinctively African theology in his work of translating biblical 47

48

Megan Vaughan, ‘Mr Mdala Writes to the Governor: Negotiating Colonial Rule in Nyasaland’, History Workshop, 60, 1 (2005), 171–189. For a fascinating collection of essays on ‘tin-trunk literacy’, the proliferation of non-elite African writings and texts produced in anglophone Africa in the early to mid-twentieth century, see Karin Barber, ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); for an excellent case study of the importance of writing and successive contests over texts in the construction of Gikuyu political identities, see Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of the Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004). Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks.

16

Inside African Anthropology

texts and during his evangelical tour of Britain during the mid-1830s.49 Emily Osborn’s essay explores the translations and mistranslations of African interpreters in the administration of French West Africa through a series of regional case studies: Ousmane Fall in Medine in the French Soudan, Lassana Oulare in Siguiri in French Guinea and Kamissoko in Kankan in French Guinea. She uses these case studies to highlight the limitations of colonial control and makes a persuasive case for renewed attention to local agency in knowledge production,50 an argument with obvious relevance to our study. Where Vaughan and Osborn present biographies of government officials (and Levine that of a native evangelist), Nancy J. Jacobs adopts a biographical approach towards the fieldwork of African research assistants in a sense that is most directly analogous to the social scientific knowledge production that we examine in this study. Jacobs combines a keen interest in the individual with a refreshing openness to concepts developed in the wider field of the history of science. In a series of articles that present case studies of particular cross-racial collaborations at ornithological field-sites in twentieth-century Africa, she foregrounds what she terms the ‘intimate politics’ of knowledge. For Jacobs ‘intimacy’ refers not only to the common-sense meaning of sexual feelings and/or behaviour, like the ‘same-sex longings’ that the West African ornithologist George Latimer Bates felt towards his Bulu research assistants, but to an ‘encompassing field of affective sociality’.51 Jacobs insists on the importance of power relations, arguing that the racially structured nature of colonial societies in early-mid-twentieth century Africa ensured that such intimacies always needed to be negotiated, managed or ‘policed’, 49

50

51

See Roger S. Levine, A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Colonial Encounter in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011); Hlonipha Mokoena, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual (Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2011). For a rare exploration of a female cultural broker in South African historiography, see Vertrees C. Malherbe, Krotoa or Eva: A Woman Between (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, 1991); R. Ross, ‘Hermanus Matroos, aka Ngxukumeshe: A Life on the Border’ in Andrew Bank and Leslie J. Bank, eds, Kronos: Journal of Cape History (Special Issue: Eastern Cape), 30 (Nov. 2004), 47–69. For a dynamic new literature on the prolific literary activities and output of Zulu converts from Bishop William Colenso’s Ekukhanyeni (‘Place of Light’) mission station near Pietermaritzburg, see V. Khumalo, ‘Ekhukhanyeni Letter-Writers: A Historical Inquiry into Epistolary Network(s) and Political Imagination in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa’ in Karin Barber, ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories, 113–142. For an incisive, self-reflexive biography by a South African anthropologist of his late research assistant ‘Jimmy Mohale’ (1969–2005), see Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press for the International African Institute, 2013). The essay was first published as Emily Osborn, ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History, 44, 1 (2003), 29–50. She adopts this phrase from Hugh Raffles, ‘Intimate Knowledge’, International Social Science Journal, 54, 3 (2002), 325–335.

Introduction

17

and explores the contrasting ways that individual ornithologists attempted to do this.52 In another essay she contrasts ‘the politics of intimacy’ with the politics of acknowledgment, and my Pondoland essay (Chapter 2) draws on both of these concepts. A broad survey of ornithological texts reveals that far from ‘simple erasure’, as Sanjek would have it, there is rather a ‘continuum of acknowledgement [of African research assistants] from anonymity to the briefly mentioned assistants, for example in concluding words of appreciation, or the naming of a bird after an assistant unmentioned in the narrative, to those named as important contributors yet about whom we know little as people, to a handful of men who are recognisable individuals with specific characteristics and characters.’ In exploring three individual research assistants in the latter category – Salimu Asmani of Tanzania, Njeru Kicho of Kenya and Jali Makawa of Malawi and Zambia – she presents a powerful case for foregrounding the motivations of these research assistants themselves, in the same way that Vaughan compels our attention to how Mdala himself (rather than others) conceived of his intellectual work. Asmani, Kicho and Makawa were, she argues, ‘servants to science’ with their own ‘motivations, affections, predelictions, sensitivities and sense of self ’.53 The Contribution of Hunter Wilson and Her Interpreters How does this book challenge ‘the official history’ and contribute to the genre of interpreter biographies discussed above? The opening chapter provides the biographical context for the book’s subsequent analyses of Monica Hunter Wilson’s research and research collaborations. Following an approach towards the history of anthropology that gives due importance to personal factors,54 I explore her missionary origins and Lovedale schooling, and make a case for the under-acknowledged influence of her undergraduate years at Cambridge University between 1927 and 1930 in shaping her subsequent career. I propose that her decision to switch from history to social anthropology in the middle of her undergraduate degree was associated with her immersion in a dynamic Labour Study Circle led by the South African Communist Party member Eddie Roux. I then argue that her Cambridge lecturers in the still unfashionable subject of social anthropology, especially her doctoral thesis supervisor Thomas Callan Hodson, were more influential in shaping her background knowledge 52 53 54

Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48, 3 (2006), 564–603. Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘Servants to Science: African Assistants in Twentieth-Century Ornithology’ (unpublished seminar paper, UCT Centre for African Studies, 2006). Edmund Leach, ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 13 (1984), 1–23.

18

Inside African Anthropology

and orientation towards her adopted discipline than has hitherto been recognised. Chapter 2 follows the newly graduated Hunter into the field. In reconstructing the micro-social world of her field-sites and the role of successive collaborations with African intermediaries at these sites, I provide a close reading of the fieldnotes she recorded in Pondoland and that have been preserved across some twenty folders in the Wilson Collection. The chapter takes us to the multiple sites where Hunter collected ethnographic data during eighteen months of fieldwork in 1931 and 1932: Auckland Village near her home, Ntibane near Umtata in Western Pondoland, and four stores and a mission station in Eastern Pondoland. This multi-sited approach to fieldwork was another of her distinctive contributions and one on which she reflected in an important early methodological essay.55 At each of these field-sites, I explore the relationships between Monica Hunter and her African research assistants, drawing on Jacobs’s concept of ‘the intimate politics’ of knowledge. This view from the field reveals, in a way that the celebrated published monograph does not, the extent of the role played by African assistants, variously as tutors in Xhosa, translators, transcribers, bodyguards, hostesses, social networkers, guides in cultural etiquette, informants and (in one case) as an author of fieldnotes. After returning from Western Pondoland in the final months of 1931, Monica started to prepare for fieldwork in urban settings and on farms in the Eastern Cape. In Chapter 3 Leslie J. Bank returns to the 400 pages of fieldnotes that Monica compiled in East London between February and April of 1932 and that were discussed in Part II of Reaction to Conquest, ‘The Bantu in Towns’. He makes an argument for the importance of her urban anthropological work of 1932, which began a month before Eileen Krige embarked on her household survey study of Marabastad in Pretoria and a year before Ellen Hellmann began working in Rooiyard.56 In order to gain access to people’s homes and lives in a highly volatile climate, she needed to be seen as a friend of the trade union movement. Here Clements Kadalie, the leader of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (a more radical offshoot of the Independent Commercial Workers’ Union) played a decisive role. Her main intermediaries in East Bank were two other contacts of her father’s: the ageing erstwhile African nationalist political leader Walter Benson Rubusana and his Lovedale-educated wife. Like her interpreters in Pondoland, the

55 56

Monica Hunter, ‘Methods of Study of Culture Contact’, Africa, 7, 3 (1934), 335–350. M. Gluckman, ‘Introductory Note’ in E. Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard (Cape Town and Livingstone: Oxford University Press and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1948: RLI Papers No. 13), 125 pp. + 19 photographs. Monica’s study was of urban Africans more generally, as the title of Part II indicates.

Introduction

19

Rubusanas performed multiple roles as interpreters, from ensuring her safety (along with an employed bodyguard) to facilitating social contact networks, and also acted as primary informants who played a decisive role in shaping her critical attitude towards the rapidity of social change in the location and an associated criticism of youth morality.57 Drawing on James Clifford’s distinction between three different forms of field-writing – inscription, transcription and description – Leslie Bank explores the ways in which interviews and observations were converted into notes, and then examines how the notes were transformed into published texts. The political volatility of East Bank helps to explain why she was not always able to write out her notes in full and would later move quickly between compressed notes and inscriptions to the final text. This created gaps of interpretation. The largest gap between her notes and her ethnography lies in her exclusion of most of the fascinating and detailed case studies she collected on dreams. Leslie Bank argues that the collection of dream narratives was influenced by her Pondoland work, where she had come to appreciate the role of dreams in Pondo interpretations of everyday life. The collection of dreams gave Hunter vital insights into the imagination of urban residents. The absence of any sustained analysis of this data in her final text created a critical silence in her work on the identity politics of ordinary African urbanites. Had Monica Hunter analysed the dreams she collected, he argues, we might have understood more fully some of the limits of social change in East London in the 1930s and developed insights into the subsequent power of Africanist politics in this and other South African cities during the 1950s and 1960s. Our case for contribution in Part 2 is again a balancing act between recognition of the crucial role played by African research assistants, here a single individual whose biography and anthropological work are explored at chapter-length, and a renewed appreciation of the significance of Monica Hunter Wilson as an ethnographer. Contrary to the conventional view that Wilson’s foremost contribution lay in the depth of her fieldwork, something seen to have been encapsulated in the title of her late-life Hoernl´e memorial lecture ‘So Truth Be in the Field’,58 Rebecca Marsland makes a powerful case for the achievement of 57 58

The contribution of Kadalie and the Rubusanas to her East Bank research is also discussed in some detail in Chapter 2. Monica Wilson, ‘ . . . So Truth Be in the Field . . . ’ (The Alfred and Winifred Hoernl´e Memorial Lecture, Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1975); Colin Murray, ‘“So Truth Be in the Field”: A Short Appreciation of Monica Wilson’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 1 (1983), 129–130. For a fine short essay highlighting her gifts as a fieldworker, and those of Godfrey, see Audrey Richards, ‘Monica Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 1–13.

20

Inside African Anthropology

Monica as author (a theme further developed in relation to her coauthored Langa study in Chapter 8). Her Nyakyusa trilogy foregrounded Godfrey’s research on ‘pagan’ ritual and featured her potentially equally innovative work on social change as little more than an afterthought, pursued at most length in just two concluding chapters of the third volume. But Godfrey’s ‘voice’ was so skilfully appropriated, Marsland argues, that the studies read almost as if they were co-authored.59 Taking up on David Hammond-Tooke’s claim that she conceived of her Nyakyusa books as ‘a sacred trust and a labour of love’,60 Marsland examines the emotional and personal associations involved not only in the production of the fieldnotes in Bunyakyusa, but in the lengthy process of revisiting, reordering and analysing the 78 surviving notebooks recorded by Godfrey.61 This revisiting of his writings is presented as a process that was at once personal, emotional and spiritual, one that would have recalled for her the shared experiences of fieldwork and happy years in Bunyakyusa but also the pain of loss after his tragic early death. The other central theme in Marsland’s essay is a case for a divergence of fieldwork ‘styles’. She contrasts the field presence of Godfrey Wilson the gregarious, immersed participant with that of Monica, the more reserved and relatively remote observer. She demonstrates that his notebooks reveal a degree of engagement with Nyakyusa culture which Monica was not able to achieve, for a complex of reasons that include her greater difficulty with the language, her missionary background and preference for conducting fieldwork close to missions, the way in which they ordered their domestic arrangements, her late start, the serious bout of malaria which forced her to be ‘invalided out’ of the field for six crucial months during the most productive phase of the fieldwork (September 1936 – January 1938), but especially to her inability to establish any equivalent to the masculine world of sociability that Godfrey was able to develop. In the following chapter Peter Lekgoathi, Timothy Mwakasekele and I reconstruct the life history and contribution of Leonard Mwaisumo to the production of the Wilsons’ anthropological knowledge about the Nyakyusa. Monica did recognise his contribution generously in her first monograph, acknowledging his work as a language teacher, translator and recorder of the numerous texts on witchcraft that feature in her

59

60 61

On the Wilsons’ ‘co-production of scientific knowledge’ (to use Schumaker’s term, Africanizing Anthropology, 246–255), see Se´an Morrow, ‘“This Is from the Firm”: The Anthropological Partnership of Monica and Godfrey Wilson’ (unpublished paper presented at the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, June 2008); Megan Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others in South-West Tanganyika’ (unpublished paper, Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, June 2008). Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 82–83. Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Department, UCT Libraries [henceforth WC], D1.1 Godfrey Wilson Notebooks, 1–79 (no. 12 is missing).

Introduction

21

substantial appendix of ‘Selected Documents’. The archival traces reveal that his role was even more fundamental. During his fifteen months of work with the Wilsons, first with Godfrey alone and then with both Godfrey and Monica, Leonard Mwaisumo taught them to speak Kinyakyusa, giving each many weeks of daily lessons – about six months apart, given Monica’s late arrival. His work with Godfrey also involved creating a Kinyakyusa–English vocabulary list which was soon envisaged as a dictionary. He then guided them from one field-site to another, negotiating their relationships at each of these sites with successive networks of informants. In Godfrey’s case these were initially the Christian elders at Mwaya on the lake shore and ‘pagan’ elders like the rainmaker Kasitile to whom Leonard introduced Godfrey in January of 1935; in Monica’s case it was the Christian communities and the world of the school. Here his dual identity as a Christian convert and as a man with a deep knowledge of, and ongoing respect for, the ‘old customs’ (ikikolo) made him an ideal mediator between worlds. He is undoubtedly the most vocal presence in Godfrey’s notebook records, which Monica used as the basis for her 1950s trilogy. He also actively intervened in interviews, questioning informants himself but frequently commenting retrospectively on the veracity of their testimony. He recorded about a thousand pages of Kinyakyusa text between January and November of 1935, variously divided between his own seven notebooks, texts in Godfrey’s notebooks or interspersed inscriptions among Monica’s loosesheet fieldnotes. These texts provide a detailed insider perspective on Nyakyusa customs, especially on attitudes about sexuality, marriage and divorce. We conclude by suggesting that Mwaisumo might more justly be described as an indigenous ethnographer or African intellectual than as a ‘native clerk’. Part 3 of the volume moves from the field to the university. Se´an Morrow’s essay provides a vivid and biographically rich account of Monica’s two-and-a-half years at Fort Hare Native College. This was where she began her career as a university lecturer in July of 1944, just six weeks after her husband’s death. He begins by highlighting the importance of her choice to remain in South Africa rather than to take up a prestigious position at an overseas university, giving evidence of the range of options that were available to her during these years. The core section of the chapter is an exploration of her many warm and productive relationships with African colleagues, friends and students under her supervision, both in the women’s hostel where she worked as a warden and in her anthropology classes. She had ambitious ideas about the development of an African studies research programme at Fort Hare and while these were never realised three of her undergraduate students went on to publish ethnographic studies in the leading South African journal, African Studies, in the years between 1945 and 1951: Livingstone

22

Inside African Anthropology

Mqotsi, Nimrod Mkele and Godfrey Pitje. At the heart of the chapter is the story of her relationship with Pitje, a man who in later years described himself as her ‘intellectual son’. Morrow provides a measured account of the contribution of Godfrey Pitje’s published work on Venda initiation and education, which has in recent years served as a rich source of empirical material for scholars writing about the history of African sexuality.62 Leslie Bank presents an extended intellectual biography of her other star undergraduate student at Fort Hare, Livingstone Mqotsi. His essay explores Wilson’s connection to an emerging black intelligentsia in the Eastern Cape and the way in which a potential cadre of new intellectuals, trained in Social Anthropology or what she also like to call African Sociology, were inducted into the academy, but were then expelled from participation in the system of higher learning at South African universities. In most cases, these intellectuals ended up in liberation politics, often in exile, and are seldom remembered today for their intellectual work outside of politics. He traces the history of a relationship between Wilson and Mqotsi that was one of intellectual mentorship, cooperation and mutual respect, one that culminated in Mqotsi’s production of significant ethnographic texts which hitherto have been hidden from view. Despite the emphasis on cohesion and social function in Wilson’s own work, Leslie Bank argues that Mqotsi presents a radical view of Xhosa society as shot though with contradiction and saturated with conflict, anxiety and spiritual insecurity. In his Limba church ethnography, which he produced for Monica in the mid-1940s, this perspective is developed most fully in his discussion of the ubiquity of witchcraft belief and spiritual insecurity in the New Brighton location of Port Elizabeth in the 1940s. Later, in his study of healers in Middledrift, which was also undertaken under Monica’s supervision, Mqotsi is even more explicit about the lines of conflict and cleavage in Xhosa society and sets out the contradictions in gender and generational relations. However, in dealing with conflict and anxiety in this study, he often turns to theories and approaches from psychology, presumably because the anthropology of the day was not particularly helpful in this regard. Leslie Bank argues that had Mqotsi entered the academy and joined an anthropology

62

Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, ‘Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Perspective’ in Peter Delius and Liz Walker, African Studies Special Issue: AIDS in Context, 61, 1 (2002), 27–54. Delius and Glaser also make generous use of Hunter’s Pondoland work as well as the ethnographies of Ellen Hellmann, Isaac Schapera, Philip and Iona Mayer and Laura Longmore as empirical sources about the history of sexual attitudes in South Africa. For the use of this ethnographic literature in relation to the history of ideas about polygamy, see Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, ‘The Myths of Polygamy: A History of Extra-Marital and Multi-Partnership Sex in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, 50 (2004), 84–114.

Introduction

23

department, he would have engaged these tensions more theoretically from within the discipline. Outside of these considerations, Mqotsi’s ethnography is important and valuable simply by virtue of his command of the Xhosa language and the cultural field within which he operates. This is most evident in the Middledrift healers study, where he provides an encyclopaedic account of the names of medicinal herbs and remedies used by healers as well as other aspects of their healing practices. This ethnographic depth and detail comes from having an ‘insider’ command of the language and culture. In Middledrift, Mqotsi was an ‘insider-outsider’, like many of the African anthropologists of his generation. By the time he arrived in the villages he had spent more than a decade in Port Elizabeth and several years at Fort Hare University. His educational achievements and social position clearly situated him culturally ‘outside’ of the local village worlds he studied. In fact, when he arrived in Middledrift, he presented himself as a cultural outsider, as a town boy who had lost contact with his own Xhosa roots. He asked the healers to educate him and teach him his own culture, which they seemed willing to do. But he already knew a great deal about the Xhosa practice of healing and could clearly understand and translate what he was being told. He had no need of an interpreter. In many ways, Livingstone Mqotsi was the perfect insideroutsider, the ideal anthropologist – embedded enough to understand virtually everything inside, but socially distanced enough for informants not to take his presence and questions for granted. The concluding chapter in this section, written by Andrew Bank with Vuyiswa Swana, examines Monica’s collaboration with her most famous former research assistant, Archie Mafeje, in their joint and sometimes undervalued study of Langa, published by Oxford University Press in 1963. We trace the long history of the Langa research project alongside the life story of Archie Mafeje, both stories beginning in 1936/7. We recommend that, rather than attempting to disaggegate the contributions of Wilson and Mafeje to the published study, as contemporary reviewers and latter-day scholars have tended to do by attributing sole or primary ‘authorship’ to one or the other, readers should value the study precisely for its unusual ability to draw together the insights of a passionate young insider ethnographer and an established senior scholar who was able to formulate incisive ethnographic questions and repackage her co-researcher’s wide-ranging field report for an international readership. Their Langa study is undoubtedly the fullest example in this collection of what Lyn Schumaker terms ‘the co-production of scientific knowledge’. The issue of insider ethnography is the other central theme of the chapter. The insider–outsider dichotomy is well illustrated by the contrast we draw, drawing on an article by one of Monica’s former colleagues, John Sharp, between the fieldwork styles of Robin Crosse-Upcott and

24

Inside African Anthropology

Archie Mafeje.63 Where the bluff former cadet and Oxford graduate never got beyond interviews with a few church leaders and a well-known township collaborator, and tended to think of his fieldwork as a form of military engagement, Mafeje was able to immerse himself in township life from the outset, partly because of his already well-established social networks and political connections in the location. He participated actively in forms of popular culture, notably jazz and sport, that were less fully documented in the book than in his rich field report. We draw attention to the many ways in which Mafeje was an insider in Langa. He was a cultural insider, a man with knowledge of both Xhosa migrant culture, which bore fruit in his detailed and still celebrated case studies of ‘home-boys’, and of the culture of Xhosa townsmen with whom he socialised at university, in political meetings and in his leisure time. He was also as comfortable relating to women as to men. Central to our story is, of course, the personal and intellectual relationship between Monica and Mafeje, and how it changed over the years as he developed from struggling undergraduate student to passionate fieldworker, and to co-researcher. Part 4 provides reflections on the legacy of Monica Hunter Wilson. Se´an Morrow and Christopher Saunders, who worked as one of Monica Wilson’s research assistants on The Oxford History of South Africa for some months, make a powerful case for a thorough reassessment of this two-volume history, but also for the centrality of Monica Wilson’s role in its production. While The Oxford History was jointly planned with Leonard Thompson in 1963 and unfolded as the product of a shared vision of a new history structured around the concept of ‘interaction’, the project was in fact driven and led by Wilson. This is most evident from the behind-the-scenes correspondence which they have unearthed in the Wilson Collection, her listing as first editor of both volumes and her authorship of five of the most important chapters: on hunters and herders, the Nguni, the Sotho, the Cape’s eastern frontier and African peasant farmers. When looked at in the longer view and outside of the intense revisionist-liberal historical debates of the early 1970s, they suggest this ambitious two-volume edited collection may be considered as a pioneering, wide-ranging and thoroughly interdisciplinary attempt to provide a sustained engagement with the history of the majority of the country’s inhabitants from pre-colonial through to colonial times. This indeed is how it seems to have been read by Nelson Mandela, Neville Alexander and other political prisoners on Robben Island. Morrow and Saunders patiently locate The Oxford History as the outcome of Wilson’s lifelong engagement with historical studies, one that 63

John Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa: The Start of an Intellectual’s Journey’ in Adebayo Olukoshi and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue: ‘Archie Mafeje (1935–2007): A Giant Has Moved On’, 3 and 4 (2008), 31–36.

Introduction

25

began during her school years at Lovedale, continued through her undergraduate years at Girton and, as they well demonstrate, remained an inseparable aspect of the social change approach towards anthropology that set her apart from most of her British functionalist peers in subsequent decades. In fact, they argue, she explicitly identified anthropology as the only effective means of studying African history in a period before the latter had been founded as a field in its own right. They tracked the concept of social change through her anthropological writings from the sections on African life in towns and on farms in Reaction to Conquest to her co-produced theoretical study with Godfrey Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change, Based on Observations in Central Africa, published in 1945, to her strong emphasis on historical process in the Nyakyusa studies, most notably in the concluding volume, For Men and Elders: Changes in the Relations of Generations and between Men and Women among the Nyakyusa-Ngonde People, 1875–1971, published in 1977. More than any other essay in this collection, their chapter provides a sense of the eclecticism and range of Monica Wilson’s interests. Her abiding intellectual curiosity is evidenced in her spirited debates about history and anthropology in letters written to the American anthropologist George Murdock in the 1950s; her great excitement at new archaeological finds of the 1960s establishing the early presence of Bantu-speaking inhabitants in the region, centuries before Van Riebeeck; her ongoing fascination with ‘animal sociology’; and her late-life project to write an ecological history of the Hogsback mountains and Tyumie valley. This is what Monica Wilson’s last graduate student, and later successor as woman professor and head of the Social Anthropology Department at UCT, recognised from her undergraduate years as her mentor’s ‘deep, unquestioned involvement in the pursuit of knowledge for itself and for her recognition of the potential power inherent in it’.64 In the concluding essay Reynolds reflects on the relationships of anthropologists and their research assistants based on her own extensive experience of fieldwork in southern Africa and the United States. She warns of the dangers of retrospective readings and, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, insists on the need to assess intellectual contributions in the terms in which they were produced and received, the need – as she puts it – to ‘reposition ourselves in the intellectual tradition’. She cautions against too great an emphasis on the role of research assistants in a contemporary context in which reassessments of the respective roles of white researchers and African assistants are politically overdetermined. She encourages us to think about the complexity of anthropological knowledge production in terms of ‘four layers which bleach into one another to produce an ethnography: 1. Training and theoretical preparation; 2. Fieldwork;

64

See Chapter 10 in this volume.

26

Inside African Anthropology

3. Analysis; 4. Writing’, suggesting that it is only in the second of these phases that the role of local ‘cultural brokers’ is prominent. She argues that the relationships of anthropologists with informants and of research assistants with informants also warrant close examination. Her essay ends with a personal memoir recalling her interactions with Monica Wilson at her field-site in Crossroads and at Wilson’s retirement home in the Hogsback. Here she suggests that there was something akin to a transmission from teacher to student, that there is a sense of her having taken forward something that went beyond the insistence on rigour in the field, on precision when writing, on integrity in social relations, but that is better conceived in affective or less tangible terms as a spirit of engagement. The Rich Life of the Wilson Collection As the above chapter outline suggests, one of our primary claims to significance is our collective, coordinated and systematic engagement with the documents archived in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers (Wilson Collection) at UCT. While some essays, notably those in Part 3 of the volume, make extensive use of supplementary oral materials, all of the chapters are based on many months, and sometimes a number of years, of sifting through and analysing the documents in the Wilson Collection. It is therefore essential to provide introductory contextual information about the history of this unique archive and what some of its rare treasures might be. If we follow the suggestion of the theorist who has been at the forefront of ‘the archival turn’ in southern African studies (Carolyn Hamilton) that we think of archives as having biographies,65 how might we narrate the life history of the Wilson Collection? The ‘backstories’ of this archive,66 what one might consider to be the preface to this biography, are the life histories of its two main subjects, their acts of cumulative creation of documents relating to their personal and working lives, their preservation of these materials, but also of the stories of their dialogues with the many interpreters who worked with them during these decades. In this background period I conceive of these documents as being in an almost constant state of production and transition, being recorded on a daily or weekly basis, at multiple locations and often initially preserved in ad hoc ways. While there were occasions on which materials got lost, as in the case of Godfrey Wilson’s Nyakyusa notebook number 12, the extent of the preservation of this accumulating body of documentary materials is truly remarkable. The very specific nature of many of the archive items illustrates the point: whether this relates to prescriptions 65 66

Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’. Ibid., 320.

Introduction

27

for spectacles (which Monica was given in 1938), a custom slip for the taking of a typewriter to England in December 1932 (as Monica did for the writing up of her Cambridge doctoral thesis), or that for the HMV portable gramophone and records that the newly married couple evidently took with them into south-west Tanganyika, or to the thousands of handwritten and typed fieldnotes that Monica preserved, seemingly almost down to the last sliver.67 It is worth enquiring why Monica preserved these documents so faithfully, indeed one might almost say obsessively (with such felicitous consequences for the modern researcher)? Her attitude towards documents would have been shaped from childhood years and here again her father was a decisive influence. As a former branch manager of a large family business, David Hunter was given to accurate accounting. The papers in the David and Jessie Hunter Collection reveal him to be a man of meticulous habits in this regard. We have detailed journals of his world travels from his teenage years, reports of his tour of mission stations in southern Africa (and a recently uncovered stash of photographs taken en route)68 and diaries for almost every year of his adult life.69 The minutiae of everyday life penned in these diaries provide, for example, our surest records of events and dates in Monica’s life from her weight at birth (see Chapter 1) to the dates of her successive fieldwork excursions and that of her Cambridge oral exam (see Chapter 2). He encouraged his daughter to keep records of her accounts from her school days at Collegiate Girls’ High in Port Elizabeth, a practice she carried forward into her university years.70 He also encouraged her to plan her life by means of diaries. His insistence that she write weekly letters home, her diligence in this regard and his careful preservation of each of these missives – 360 in all – provide far and away the richest materials about the personal and intellectual life of Monica as a teenager and young adult. To this she brought her own attitude towards the status of written documents. As noted above, she was passionate about history from schooldays and envisaged becoming a history teacher before she switched in the midst of her Cambridge undergraduate career to social anthropology. As Morrow and Saunders insist, she never really let go of this passion for history, and initially conceived of her anthropological work as the only 67

68 69

70

The respective archival references are to WC, A2.12, A2.22, H2.2 (Auckland), uncatalogued notes (Pondoland and East London), D2-D7 (Nyakyusa fieldnotes), K3 [Langa] (includes notes to and from MW). Francis Wilson, personal communication, 10 February 2012. Archives and Manuscripts Department, UCT Libraries, David and Jessie Hunter Papers, AA1.1 Pocket diaries, 1890–1893, 1895, 1898–1948; AA1.4 Travel diaries Norway 1871, Cruise of the yacht ‘Osprey’, 1889; Victoria Falls 1904; AA2 Accounts of travels . . . Some recollections of Ceylon; DD1.1 Report on tour of mission stations in South Africa, TSS, 10 Oct. 1895. WC, A2.9 [MW] School and University accounts.

28

Inside African Anthropology

practical way of grappling with African history at a time before the latter was a formal field of study. It might also be that her deeply religious background (discussed in Chapter 1) encouraged an added sense of reverence for the written word. There is certainly a sense when immersing oneself in the Wilson Collection that she was deeply committed to the preservation of written documents relating to her life and work, and she may well have had the sense in her later life of these materials as part of an autobiography or biography in the making.71 There is hardly any form of documentation that she seems to have considered too ad hoc or peripheral for preservation. To return to the life story of the Collection, I date the formal process of its ‘archival housing’72 to the retirement years of Monica between 1973 and 1982. It is she whom we should think of as the first curator of the Wilson Collection. In this first phase of its life, the Collection was located in a square stone building, some twenty metres apart from the main stone house at Hunterstoun. Monica had built this outhouse herself, expressly for the purpose of storing books and manuscripts, but also to serve as a place for her continued writing.73 When Leslie Bank and I first visited her library in August of 2007, this large room with an adjoining hallway had been cleared of the archival documents, but her bookshelves were packed tight with an astonishingly wide range of anthropological, historical, botanical, theological and other texts which bore witness to a depth and breadth of learning. Stacked on her writing table, seemingly in the very state in which they had been left when she died twenty-five years earlier, were hardback copies of what we took to be her favourite books. Arranged in chronological order were original editions of Reaction to Conquest, Langa, the two volume Oxford History, and autobiographies of Z. K. Matthews, published in 1981, and John Dover Wilson.74 Her reading glasses were neatly positioned flush against the volumes. We were, however, taken aback to find another desk, symmetrically arranged, on the other side the room, and to find that there were two 71

72

73 74

Francis Wilson spoke of ‘continuing the autobiography of Monica Wilson’ when he and Lindy Wilson interviewed her about her Pondoland fieldwork at Hunterstoun in July 1979. (WC, uncatalogued). Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’, 320. There have of course been many other ways in which ‘the archive’ has been conceptualised apart from the notion of the archive as a building, a place, a repository for documents. As much recent literature demonstrates, in our electronic age it is no longer possible to think of archival collections as bounded, ordered and contained within a single space. The recent digitisation of the Bleek-Lloyd notebooks and other materials related to the /Xam and !Kung researches of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd is but one of many recent examples of this blurring of boundaries in relation to the access or containment of documentary materials. Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Wilson: An Appreciation’, 24. John Dover Wilson, Milestones on the Dover Road (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).

Introduction

29

lounge chairs rather than one facing onto the fireplace. The extra seat and working desk, we soon realised, were symbolic markers of the spirit of Monica’s late husband Godfrey who, almost forty years after his death, still remained ‘an active presence’ in her spiritual and emotional life.75 The anthropologist Robert Thornton confirmed this when he told us of the uncomfortable experience of having sat in ‘Godfrey’s chair’, or on ‘Godfrey’s ghost’ as he put it, during an awkward visit to Hunterstoun in the year before she died.76 Monica’s archive may thus be said to have had a dual character. On the one hand, it would have had the orderliness of official repositories of documents. I imagine her distribution of documents across cupboards, bookcases, shelving cabinets and trunks as orderly (for the most part), even if the logic was at times personal or idiosyncratic. On the other hand, this space and the documents within it had intensely private associations. Here we should bear in mind Rebecca Marsland’s argument (noted above) that Godfrey’s notebooks served as a memorial to his presence during her many years of writing up the Nyakyusa studies. The layout and set-apart location gave the building the air of a chapel, as did its stone structure, bringing to mind Achille Mbembe’s evocative description of the entanglement of the material and the imaginary in the very architecture of an archive. The archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension, which encompasses the physical space of the site of the building, its motifs and columns, the arrangement of the rooms [here one large room], the organisation of the ‘files’, the labyrinth of corridors, and that degree of discipline, half-light and austerity that give the place something of the nature of a temple and a cemetery: a religious space because a set of rituals is constantly taking place there [here reading and writing], rituals that . . . are of a quasi-magical nature, and a cemetery in the sense that fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there, their shadows and footprints inscribed on paper and preserved like so many relics.77

The second chapter in this life history, what we might like to think of as the unsettled teenage years of the Wilson Collection, saw most of the documents being moved to a private office in the Social Anthropology Department at UCT. Pamela Reynolds was the main curator during this relatively brief transitional period, although she does not appear to have worked much with the materials. Reynolds had returned from ten years of field research in Zimbabwe to take up a post in UCT’s 75 76 77

Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 83. Robert Thornton, personal communication, 24 June 2008. He was also rightly wrapped over the knuckles for placing his tea cup on a copy of the Bible. Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’ (trans. from French by Judith Inggs) in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Roger Salek, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 19.

30

Inside African Anthropology

Anthropology Department. She intended to write a biography of her late supervisor. Francis and Tim Wilson gave her permission to transfer to her office all the archival documents relating to the private and working life of Monica, notably including the voluminous collections of letters and fieldnotes (on which our study draws most heavily).78 This is where they remained between 1992 and 1996. In the end she chose not to write the biography. Francis and Tim Wilson then engaged in negotiations with the Manuscripts and Archives Department in order to have the Wilson Collection transferred to UCT Libraries79 and thus made accessible to the public for the first time.80 As indicated in our Acknowledgements, the transfer coincided with the appointment of Lesley Hart as head of Manuscripts and Archives and may be seen to herald the moment when the Collection came of age. The adult years of the Wilson Collection, if we might pursue the metaphor, have been relatively settled. Having taken charge of transferred materials from Pamela Reynolds’s office, Hart spent more than a year compiling an index to the Collection in 1998 and 1999. This is the means by which the authors of these essays have accessed the papers. Her 26-page inventory divides the Collection into the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers and those of Monica Wilson’s parents, a six-page subsection entitled the David and Jessie Hunter Papers.81 The following year, Hart journeyed to Hogsback to assess the state of the remaining documents at Hunterstoun and then on a weekend trip in 2001 transferred a Kombi-load of boxes, files and folders back to UCT Library. Following well-established archival guidelines, ones which she had already applied in compiling catalogues for eight other archival collections at UCT,82 Hart divided the materials into private and public 78

79

80

81 82

Not all of the documents relating to Monica’s private and working life were transferred to her office, however. Lesley Hart recalls: ‘When I was processing the collection [in 1998– 9], I wondered about some of the very evident gaps – the reason for which became clear when I visited Hunterstoun for the first time [in 2000], and saw that there was still a large quantity of material in the filing cabinets and cupboards’ [personal communication, 7 Dec. 2012]. They had been in contact with the UCT Archives and Manuscripts Department for some years. See letter written in November of 1992 by Francis Wilson to Leonie TwentymanJones, then Head of Manuscripts and Archives. See Provenance folder, BC880 Monica Wilson Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Department. At this stage, however, Reynolds was still intent on writing the biography and wished to keep most of the materials in her office. The American social anthropologist James G. Ellison, fresh from two years of fieldwork in Bunyakyusa, was the first researcher to consult the Wilson Collection in this new public space. Andrew Bank interview with Lesley Hart, Cape Town, 21 January 2010. He worked mainly on the Nyakyusa notebooks of Godfrey Wilson and those of three of his research assistants (see Chapter 5), which had, in fact, been transferred to UCT Libraries in 1994. Lesley Hart, BC880 The Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers: An Index compiled by Lesley Hart (Cape Town: UCT Libraries, 1999), 21–26. The one she remembers best is that of Oswald Doughty (BC666), an internationally renowned expert on the post-Raphaelite scholar Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Andrew Bank

Introduction

31

documents, beginning with the former. Her ‘List’ thus begins with personal papers, followed by the voluminous collections of letters, first those of Godfrey, then those of Monica: in each case first the correspondence with family members, then with anthropological colleagues and scholarly peers, and then contacts with others. The subsections then follow the professional careers of the Wilsons, again that of Godfrey in the first instance, tracked from his 78 Bunyakyusa notebooks and those of his research assistants (here Monica’s fieldnotes feature as well) through his two years of research at Broken Hill (Kabwe) in Northern Rhodesia, a still almost entirely untouched treasure trove of notebooks and other materials recorded by Godfrey Wilson in his years as RLI director, to the documents relating to the making of the posthumously published Analysis of Social Change. Hart’s list then follows Monica’s career from Student Essays and Notes through to her Eastern Cape research projects, including the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey of the late 1940s as well as her bulk of work in Pondoland, to her working life as a researcher and teacher at UCT, including all the materials relating to the making of the Langa study.83 Their family and fieldwork photograph materials are listed near the end of the inventory. Finally, as noted above, there is an extensive inventory of the papers of Monica’s missionary parents, David and Jessie Hunter. Behind these ostensibly dry divisions into Wilson Papers and Hunter Papers, private papers and public papers, Godfrey Wilson documents and Monica Wilson documents, written documents and visual documents lies an extraordinary wealth of information. The riches of the Wilson Collection are perhaps best illustrated by contrasting them with written and visual materials in archival collections of her anthropological colleagues working in southern Africa at the same time. Here I will focus particularly on the archives of fellow women anthropologists with which I am familiar: the Winifred Hoernl´e Papers and the Ellen Hellmann Papers at Wits University, the Jack and Eileen Krige Collection at Killie Campbell Library in Durban, and the Hilda Kuper Papers at UCLA. The Hellmann Papers and the Winifred Hoernl´e Papers are both small collections, largely shorn of personal information. The Hellmann Papers consist of some forty folders stored in seven boxes, almost all of which are confined to her public and published writings.84 The Winifred Hoernl´e Collection is stored in eight boxes and also includes only a scattering of letters along with the originals of her field diaries (which have

83 84

interview with Lesley Hart, Cape Town, 21 January 2010). Doughty was UCT’s Arderne Professor of English from the late 1920s to 1954. He would have met with Monica Wilson in 1952 when she took up her post as Chair of Social Anthropology and Head of the School of African Studies. Lesley Hart, BC880 The Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers: An Index. A1419, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand.

32

Inside African Anthropology

been published),85 lecture notes and early chapters of an uncompleted draft doctoral manuscript in preparation, which was being supervised by Radcliffe-Brown,86 and an incomplete draft posthumous biography of her husband, the philosopher Alfred Hoernl´e. The other two collections are more substantial. There are 72 boxes of materials in the Hilda Kuper Papers,87 as well as her Swaziland notebooks which gathered dust in a backroom for some fifteen years without the archivists knowing about their location. The correspondence in this collection relates almost entirely to her working life and professional contacts, and there is, for example, virtually no information and no visual images of her relationships with her parents, siblings or sociologist husband.88 The Jack and Eileen Krige Collection at the Killie Campbell Library in Durban is equally extensive, but is also strikingly silent about the private life of these two anthropologists, with little more than an occasional letter from the field written by Eileen to her father, and only rare items of correspondence between the Kriges and their anthropological colleagues. When viewed in this wider comparative frame, the Wilson Collection is highly distinctive. This relates not only to its scale, but to the density, depth and historical continuity of information about the personal life of Monica (as well as that of Godfrey). These other archives contain no body of material about the parents of these other scholars that begins to compare with the David and Jessie Hunter Papers. In addition, and as already noted, the 360 letters written by Monica to her father (with whom she was very close) give us the most textured of accounts of her thoughts and feelings and changing attitudes as she grew from a teenager to a young woman embarking on an unusual career. They are filled with details of her intellectual passions as well as her private life.89 These other archives also have no equivalent of the collections of documents listed under ‘personal papers’, which in the case of Godfrey Wilson includes school certificates, military records, his fascinating diary of his travels on his first visit to South Africa and then during his early first months of fieldwork, his budget of field expenses and the occasional religious tract. Monica Wilson’s personal papers include her school and university 85

86 87 88 89

Carstens, Klinghardt and West, eds, Trails in the Thirstland. It was in fact Hellmann who passed them on to Carstens in 1967, having been entrusted with them seven years earlier when her much-loved mentor died. She began the process of transcription herself, but was unable to complete it on account of her mentor’s illegible handwriting. AU8 HOE, University Archive, University of the Witwatersrand. Collection 1343, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. I have not yet consulted the Leo Kuper Papers at the University of North Carolina, which may contain more information about their private life. This contrasts with only 17 letters to and from her mother for reasons I explore in my account of her childhood in Chapter 1.

Introduction

33

certificates, her private diaries, and miscellaneous items like the customs forms and spectacle prescription mentioned above. Another significant difference is that these collections contain no equivalent information about the marital and intertwined professional relationships of the scholars with their respective spouses, all of whom were either anthropologists or sociologists (bar Ellen Hellmann’s husband, who was a lawyer). There are no surviving letters between Eileen Jensen Krige and Jack Krige, the other husband-and-wife team whose joint International African Institute-funded fieldwork of the mid-1930s produced an internationally respected anthropological study.90 Contrast this with 438 letters written by Godfrey to Monica and 190 letters written by Monica to Godfrey, all concentrated on the intense decade of their joint anthropological work between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s.91 Most of these collections contain records of correspondence with fellow anthropologists, oriented as they all are towards the professional lives of these women. Even here the Wilson Collection stands out by comparison. The twelve letters to and from Eddie Roux reinforce the sense provided in her correspondence to her father that he was a significant influence during her undergraduate years at Cambridge. The warm personal and intellectual relationship of both of the Wilsons with Audrey Richards is documented in 137 letters between Monica and Audrey, running from 1940 to 1982, and 110 letters between Godfrey and Audrey concentrated in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when they communicated about Bemba language and culture.92 The letters to and from African students and research assistants have been an obvious treasure in relation to our study; different essays collected here have drawn on Monica’s carefully preserved correspondences with Godfrey Pitje, Livingstone Mqotsi and Archie Mafeje – running into dozens of letters dating from 1960 to 1973 in the latter case. To this we must add the privilege of access to a remarkably full visual record of the private life of Monica Wilson. For example, while it took 90

91

92

Eileen Jensen Krige and Jack D. Krige, The Realm of a Rain-Queen: A Study of the Pattern of Lovedu Society (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1943). Like Reaction to Conquest, this classic text also featured a foreword by Jan Smuts. The impact of this on our book has been limited by restricted access. Only one of the researchers contributing to this volume, Se´an Morrow, has been granted access to this part of the Collection by Francis and Tim Wilson. Megan Vaughan was also granted permission to consult these letters. The reasons for the restrictions seemingly relate to the sensitivity of the materials. Some letters are intimate in nature, especially in the early years, and in the last months they document the mental decline that ultimately led to Godfrey’s tragic suicide. For a sense of this intimacy, see Se´an Morrow, ‘“This Is from the Firm” ’. WC, B4.7 and B6.14. I have not consulted the Audrey Richards Collection at University of London, which may be comparable to the Wilson Collection in the extent and range of its information about personal life, but especially about anthropological networks.

34

Inside African Anthropology

considerable effort to unearth a single photograph of Winifred Tucker Hoernl´e as a teenager, wife or mother (there are in fact just two such images that survive), the Wilson Collection contains photographs for most years of Monica’s childhood and early adulthood: often many photographs in a given year. There are also dozens of photographs of her parents; a few of her elder brother who died so young as well as one of his grave; many of her close friends, particularly her women friends from Girton College; and, of course, many of Godfrey at home or in the field and of their own children; as well as a scattering of visual records of students, fellow anthropologists and an occasional historian (in the form of Leonard Thompson: see Figure 9.1). A selection of these images features in the pages below. There are signs of the Collection entering yet another phase of life. The documents have been moved, along with many of the other collections preserved in the Manuscripts and Archives Department. The new location is the main library building at UCT. The work of classifying the Collection is still far from complete. Some 40 per cent of the papers are still being catalogued and indexed.93 Substantial new bodies of documents are being added to the Collection. The latest addition is a voluminous body of correspondence from Monica’s mother Jessie, including 264 letters from her husband, and 54 letters from her daughter.94 There will doubtless be further additions of material relating to the lives, working careers and families of Francis and Timothy Wilson in years to come, giving the archive yet further generational depth. Existing materials are also now being made available in new forms, notably in the case of a Carnegie-funded project freshly underway. This involves digitising hundreds of photographic negatives taken by Monica in Pondoland, and by Monica and Godfrey in the Bunyakyusa,95 making at least part of the Collection available to an international readership for the first time.

93 94

95

Andrew Bank, Interview with Lesley Hart, Cape Town, 21 January 2010. Andre Landman, BC880 Wilson Family Papers – Additions 2012 (Cape Town: UCT Libraries, 2012), 20 pp., A1.1-A1.264 David Hunter to Jessie Hunter, A5.1-A5.56 Monica/Godfrey to Jessie Hunter (only two items are from Godfrey). These letters were unfortunately not yet open to public access at the time of the production of this book. There are, for example, 600 negative plates of different sizes and some 400 silver prints taken by the Wilsons in Bunyakyusa, most of them taken by Monica Wilson using two different cameras. For a close visual analysis of this collection, see Rui Carlos de Naronha Assubuji, ‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography’.

Part 1

Pondoland and the Eastern Cape

Figure P.1. The making of a woman anthropologist: the studious young Monica Hunter at work in the Stanley Library, Girton College, c. 1930, the year in which she completed her undergraduate degree at Cambridge having switched from history to anthropology. She won an Anthony Wilkin scholarship which funded her fieldwork in Pondoland and the Eastern Cape beginning the following year. Photographer: unknown. HP, EE7 Photographs sent by Monica Hunter to her parents, mostly of university in England.

1

Family, Friends and Mentors: Monica Hunter at Lovedale and Cambridge, 1908–1930 Andrew Bank

In an article entitled ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology’ published in 1984, the Cambridgebased social anthropologist Edmund Leach criticised standard histories of anthropology for treating cultural knowledge production exclusively in terms of the international circulation of theoretical ideas and published texts. He called for a closer examination of the role that the personal background of social anthropologists had played in shaping their work and orientation. In particular he called for detailed attention to ‘the geographical, ethnic, family, and class background of the individuals concerned’.1 This chapter seeks to provide such details in the case of Monica Hunter Wilson, and also emphasises the importance of religion in her upbringing. The Jewish background of many prominent social anthropologists in southern Africa has been a major theme in recent literature.2 In an essay published in 1996 Archie Mafeje argued that Philip Mayer’s Jewish identity explained the empathy with which he wrote about the conservative ‘Reds’ of East London in Townsmen or Tribesmen. Mafeje contrasted this with his former mentor Monica Wilson’s sympathies for the schooled Christian township elite when they worked together on their Langa: A 1 2

Edmund Leach, ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 13 (1984), 2–3. On Max Gluckman see Richard Brown, ‘Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist: Max Gluckman in Northern Rhodesia’, Journal of African History, 20, 4 (1979), 227–232; on Gluckman and his colleagues A. L. (Bill) Epstein and Abner Cohen at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute see Hugh Macmillan, ‘From Race to Ethnic Identity: South Central Africa, Social Anthropology and the Shadow of the Holocaust’ in Patrick Harries and Megan Vaughan, eds, Social Dynamics Special Issue: Essays in Commemoration of Leroy Vail, 26, 2 (Summer 2000), 87–115; on Philip and Iona Mayer see William Beinart, ‘Speaking for Themselves’ in Andrew D. Spiegel and Patrick A. McAllister, eds, Tradition and Transition in Southern Africa: Festschrift for Philip and Iona Mayer (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1991), 11–15, 37–38; on Adam Kuper see Isak Niehaus, ‘Adam Kuper: An Anthropologist’s Account’ in Deborah James, Evie Plaice and C. Toren, eds, Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 171–174. The case in relation to the female anthropologists Ellen Hellmann and Hilda Kuper still needs to be developed.

37

38

Inside African Anthropology

Study of Social Groups in an African Township.3 Here I make a case for the centrality of Scottish missionary Christianity in shaping her attitudes and worldview. We can situate her, as she herself did from her first monograph through to her retirement years, as ‘a daughter of Lovedale’.4 Her missionary parents, but especially her father David, played a formative role with lasting consequences for her later anthropological work, including the openness with which she related to African research assistants during her projects in Pondoland, Bunyakyusa and Langa. Her schooling at the racially mixed Lovedale Missionary Institution near Alice during 1918– 20 instilled in her a curiosity about African culture and a passion for history that burgeoned during her years at Collegiate Girls’ High School in Port Elizabeth. These rival interests played on during her undergraduate years at Girton College Cambridge as she switched during her second year from history to social anthropology. The second section of the chapter explores how her undergraduate years at Cambridge developed her as a social anthropologist.5 Although Cambridge was far more racially exclusive than Lovedale had been, she moved in a multicultural and politically left-wing circle that encouraged her shift towards the still highly unfashionable field of social anthropology. Here we see the value of interpersonal relations, the role of friends and mentors. Two fellow students – a young Egyptian woman whom she met at Girton named Munira Sadek and an older student and Communist Party of South Africa member, Eddie Roux – were great influences given their shared interest in history and sociopolitical change in Africa. Roux was the leader and Sadek an active member of a Labour Study Circle that had a significant impact on her political ideas and, more concretely, contributed to her decision to shift from history to social anthropology. Two of her social anthropology lecturers at Cambridge, Jack Herbert Driberg and Thomas Callan Hodson, who later supervised her doctoral thesis, played an underacknowledged role in introducing her to African anthropology. What is abundantly clear from Hunter’s letters from Girton, as we shall see, is that she found Cambridge and college life anything but restrictive. Her experience of studying social anthropology 3

4

5

Archie Mafeje, ‘A Commentary on Anthropology and Africa’, CODESRIA Bulletin, 1996 (No. 2), 6–13. Wilson and Mafeje’s collaborative work on Langa is discussed in Chapter 8. Monica Wilson, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa, 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1973), 4; on her self-image as missionary’s daughter in her monograph see Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2009 (1936), 4th edition), 12. This latter part of the chapter is an edited and amended version of my article ‘The Making of a Woman Anthropologist: Monica Hunter at Girton College, Cambridge, 1927–1930’, African Studies, 68, 1 (April 2009), 29–57. Thanks to African Studies for permission to reproduce a reworked version of the article here.

Family, Friends and Mentors

39

was far from ‘stifling’, as Edmund Leach suggests of Cambridge in this interwar period in his article cited above. The notion that she ‘sat at the feet of Malinowski’ accords more with the training of Audrey Richards, or indeed that of her future husband Godfrey Wilson, who was one of Malinowski’s most favoured disciples, rather than with her own experience. She encountered his writings at Cambridge and acknowledged in her monograph that these works had inspired her, but she remained on the margins of the sacred circle, a ‘serious, rather silent’ presence when she attended his seminar in 1933.6 A Lovedale Education, 1908–1921 Monica Hunter was the daughter of missionary parents, David and Jessie Hunter (n´ee McGregor). We know much more about her father than about her mother, and much more about her paternal than her maternal relationship.7 The archival documents and her later life recollections do seem to suggest, however, that her father was very much the dominant influence. David Hunter (1864–1949) had grown up in a devout Methodist family in Glasgow. Hugh Macmillan locates David Hunter’s liberal Christian ideology within the religious and intellectual traditions of the Free Church of Scotland, ‘itself a product of the movement of ideas that has come to be known as “the Scottish Enlightenment”’. Like his Scottish Enlightenment forebears and his Free Church peers who included Lovedale’s best-known directors James Stewart and James Henderson, Hunter was as deeply concerned with matters of the world as with those of the spirit.8 This engaged form of Christianity would profoundly influence his daughter. David’s father William owned a large iron-manufacturing business. David attended school in Geneva and Cambridge before ill health sent him on a series of voyages to Norway, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and Ceylon between 1881 and 1886.9 He returned to manage the Liverpool branch of his father’s business. He was ordained 6

7

8

9

Audrey Richards, ‘Monica Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Whisson and West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa, 3. For a fuller discussion of her relatively marginal relationship with the Malinowski circle, see Chapter 9. A newly uncovered stash of letters between Monica and Jessie Hunter have the potential to offer a fuller and more balanced account of her relationship with her parents than that presented here. They are, however, not yet open to public access. Hugh Macmillan, ‘From “Rational Divines” to the Northern Rhodesian Mines: Christianity, Political Economy and Social Anthropology in Southern Africa’ (unpublished paper presented at the Monica Hunter Centenary Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June 2008), 1–3. University of Cape Town Libraries, Manuscripts and Archives Department, BC880, David and Jessie Hunter Papers (HP), AA1.4, David Hunter, Travel Diaries 1881, 1882, 1886.

40

Inside African Anthropology

at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Waterloo, London,10 but the real turning point was a profound religious experience in 1893, as he later recounted. Some fifty years ago a mother in Scotland wished that one of her five sons should become a medical missionary . . . One of these sons, who for ten years had been in business in Scotland and England and out East, was persuaded, against his inclination, to go to the Keswick Convention [in 1893]. There he had a deep spiritual experience. One outcome was an impulse to withdraw from business and seek to render some service towards the extension of Christ’s kingdom in Africa.11

David spent a year travelling through southern Africa by rail, buggy, oxwagon and on horseback, visiting mission stations throughout the region – including those in a still-independent Pondoland, where his daughter would later do fieldwork. His visit to Lovedale in this period had a sequel: its longtime director James Stewart offered him a position as a lay minister with responsibility for editing the mission’s journal The Christian Express, later known as The South African Outlook, teaching Bible classes, working on improving communications between missionaries and Xhosa-speaking converts, and preaching and proselytising.12 In his early years he successfully raised funds from the Cape government and friends back home in Scotland for the construction of the Victoria Hospital at Lovedale. In 1901 he married Jessie McGregor (1869–1949). In his letter of blessing her missionary father William gave a glimpse of her life history. He wrote that ‘through her mother’s departure to China, and subsequent death, she [Jessie] had, when still very young, a heavy responsibility thrown on her which she had faithfully and nobly discharged’.13 It seems likely that Jessie looked after her younger siblings in Edinburgh while her parents served as missionaries in China. These early duties might help explain why Jessie McGregor married relatively late. Mary Monica was the Hunters’ second child, born around 11.30 a.m. on 3 January 1908, some two years after her brother Aylmer (pronounced Elmer). She weighed 2.7 kilograms.14 Monica’s memories of childhood, as related in late life to her son Francis and daughter-in-law Lindy, are dominated by the figure of her father. Her earliest recollection is of his showing her Halley’s Comet when she was just two–and–a–half. 10 11

12 13 14

HP, AA11, Copy of minutes relating to ordination of David Hunter. HP, DD1.7, David Hunter’s Writings on Lovedale and Mission Work, David Hunter, ‘The Story of Lovedale Hospital’, handwritten ms [n.d., c. 1932]. Note: Square brackets in references enclose a person’s name, place, date or other item that is not specified in the text but is apparent to the author from the context. HP, BB5, Letters from James Stewart David Hunter, 1893–1902, James Stewart/David Hunter, 25 Sept. 1900, Edinburgh. HP, BB6, William McGregor/David Hunter, 9 Dec. 1900, Amory, China. HP, AA1.1 [David Hunter] Pocket Diaries, 1908.

Family, Friends and Mentors

41

I was taken by my father rolled up in a shawl which I can still see, a Shetland shawl, brown with a lovely lace border and it smelt very nice. And I liked being carried out by him on a cold winter night. And we went up to the terrace in Lovedale and looked at the blooming comet in the sky. And I remember my father saying, ‘If you live to be a very very old lady, you might see it again, but not otherwise, because it only comes very seldom.’15

Her early childhood years were difficult. The sense of seriousness in the Hunter household was perhaps due to her mother and father already being 39 and 44 years of age respectively at the time of her birth and to their devout religious beliefs. A family tragedy also played a role. Her brother died of appendicitis when Monica was four,16 a pain that would remain with her throughout her life. ‘The next memory is of his [Aylmer’s] death and the funeral . . . And my father wanted me to kiss him and, er, I knew that the corpse was not my brother. And it was terrible.’17 She linked the loss of her brother with ‘the sort of feeling that has dogged me always of being in the way and not being wanted’. She recalls her feelings of loneliness and fear when journeying with her parents as a five-year-old to England and Scotland. She spoke of the ‘terror of trains and tubes’, the awful smells of London and the deep sadness of her mother.18 Her revival began back at home in rural Lovedale and nearby Hogsback, where her father had bought a holiday home some years earlier. Horse-riding played an important role in her childhood, a skill she put to use in later years as a fieldworker in Pondoland, as we shall see in the next chapter. She recalled her father’s great skill as a rider and spoke of how, from an early age, he would egg her on to take the reins when driving their horse-and-carriage over the mountain to their holiday home. ‘And from the time I was about seven or eight I used to drive the last bit up the steep hill because I was the lightest member of the family. And my father used to walk alongside sort of clucking encouragingly to me, and my mother was slightly nervous at my having the horses in case they bolted at the top.’19 ‘The miracle of nature’ as expressed in a love of flowers and trees was another dominant childhood theme. Her father instructed pupils at Lovedale about gardening. His pupils included the Swazi King Sobhuza 15

16 17 18 19

WC, Uncatalogued CD, Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson, ‘Childhood’, Hogsback, 10 Jan. 1979. My transcription. [Henceforth Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’]. I am grateful to Francis and Lindy Wilson for permission to use this interview. Monica died at the age of 74 in 1982, just two years before the return of Halley’s Comet. On the cause of death see Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 3. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’. Ibid. Ibid.

42

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 1.1. A wedding photograph taken on the front porch of the home of David and Jessie Hunter at Lovedale in 1911. Monica (far left, aged 3) is being held in the arms of her father David, with her mother Jessie standing alongside. The importance of their Scottish ancestry is evident from the kilt worn by her brother Aylmer (aged 5) who died just a year after this photograph was taken. The bride is Jessie’s sister Marie and the groom is Cecil Hobart Houghton, a close family friend. In front of the bridal pair is Betty Henderson, daughter of the Lovedale principal. Next to Cecil is his brother Kenneth who in much later years, as inspector of schools in the Transkei, would advise the newly graduated Monica on her choice of field-sites in Pondoland. The small boy in front of Kenneth is probably Betty’s younger brother, Donald.20

II and the Pondo Chief Victor Poto,21 who would give Monica permission to do fieldwork in Western Pondoland. These Lovedale networks were of great importance at future field-sites, as we see in Chapter 2. He encouraged the planting of trees and experimented with new species in the garden of their holiday home. ‘And so we grew trees. And my father had correspondence in all corners of the world . . . he used to travel and he brought home seeds in his pockets. And all sorts of queer things began appearing at Hogsback . . . ’22 20 21 22

HP, EE3 Family photograph albums. Thanks to Francis Wilson for identifying the Houghtons and Hendersons. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’. Ibid. Monica inherited this experimental attitude towards gardening. Francis Wilson notes that she nurtured and developed her father’s garden with such a passion that it was one of a select number of gardens to feature (posthumously) in the Oxford Companion to Gardens. Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’, 24.

Family, Friends and Mentors

43

Figure 1.2. Monica Wilson aged five. The photograph was taken during the family visit to England and Scotland in 1913, a year after the death of her brother.23

Her memories of home were most strongly associated with religious instruction. She reflected that ‘the whole atmosphere of the house was one of the deepest reverence and an awareness of the presence of God’. This was the part of her childhood that was most closely connected with her mother who taught her from home in her young days. ‘I knew the Psalms, a number of the Psalms, and quite a lot of the Gospels by the time I was old enough to go to boarding school [in Port Elizabeth]. My mother thought that this was the best religious education possible. And I would have said it was the best literary education possible also, because I can still recite quite a lot of the Psalms and chunks of the Gospel.’24 She attended Lovedale Missionary School from the age of ten. The mission station had been founded in 1824 and the school dated back to 1841. It had always had a cross-cultural and multiracial character.25 Although ‘the over-riding concern was with training in Christian living’ and for girls this included practical training in sewing, the academic

23 24 25

HP, EE8 Photographs of Monica and family. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’. Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’, 4; for the standard history of the mission and its school, see also Robert H. W. Shepherd, Lovedale, South Africa, 1824–1955 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1971). A more modern history of Lovedale has still to be written.

44

Inside African Anthropology

standard was very high in this period of its history. Lovedale had an excellent library, a botanical collection, and an ornithological collection.26 The small classes encouraged close bonds between pupils.27 She made friends with many of her Xhosa classmates, of whom Frieda Bokwe, later wife of her Fort Hare colleague and longtime friend Z. K. Matthews, is the best known. Monica retrospectively traced her interest in history to the intense debates between the schoolteacher and her Xhosa classmates about the British–Xhosa Wars of the nineteenth century. These debates were all the more intense given the presence of Janet Maqoma, the great-grand-daughter of one of the Xhosa chiefs who had fought most energetically to defend his land against British invasion during the 1820s and 1830s. She herself debated with her classmates about cultural practices and here too the dialogues were, she reflected, ‘the seed of later ideas’. I remember a lively discussion when I was in Standard Six [in 1920] with a girl called Peggy Mbilini about lobola [bride-wealth]. And they [her Xhosa class-mates] were upholding lobola. And I was saying that I really didn’t want cattle given for me. I wanted to choose. And, er, the African girls didn’t really believe that we married without lobola. They were extremely sceptical of this. And we [the English-speaking pupils] were holding forth on our ideas about marriage.28

Home learning remained important, though now in a more informal way. Her father was deeply involved with African education, and medical and agricultural development. He was passionate about the idea of Native Industries and implacably opposed to the migrant labour system and the effects it had on African morality and family life.29 His diaries record his meetings over the years with prominent political figures including in the early 1900s the Cape prime minister J. X. Merriman, the female doctor Jane Waterson, the missionary anthropologist Henri Alexandre Junod at Lovedale, and in 1925 the minister of Native Affairs J. B. M. Hertzog. He also interacted with many visitors from other parts of Africa. ‘Bishops, and Plymouth Brethren, and all sorts of variety of characters 26

27

28 29

Monica Wilson, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa, 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1973), 8. Here she expressed a deep sense of sadness about the decline of Lovedale during the apartheid years. There were just seventeen pupils in her class in her second year at Lovedale. See WC, A2.6, Personal Papers, Monica Hunter, School Report, Lovedale Missionary College, Std. 5, 1919. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’. His critique of migrant labour would have a long legacy in the Wilson family, being taken up in print first by Monica Wilson in ‘The Bantu in Towns’ section of Reaction to Conquest and elsewhere in later writings, and then at length by Francis Wilson in Labour in the South African Goldmines, 1911–1969 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). On David Hunter’s economics, see his Editorial in Wilson and Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century, 271–80, 286–92, 304–28, 351–65.

Family, Friends and Mentors

45

used to turn up, and be entertained, irrespective of colour. And you picked up a great deal about Africa generally.’30 These recollections and many of the photographs of her childhood, like one of Monica and a large gathering of adults on a picnic in the Hogsback, suggest that she was forced, from an early age, to join the world of grown-ups. The conversation was mostly about serious matters from African politics to mission affairs or the mission journal. Edinburgh, Port Elizabeth and Alice, 1921–1926 Monica spent a year at St George’s School for Girls in Edinburgh in 1921 while her family was on leave. She was astonished to find that the standards in sewing class were inferior to those at Lovedale. On her return she was sent to board at Collegiate School for Girls in Port Elizabeth. Her weekly letters to her father tell of a strongly anglocentric cultural training with comments on the great celebrations associated with British royal visits and teachers who constantly upheld English schools and universities as models of comportment and educational standards. They also spill over with an ever-growing passion for books and reading.31 It was at the age of fifteen that she decided she wanted to study history. History is interesting. When I start reading it I want to go on and on and on. It’s fatal if I have to look up something and spike on a well written history of England. I get deep in it and forget to do my looking up. I would like to specialise in History one day.32

She wrote at this time of being ‘deep in a life of Clive [of India]’, having violent arguments about the reasons for Napoleon’s downfall and of her burning desire to win the History Prize.33 Given her liberal background and enquiring mind, it is not surprising that she criticised the settler school of South African historiography which they encountered through textbooks written by the likes of George McCall Theal and George Cory. ‘I don’t like Theal’s books, and he is supposed to be the man on South African History.’34 She was also critical of the maps in Eric Walker’s 30 31

32 33 34

Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’. WC, B5.1 Letters MH to her father (David Hunter), 2 Aug. 1922–4, Dec. 1925. There are more than a hundred surviving letters written by Monica to her father during these four years at Collegiate Girls’ High School. They give a remarkably rich sense of Monica as a bubbly and outgoing teenager, something that contrasts starkly with the recollections of former students of Monica as a shy and stern professor in later years. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 3 May 1923, Port Elizabeth. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 20 March 1924, 30 July 1924, 30 Oct. 1924, Port Elizabeth. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 26 Feb. 1925, Port Elizabeth. On Theal, Cory and the settler school of South African historiography, see Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1988), 9–46.

46

Inside African Anthropology

recently published Historical Atlas (1922). ‘I can still remember arguing with the History mistress at the Collegiate about the accuracy of the maps we had – that was Walker’s maps on the frontier. And I was maintaining that he got things on the wrong sides of the river. And generally I was extremely sceptical of the official interpretation of frontier history.’35 A Hunter of the Girton Tribe, October 1927–June 1928 In the year after matriculating from Collegiate Girls’ High, Monica applied to Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge and to Summerville College at Oxford. Girton was clearly the first choice. She had started studying the 12-volume Cambridge Modern History, the key text for her exam, not long after finishing her final examinations at Collegiate in November 1925.36 If we think of her exam preparation as a form of female ritual seclusion with the goal of acquiring specialised knowledge,37 then the female elder who guided her initiation before she set sail for England aboard the Union Castle ship with her mother was her former history mistress at Collegiate, a Miss Ruffel. There was also an oral component to the exam, or at least an interview, in this case with both mother and daughter. The history mistress at Girton, Miss Gwladys Jones, a former hockey international and dedicated coach of young women for whom Monica retained a lifelong sense of debt and devotion, felt that she was ‘very young’ – just 19 years 3 months at the time of the interview. But she was admitted, and sent a celebratory single-word telegram message to her father: ‘Girton!’38 In the months before ‘going up’, the prelude to the main initiation rituals, Monica read for her courses and even had the time and inclination to plan a novel. It was evidently autobiographical in inspiration. The leading lady was a Girton girl who goes out to rural South Africa to teach in a ‘native school’. This was her own vision of her future path. She recorded in her pocket diary at the time: ‘It will be worth my while to dedicate my life to training native girls.’ Once in South Africa the young Girtonian meets two men with differing views of the ‘native question’, a young man of somewhat wayward views and an old and wise medical missionary with great ideals, a man clearly modelled on her father. She

35

36 37

38

WC, Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’; on Walker’s reproduction of Theal’s historical myths in his early work, see Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past 42. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 18 March 1926, Lovedale. The idea of describing the Girton experience in terms of tribal rituals is adapted from the description of men’s rituals in Paul R. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3–9. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 23 April 1927, Glasgow.

Family, Friends and Mentors

47

only appears to have got as far as this outline of the cast of characters, but the novel-in-embryo is revealing of her vision of herself as a teacher-intraining and as one with a keen interest in the ‘native question’.39 When in England she noted with relief that coming from Lovedale had a less loaded political meaning than it did in her native South Africa.40 The main rituals of initiation took place in early October. On the first Sunday of that month, the freshers (who numbered 61 in 1927) were told about the ancestors by the college mistress, Helen Major. A fellow fresher recalled that Miss Major spoke about the great women educationalists – Emily Davies at the heart of the movement, Barbara Bodichon the artist, Sophia Jex-Blake the doctor, Josephine Butler the reformer, and George Eliot the novelist who had approved [of the foundation of the college in 1869]. These women were already becoming familiar to us, for their small portraits were along the corridors and larger paintings of college worthies were in the hall. The talk left me, at least, with a feeling that I had been admitted to a noble institution.41

The initiates were formally accepted into the tribe after their ‘matriculation’ ceremony and officially signed the college register. The event ended with the staging of the matriculation photograph on the lawn outside the front entrance of the college. Monica sent her father a copy with a handwritten key identifying each participant.42 In college life the language of kinship was explicit. Almost immediately the freshers were divided into ‘families’ of eight or ten members each. Given the peculiarity of this concept in a college setting, Monica found it necessary to explain to her father what they meant: ‘family i.e. the group that sits together at table and more or less knows one another’.43 As this suggests, sitting together in the dining hall for the evening meal was the central family ritual. The senior students sat closest to the high table and were apparently permitted, just once during their third and final undergraduate year, to ‘dine on high’, although this fearful prospect was softened by the possibility of being accompanied by a fellow family member. The ‘fresher’ families, on the other hand, sat at tables on ‘the junior side’ of the hall – the bottom end furthest from high table. The young women were required to wear formal evening dress for these occasions. For some there was even a regular powdering before the event, though Monica herself was not much given to cosmetics. 39 40 41 42 43

WC, A2.2, Diaries, Monica Hunter, Pocket Diary, 1927. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 13 March 1927, Cambridge. Gwendolen Freeman, Alma Mater: Memoirs of Girton College 1926–1929 (Cambridge: Pevensey, 1990), 14. WC, N2, Photographs in Groups. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 13 Nov. 1927, Cambridge.

48

Inside African Anthropology

When her college mate Muriel Bradbrook spoke of Monica as having belonged to ‘the social elite family of our year’,44 this was not a statement about class origins – indeed, Monica’s letters home make it clear that she saw her squarely middle-class family as quite other than aristocratic ‘High Brows’. Instead, Muriel’s remark was both a comment on their leadership within college and a retrospective reflection on their remarkable degree of success in later professional life. Monica herself was president of the Girton College branch of the League of Nations, college secretary for the Student Christian Movement and a member of the Boat Club. Social events in the ‘family calendar’ included the ‘jovial jug’, attended by as many family members as possible. They were held in the private rooms of one of the family members, usually about once a fortnight, beginning at 9.15 or 9.30 in the evening. College histories reveal that in earlier years there had also been gatherings known as ‘wines’, which involved even larger parties. While the ‘jugs’ had begun in Victorian days as cocoa-drinking parties, in the more experimental atmosphere of the 1920s the hostesses would also usually serve coffee and offer cigarettes. Indeed, ashtrays were near-obligatory furnishings on the mantelpieces of newly decorated college rooms. Monica’s contemporary Gwendolen Freeman recalls that smoking was seen as a way of asserting freedom and an expression of equality with men. Monica’s letters confirm that ‘a great many people smoke in college – in moderation – but it is quite possible to refrain and not be considered a freak’.45 She provided many accounts of the ‘family jugs’, of which this was the most evocative. There were nine of the family there (Kathleen Earp could not come) – and Frieda Picot, the blind English student from Guernsey [who had come as a guest]. We had an uproarious time. Munira [Sadek] brought her gramophone and E [Elizabeth] dispersed cocoa while I dealt with the oat cakes and toast and tried to prevent chestnuts ‘popping’ and hitting people in the eye. Ten of us made E’s room pretty full, and we had all come in pyjamas and dressing gowns. Having been fed, we proceeded to duck for apples in a foot bath Elizabeth had unearthed in the gyp [maids’] wing; then still munching we turned off the lights and Frieda told us folktales and witch stories from the Channel Islands.46

Language, as the above extracts confirm, was a distinctive feature of tribal life at Girton. The lingo could be general – ‘going down’, ‘going up’, ‘May fever’, ‘dining on high’ – or specific: ‘jumping’, ‘throwing jugs’, ‘the Gyps’ wing’. 44

45 46

Girton College Archive, Memories of Muriel Bradbrook on tape (with a transcript), compiled during the 1980s as part of the series entitled ‘Strong-Minded Dons’. Bradbrook became a well-known novelist and remained a lifelong friend of Monica’s, attending her funeral in Hogsback in 1982. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 18 Dec. 1927, Cambridge. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 4 Oct. 1928, Cambridge.

Family, Friends and Mentors

49

Jane Howarth observes that the history of women’s education at Oxford after 1920 has been viewed in two different ways: either as ‘a story of growth and assimilation . . . or as one of constraints of various kinds experienced by women “implanted into a men’s society”’.47 Early feminist literature tended to emphasise the latter, especially at Cambridge, given the ‘peculiarly mulish degree of prejudice towards women’ that lingered here into the interwar period.48 Where Oxford women were allowed to attend the university graduation ceremonies from 1920 onwards, Monica had to wait until 1948 to receive her undergraduate (and by now also graduate) certificates in an academic gown at a formal ceremony. The fact that she made the long journey to Cambridge from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where she had taken up her first post as departmental chair in anthropology, suggests that she saw this long overdue expression of equality as an important milestone.49 Her letters do convey resentment at the continued institutional discrimination against women at Cambridge. She was intensely annoyed at being forced to sit in the visitors’ seats with her fellow Girtonians when she went to listen to the Union sermon, for example, while the ‘hoary and aged Dons’ occupied the pound seats.50 Yet such expressions are rare in her letters, and it is the other face of college life – ‘growth and assimilation’ – that comes to the fore. Indeed, the overwhelming tone of her letters is a bubbling sense of excitement of a life lived at a lick. She was ever-reluctant to ‘go down’ and keen to ‘come up’ after holidays spent with relatives. This was partly thanks to the independence and freedom that came with college life. ‘I Have Let Myself in for a Labour Study Circle’: Hunter, Sadek and Roux, October 1927–November 1928 As well as its routines, not least as a world of leisure and sociability, Girton was of course also a space of intellectual engagement. In this sense in particular, it left a lasting imprint on Monica’s life and career. After her first year of study she enthused: ‘I feel that in three terms I have collected enough ideas, to keep my brain busy for at least ten years. To me it is not what you learn that is important, but they teach you to think, and work things out, and make you so keen.’51 This passion for learning was partly developed in her many conversations with her college mates; variously described as ‘yarning’, 47 48 49 50 51

Jane Howarth, ‘Women’ in B. Harrison, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 8: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Clarendon), 345–376. Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge: A Men’s University – Though of a Mixed Type (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), 1. WC, B5.5, Corr. with Dover Wilson, J. Dover Wilson/Monica Wilson, 1948, Oxford. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, Cambridge, 15 Oct. 1928. Ibid., Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 28 July 1928, Cambridge.

50

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 1.3. Monica sent this postcard of Girton to her father with the comment: ‘This rather jolly view of “Emily Davis Court” where we play tennis in summer.’52

‘gassing’ and ‘waxing’. ‘We are forever discussing things like race and colour problems.’53 She paints a picture of a culture of debate and openness that obviously left a lasting impression. She was challenged on numerous occasions by her college mates for failing to be more outspoken in defence of the missionary model of colonial development, which she evidently held dear; she repeatedly noted the diversity of views in college but also that the ethic was one of ‘thrashing things out’. This ethic was strongly promoted by her much admired history mistress, Mary Gwladys Jones, who insisted for example that she take political science classes with a lecturer who had a viewpoint contrary to her own. Monica’s letters are filled with valuable lessons from Miss Jones, encouraging her to work on her writing style by reading classic histories like Edward Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, to explore the boundaries between history and literature by studying historical novels, and also to nurture what Jones perceived as her deep interest in racial issues in colonial settings. With this in mind she was encouraged to write essays on ‘the noble savage in literature’ and on ‘racial problems in contemporary South Africa’.54 52 53 54

HP, EE7 Photographs sent by Monica Hunter (Wilson) to her parents, mostly of university in England (annotated by Monica). Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, Cambridge, 6 July 1927. For more on the influence of Jones, see Chapter 9.

Family, Friends and Mentors

51

Figure 1.4. Portrait of Monica dating from her Girton College years.55

The social world of the college was, however, relatively restricted in the opportunities it offered for cross-cultural contact. While the number of ‘colonials’ at Cambridge had been increasing steadily, students from the British ‘dominions’ (as they were called then) were still a small minority. Indians had long been the most numerous, but there were still only about a hundred of them at Cambridge in the 1920s, just 2 per cent of the total student population.56 African students were far less numerous. From passing mentions in her letters I would guess there were fewer than twenty-five students from Africa among the 4,600 undergraduates. Gwendolen Freeman recalls that Cambridge of that era was ‘still very much a non-multiracial society’. She recalls an argument with college mates as to whether it was proper to behave towards an Indian man as one would towards an Englishman.57 Even Monica, with her much more culturally diverse and open background, seems to have found some difficulty in relating to Indian men, whom she once described as ‘bitter’ and wont to dominate political 55 56 57

HP, EE14. Packets of assorted photographs, mostly unidentified. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men, 210. Freeman, Alma Mater, 98.

52

Inside African Anthropology

discussions, leading her to muse at various points whether men and women meeting together at fortnightly international teas or international conferences between terms was in fact a good thing. She described the awkwardness on the last evening of an international conference in Liverpool during her Easter vacation in 1928. The evening began with people from different countries singing traditional songs: ‘Ida Russell [a South African friend from Newnham] sang an Afrikaans thing, an Arab went on in Arabic, and an Egyptian sang a wild revolutionary song, also in Arabic. Indians followed’, she wrote to her father. ‘The Indians are so like Europeans (much more so than any Bantu that I have met) that there seems no earthly reason for regarding [treating crossed out here] them differently, but after living at home, you know you just can’t.’ She concluded: ‘If there were only girls together it would have been perfectly alright, and a good many of us agreed that it would be better to have them [conferences] for men and women separately.’58 In this relatively narrow cultural world, personal friendships could play a crucial role in developing a deeper sense of cross-cultural connection. One of Monica’s most significant friendships at Girton was with the only other African student of her year, an Egyptian woman named Munira Sadek. Monica’s friendship with Munira was a running theme through her letters. Munira was first mentioned during Monica’s first month in college, but they seem to have become close when attending the Liverpool conference of 1928. ‘Munira is a nice person. She, by the way, is a rabid nationalist and rather upset by recent doings in Egypt.’59 During the summer vacation Monica introduced Munira to her relatives in Edinburgh, Uncle Ian and Aunty Mary. By second year they were the closest of friends. Monica now revealed further details about her Egyptian sister. She ‘taught in Egypt for a little before she came here. She holds a state scholarship, and is going back to teach again. I somehow don’t think she will ever get married . . . Munira is one of the nicest people I know, and the only non-European whom I ever forget is not European.’60 Munira had been brought up as a Christian rather than a Muslim, her family being members of the Coptic Church. In January 1929 Monica shared a room with her at another international conference. ‘The key-note of the Conference was “friendship” and in our hostel and elsewhere, we were just good friends all round – black and white and yellow.’ Again, though, there is still evidence of a residual paternalism in her attitude towards Africans – which I read as a legacy of her missionary upbringing. ‘It’s much more complicated at home . . . Rosebery Bokwe was in the hostel too, and I was proud of 58 59 60

WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 20 March 1928, Cambridge. Ibid. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 14 Nov. 1928, Cambridge.

Family, Friends and Mentors

53

Figure 1.5. Monica’s closest friend at Girton College, the Egyptian nationalist Munira Sadek.61

Lovedale and Fort Hare. He was one of the most popular people there, and such a contrast to some other Indians and people. He spoke for South Africa . . . when various delegates were asked to give some account of the S.C.M. [Student Christian Movement] in their countries and did exceedingly well . . . I thought he was getting through remarkably quickly for a Bantu.’62 Later that month Munira invited Monica to the Annual AngloEgyptian Tea at Cambridge, an event arranged to promote better relations between students of the two nationalities. ‘Egyptians complain that they find themselves very much shut out from social life in England. I think in most cases their complaint is just – they are shut out, but I do not know what ought to be done about it. If only they were all like Munira there would not be much difficulty.’ Monica was wrong about Munira in just one respect: she did marry; among the relatively sparse entries in Monica’s address book in later years, we read of a Munira Saad living in Malarea near Cairo.63 An article in the college journal in 1933 reported that Munira had risen very rapidly to a position of responsibility in her 61 62 63

WC, N7. Unidentified photographs. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 9 Jan. 1928, Cambridge. WC, A2.4, Personal Papers, Address Book of Monica Wilson.

54

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 1.6. Monica’s long-standing friend, the Communist Party of South Africa member Eddie Roux in his young days.64

home country. She was headmistress of the Tewfik Coptic School for Girls with 520 pupils.65 An even more important friendship for Monica’s later career was with Edward Rudolph Roux of Clare College, who is associated with pioneering radical history in South Africa. Roux was born five years before Monica in Pietersburg in what is now the Northern Province of South Africa, but grew up in Johannesburg. He joined the Young Communist League in 1922, at just 19 years of age, and describes in his autobiography how his sympathies with the aspirations of black workers through his Communist Party contacts led to arguments, alienation and eventually ostracism from his own family. While studying at Witwatersrand University he rented a room from one of his Party comrades, Willy Brandt, and thus became ever more embroiled in the world of urban working-class politics, being introduced to Sydney Bunting, a man for whom he retained a lifelong devotion, and activists in the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU). Roux had begun a doctoral thesis on plant physiology a year before Monica arrived at Girton.66 64 65 66

A2203 Eddie Roux Collection, D8, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. Thanks to Michelle Pickover for permission to reproduce this photograph. E. S. Fegan, ‘A Near-Eastern Tour’, The Girton Review, 92 (1933), 20. Eddie Roux and Win Roux, Rebel Pity: The Life of Eddie Roux (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 50.

Family, Friends and Mentors

55

In many ways it was an unlikely friendship. ‘Roux’, as Monica would refer to him, was an outspoken atheist and a member of the Communist Party of South Africa. She, as we know, was a deeply committed Christian liberal. They met through Monica’s involvement in a Cambridge Labour Study Circle led by Roux, which was also attended by Munira Sadek and many other Girtonians. On 19 October 1927 Monica wrote to her father: ‘I did my best to keep out of all political clubs’, something he seemingly had advised, but ‘everyone persecuted you to belong to this particular party. Now I have let myself in for a labour study circle in Cambridge on “race” and “internationalism” (most interesting) and have also promised to go to a Conservative meeting at the end of November and lead a discussion on South African politics’. The fence sitting did not last long – within a few months she commented after listening to a Union debate that she was ‘less of a Tory than ever’. By January 1928 she reported, ‘I, like all the other intelligent people in Girton, am wearing scarlet and vote Labour!’67 She was elected Labour Club secretary at Girton at the beginning of her second year but stood down due to other responsibilities.68 I read this clarity about her affiliation to Labour as driven by the politically experienced Eddie Roux whose dialogues with Monica were conducted through the three-hour fortnightly debates in their study circle. Roux’s programme was nothing if not ambitious. We are going to meet once a week and do the Empire and Native races. The general scheme of study is to follow this plan: 1. Outline of economic position. 2. Administration. 3. Land Tenure. 4. Labour. 5. Education. 6 Social Welfare. 7. Native Movements – Nationalistic etc. and then apply it to different groups of colonies like West Africa, Kenya and Tanganyika, South Africa, Malay States and Hong Kong, Egypt and Sudan, Palestine etc. Each person works up a different colony, and we discuss it at one meeting. I am doing South Africa.69

At this stage she was still unsure about Roux. ‘I foresee we are going to have royal battles. One man there is from Jo’burg and I believe is a communist, but I like the girls that come from Girton awfully and they quite understand that I am by no means a socialist.’70 Within a fortnight, though, Roux had put her on a reading programme in what may be described as ‘Anti-imperial and Anti-capitalist Studies’ beginning with Lord Olivier’s The Anatomy of South African Misery, published that same year, 1927. Olivier’s book was a resounding critique of the racial policies of South Africa, notably segregation, and the fearful ideas on which they were based. He made a strong link between the 67 68 69 70

Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 24 Jan. 1928, Cambridge. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 15 Oct. 1928, Cambridge. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 19 Oct. 1927, Cambridge. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 19 Oct. 1927, Cambridge.

56

Inside African Anthropology

needs of British mining capitalists in South Africa and the requirements of racially discriminatory legislation there. Monica reported to her father, ‘I think it is extraordinarily good – especially on the economic conditions in the Union.’71 In his autobiography Roux reflected that he still considered The Anatomy of South African Misery the most incisive critique of segregation and white supremacist thought in South Africa. Indeed, he had taken the title for his early radical history from the West Indian slave proverb that served as the epigraph for Olivier’s book: ‘Time Longer Than Rope’. This ‘first major Africanist history to emerge from South Africa’ was already written up in draft form in 1939 but only published in 1948.72 The paper Monica presented on South Africa to the Labour Study Circle in November was her first formal ‘academic’ presentation. It proved to be ‘a dreadful ordeal’ on account of ‘awfully bad stage fright’ (something that never entirely left her).73 She did discover, though, that she and Roux were not all that far apart in their views. ‘Hitherto the other South African and I have been eyeing one another rather askance, each imagining the other’s point of view to be more or less the typical colonial one, so it was rather amusing to discover that we agreed on most points.’74 At the end of her first term, Roux asked her to work up a paper on ‘Administration in African Colonies’ for the opening meeting of the new year. ‘None of us from Girton went to the last meeting and the wretched men fixed it up, and nabbed all the decent subjects like education. Exploiting female labour I call it. Bis [Bice Creighton Miller] is all right (she is doing “Land and Labour”) for she is going to spend Christmas in the J. H. Oldham’s house, so will be able to get heaps of books.’75 When Monica got into a panic about her presentation, which was supposed to include commentary on East and West Africa as well as South Africa (but in the event did not), Creighton Miller sent her a reading list of seven or eight books, presumably based on what she had found on Oldham’s shelves. By January 1928 Hunter and Roux had developed a friendship. She described taking a ‘tramp’ with him down to Grantchester. A few weeks later Roux gave a paper on ‘native movements in Africa’, which was ‘mainly an account of the ICU [Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union] of which he is an ardent supporter. The general theme was that 71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 30 Oct. 1927, Cambridge. Saunders, Making of the South African Past, 134; Eddie Roux, Time Longer Than Rope (London: Rex Collings, 1948). Martin E. West, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: A Memoir’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 45, 2 (1984), 208. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 20 Nov. 1927, Cambridge. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 9 Dec. 1927, Cambridge.

Family, Friends and Mentors

57

the only way to fight a repressionist native policy was to boost up native trade unions.’76 Monica’s highly sympathetic account of African nationalist movements, and especially of the ICU and its recent strike in East London, in her first study, Reaction to Conquest (1936), was doubtless influenced by the insider’s view of the organisation which Eddie Roux presented to the Labour Study Circle in February 1928.77 Roux and the other leaders of the study circle, like Creighton Miller, made conscious attempts to connect their work with the wider world of Labour politics in the late 1920s. Roux’s annual report on their study circle meetings was sent by Creighton Miller to Norman Leys, another leading ideologue of the anti-imperialist school within the Labour Party. Leys, who had authored a number of books that criticised settler colonialism in Kenya,78 was apparently ‘rather complimentary in patches’ and ‘sent two pages of criticisms’.79 In the course of her involvement with Labour politics, Monica would meet with other influential figures in the Labour Party like McGregor Ross, who invited her to visit him in Kenya. Following Monica’s presentation on administration in Africa, the Labour Study Circle moved on to item 3 of Roux’s programme, land tenure. In the course of her research on the subject, Monica wrote a lengthy questionnaire to her father in April 1928, the very month before she first broached the subject of switching from history to anthropology with Miss Jones. I read this as her first anthropological document. It was headed ‘Questions on Native Land Tenure’ and was laid out with the kind of meticulous attention to detail and thoroughness that would become a hallmark of her later work as an anthropologist. There were ten questions, to only a few of which David Hunter could pencil in adequate answers. It begins: ‘1. Does a man hold his “garden” in individual ownership? 2. Has he absolute right over it? Can he fence it etc.? Can he bequeath it to his son?’ and ended with ‘9. How can a man increase the size of his “garden” i.e. Can a man in the Tyumie buy another patch of land to add to his original holding. 10. Are the tenure laws the same in Bechuanaland and Botswana as in the Union? – If not, what are the answers there to the same [ten] questions.’80 From here, it was but a short step for Monica to take the formal decision to switch to studying anthropology, but before we turn to this it is necessary to give a brief account of the interactions between Hunter and Roux in first term of the 1928–9 academic year, given the influence 76 77 78 79 80

Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 9 Feb. 1928, Cambridge. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 567–573. Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73–77. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 27 May 1928, Cambridge. Ibid., Attachment to letter, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 8 April 1928, Cambridge.

58

Inside African Anthropology

of this relationship on her formative years at Cambridge. She reported in mid-October. I have been having a regular dose of ‘Labour’ for Roux came to tea with me yesterday. He was in Moscow for 7 weeks during the summer, as one of about 500 delegates from 52 countries, at an international communist conference there. I was aching to hear about it. Munira came in, and we talked hard for a couple of hours. My impression at the end was that communism was not so upsetting as you had thought, once you got down to the facts . . . Anyway it was interesting to get a first-hand impression of Russia today. Roux is at least honest, so you know where you are when you are talking to him and get something of both sides.81

There are signs of romantic interest on Roux’s part. On 5 November ‘E. R. R.’ sent an invitation card to Monica from his Lensfield Road address in Cambridge: ‘going to see an African film (descriptive) at the Guildhall on Tues. 13th. I wonder whether you could come. I have an extra ticket.’ The movie was called ‘Africa Today’. Monica took up the invitation. We had supper first in the K.P. [King’s Parade] Cafe – that being owned by an old lady and considered by the mistress [Miss Major] as a place in which it was suitable for me to dine out with a young man! The pictures were awfully good. Roux and I really behaved badly, commenting and talking all the way through . . . Imagine bobbing up and down when a picture of Lovedale or Jo’burg came on the film – ‘Oh you see that?’ – and just round the corner there’s –, and that there –, and (me grand crescendo and nearly out of my seat –) ‘if that is not the main avenue with our house just around the corner?’ The people must have thought us quite mad. There were half a dozen or so pictures of Lovedale – some classes, and students coming back after the vac, and one or two whom I recognised. I did enjoy myself. It was so nice going with someone with whom you could talk undiluted S. Africa. Roux is a nice person too – a thorough gentleman in the proper sense of the word.82

Roux moved down to London a month or two later and was back in South Africa by the middle of 1929, working for the Communist Party in Johannesburg and looking for a job as a lecturer in botany. His last letter to Monica was written from Durban over a year later, in which he indicated that he was due to stand trial for defying a banning order.83 By now their private and political lives had begun to move apart. He was still romantically interested (reading between the lines) but she kept him at a distance, especially as she had met Godfrey, her future husband, a 81 82 83

Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 21 Oct. 1928, Cambridge. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 14 Nov. 1928, Cambridge. WC, B6.15, Corr. with Eddie Roux, Eddie Roux/Monica Hunter, 5 Dec. 1931, Cambridge.

Family, Friends and Mentors

59

month before seeing Roux again at a workshop in Geneva organised by the British Universities League of Nations Society.84 In upshot, the personal and intellectual relationship with the politically experienced Eddie Roux was an essential prelude to Monica’s decision to turn from history to anthropology at Cambridge, which had obvious implications for her later life and career. It was Eddie’s loan of Lord Olivier’s book that was so seminal, plus the fact that he shared his knowledge of urban African life and political movements with her, cajoled her into presenting papers to their study circle or doing background research for their meetings, and even reported to her on his trip to Moscow. Social Anthropology at Cambridge: Hunter, Driberg and Hodson, March 1929–June 1930 While Roux made no mention of Monica in his autobiography, she did talk about him in a late life interview with Francis and Lindy Wilson. She associated him with her decision to read anthropology in the second half of her Tripos. I remember very well in Cambridge, er, I had gone with Eddie Roux, who was a Communist, to a meeting of the Heretics Club at which J. H. Driberg was speaking. He was the lecturer in African anthropology, and he was very rude about missionaries in his lecture. So Eddie took me along to speak to him afterwards, and I had said to him, ‘Introduce me as a missionary’s daughter,’ which he did. And Driberg was horrified and said: ‘Why, I didn’t mean anything personally insulting in any way’ [rushed, apologetic tone of voice] And I said: ‘Oh no, I am quite used to it. I am not upset.’ [light tone] And, er, Eddie said: ‘Miss Hunter’s going to read Anthropology next year.’ And Driberg said ‘Oh. I don’t believe in teaching missionaries. It makes them too damned efficient.’ [in an authoritarian and heavily moralising tone of voice] And I said genially to him: ‘But I am not going to be a missionary. I just want to know about the people.’ And he looked at me with extreme suspicion. But he couldn’t exclude me from his classes. A lecturer hasn’t the right to do that in Cambridge. And so I turned up in his classes.85

Sir Robert Thorne Coryndon, the governor of Uganda, praised Driberg in the foreword to his monograph The Lango for his fluency in the Lango language, his comprehensive and meticulous documentation of tribal life, and, above all perhaps, the practical utility of his study: ‘The broad 84 85

Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’, 7. WC, uncatalogued CD, Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson, ‘Pondoland’, Hogsback, July 1979, my transcription. Henceforth Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Jack Herbert Driberg came to social anthropology via the Colonial Office. Between 1912 and 1917 he had worked as a native administrator in eastern Uganda and then spent some time working in Sudan. His first major work was a 438-page monograph entitled The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923).

60

Inside African Anthropology

viewpoint shows the author to be at once a sympathetic administrator and anything but a visionary – a muscular student, in fact.’86 It is difficult to judge how accurately Monica recalled her first encounter with this ‘muscular student’, nearly fifty years after the event. There is no doubt that Driberg was outspokenly critical of missionaries and it is fair to assume that this would have been a theme in his lecture. A book he published just a year or two later launches something of a crusade against the missionaries.87 Her account of their conversation, however, rings somewhat false. I find it implausible that Driberg – then approaching the height of his scholarly career – would have felt apologetic about his views, or threatened in any way by a young woman student whose father happened to be a missionary. I am also sceptical about her claim that he actively wished to exclude women students from his lectures. There were Cambridge lecturers of that sort and Monica did recall him being so ‘shocking’ in his lectures on African sexuality that the only other woman student in the class dropped the course, but nevertheless she later admitted that ‘he took quite a lot of trouble’.88 Driberg’s own writings confirm my suspicions. In his book At Home with the Savage, also published not long after Monica’s classes with him, Driberg argued that there was a role for women anthropologists, although he made it very clear that this was a subsidiary one. His tone is strikingly paternalistic. There is scope, therefore, within limits, for women anthropologists who should investigate only the specifically female elements of the culture and should supplement rather than compete with the work of male anthropologists: for with a great deal of the male organisation of a tribe, and certainly on its more esoteric side [read: the sexual practices of secret societies], they would be as much out of their depth as a man would be with the women’s share of social activities. There are also, for those that like such things, possible lines of comparative research which women might undertake, such as the conditions of birth, diet and infant education.89

Driberg’s concept of women’s fieldwork was not all that unusual. Audrey Richards claimed that Malinowski was inclined to the view that women anthropologists should focus on women’s issues. There is strong evidence to suggest that many women anthropologists of that generation internalised this view. Richards’s fellow Newnhamite, Camilla Wedgwood, for example, wrote from the field that she was ‘keeping to the position of

86 87 88 89

Robert T. Coryndon, ‘Foreword’ in Driberg, Lango, 5. Jack Herbert Driberg, The East African Problem (London: Williams and Norgate, 1930), 13, 59. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Jack Herbert Driberg, At Home with the Savage (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1932), 32.

Family, Friends and Mentors

61

being a woman principally interested in women’s things’.90 Monica’s early letters from Pondoland indicate that she too saw women’s issues as the focus of her Pondoland study during the early phases of her fieldwork and this indeed was the theme of her earliest articles on Pondo culture.91 Driberg should also be credited with having introduced Monica to the functionalist theory of anthropology and the method of participant observation. He had studied in London under Malinowski in 1926, together with Isaac Schapera. In the introductory chapter of At Home with the Savage (1932) he outlined ‘The Scope and Function of Anthropology’ in terms that directly echoed his mentor. ‘Culture’ was a complex ‘living and working organism’, made up of different parts and it was the role of the anthropologist to discover ‘what functions these customs [or parts] have’. The following chapter, ‘In the Field’, championed the Malinowskian method, contrasting it with the ways of the old armchair anthropologists. ‘A year or two years of intimacy will give amazing results, but it must be complete intimacy in which we are prepared to share in all the pursuits of our hosts: to play their games: to eat their food; to live, in short, as they do.’92 This enthusiasm for fieldwork surely did have some influence on the young Monica, who would later become famous for the meticulous and energetic quality of her work in the field. There are direct echoes of his language of ‘intimacy’ in her earliest journal articles.93 At the very least, Driberg should be credited with introducing Monica to the existing anthropological literature on southern Africa. His generously acknowledged role in shepherding Isaac Schapera’s The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa through to publication in London confirms that he was well acquainted with regional anthropological issues and had collaborated closely with young Schapera. A co-authored introductory note to the book indicates that the two men envisaged the volume as the ‘first of a series designed to provide in a scientific manner a comprehensive survey of what is at present known about the racial characters, cultures and languages of the native peoples of Africa’.94 For whatever reasons, their collaboration did not last, but there is little doubt that Schapera’s then study-in-the-making was the main textbook for Monica’s courses in 90 91

92 93 94

Nancy Lutkehaus, ‘“She Was So Cambridge”: Camilla Wedgwood and the History of Women in British Social Anthropology’, American Ethnologist, 13, 4 (1986), 786. Monica Hunter, ‘Results of Culture Contact on the Pondo and Xosa Family’, South African Journal of Science, 24 (1932), 681–686 and especially Monica Hunter, ‘The Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Status of Pondo Women’, Africa, 6, 3 (1933), 259–276. See also Monica Hunter, ‘Review of Valenge Women by E. Dora Earthy’, Africa, 7, 1 (Jan. 1934), 110–112. Driberg, At Home with the Savage, 34–35. Monica Hunter, ‘Methods of Study of Culture Contact’, Africa, 7, 3 (July 1934), 341. Isaac Schapera, The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1930), v.

62

Inside African Anthropology

African anthropology. No fewer than six of the ten questions in her May 1930 final examination were on, or related to, Khoisan culture.95 Her decision to take up anthropology had been made some months before attending Driberg’s lecture with Eddie Roux. The thinking behind her choice is set out in detail in a letter to her father, penned on 6 May 1928. On Friday, I went along to Miss Jones and rather in fear and trembling broached the subject of doing anthropology in my third year, instead of history. She leapt upon the proposal, thought it a splendid plan, and thinks I could teach and get a job perfectly well on Part I History . . . In anthropology, the skull measuring wash is mostly being cut out now, and I would be able to concentrate on social anthropology, which would give me a good background for beginning to study Bantu Social customs, and could well be combined with teaching in a native school, or (if I am lucky) at Fort Hare.96

When she mentioned her idea to Hester Laws, the only other Girtonian who was reading anthropology, Hester informed Driberg’s older colleague Thomas Callan Hodson. Hodson came rushing over to enquire about the new ‘possible’ and Monica could not fail to note his enthusiasm. ‘He’s really mad about his subject . . . The Cape is the district for special study in 1929–30 (when I would be reading anthropology) so it really looks as if I were meant to do it . . . Anthropology would be more helpful than history in “vocational training”. I hope you will agree.’ To Monica’s ‘most awful relief ’ her father supported her proposal. In her next letter she put forward another argument in its favour. ‘I am sure that I shan’t want to teach for always and always, and anthropological research is a thing I can do on my own, if I can’t get a job near, and you want me home any time.’97 Hodson had succeeded Alfred Cort Haddon as Cambridge University’s Reader in Ethnology in 1926. He had trained in the Indian Civil Service (1894–1901) and published four books on India: a grammar of an Indian language in 1906, two tribal ethnographies in 1908 and 1911, and a more general study entitled The Primitive Culture of India in 1922. He had lectured in Michigan and Oxford prior to his Cambridge appointment.98 Monica began her anthropological studies in the last term of her second year. Her letters to her father run dry at almost exactly this point (partly 95 96 97 98

Cambridge University Examination Papers: Michaelmas Term 1929 to Easter Term 1930, vol. 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 1179. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 6 May 1928, Cambridge. Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 3 May 1928, Cambridge, 24 May 1928, Cambridge. Who Was Who, vol. 5, 1951–1960 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1984, 4th edition).

Family, Friends and Mentors

63

because her parents came over to visit in the summer holiday), but her study programme can be pieced together from other sources. Her Cambridge Pocket Diary records her lecture schedule for the term. On Mondays and Fridays she had an hour-long lecture on prehistory with Miles Crawford Burkitt (1890–1971), then still in the position of temporary lecturer in the subject, as well as a practical with Burkitt for an hour on Thursday afternoon. She had met with him a year earlier at his public lecture to the newly formed Anthropology Club. Last night I went to an Anthropology lecture by a man just returned from South Africa. He was sent out from here to study bushman drawings, and flints and things and made an extensive tour. He had been captivated by South Africa (which fair endeared him to me on the spot) and gave a most fascinating lecture. I was nearly out of my seat when he came to relate how he had made wonderful finds at Middledrift [some 30 kilometres from Lovedale], and had picked a choice specimen out of the sloot in front of the hotel [in Alice]! There were other men there who had been studying Anthropology in South Africa and you positively breathed an atmosphere of hominess. It was refreshing.99

On Tuesdays and Thursdays she attended lectures by Hodson, one on general anthropology and the other on social anthropology. Hodson was also her tutor. Despite his lack of any firsthand knowledge of anthropology in Africa, he was an empirical ethnographer given to detail and close observation. In this sense it is likely that he did play some role in shaping Monica’s approach. At the end of her life she still warmly recalled working with him on specific texts in her undergraduate years. One splendid piece of advice that Hodson gave me was this: that actual cases are far more worthwhile than generalisations. And he showed the difference between Junod’s, er, work [Life of a South African Tribe], and Smith and Dale on the Ila [The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia]. Dale was an administrator and Smith a missionary. And Smith and Dale were full of concrete cases. And so Hodson had said collect all the cases you can.100

He was also influential in a more practical sense, giving personal support to the sole female student in his small class. There were only about a dozen anthropology students in her year, although that number would rise significantly by 1935.101 Hodson gave her advice about preparing for her Tripos exams, and on the strength of her first-class pass he suggested she apply for an Anthony Wilkin Scholarship – which she won, providing the funding for her fieldwork in Pondoland in 1931 and 1932. As her 99 100 101

WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 27 Nov. 1927. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Manuscripts and Archives Department, University of Cape Town Libraries, BC290, Goodwin Papers, Letters from A. C. Haddon to John Goodwin, 1929, 1935.

64

Inside African Anthropology

fieldwork neared completion two years later, he wrote glowing recommendations that ensured she was accepted as a doctoral student and got a place in residence for three further terms at Girton. He even offered £25 of his own salary towards her college fees.102 Reaction to Conquest included a heartfelt acknowledgment ‘To Professor Hodson to whom I owe my training in anthropology, the stimulus to undertake fieldwork, support in obtaining the necessary funds, constant aid and encouragement while I was in the field, and help in the preparation of this book.’103 Conclusion There is of course already a literature dealing with aspects of Monica Hunter Wilson’s personal life. Reading this literature, we may identify two important phases in seeing her life as a narrative. The first phase dates to the decade between her retirement as Professor of Social Anthropology at UCT and the year immediately after her death at Hogsback in 1982 when former students wrote obituaries. I see the intense interest in Monica’s biography and scholarship in recent years as the second phase, associated in part with the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference of 2008. Monica herself was of course influential in crafting a certain kind of narrative about her life. Writing in 1973 from Hogsback, her beloved childhood holiday retreat and by then retirement home Hunterstoun, Monica told a version of her history in which the spaces of her childhood and early schooling loomed large. Defining herself as ‘a daughter of Lovedale’, she focused in particular on the unusual racially liberal atmosphere of twentieth-century Lovedale, the influence of her schooling along with Xhosa students and the challenge that posed to the standard white mythologies about frontier history. In the series of late-life interviews with her son Francis and daughter-in-law Lindy in 1979, she again told her life story as one that unfolded in the shadow of the Amatolas, so to speak, with her father and her Xhosa schoolmates prominent as religious and political influences. Francis’s introduction to one of the recordings suggests they were conceived as ‘the autobiography of Monica Wilson’, one that remained unwritten.104 From this first phase, her former students in social anthropology at UCT helped to evoke what their former mentor was like. Their memories of her were strongly coloured by personal encounters with her as a supervisor and the senior professor in the Social Anthropology Department.

102 103 104

Girton College Archive, GCAC 2/4/1/8, T. C. Hodson/The Mistress of Girton College, 7 June 1932, Cambridge. Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, xi. ‘Second side of first tape continuing the autobiography of Monica Wilson’: Francis Wilson at the beginning of Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.

Family, Friends and Mentors

65

Martin West, David Brokensha and Colin Murray recall her as a serious presence in their obituary articles. For West in particular the emphasis was on the ‘exceptional discipline’ and exacting scholarly standards of a deeply private person who presented a determined but somewhat grim face to the world (even though there was warmth and compassion behind it).105 He tells of nervous students shaking outside her office and that, given her ‘tough and chilly’ bearing, ‘many stood in awe of her and some [were] not a little frightened’.106 While this austere image was doubtless partly true of Monica in her mature years, this chapter has sought to capture a very different side of her personality. Tracing her story from early childhood I have tried to highlight her vulnerability rather than her authority, her bubbling spontaneity rather than her discipline, and her ever-pushing of the boundaries of what she knew and what she could do rather than her entrapment in a stifling and frustrating institutional and political culture. Heeding Edmund Leach’s call for close attention to personal background in the history of social anthropology, I have argued for the special importance of family, friends and mentors in her development from missionary’s daughter to Cambridge graduate. The most significant influence was her father David Hunter, the Scottish businessman turned missionary. His Christian liberal racial ideology, shared by his wife Mary, remained the bedrock of Monica’s worldview throughout her life. She was directly influenced by his ideas on social and economic change in Africa, notably the negative impact of migrant labour and the positive role that rural-based development could play, and especially by his ethos of open engagement with African students, colleagues and visitors. Above all, he saw his dearly beloved daughter’s intellectual abilities and independent spirit and encouraged her to develop them at every turn. He prodded her to go for Girton College in Cambridge (where he had been schooled) even though some of her high school teachers doubted her abilities. He made her keep a record of her accounts at high school and manage her own finances at Cambridge, and encouraged her to engage in religious and political life, which she did with great passion. Her Cambridge letters do have a sense of initiation about them, something of a deep personal intensity getting to grips with a new world. The friends at the centre of this narrative are her Egyptian college mate Munira Sadek and the Communist Party of South Africa member Edward Rudolph Roux, whose intellectual engagement with her as a

105

106

West, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson’; David Brokensha, ‘Monica Wilson 1908–1982: An Appreciation’, Africa, 53, 3 (1983), 83–87; Colin Murray, ‘“So Truth Be in the Field . . . ”: A Short Appreciation of Monica Wilson’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 1 (1983), 129–130. West, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson’, 208.

66

Inside African Anthropology

Cambridge student was arguably a decisive factor behind her shift in career path.Hodson, although her other lecturer in African anthropology Jack Driberg also played a role by introducing her to this new subject and functionalist theory. She ‘went up’ planning to become a teacher of history in her home area, a passion instilled at Lovedale and developed during her years at the more mainstream Collegiate Girls’ High in Port Elizabeth. Roux provoked and encouraged her to think about South African history in a different, more radical, way through his sociologically developed understanding of the wider underlying forces shaping that society. She ‘came down’ as a young woman looking to do fieldwork and contribute to a literature about African cultures in her home region. The mentor who nurtured Monica was her Cambridge tutor and then supervisor Thomas Callan Hodson. While Hodson was no towering figure in the history of social anthropology – nothing like Malinowski, with whom Monica’s training has mistakenly been too closely associated – he had an influence as much personal as intellectual. He was a great enthusiast for social anthropology when it was still a marginal field of study, with no more than a dozen students at Cambridge at that time. He took a direct interest in her as an undergraduate, encouraged her to follow through her decision to switch to African anthropology in the middle of her degree, and got her to write essays on aspects of African culture. He would later help her shift from student to fieldworker by raising funds for her at Cambridge and advising her about the importance of empirical method in fieldwork. In hindsight she might have regarded him as ‘light weight’ (see Chapter 9), and admittedly his training was in India rather than Africa; but it is telling that she opens her famous monograph Reaction to Conquest with such a profound acknowledgment of his role in her training. This is a sharp reminder that the affective, the personal, can be as fundamental as the abstract, the theoretical, in the shaping of cultural knowledge production.

2

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and Her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–1932 Andrew Bank

In an article published some twenty years ago, Roger Sanjek called for ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’ to be exposed.1 By this he meant uncovering the hidden history of the ‘remarkable contribution’ of research assistants – ‘mainly persons of colour’ – towards the making of anthropological knowledge. In no major treatment of the discipline, he lamented, was the role of these ‘major providers of information, translation, fieldnotes, and fieldwork’ portrayed as fundamental. He ambitiously tracked relationships between anthropologists and their research assistants through different phases and on a global scale, concluding: In 1993, it seems to me no longer possible that the history of anthropology should be taught without including in it Ahuia Ova, George Hunt, Billy Williams, Francis La Flesche, James Murie, I Made Kaler, Alfonso Villa Rojas, Juan Rosales, A. B. Quartey-Papafio, the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute African staff members . . . and other assistants and native scholars who were producers of our ethnographic heritage and history.2

In recent years there has been marked progress in remedying this imbalance, particularly in histories of African anthropology. Lyn Schumaker’s seminal study, Africanizing Anthropology, places the role of African research assistants and anthropologists at the centre of analysis. As noted in the Introduction, Schumaker makes a powerful case for studying the history of anthropology ‘from the tent’ rather than from the university office or library; she emphasises anthropology as a practice, as actions and 1

2

Apart from minor textual changes, this chapter is a reproduction in full and with permission of my article: Andrew Bank, ‘The “Intimate Politics” of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–32’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34, 3 (2008), 557–574. The section on East London overlaps with the fuller treatment of this part of her fieldwork in Chapter 3. Roger Sanjek, ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and their Ethnographers’, Anthropology Today, 9, 2 (April 1993), 13, 16. As noted in the Introduction, I am now of the view that Roger Sanjek’s concept of ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’ is too blunt a framing concept for the complex and historically varied relationships between anthropologists and their research assistants, as the essays in this volume illustrate in relation to the career of just one anthropologist.

67

68

Inside African Anthropology

events in the field rather than simply a corpus of knowledge published by scholars in journals or monographs. This shift of perspective allows us to examine in much more detailed terms how anthropological knowledge was produced in its African contexts. Schumaker moves a new cast of characters centre-stage – including, in the case of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) from the late 1930s to the 1950s, Matshakaza Blackson Lukhero, Benjamin Shipopa, Rafael Almakio Mvula, Dyson Dadirayi Mahaci, Rajabu Kimpulula, Joachim Lengwe, Davidson Silwesa Sianya, Sykes Ndilila and others. These men were active collaborators in the ‘coproduction of scientific knowledge’, but also individuals with their own skills, ideas and motivations.3 In his reconstructions of the pioneering fieldwork and writings of the Swiss missionary anthropologist Henri Alexandre Junod, Patrick Harries documents the crucial role played by Elias (‘Spoon’) Libombo, among others. Harries shows how Libombo’s expert assistance as a butterfly collector was carried forward into Junod’s ethnographic work and was to play a decisive role in transforming Junod’s attitudes towards Tsonga religion. Jeff Guy argues likewise in relation to the Zulu research assistant William Ngidi, who made a crucial contribution to the ‘heretical’ transformation in the worldview of that proto-anthropologist, Bishop William Colenso.4 Scholars exploring the histories of other disciplines emerging in southern Africa during the early and mid-twentieth century have similarly emphasised the need to come to terms with the contributions of African research assistants. Nick Shepherd has thrown light on the shadowy figures lurking on the margins of the University of Cape Town archaeologist John Goodwin’s photographs and notebooks, notably Adam Windwaai, who worked with Goodwin at Oakhurst Cave in the southern Cape in the 1930s, and Justus Akeredolu, who collaborated with him in Nigeria in the 1950s.5 Leslie Witz has documented the relationship between Guy Chester Shortbridge and Nicolas Arends in a more established discipline where knowledge was typically seen to be discovered rather than produced: natural history.6 3 4

5

6

Lyn Schumaker, ‘A Tent with a View’, 1–21, 152–226. Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians, 136–137, 219–232; Jeff Guy, ‘Class, Imperialism and Literary Criticism: William Ngidi, John Colenso and Matthew Arnold’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 23, 2 (1997), 219–241. Nick Shepherd, ‘“When the Hand That Holds the Trowel Is Black”: Disciplinary Practices of Self-Representation and the Issue of “Native” Labour in Archaeology’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 3, 3 (2003), 334–352. Leslie Witz, ‘The Making of an Animal Biography: Huberta’s Journey into South African Natural History, 1928–1932’, Kronos: A Journal of Cape History, 30 (November 2004), 147, 153–154. For a wonderfully vivid recreation of the fieldwork relationship between a naturalist and his assistant in the nineteenth century, see Jane R. Camerini, ‘Wallace in the Field’, Osiris, 11 (1996), 44–65. See also Rosalyn Shanafelt, ‘How Charles Darwin

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

69

Nancy Jacobs’s work on the history of African ornithology foregrounds the major contributions of African assistants like Salimu Asmani of Tanzania, Njero Kicho of Kenya, and Jali Makawa of Malawi and Zambia. As noted in the Introduction, Jacobs explores what she calls the ‘intimate politics of knowledge’ in African ornithology. Close and constant interpersonal interaction in the field produced a form of intimacy, notably in a case such as George Latimer Bates’s relationships with his research assistants in West Africa, but this intimacy was always bounded by the politics of race in the colonial African context.7 To a greater extent than other scholars, Jacobs has also drawn attention to the motivations of African research assistants. Reading their own fieldnotes, she argues that some of these assistants were driven less by financial inducements than by a passion for knowledge for its own sake; they saw themselves working not merely for the metropolitan scientists who employed them, but in the service of science itself.8 This chapter applies themes in this rich literature to Monica’s fieldwork practice in Pondoland and the Eastern Cape: a much fuller appreciation of the collaborative role played by African assistants in the production of knowledge; a recovery of the agency and life histories of these partially obscured figures; and an exploration of the complex relationships between Monica and her assistants at the various sites where she worked. What is new here is that the researcher, unlike Goodwin, Shortbridge, Bates and the directors of the RLI (Elizabeth Colson excepted), was a woman; and a very young woman at that – only 23 years old when she began her fieldwork in February 1931. Also unique is that three of her African collaborators were women, including her main research assistant in Pondoland. My primary interest is in reconstructing how a famous ethnographic work resulted from the complex and intricate social interactions that contributed to its production. The ‘view from the tent’, or in this instance the trading store, demonstrates just how thoroughly collaborative this process was at every stage, although in ways that differed according to the identities of the research assistants and the specifics of each field-site. Only secondarily, and especially in the concluding section, do I detail how and why Monica very largely wrote this ‘intimate politics’ out of her celebrated monograph. A word needs to be said about my sources in the Wilson Collection. I have used the diaries of Monica’s father David to pinpoint the dates of

7 8

Got Emotional Expression out of South Africa (and the People Who Helped Him)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 4 (2003), 815–842. Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’, 564–603. Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘Servants to Science’.

70

Inside African Anthropology

her successive field trips. The voluminous and hitherto unused folders of fieldnotes provide constant on-site information about her research assistants and their role in her work, as well as the attitudes of informants and communities towards them.9 There is also the occasional correspondence from the field and, finally, the interview with Monica by her son Francis and daughter-in-law Lindy, conducted in July 1979 specifically on her Pondoland research. This recording offers a freshness and access to the tone and texture of her attitudes towards her research assistants that no documentary source can reproduce.10 ‘A Fingo Girl of My Own Age’: Auckland Village, Cape Province, February–April 1931 Monica chose Auckland Village, or e-Hala, as the place to begin her fieldwork. This was a matter of convenience. Auckland Village is only 25 kilometres from Lovedale, where she had grown up, and five or six kilometres by road in the valley below the Hunter family’s holiday home at Hunterstoun in the Hogsback Mountains. She had travelled past this village in the valley, with its five or six hundred inhabitants, many times en route to their mountain retreat. Her schooling at Lovedale, as she would later recall, had nurtured in her a keen interest in frontier history and in Xhosa and Mfengu cultural life: ‘You see I’d looked at the outside of communities for years. I had travelled around Auckland and the countryside, and so often wondered what went on.’11 It was this curiosity, born of personal experience as much as any theoretical training, that drove Monica’s early fieldwork – and helps to explain the richly detailed empirical form it eventually took. In her final year of undergraduate study at Cambridge University as was described in detail in the previous chapter, she had taken courses on the anthropology of southern Africa under Jack Herbert Driberg, a former student of Malinowski’s who had recently worked in active collaboration with Isaac Schapera, and on social anthropological method with Thomas Callan Hodson, a relatively well-recognised ethnographer who had cut his teeth in the Indian Civil Service.12 On the advice of the enthusiastic Hodson, she had applied for (and was duly awarded) the prestigious Anthony Wilkin Scholarship after finishing her Tripos in 1930. 9

10 11 12

There are some 25 folders that collectively contain thousands of pages or slips of paper, mostly handwritten but many typed. Thankfully, these folders have Monica’s own labels on the outside. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. See Chapter 1 for earlier references. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. On the hitherto underacknowledged role of her Cambridge undergraduate training on her career, see Chapter 1.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

71

Monica’s youth explains why she chose to begin at a site so close to home. Her parents were understandably concerned about her working alone. Her father David had been a missionary at Lovedale for the past 36 years and would undoubtedly have been well acquainted with Mr and Mrs Argyle, who ran the store in Auckland Village. This was where Monica set to work, as she explained in an essay published in The Girton Review just a few months after her return from the field. An attempt to study a section of the social changes produced by contact, ‘the effects of contact with Europeans on the life of Bantu women’, seemed intriguing. I thought it would be fun to try. One felt like a rat being confronted with an Everest of cheese, and wondered where to begin nibbling. The cheese is in various stages of maturity – or decay. A room was available in the store of a village, and I spent days sitting on a maize sack watching the women come in to buy soap and matches, and listening as they chose dress lengths of print . . . The store was the social club for the village. Girls met their boys there. Boys who returned from the mines with money would buy packets of sugar, and squat with the best girls on the verandah to eat it . . . I sat on the maize sack and listened.13

While she reminisced in much later years of ‘having a horse and riding the 15 miles back home’ on Friday afternoon and then ‘coming back [to her field-site] on Sunday’ evenings,14 her father’s personal diary tells a less independent story. He records having fetched Monica from Auckland or taken her there on 12 and 25 February 1931, as well as on 1, 4, 7, 8, 15, 21 and 26 March. The recently acquired family Buick would have been the mode of transport. When he took ill in April, an assistant named only as Pilson did the fetching and carrying: ‘7 April: In bed. Pilson took car with Moch´e [Monica’s nickname to those close to her] to Auckland and brought Jess [Monica’s mother] back . . . 26 April Pilson took Moch´e back to Auckland in our car.’ His cash expenses page indicates that he paid Argyle £10 at the end of April for Monica’s board.15 While Monica wrote in later years of her childhood memories of the beautiful sounds of Xhosa hymns sung at services in Lovedale, she explicitly recalled in her 1936 book that she was ‘not fluent in Xhosa’ when she began in the field.16 Many of the Mfengu (Fingo) villagers, however, would have had some knowledge of the English language, given their close proximity to colonial farms and a long history of mission activity 13 14 15 16

Monica Hunter, ‘In Pondoland’, The Girton Review, 92 (Easter Term 1933), 27. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. HP, AA1, Diary of David Hunter for 1930. Monica Wilson, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’, 6; Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008 (1936), 4th edition), 12.

72

Inside African Anthropology

in the village. In fact, English may well have been the medium of communication on her visits to ‘a number of the people I had known since childhood . . . I spent days chatting in their huts. I played with the children, sat through their all-night concerts in the school house, joined the women when they went to build the hut for the boys to be circumcised that year.’17 When she ventured beyond the store and the huts of childhood friends, a mediator was needed to assist in the work of administering questionnaires and gathering genealogical and cultural data. In one of the first articles she published after her fieldwork, Monica made passing mention of the contribution of ‘the local schoolmistress, a Fingo girl of my own age’.18 Her fieldnotes from Auckland list the names of many of her informants – after all, she knew many of the families from childhood – but not that of her research assistant. In a retrospectively typed note produced in the course of writing up materials for an article rather than in the field, she recorded a few further details about her first research assistant. ‘The woman teacher in Auckland, a girl of twenty-two, went about with older women in the location, was received with respect in every umzi [homestead], and was listened to with more deference than an ordinary girl of her age.’ Yet her friend had evidently learnt the lessons of paying due deference to her elders from experience as Monica went on to note that ‘undue presumption towards elders from educated youngsters is not tolerated. The woman teacher of Auckland was once thrashed by older women of the location because she was not sufficiently deferential towards them, and when I was there she was always very particular to use to her elders the status terms due to seniors.’19 Sadly, there are no further details about this Mfengu research assistant. What roles did she play in Monica’s early fieldwork? Did she not provide Monica with a crash-course in Xhosa? She evidently acted as a broker in the tricky matters of cultural etiquette, but to what extent did she influence Monica’s ideas about African culture? ‘Mrs D. Was a Frightful Brick’: Ntibane, Western Pondoland, May–November 1931 After three months in Auckland, Monica had come to the view that the community was already too culturally and racially mixed for her to acquire a clear enough sense of the process of ‘culture contact’. 17 18 19

Monica Hunter, ‘Methods of Study of Culture Contact’, 336. Ibid. WC, H2.2 Research in Auckland, Victoria East District: Fieldnotes, draft, TSS. We know it was retrospective because she only acquired a (Corona) typewriter as a Christmas gift from her father some ten months later. See Chapter 3 on her use of the typewriter and typed notes as a genre of field writing in East London.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

73

In the metaphor she introduced to her fellow Girtonians, the ripe cheese was no longer so satisfying to taste. She made a decision to sample cheeses in different states of maturation: the unripe cheese of the native reserve, the decaying cheese of the native location, and the medium cheese of settler farms. In early May 1931 she still envisaged these as equal samplings. In the event, however, it was the unripe cheese of the Pondo reserve that was most to her taste and later to that of readers hungry for information about traditional life in Africa. Her success at working from a trading store in Auckland suggested that a trading contact in Pondoland would be important. William Beinart has documented the long-established presence of traders in Pondoland. There was a trading station at Port St John’s as early as the 1840s. In 1894 there were about a hundred stores in the region and 119 by 1904, when a new law was passed stipulating that trading stores should be at least five miles apart from each other.20 When Monica was planning which of these sites to choose, she drew again on her family connections. A close family friend, Kenneth Hobart Houghton, known to Monica as ‘Uncle Kenneth’ (see Figure 1.1), knew Pondoland from his days as inspector of schools in the Transkei. He had come into contact with a German storekeeper named Theodore Frederick Dreyer (pronounced ‘Drier’, the family’s anglicised rendition of the name). Dreyer was based at Ntibane, some 35 kilometres east of Umtata and 15 kilometres inland from the sea.21 Monica was met at Umtata station by a missionary connection, the Reverend William Gavin, who accompanied her on a visit to Chief Poto, the paramount chief of Western Pondoland, who granted her permission to conduct research in the region. Gavin then drove Monica to his mission station, Lower Rainy, situated north of Umtata, before driving her to Ntibane. Here he introduced her to Mrs Dreyer, whom she in turn introduced to her readers in the Acknowledgements page in Reaction to Conquest: ‘Particularly am I indebted to Mrs T. F. Dreyer of ’nTibane who gave me much of her time, and whose popularity with, and knowledge of, her Pondo neighbours made it easy for me to get to know them.’22 In the introductory subsection on her ‘Method of Work’, Monica explained that she worked from ‘a European trader’s store’ and that the ‘trader’s wife’ made cotton skirts for Pondo women. In a later chapter we read of Mrs Dreyer’s Scottish ancestry. ‘My long stay [of seven months] at one store was considered curious until my hostess explained that her mother and mine were of the same clan, both being amaScots. Then I was labelled 20 21 22

William Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982), 23, 46. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, xvii.

74

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 2.1. The map of Pondoland that featured inside the cover of the first edition of Reaction to Conquest (1936). The locations of Monica Hunter’s six field-sites in Pondoland are underlined: the trading store in Western Pondoland (Ntibane) where she spent seven months, and the four trading stores (Mbotji, Ntontela, Nkantsweni and Mzizi) and the mission station (Holy Cross) in Eastern Pondoland where she spent four months collectively.23

her “sister”, and my visit thought quite natural.’ In another chapter we are told that her hostess employed a Pondo cook.24 The impression we gain is that her hostess was a white woman of Scottish ancestry: one trusted and respected by the Pondo community in Ntibane, as she had gone to the trouble of acquiring knowledge about their language and culture. Monica describes in some detail how Mrs Dreyer facilitated her research: [C]ustomers used to arrive [at the store, Figure P.4, page 281] in the morning, order a skirt, and wait until it was finished. The women were in the habit of chatting with my hostess, who was extremely popular. I was accepted as her sister, and shared the goodwill shown to her. Sitting in a corner of the store I listened to the gossip, and joined in the conversation. 23 24

Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (London: Oxford University Press in Association with the IAI, 1936), inside front cover. Ibid., 10, 52, 79.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

75

We talked about marriage, initiation, crops, and children . . . I kept a bag of tobacco which helped the conversation along.25

This was only half of the story. For ‘Mrs T. F. Dreyer’ was, in actual fact, Mary Agnes Buchanan Soga, daughter of Dr William Anderson Soga, the eldest son of the famous Tiyo Soga, the first black man to be ordained as a minister in South Africa and the translator of The Pilgrim’s Progress into Xhosa, among other achievements.26 Her mother was indeed a Scottish woman, Mary Agnes Meikle, as of course was her grandmother, Janet Burnside. That this was consciously edited out is evident by comparing this text with the corresponding extract in her Cambridge doctoral thesis, submitted in January 1934, out of which her book developed. In this earlier version, the second sentence in an otherwise identical passage reads: ‘The women were in the habit of chatting with my hostess, who herself had coloured blood, and was extremely popular with the Pondo.’27 The reasons for this editorial sleight of hand will be addressed later. Mary Soga was born on Malan mission station in Willowvale in September 1886.28 Her father was then some thirty years of age, having already obtained his doctoral degree in Scotland where he had met and married her mother. In the course of her childhood, Mary Soga moved with her parents to Elliotdale, where her father served as a missionary doctor: one of only five missionaries south of the Zambezi with a proper medical training.29 Mary may well have been schooled at Lovedale, as were so many of her family members. The details of her early married and working life are obscure. In 1923, when Mary was 37, she and her husband took over the running of the Ntibane trading store, which had been purchased by Mary’s younger brother, Dr Alexander Robert Bugue Soga. In May 1931, the very month of Monica’s arrival, the store was officially transferred into Theodore Dreyer’s name.30 25 26

27 28 29

30

Ibid., 10–11. On Tiyo Soga, see Leon de Kock, Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), 170–184; Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 113– 122. Monica Hunter, ‘The Effect of Contact with Europeans upon a South-Eastern Bantu Group’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1934), 2. Cape Archives Depot (CAD), Death Notice of Mary Soga, MOOC 6/9/16812, 1950, 503/50. Arnett Wilkes, ‘Tiyo Soga’ in W. J. de Kock, ed., Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 1 (Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1968), 758. The estimate is David Hunter’s in his ‘Report on a Visit to 50 Mission Stations in South Africa, Glasgow, Oct. 1895’ (HP, DD1.1, David Hunter’s Writings on Lovedale and Mission Work). CAD, 1/NQL, vol. 50, file 2/3/2(11). We also learn from this source that the Dreyers had a child, Ronald Ivan, who later inherited the store.

76

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 2.2. One of only two surviving photos of Monica Hunter in the field in Pondoland. Given the vegetation the likely setting is Mbotji and the photographer was therefore probably Michael Geza, her research assistant in Eastern Pondoland (whose contribution is discussed in detail below).31

This information has considerable significance for understanding Monica’s relationship with her hostess. Clearly there was a long-standing family connection, for the Sogas had almost all been schooled at Lovedale and it is likely that Mary Soga herself attended Lovedale around the time that David Hunter began working there in the mid-1890s. The Soga– Hunter connection continued into the 1930s. David Hunter’s personal papers provide evidence of a warm and mutually respectful personal and professional relationship with Tiyo Burnside Soga, then a missionary at Emgwali.32 The two men had worked together as joint treasurers of the Lovedale Educational Board. There were also other scholarly connections. Monica would have recently read the classic account of Xhosa history written by Mary’s uncle, John Henderson Soga, and published by Witwatersrand University Press the year before she came to Ntibane. The South-Eastern Bantu is one of the few works cited in the hastily compiled bibliography to her doctoral thesis. She had probably also read, in

31 32

HP, EE12 Photographs of African Scenes. HP, BB6, Correspondence of David Hunter, T. B. Soga/D. Hunter, 11 March 1930, Emgwali. Tiyo Burnside Soga was the son of Tiyo Soga’s half-brother, Xaxa.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

77

manuscript form, John Henderson Soga’s other major work, The AmaXosa: Life and Customs, which was published by Lovedale Press during her stay with Mary Soga.33 That the Soga name played a direct role in the choice of Ntibane is evident from Monica’s private recollections many years later. ‘My mother, who was slightly suspicious of trading stores, said: “Oh well, if she is going to a Soga, it’s all right. I don’t mind.” So off I went to Pondoland.’ Jessie Hunter’s faith was well placed. In her old age, Monica still fondly recalled how Mary ‘Drier’ had ‘kept a very motherly eye on me’.34 Monica stayed in one of the rooms in the Dreyers’ house, which still stands some ten or fifteen metres behind the shop at Ntibane. Mary ensured that her laundry was done – it was included in the £5 a month that her father paid for board – and they allowed Monica to use one of their horses on her expeditions. Mary, Monica later recalled, ‘didn’t like my going round alone’ and ensured that the Hunter’s daughter was accompanied on all her expeditions – sometimes by a teenage girl but often by Mary herself, as the following letter indicates. It was written to her mother in the last of her seven months at Ntibane and is all the more precious as one of only two surviving letters written from the field. Dearest mums, . . . Yesterday Mrs D. and I set off at 7 a.m. to make a long visit to old Mr Kehle, a great grandfather, who lives about 4 miles away across rough country, and who was reputed to be a mine of information. Mrs D. was a frightful brick and toiled up hill and down dale with me, and we reached our friend at nine. Then we asked questions solidly till 2 p.m.! It was a good indaba [meeting], and the Kehle quite came up to his reputation, his tongue having been loosened by tea and sugar and ’baccy [tobacco]. We sat under a tree in the inkundla [court-yard] and drank amasi [sour milk], and were very happy. Imagine the shock Mrs D and I got when a son calmly produced a dagga pipe and began to smoke. The fine for dagga smoking is enormous, and the police active in apprehending people, so it was a comment on the confidence with which Mrs D is regarded. We all solemnly went on, as if it were only tobacco. I had meant to go on to the umjadu [dance], postponed from Friday, which was in the same direction, but it was too far for Mrs D . . . so we ate our sandwiches and toiled home. 15 minutes after we got in a bad hailstorm broke, and there was a series of storms lasting till suppertime, so we were lucky. Mrs D. is terrified of storms, so I was particularly glad we were in. I curled up for a blissful two hours with David Copperfield and was quite oblivious to the heavy artillery overhead.35 33 34 35

On J. H. Soga’s works, see Jeff B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), 178–179. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. WC, B5.2, Correspondence between Monica Hunter and Jessie Hunter, Monica Hunter/Jessie Hunter, 2 Nov. 1931, Ngqeleni.

78

Inside African Anthropology

What this reveals, apart from Monica’s already lively and fluent writing style, sound reading habits and immersion in a world of amasi (sour milk), the inkundla (the courtyard between huts and kraal in which men sit) and an umjadu (feast), is that (at least some) of her fieldwork was a thoroughly collaborative effort. Mary Soga did more than locate a wise old man through her shop-based news network and guide Monica to his residence. She spent four or five hours solidly questioning him along with Monica, presumably assisting with interpretation and possibly offering gentle guidance in matters of cultural etiquette. In her book, Monica wrote: ‘I still blush to think of the outrageous things I did – sitting on the wrong side of a hut, walking across the inkundla, stating my business before the proper greetings had been made and I had been asked why I had come – when I was first in Pondoland.’36 It is fair to assume that it was Mary Soga who did most of the work in smoothing things over on such awkward occasions. There are a few further sources of information about Mary Soga. The first are Monica’s fieldnotes, of which piles and piles remain stored and archived in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection. These notes certainly confirm that Mary Soga, and to a lesser extent her husband Theodore, provided Monica with much cultural information. There are dozens of references to ‘Mrs D.’ or ‘M. D.’ (and occasionally ‘Mr D.’) in these fieldnotes – perhaps even in excess of a hundred notes contain such inscriptions. Many of them relate to the position of women in Pondo society. In reworking her doctoral thesis for publication some three years later, it was the woman who had first initiated her into a knowledge of such issues to whom Monica applied for clarification. ‘M. A. B. Dreyer’, as she signs herself, addresses her response to ‘Miss Hunter’ rather than ‘Monica’ and spends little time on small talk: ‘Always glad to hear of you. We are all fairly well.’ For the rest, she provides a detailed response to Monica’s ethnographic queries about lovers and lobola laid out in point form, as no doubt they had been in Monica’s own letter. The letter is more formal than one might have anticipated, though there are many possible reasons for this: the intervening years, the constraints of a relatively unfamiliar format of communication, a mother–daughter rather than sisterly relationship, or perhaps even a tinge of reserve in the attitude of a ‘mixed’-race woman (as her death notice designated her) towards a white woman, however friendly and open-minded.37 Last but not least, some of the older men at Ntibane today still recall the Dreyer family who ran their local store. Dumisani Mbube revealed that 36 37

Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 545. Death Notice of Mary Soga, CAD, MOOC 6/9/16812, 1950, 503/50. Interestingly, her brother’s racial classification was ‘European’ on his death notice the same year (Death Notice of Alexander Soga, CAD, MOOC 6/9/1682, 1950, 6522/49).

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

79

Mary Dreyer was known to people in the community as ‘Inkosazana’ and was particularly well liked, as Monica’s ethnography would suggest. He recalls her encouraging crafts in the area, which would be in keeping with Monica’s account of her as a dress- and skirt-maker. Among other things, she taught women to stuff pillows. She is also said to have encouraged the introduction of soya into local diets. The ability of the store to procure different foodstuffs no doubt enhanced her reputation as an innovator in this regard. Mbube also remembers her growing her own vegetables in a fenced-off area behind the store where her husband planted the gum trees and kept cattle.38 A passing reference in one of Monica’s early articles indicates that Mary also grew roses, but that it was her maize crop that ‘was the talk of the district’.39 The kindness and philanthropy of Mrs Dreyer was to some extent compromised by her association with ‘Doboliyatsha’ – ‘Burning Field’ – the name by which her husband was known and is still referred to today.40 His nickname apparently relates to his role as a labour recruiter for the mines; in one of Monica’s early articles we have confirmation that the store doubled up as a ‘recruiting office’.41 According to William Beinart, many trading stores in Pondoland performed this function as the number of migrants from the region had increased to over 30,000 by the early the 1930s, two-thirds of whom worked on the Rand gold mines.42 Mbube recalled ‘Doboliyatsha’ taking truckloads of recruits to Ngqeleni, the central village in the district some 25 kilometres west of Ntibane, where they would have been loaded onto buses bound for Umtata and then transported to the north. Monica stayed with the Dreyers much longer than she had initially intended. The reasons are not difficult to fathom. This was her richest fieldwork experience. During a single winter in Pondoland she attended – through Mary Soga’s networks – 73 beer drinks, eight girls’ initiation dances, three weddings, two feasts for diviners and a number of ritual killings, mostly within an 8-kilometre radius of the store.43 At the end of her letter to her mother, she reflected: ‘I do like the work. Even if I don’t write anything I have learnt an enormous amount of value to myself.’ Fifty years later she could still vividly recall the great excitement of this first extended period of independent fieldwork. 38

39 40 41 42 43

Interview at Ntibane with Dumisani Mbube, a local chief born in the area in the 1930s, by Leslie and Andrew Bank, 14 March 2007. Patrick Kunju, secretary to the chief of the Tribal Authority, acted as our translator. My thanks to Leslie for arranging the interview. Hunter, ‘Methods of Study’, 349. Theodore Dreyer ran the store after his wife’s death in 1950, before it was passed on to his son. Hunter, ‘Methods of Study’, 349. Beinart, Political Economy, 146. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 356.

80

Inside African Anthropology I thought nothing of working nine or ten hours a day. I would be out all day watching, or sitting in the store listening and scribbling, and redoing my notes at night. Immense energy I had then, and I was fascinated by this process . . . It was a real passion for understanding that pushed me through . . . I was completely swallowed by the excitement of doing this research.44

Monica arrived back at her Lovedale home on 8 December 1931. She spent the following two months getting her notes in order during the family’s annual summer holiday at Hunterstoun above e-Hala. She was assisted in this by the purchase of a typewriter in the first week of January, a Christmas present from her father.45 A ‘Man Who Talks of European Politics & Sitting Next to Lloyd George’: East Bank, East London, February–April 1932 The next field-site could scarcely have been more different from Ntibane. From February to April 1932 Monica worked in East Bank location in East London, an experience that needs to be set in the context of the political and ideological activism of the port city in the years before her arrival. William Beinart and Colin Bundy have analysed the politics of East Bank and particularly that of the powerful Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (IICU) during 1929–32 and my account below follows their arguments closely.46 They show that the IICU, founded in April 1929 as an offshoot of the ICU (the first African trade union in South Africa) and based in East London, espoused a more radical Africanism than its parent organisation. The new attitude was well captured in September 1929 in this strident denunciation of Hertzog and white segregationist politics by Clements Kadalie, the Malawian-born founder of both the ICU (in 1919) and now the IICU: ‘Hertzog hates me and I hate him like hell, the bugger. I am a bad native and I will remain a bad native.’47 In the months that followed, Kadalie’s mood remained aggressive, and his organisation’s rhetoric was increasingly expressed in a language of conflict and violence. Suspicions of and hostility towards whites typically featured in the speeches of the time. ‘They say it took them 2,000 years to reach their present state of civilisation which is only what we can 44 45 46

47

Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Emphasis in original. HP, AA1; Pocket diaries (David Hunter), Jan. 1932. William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and the Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 270–320. Cited ibid., 290.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

81

expect from such blockheads.’48 Beinart and Bundy maintain that the IICU strike in January 1930 was a far more serious threat to white East London than historians have hitherto acknowledged. Monica Hunter herself gave a detailed and sympathetic account of these events over three pages in Reaction to Conquest, setting it alongside other expressions of African nationalism including the activity of separatist Churches and the politics of the African National Congress.49 Beinart and Bundy argue that the IICU retained its political momentum after the strike, adapting its politics to address location-specific grievances like beer-brewing and lodgers’ permits. It was still able to attract 6,000 followers at protest meetings in March 1931, just a year before Monica Hunter began her fieldwork in East Bank.50 Monica’s fieldnotes reveal that the attitudes of urban Africans to her questions were often less accommodating than those of country folk. One informant challenged her directly: ‘Why do you come and ask these things? You have never been ruled and ill-treated by foreigners.’51 To work in such an environment, as she later reflected, was only possible with the sanction of Clements Kadalie himself, and here too her status as a ‘daughter of Lovedale’ was indispensable. I called on him and he said yes, he would certainly support my work. And he called a meeting on a Sunday. And there was a great crowd there. And he said they could answer any of my questions . . . [that] to collect budgets on their family affairs was very much in the interests of the community, that the poverty should be exposed. And he said that he had had a meal in my father’s house and he could vouch for me.52

Even so, the prospect of Monica’s working long days in East Bank must have been a very anxious one for her parents. She stayed in white East London – an option both legal and practical53 – at a boarding house in 22 Belgrave Street run by a Mrs Grant. She recalls a curious incident towards the end of her stay. In the boarding-house in which I had meals, there was the Chief of Police. This was quite accidental. But he always knew exactly where I had been and, er, chipped me about this after some time, and talked about the danger of going around alone. And I told him not to be silly, I never went around at night. And his reply was, ‘Can I take off the tail on you at night? Will 48 49 50 51 52 53

Cited ibid., 293. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 568–570. Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, 316–317. WC, uncat., Fieldnote in Folder Entitled ‘East London’. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’. As Schumaker notes in relation to urban anthropology in Northern Rhodesia during the 1950s, there were difficulties in applying functionalist anthropological methods in segregated urban spaces: full ‘participant observation’ was illegal (Schumaker, ‘Tent with a View’, 252).

82

Inside African Anthropology you promise not to go?’ I said, ‘Of course I won’t go, unless I go with somebody else.’ But it was quite clear that I had been carefully observed in East London. This was 1932.54

There is in fact evidence that David Hunter employed a bodyguard to protect Monica during her daily visits to East Bank. She reported in one of her articles that her ‘bodyguard’ defended her verbally – from the prying questions of ‘older men’ who felt that she was too young for the kind of work she was doing. ‘My bodyguard always retorted with an oration on my education, and the attitude of the critics changed. “She is really a B.A.? Well of course that does make a difference.”’55 Her fieldnotes reveal that her bodyguard doubled up as her interpreter. On one fieldnote she even entered ‘Interpreter’ before crossing it out and replacing it with ‘Bodyguard’. Another records the day she was introduced to him: ‘Seen beer being made. 5 houses today. Feb. 20. Interpreter [services of] offered.’ Many others record his importance as an informant: ‘Interpreter knows of no case of person deported from location, under Urban Areas Act’, or ‘Interpreter – “very little or no polygamy in town. Men cannot afford it.”’ He was also evidently literate (‘Interpreter borrowing books where he can’). I suspect that this bodyguard-cum-interpreter was Mr R. H. Godlo, a steward of the Wesleyan Church and member of the Location Advisory Board (a committee of Africans who made decisions about local politics and government): both because one of her fieldnotes records an address along with his name (St Paul’s Street) and because her main facilitator and protector in East Bank was the chair of the Location Advisory Board, Walter Benson Rubusana.56 Monica met with the 74-year-old Rubusana on the day she began her work in East Bank. ‘First day. Visit man who talks of European politics and sitting next to Lloyd George.’ This was almost certainly Rubusana himself recalling having sat next to Lloyd George on one of his diplomatic missions to London. Coupled with Monica’s misspelling his name as ‘Rubisana’ in other notes and in her book, this observation hints that, unlike Clements Kadalie and the Soga family, Dr Rubusana had not previously met David Hunter. It also suggests that Monica had not yet read his famous contribution to African-language literature, Zemk’ inkomo Magwalandini, a collection of over a hundred proverbs with explanatory notes that was first published in London in 1906 and went into a second edition within a few years. Over the next two months, however, she got

54 55 56

Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Hunter, ‘Methods of Study’, 341. Quotations are from WC, uncat., Fieldnotes in Folder Entitled ‘East London’. R. H. Godlo was later elected to the Native Representative Council.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

83

to know Dr Rubusana well and recalls him as something of a father figure: I talked a great deal with old Doctor Rubusana, who was older than my father, a very much respected man who had been a member of the Provincial Council in the Cape Province. And he was interested in, er, social problems in the city. He was essentially a city-dweller. His wife, who was his second wife, came from Tyumie. She was a Kashe. And so I had fairly close links with them.57

Monica’s passing acknowledgment of the ‘Rubisanas’ in Reaction to Conquest does not do full justice to the influence they had on her fieldwork. They did very much more than offer her security and a stamp of approval: ‘In East London I secured the support of Dr Rubisana, a leading Bantu minister, and his wife, and also of the officials of the Independent ICU, a Bantu trades union, and thanks to their influence I was cordially received in most houses.’58 The dozens of fieldnotes beginning with ‘Dr R.’ or ‘Mrs R.’ reveal that they frequently acted as informants. Mrs Rubusana also evidently accompanied Monica on house visits and was a respected figure in the township: ‘Excellent furniture in houses. Deference to Mrs R – inkosikazi.’ For information about the life of township women, Mrs Rubusana was Monica’s primary informant. The relationship between them, despite the substantial age gap, was probably fairly warm. They shared a Lovedale connection and occasional notes suggest that some of the information was of a personal kind, as when Mrs Rubusana spoke of her concerns about whether to be buried in town or back home. Dr Rubusana undoubtedly played a fundamental role in shaping Monica’s overall view of African life in the location. From her first published articles through to her 1936 book, she painted a negative picture of ‘Bantu’ urban life. It is easy to imagine the voice of Rubusana in the background when reading her extended laments about the decline of African customs and rituals in the urban context, especially those about the dissolution of family values and traditional morality – sexual mores in particular. While something of this might have come from her father – a great champion of rural craft industries and opponent of migrancy and rapid African urbanisation – her later recollections confirm that Rubusana was the main source of information. He used to tell me that one of the difficulties of bringing up children in town was that there were so many teenagers coming from the country who were living without supervision, people who came in to work in town. And that it was very difficult to bring up, to have a good family life in town, 57 58

Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 438.

84

Inside African Anthropology because of the influence of those who were coming in without family ties or supervision.59

David Hunter – again our most reliable guide to Monica’s movements – records that Monica returned home on 15 April 1932. In May and June she worked in Rhini, the African location in Grahamstown. Her Grahamstown file is very slender by comparison with that for East London, most likely because she found no mediators with the status and generous spirit of the Rubusanas of East Bank. ‘Michael Geza My Clerk’: Four Stores and a Mission Station, Eastern Pondoland, July–November 1932 Ever industrious, Monica wrote a paper in late June and presented it at the annual meeting of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in Durban on 7 July.60 She began her second major field trip in Pondoland just three weeks later. On 27 July, David Hunter recorded in his diary: ‘Took Monica to Komgha, 164 miles.’61 Here she caught a train north to Umtata, where she would have spent some days meeting with officials in order to obtain permission to travel through Western Pondoland, the region to the north of the Umzimvubu River. This is also probably where she took on the services of a Pondo man named Michael Geza, who would spend the following four months with her. They were based at four trading stores (Mbotji, Ntontela, Nkantsweni and Mzizi) and a mission station (Holy Cross). (See Figure 2.1.) Michael Geza’s contribution in the field is more fully acknowledged in Reaction to Conquest than that of either Mary Dreyer or the Rubusanas. She introduces him to readers as ‘my clerk’ in a brief opening acknowledgment, but later lists his ‘clerical’ activities in detail along with some background information. On the second visit I was accompanied by a Pondo clerk, Michael Geza. He was extremely helpful in writing reports of cases which we heard in chiefs’ courts, taking down songs and folk-tales, reporting witchcraft cases, and writing accounts of customs in the vernacular. He was educated and a Christian, but came of a pagan family of doctors, his ancestors having been doctors to the imiZizi chiefs for nine generations. The office is still in his family.62

As in the case of Mary Soga, it is instructive to consider how this text differed from the corresponding extract in her doctoral thesis, for here too Monica had chosen to omit certain details. ‘On my second visit I was 59 60 61 62

Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Later published as Monica Hunter, ‘Results of Culture Contact in the Pondo and Xosa Family’, South African Journal of Science, 29 (October 1932), 681–686. HP, AA1, Diary, 1932. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, xvii, 12.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

85

accompanied by a Pondo man Michael Geza, as bodyguard, and having him with me learned considerably more of matters concerning men, than I had the previous year, and spent more time in chiefs’ courts, listening to cases and talking to councillors. My bodyguard was literate, and I found him extremely useful in writing reports.’63 In this fuller account, Geza is given a far more active role in the production of anthropological knowledge in the field. Monica indicates that he doubled up as a bodyguard, attributes to him much of her newfound knowledge of men’s matters, and implies that he facilitated her access to the chiefs’ courts and councillors. There is also more information of a personal kind. He therefore knew much of native custom, particularly of matters connected with religion and magic, and was useful as a check on the information of other people. Having a full time man in my pay I found an advantage, as he identified with my interests, could repeat to me gossip of the district which we visited, found suitable people to whom we might go for specialized knowledge, and told me much about his own family and boyhood. Long days in the saddle were conducive to conversation, and we sometimes travelled far to visit some ancient noted as a specialist on custom and history.64

Her notes confirm that Michael Geza contributed very significantly to her researches in the field. There are perhaps two hundred pages written in Xhosa in Geza’s own hand, including lengthy documents headed iintsomi (traditional tales), ukubusa (gifts), iingoma (songs, usually those of traditional healers) and so on. Her fieldnotes are filled with his medical knowledge, much of it unused in her published work. As the first Pondo among the men with whom she had collaborated (Dr Rubusana and Mr Godlo were Xhosa), Geza significantly shaped her ideas about the attitudes of Pondo men towards chieftainship and political authority, marriage and magic, tillage and the tokoloshe (in which he firmly believed despite being schooled). The notes also provide additional biographical details, for example this praise song to his grandfather, who was celebrated as a fearsome warrior: UNomandindi wezibaya zika, Mkizwana, uhlaba zihlangana, UNgqambu ngo-mkonto kuvel’amatumbu. He [who] battered down the cattle kraal of Mkizwana He who stabbed the first And he who cut till the intestines came out.65 63 64

65

Monica Hunter, ‘The Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa’ (Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1934), 6 (emphasis added). Ibid., 6–7. I am most grateful to Alannah Birch, my colleague at the University of the Western Cape, for initially identifying these differences during a research trip to Cambridge in May 2007. WC, uncat., Fieldnote in Folder Entitled ‘Magic’. My thanks to Isaac Ntabankulu for the translation.

86

Inside African Anthropology

In the opening chapter of her book, Hunter shares some of the details she learnt in the saddle: ‘Geza’s parents died when he was still a child, and he was brought up in the home of his father’s junior brother’s son. This man’s wife, Geza said, was extremely good to him, treating him as if he were her own child.’66 We later read in passing about his former profession, family and home in Mzizi: ‘Geza, whose own home was immaculate, detested entering the bug-infested huts in which we had to spend days. He was as loath as I to accept food in dirty places. It is understandable that a retired policeman, living in his well-built brick house, with his motor-car and six sons, all certified teachers, coming home at week-ends on their motor-bicycles, should hold himself somewhat aloof from poor and dirty neighbours.’67 Here again Monica was many years younger than her assistant in the field. Her much later recollections of ‘Geza’ are not as warm as those in relation to ‘Mary Drier’ and ‘old Dr Rubusana’. Notes in preparation for her 1934 article on her fieldwork methodology suggest that their relationship was relatively formal despite the long hours of contact: ‘Second trip. E. Pondoland . . . Use of body guard . . . Interested in job – good manners.’68 There was seemingly a need for a ‘bodyguard’, given that she was viewed with suspicion also in these more remote country areas. ‘On first arrival in a new district I was always suspected of being a tax collector, one investigating for the Government who were considering raising taxation, a detective in search of criminals, a Government agent spying on the chief, or one looking for lepers.’69 Michael Geza would have played a role in smoothing things over, just as Mr Godlo had done in East Bank. Like Mary Soga, he offered gentle guidance and occasional censure in matters of cultural etiquette, as these notes reveal: ‘M. “Asking a person to tell an intsomi is just like meeting someone in the road, and asking them to dance”’; ‘It is insulting to old people to ask them to tell iintsomi. You are making a game of them if you ask them to tell you these things.’70 That Monica was uncertain quite how to classify Geza’s collaborative work is evident from her only other surviving letter from the field. It was typed up in October 1932 at the store of a trader named Smith, based at Ntontela, and sent to Winifred Hoernl´e at the University of the Witwatersrand, who had evidently taken on the role of informal supervisor. 66 67 68 69 70

Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 21. Ibid., 377. WC, A2.15, Monica Wilson, ‘Notes: Anthropology in South Africa’, Recorded for Jim Fox, Behavioural Sciences Centre, April 1972’. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 433. WC, uncat., Fieldnote in Folder Entitled ‘Pondo Iintsomi: Linguistic’.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

87

Figure 2.3. This is a recording of one of the many iintsomi (Xhosa traditional stories) written for Monica by Michael Geza. Headed ‘The story of SiswanaSibomvana’, it tells of a young girl who went to plough the fields with her mother. She became thirsty and went to drink water from the well of the chief of the animals, the lion. She drank all the water from the well. When the lion returned in the afternoon and asked her who it was that had drunk the water she said, ‘Please ask my mother who sent me here’. She was swallowed by the lion. When her mother went looking for her at the home of the lion she too was swallowed by him.71 Thank you ever so much for all the questions. They help very greatly. I am still considering the points raised on chieftainship in your second letter, and will reply to them later . . . I thought of moving on from here in a fortnight or three weeks, to Sikelweni in the Flagstaff district, where I shall be among Nyaza Pondo but in reach of the Imizizi, with whom I should like to spend a few days, to check up history, and relations with the Pondo. The ‘accompanyist’ is an Mzizi and can put me in touch with reliable old men there. 72

Monica returned from Eastern Pondoland in early November and spent her final two months visiting farms in the Adelaide, Bedford and Albany districts closer to home. Here again ‘Uncle Kenneth’, now an inspector for schools in the Ciskei, provided the contacts that facilitated access to the farms and their communities of African workers.73 For the first time, 71 72 73

WC, uncat., Fieldnote in Folder Entitled ‘Pondo Iintsomi: Linguistic’. Thanks to Isaac Ntabankulu for this summary of the translated text. Witwatersrand University Archive, AU8 HOE, Winifred Hoernl´e Papers, Box Entitled ‘Bantu’, Folder Entitled ‘Bantu Religion’. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.

88

Inside African Anthropology

language and culture were not a problem – many of the farmworkers were second or third generation. There was therefore no need for bodyguards, intermediaries or ‘accompanyists’. In January 1933, Monica sailed back to Cambridge. She spent a year writing up her findings under the supervision of Thomas Hodson, while attending Malinowski’s famous seminar at the London School of Economics. David Hunter’s diary reveals that she sat for her viva on 17 January 1934.74 Acknowledgement Reaction to Conquest came out in July 1936, published by Oxford University Press in association with the International African Institute. It was introduced by the former South African prime minister Jan Smuts, who was fulsome in his praise: ‘probably as detailed and exact an account of the social system and ideas of a tribe as is to be found anywhere. It is worthy to be placed by the side of Junod’s Life of a South African Tribe’.75 Monica sent copies to J. B. M. Hertzog and Jan Hofmeyr, as well as the minister and secretary of Native Affairs. She also sent a copy to Mrs Dreyer at Ntibane, though interestingly not to Michael Geza. Dr Rubusana had died just two months before publication. The book was truly something of a media event. It was reviewed – favourably, without exception – in at least a dozen newspapers. The Cape Times and Daily Dispatch featured these reviews as their leading articles. Isaac Schapera praised it at length in the Cape Argus the following month. It featured later in the Johannesburg Star and the Sunday Times as well as the Natal Witness and the Mercury. The British press was, if anything, more enthusiastic. Reviews appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator (Audrey Richards at some length) and (with lavish visuals selected from the book) the Illustrated London News.76 Glowing journal reviews also came after some months, with many leading South African intellectuals adding their voices to the chorus of praise: Winifred Hoernl´e most incisively, W. M. Macmillan almost grudgingly.77 Malinowski, the 74 75

76 77

HP, AA1, Diary of 1934. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, viii. Numerous reviewers criticised the title, pointing out (as Monica herself very clearly did in the Introduction) that the Pondo were one of the only African groups who were not militarily conquered. Pondoland was annexed to the Cape Colony in 1894. Her correspondence with the Institute of African Languages and Cultures suggests that she had difficulty coming up with a marketable title. At one point she even suggested ‘Pondo Meet White Men’, a somewhat na¨ıve and old-style title thoroughly out of keeping with her sophisticated analysis (WC, D11, J. H. Oldham/Mrs G. B. Wilson, 31 May 1935, London). For clippings of these reviews, see WC, H1.3, Reaction to Conquest, Reviews. Agnes Winifred Hoernl´e, ‘Review of Reaction to Conquest’, Africa, 10, 1 (1937), 121– 126; William Miller Macmillan, ‘Review’, International Affairs, 16, 2 (March 1937), 314–315.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

89

Figure 2.4. The first of the page-spread features published in the Illustrated London News of 22 August 1936 in ‘appreciation’ of Reaction to Conquest. The photographs were selected from the 28 plates that featured in the book.

90

Inside African Anthropology

great guru himself, described it as the best study of culture contact in a decade in which such works were appearing thick and fast.78 It was the making of her academic reputation – and justly so. As later generations of scholars have recognised, it was ‘precocious’, ‘a classic’ with a wealth of textural detail about Pondo cultural life combined with an astute political analysis. It was the richness of the fieldwork that gave the study this instant and international recognition. Monica’s African assistants played a crucial role in ensuring the book’s acclaim. Without them, her study would simply have not been possible. As noted earlier Nancy Jacobs writes of ‘a continuum of acknowledgement’79 in relation to ornithologists’ assistants in Africa, ranging from complete anonymity, through brief mentions of important contributors about whom we know little, to a handful of assistants who are recognisable as both contributors to scientific knowledge and individual personalities. If we apply this continuum to the African assistants used by Monica, the ‘Fingo schoolmistress of my own age’ in Auckland Village is at the bottom end. Her assistance is only mentioned in passing in an article, although this young woman probably was very important in developing Monica’s linguistic knowledge in her earliest days in the field. Yet we do not even know her name. Dr Walter Benson Rubusana is only briefly mentioned in the book, although we know much about his life from other sources. There is a striking gap between this acknowledgment and his actual contribution, as revealed through later memories and especially in Monica’s fieldnotes. The tradition of political radicalism, and the particular expressions of that radicalism through the activism of the IICU in East London in the years immediately before she came to work in the location, meant that it was no easy matter for a young white woman to drop in and start asking questions. Her fieldnotes and the political commentary in her published study indicate that there was considerable and understandable hostility towards white people among Africans in the location. Clements Kadalie vouched for her, but it was ‘old Dr Rubusana’ who was most important in lending her project a sense of moral authority. Rubusana put her in contact with her interpreter-cum-bodyguard, probably Mr Godlo. He and his wife profoundly shaped her overall interpretation of the African urban experience. As often as not, it is the moral tone of these moderate Africans that we encounter in the concluding section of her study dealing with recent trends in African politics. Next along the continuum is Michael Geza. In her book, Monica lists his ‘clerical’ contributions – reporting on court and witchcraft cases, 78

79

Bronislaw M. Malinowski, ‘Introductory Essay: The Anthropology of Changing African Cultures’ in Bronislaw M. Malinowski, ed., Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), xxxiv. Jacobs, ‘Servants to Science’, 3.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

91

transcribing songs and folktales, recording customs in the vernacular. She also provides far more detail about his personal life than she does about any of her other African assistants, albeit in passing and interspersed through the chapters. Yet here too, the acknowledgment does not do full justice to his contribution, for the ‘M’ of her fieldnotes was very much more than a recording ‘clerk’. As she more openly revealed in her doctoral thesis, Michael Geza acted as a bodyguard, negotiated access to informants in a context of much suspicion, and, most importantly, ‘during long days in the saddle’ provided her with knowledge about matters of magic, medicine and witchcraft – the topics that absorbed most of her attention during her fieldwork in Eastern Pondoland. This arguably allowed her to adjust the project from one on the changing status of Pondo women to a book documenting Pondo cultural life more generally. Geza also guided her in matters of etiquette, including polite ways of collecting traditional stories. Mary Dreyer was the most fully and warmly acknowledged of Monica’s African assistants. At the outset, she expresses a special debt to ‘Mrs. T. F. Dreyer’ for sharing her time, knowledge and networks, and her accounts of her fieldwork methodology explain in more detail how these contacts were established through informal networks in the store and its sewing room. Monica indicates that she came to be viewed as Mrs Dreyer’s sister by her informants, as we have seen. Yet even this did not do full justice to the role Mary Dreyer played. Monica’s surviving letter from Ntibane shows that her ‘hostess’ actually accompanied her on field trips, acting as a guide and translator on country visits. Her fieldnotes indicate that she relied extensively on Mary Dreyer for cultural information about the world of Pondo women, the initial focus of her research. Most interesting, however, is what her doctoral thesis clearly reveals to be a self-conscious suppression of the ‘coloured’ identity of Mary Soga. Herein lies the very key to understanding Monica’s motivation for downplaying the enormous contribution of her African assistants. The authority of anthropological writers in the era of Malinowski and the ‘tribal’ monograph was premised on thorough immersion in an exotic culture, one that presupposed complete linguistic fluency – of the kind that Malinowski himself had developed with his great flair for languages. The native interpreter or intermediary so generously acknowledged in word and image by, say, Henri Junod could no longer be given the same textual authority. This process is best described by James Clifford in his essay ‘On Ethnographic Authority’. By representing the Nuer, the Trobrianders, or the Balinese as whole subjects, sources of a meaningful intention, the ethnographer transforms the research situation’s ambiguities and diversities of meaning into an integrated portrait. It is important, though, to notice what has dropped out of sight. The research process is separated from the texts it generates and

92

Inside African Anthropology from the fictive world they are made to call up. The actuality of discursive situations and individual interlocutors is filtered out. But informants – along with fieldnotes – are crucial intermediaries, typically excluded from authoritative ethnographies. The dialogical, situational aspects of ethnographic interpretation tend to be banished from the final representative text.80

Read in this light, the editorial sleights of hand between the doctoral thesis submitted to Cambridge in December 1933, the draft manuscript version, ‘Pondo Meets White Man’, submitted to the Institute of Languages and Cultures around May 1934, and the smoothed-over final text of Reaction to Conquest as published in July 1936 together expressed a more general trend: the filtering out of local knowledge in order to bolster the authority of the individual ethnographer. Monica did not want (or could not allow) ‘Mrs T. F. Dreyer’ to be seen as too influential in the shaping of her own knowledge. Admitting that she was Mary Soga, a woman with a Xhosa father, would have threatened to do this, as perhaps would any fuller admissions of the extent of her contributions on field trips. Likewise, the silences regarding the ‘long days in the saddle’ and Michael Geza’s expert knowledge of the world of Pondo men, the Rubusanas’ lessons about location life, or the Xhosa lessons of the schoolmistress, all generated an impression – indeed a fiction – of the author’s ‘ethnographic authority’. In a discipline where cross-cultural negotiation was always complex and highly contextual, bolstering a sense of ethnographic authority often meant writing out the inevitable messiness involved in social relations and suppressing any sense of vulnerablility or confusion or dependence. It is also important to reflect – following Lyn Schumaker and Nancy Jacobs – on what motivated these Africans to become research assistants. In the case of the RLI, where the connections were longer term, Schumaker argues that African assistants were partly motivated by financial rewards and associated status benefits and the desire to develop new skills and knowledge, but primarily by racial politics: a desire to contribute to a profession critical of government and white settler dominance. For the African assistants who worked with Monica, we unfortunately do not have any detailed independent research reports to draw upon; their mix of motives is therefore a matter for conjecture. Friendship from school days, minor financial reward and perhaps the desire of an educated young woman to contribute in some way to the understanding of her own community in Auckland may all have motivated the unnamed Mfengu schoolmistress. Loyalty to Lovedale may have been significant initially for Mary Soga, but the written traces leave little 80

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 40.

The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork

93

doubt that the two women built up a warm and close relationship in which Mary to some extent viewed Monica as a daughter in need of protection and support. Walter Benson Rubusana, that veteran of Eastern Cape politics, also had some sense of needing to protect a white woman in her early twenties in a highly politicised African location, but his interests were no doubt primarily political and scholarly. As an author himself of a work on Xhosa culture, he would have been strongly motivated to contribute to Monica’s understanding of African culture and to shape her interpretations, as he did, of the differences between African urban and rural life in the early 1930s. He also presumably, like Clements Kadalie, perceived that her study would contribute to presenting an African point of view and, like the RLI assistants, wanted to contribute to a critique of segregation and white politics. For Michael Geza, her most active co-producer of knowledge, the finances were also a minor part of the story. He was relatively well-to-do, with an immaculate house, successful children and a career behind him. His desire to instruct and further contribute to Monica’s by then already substantial knowledge of Pondo culture was presumably his principal motivation. To what extent, then, is Monica Hunter’s Reaction to Conquest yet another example of ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’? On the one hand, her knowledge of Pondo culture did draw far more extensively than she acknowledged on the contributions of a cast of research assistants at her various field-sites; certainly she downplayed the extent of her dependence on these cultural brokers in the published work, possibly even to bolster her own ‘ethnographic authority’. Yet this would be a rather harsh judgement on what has been recognised as a classic ethnographic study from the time of its publication, as we have seen. As in the other chapters in this volume, the evidence of her relationships with the Mfengu schoolmistress in Auckland Village, Mary Soga in Western Pondoland, Michael Geza in Eastern Pondoland, and then Walter Benson and Mrs Rubusana in East London are better conceptualised as creative dialogues, albeit ones that might have been more fully recognised. Indeed, as the later essays on her relationships with one research assistant in Bunyakyusa in the mid-1930s and then with her African students at Fort Hare and the University of Cape Town from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s so clearly demonstrate, it was her openness and warmth towards the African interpreters with whom she collaborated that was one of the underlying reasons for her success as an ethnographer able to work ‘inside African anthropology’. Unusually, almost uniquely in southern African ethnographic studies of the period, her main research assistant in Pondoland was a woman. It is easy to imagine that her later reflections in a 1972 lecture on the crucial importance of women as interpreters in the South Africa context (see the Introduction) drew not just on memories of ‘Koliswe and Thandiwe whom I used to play with

94

Inside African Anthropology

as a child’, but also of her first intensive fieldwork experience and her ‘intimate’ relationship with Mary Soga at and around Ntibane. As she went on to remark, ‘Face to face relationships, time to get to know one another, and a measure of mutual trust are conditions of establishing real communication.’81

81

Monica Wilson, ‘The Interpreters’, 8–9.

3

City Dreams, Country Magic: Re-Reading Monica Hunter’s East London Fieldnotes Leslie J. Bank The Cambridge idea was that I should observe and see what I saw, and I could do the reading later . . . And observe events I did! I would be out all day watching, or sitting in the store listening and scribbling, and redoing my notes at night. It was very exciting because there was no record anywhere of a great many of the things I actually known and participated in . . . Monica Wilson, interview with Francis and Lindy Wilson, Hogsback, July 19791 The texts produced in the field are often polyglot. They include large quantities of the local vernacular plus diverse pidgins, short-hands, and languages of translation, along with the language or languages of the ethnographer. The final ‘written-up’ ethnography smooths over the discursive mess – or richness – reflected in the fieldnotes. James Clifford in Roger Sanjek, ed, Fieldnotes (1990)2

Monica Wilson is best remembered for her rich and detailed rural ethnographies. Her study of the social change and cultural life in Pondoland became an instant classic in the 1930s, as did her studies on the Nyakyusa of south-western Tanzania. In the late 1940s she also worked on an interdisciplinary project on land tenure and rural livelihoods in the district of Keiskammahoek in the Eastern Cape before moving to Cape Town, where she wrote up the remainder of the Nyakyusa material. By the late 1950s, however, there was a growing interest in the anthropology of urbanisation and social change. Monica responded to this by embarking on a study of social group formation in Langa, Cape Town. As demonstrated in Chapter 9, this research was a collaborative effort with her student, Archie Mafeje, and was published in 1963 under the title Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township.3 The Langa study was released with a series of others on Xhosa responses to urbanisation, most notably 1 2 3

Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. James Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’ in Roger Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 59. Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963).

95

96

Inside African Anthropology

the ‘Xhosa in Town’ trilogy produced by Philip and Iona Mayer and their colleagues at Rhodes University.4 It is often forgotten that her co-authored Langa study was not Monica’s first attempt at writing urban ethnography.5 As we have seen in the previous chapter, she had spent several months conducting fieldwork in the locations of East London and Grahamstown between March and July of 1932 as part of her Reaction to Conquest study, collecting information on social change and everyday life in town. The result of this was an extended ethnographic discussion about a hundred pages long in the published study. This research is significant for a number of reasons. It was one of the first examples of urban anthropological research in South Africa in the twentieth century, alongside Ellen Hellmann’s much-quoted study on Rooiyard in Johannesburg.6 Second, the bulk of the work was undertaken in the East London locations, which became the site of intensive anthropological research in the 1950s under the leadership of Philip Mayer. The ‘Xhosa in Town’ researchers made surprisingly little reference to Hunter’s original study of East London, another reason why it has often been overlooked in the corpus of South African urban anthropology. The work is also important historically because it covers the period prior to the Second World War and remains one of very few studies of location life in a South African city at the time of the Great Depression. The aim of this chapter is to bring Monica’s urban ethnography of the 1930s back into view. I want to reflect on the main argument of this work and how it was constructed. By her own admission, she followed the ‘Cambridge way’ of researching now and reading later, as she recalled in the epigraph above. We know she came back to the Eastern Cape from Cambridge having spent just one year reading anthropology with a particular focus on African anthropology. Her meticulously preserved notes of books read during this final year of undergraduate study reveals that her reading did not include any of the classic sociological treaties on the city by scholars such as Weber or Simmel, or the functionalist works of the Chicago School, which were leading the way in urban studies on the

4

5

6

The ‘Xhosa in Town’ trilogy consists of Desmond Reader, The Black Man’s Portion: History, Demography and Living Conditions of East London (Cape Town: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, 1961); Philip Mayer with Iona Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of Urbanisation in a South African City (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1961) and Berthold A. Pauw, The Second Generation: A Study of the Family among Urbanised Bantu in East London (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963). For another recent acknowledgment of the importance of her urban research in East London and Grahamstown in the early 1930s, see James G. Ellison, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: Anthropology and Social Justice’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (Berlin: LIT Verlag for the International African Institute, 2008 (1936)), 33–34. See Ellen Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slumyard, RhodesLivingstone Institute Papers, 13 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1948).

City Dreams, Country Magic

97

other side of the Atlantic in the 1920s. Her approach was one of contrasting urban life to the rural customs she had documented in Pondoland. It is interesting that she did not specifically seek out Pondo migrants and families in East London’s locations, but chose to focus on Xhosaspeaking people in town more generally. Pondo migrants lived mainly in the small West Bank location and most of them worked in the harbour and fishing industries. They formed a tight-knit community that lived and socialised in relative isolation from other Xhosa speakers. As an ethnic group in East London, the Pondo had much in common with the Bhaca, who were concentrated in the Cambridge location and were employed mainly in the municipal sewerage department. Both Bhaca and Pondo migrants tended, in the Mayers’ terminology, to ‘encapsulate’ themselves in home-mate groups. Unlike the Xhosa-speaking men in town, men from these tribal groups did not undertake circumcision with male initiation. Xhosa women and men would taunt them, referring to them as ‘boys’ – amakhwenkwe – who had not reached proper manhood. Such accusations sometimes led to violence. In fact, in 1956, twenty years after Monica visited East London, local residents remember that intense action broke out in West Bank, when Xhosa ncibis (traditional surgeons) took their knives to Pondo ‘boys’ to enforce Xhosa manhood on them. Their intrusion provoked a heavy response that took over six months for the police to bring under control.7 Monica’s fieldnotes suggest that she did not visit the Pondoland ‘homeboys’ in West Bank. Her fieldwork was confined to the larger East Bank location, which was dominated by Xhosa speakers from Kentani, Queenstown, Comfimvaba, Butterworth and surrounding areas, and other parts of the former Ciskei reserve. Unlike most urban anthropologists of the 1950s, therefore, she did not engage in urban anthropology by following ‘her group’ into town. As noted in Chapter 2, she entered the city not via the social contacts she had made with migrants in Pondoland in 1931 but through a different network altogether, her father David Hunter’s social contacts with middle-class Africans in Alice and connections to Churches and African ministers in the East London locations. The renowned Methodist minister and African National Congress (ANC) stalwart Walter Benson Rubusana was a friend and associate of David Hunter, whom he visited from time to time in Alice. They were mutually connected to other middle-class Christian families in East Bank and Alice. When Monica said she wanted to explore social change in an urban context, it was her father who made the initial connections in East 7

Lawrence Tutu interviewed by Leslie J. Bank, East London, 28 November 2010. See Leslie J. Bank, Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City (London: Pluto, 2011), 145–165 for a discussion of similar conflicts involving Bhaca migrants in East London.

98

Inside African Anthropology

London. We have seen that he even employed ‘a bodyguard’ to watch over her during her fieldwork. I argue that these connections – the Alice–East London Church network – had a significant bearing on the perspective that Monica developed in the section of her monograph on urban social change. It was arguably a very different view to the one she would have developed had she worked among the Pondo migrants in West Bank. This is one of the reasons why Monica’s findings in East London contrasted so markedly with those generated in the ethnography of Philip and Iona Mayer, who studied migrant networks and social life in the city twenty years later.8 Monica’s reliance on her father’s networks was, I believe, a product of the difficulties of accessing the city through male, migrant networks. In Pondoland reserve, as we have seen in Chapter 2, her access to male perspectives and orientations came largely through her participant observation as she listened and interviewed at the store and at beer drinks, rituals and other events where she had contact with men in public settings. Her more ‘intimate’ work, especially during her first period of fieldwork at Ntibane, was with women. This denied her access to the kinds of networks that would have led her to West Bank or other migrant destinations. It is also significant that in East Bank she chose Rubusana’s wife as her main fieldwork assistant, replicating the model she had developed in Pondoland with Mary Dreyer (n´ee Soga). Her entry was further complicated by urban politics in the locations, which revolved around worker demands for higher wages and the activities of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU), the largest workers’ union in Africa at this time, led by Clements Kadalie. The power of the IICU in the city forced the topics of wages, poverty and subsistence onto Monica’s research agenda. This greatly influenced how extensively work and household budgets emerged as key themes in her urban fieldwork. The ethnography she produced bore the imprint of these points of connection and was shaped, I maintain, by larger questions of social and cultural change framed more by her liberal, mission upbringing and her experience of political debates in the Cambridge Labour Study Circle (see Chapter 1) than by her recent year of fieldwork in Pondoland. Thus her work reflected her points of access and more distant past experience – but I also think her urban ethnographic text was influenced by the way she made fieldnotes and converted these into ‘thick descriptions’ of urban life.9 In a seminal essay James Clifford distinguishes between three kinds of writing in the field: inscription, the cryptic notes 8 9

See Philip Mayer with Iona Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen, 94–95, 124–134. The term ‘thick description’ was coined by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

City Dreams, Country Magic

99

made by the fieldworker in moments of direct observation and social discourse; transcription, the recording of stories and indigenous texts outside of direct participant observation; and description, the writing up of fieldnotes away from sites of interaction, whether in longhand or on a typewriter.10 Although these processes overlap, Clifford feels it is useful to distinguish between them in trying to understand ways of cultural translation and ethnographic writing. Monica used all three modes in East London and the process had a significant effect on the kind of ethnographic text she produced from her fieldwork.11 In the absence of a clear theoretical model, she was strongly influenced by her methods of recording, which rendered certain kinds of information more visible than others. As I see it, her master narrative on urban social change was constructed from the compression of household interviews into typed transcriptions and from the many inscriptions she typed up in the field. Exploring her methods of field writing provides critical insight into how her East London work was translated into thick description. By approaching her ethnography in this way, I have also been able to identify certain silences in her published ethnography, dimensions of the field experience that are rich in the notes yet were never converted into thick description in the published text. This chapter first considers the social and political situation in the East London locations in the early 1930s. It then notes how Monica entered the field and went on to conduct her research there. This sets the scene for my assessment of her arguments and the way they were built ‘upwards’ from fieldnotes rather than ‘downwards’ from theory. Most of what she wrote in the field took the form of inscription, cryptic notes recorded on loose sheets during her extensive interviews with householders. Her fieldwork in East London was much more structured than it had been in Pondoland, where she had found many more opportunities for ‘deep hanging out’, initially around the trading store and later at rituals, listening to gossip and everyday conversion. This was not easy in East London given the political circumstances, so she had to rely much more heavily on the accounts of key informants. These interviews were the ones she transcribed most fastidiously and that had the most direct impact on the perspective she developed. I start with her typed notes and fuller handwritten transcriptions before moving on to her more cryptic household interview notes with their combination of inscription and transcription. It is in these notes that I find some interesting insights that are significantly 10 11

Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 51–52. Monica’s East London fieldnotes are kept in a bulky single folder and labelled as such on the cover. When I first consulted them in 2007 this folder was one among many still uncatalogued materials in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection (WC) in the Manuscript and Archives Department at the University of Cape Town Libraries. For a discussion of this archive and its making, see the Introduction to this volume.

100

Inside African Anthropology

underrepresented in her final ethnographic text, and which provide useful ways of re-engaging with social life in East London’s locations of the 1930s. ‘A Daughter of Lovedale’ in East Bank, February–April 1932 The African locations of burgeoning East London were in turmoil in the early 1930s. Two native locations had been established, one on either side of the Buffalo River. The larger of these was East Bank, where Monica did most of her fieldwork. In the early decades of the twentieth century East London had risen to prominence as a trading centre where economic activity centred on the harbour, railway, merchant houses, small processing works and craft shops. The town was a centre of African trade and a major port for exporting wool produced in the Eastern Cape to Britain and elsewhere. By the 1920s, however, its wool-exporting role was under challenge and the city was beginning to experience the effects of economic decline and depression.12 Population growth in the locations had increased steadily during the first two decades of the century, but exploded during the 1920s as rural impoverishment in the Ciskei and southern Transkei intensified in the middle years of that decade. Between 1919 and 1928, the African population of East London grew by over 40 per cent, and between 1925 and 1930 it grew by nearly 8,500 people, an increase of over 50 per cent in five years. In 1929 alone it was reported that 1,100 immigrants had arrived from rural areas. Bundy and Beinart explain: Broadly by the 1920s the urban population comprised three overlapping categories: those who lived permanently in the town and knew no other milieu than the city locations; those who regarded themselves as rural dwellers and were in the city on a strictly migrant basis; and a third or marginal category whose decreasing access to rural livelihoods of any sort was impelling them firmly, if reluctantly, into the status of permanent urban proletarians. These categories lack precision, but as roughly hewn sociological divisions they were recognised at the time by white and black observers . . . In 1935 about 30 per cent were urbanised, another 30 per cent semi-urbanised and 40 per cent were ‘rural’.13

The importance of population growth and the pressure it placed on the social and economic fabric of the location was noted by many of Monica’s informants. In one typed note she reported that her ‘interpreter and [a] Thembu man of standing’ 12 13

Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, 273. Ibid., 274.

City Dreams, Country Magic

101

think[s] that over-population is one of the most serious questions. They say there are far too many people. They think that a war is the only solution to unemployment. All unemployed would go out to fight and be killed. Rich men would have to put their hands in their pockets. When I argued that war would make economic conditions worse, they said: ‘that is because you have never known hardship’.14

The extract illustrates the economic pressures in the locations, and also the growing militancy at this time. The political situation in the location was tense and in a state of flux. One reason was the diminishing sway of the Location Advisory Board, which had been established to represent the interests of the African residents but was rapidly losing influence. There were a couple of hundred property owners in the locations registered on the Cape voters’ roll, including the ANC stalwarts Walter Benson Rubusana, R. H. Godlo and J. J. Vimbe, who sat on the Advisory Board. By the late 1920s residents were increasingly dissatisfied with the representation they were receiving from these elites and had begun turning to other organisations to express their grievances, such as labour unions and the local Vigilance Association, which had been set up to represent the interests of leaseholders and lodgers. The latter constituted a large majority in the location, where access to new accommodation was restricted and existing home-owners were encouraged to rent out rooms in their yards. Overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions and the absence of basic services angered local residents, who felt that more land should be made available for housing in the area. They also felt that building new municipal houses for elites did not address the underlying need for accommodation.15 The locations were also rife with dissatisfaction at local wages and working conditions at the port and on the railways. Average wages for men in the 1920s were around £5 a month. These were deemed hopelessly inadequate to cover rising living expenses. As discussed in an earlier chapter, workers were also becoming impatient with the old leadership in local unions, especially the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), which was dominated by many of the same figures as the Location Advisory Board. A split in the ICU in 1929 led to the formation of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union with its headquarters in East London.16 The return of the unionist Clements Kadalie from Cape Town in the mid-1920s also gave the new union momentum. Kadalie and the IICU held meetings in the location every Sunday and these were well attended. According to Beinart and Bundy, 14 15 16

WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter). Bank, Home Spaces, 145–146. See Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987).

102

Inside African Anthropology

a clash between Kadalie and Ballinger, a white lawyer from England working for the ICU, pushed the new labour union in a more Africanist direction and created new connections between African workers and independent Churches.17 The new IICU broadened its leadership base well beyond the trusted old elites and, as a result, drew increasing attention from the police. In a context of deteriorating relations among the government, the union and employers, Kadalie and the IICU called a strike in January 1930 after an ultimatum to the South African Railways and Harbours for higher wages and better working conditions had not been heeded. Between 2,000 and 4,000 workers immediately went out on strike and started attending daily meetings and rallies. By 20 January Kadalie and the other leaders had been arrested. Monica recorded this note about the history of the strike. Strike called everyone out, for more wages. Some continued to work, but very many came out. Picketing was unsuccessful because of the European police. There were some rations at first in mealie meal and samp. Kadalie imprisoned and after two weeks people started to trickle back to work. Some work for three months. Wages decreased rather than increased . . . It was called ‘Kadalie’s Strike’!18

Although the strike was quickly broken by the state and employers, and workers started filtering back to work by the end of January, the power of the IICU was now stronger than ever in East and West Bank. By 1932 the IICU had begun to address a range of other issues beyond the shop floor, including the right of women to brew beer without harassment. The IICU had cleverly broadened its support base, taking on location grievances and appealing directly to women and independent Churches for support. Its influence had also increased in rural areas around the city. Monica’s entry into the East London location scene in 1932 thus occurred in a context of considerable political activism amid social upheaval. There was growing anti-white feeling and also a deepening disillusionment with the cooperative strategies of the local elite, including long-standing ANC members like Walter Rubusana, who was now regarded by many as an ‘old school’ collaborator. East Bank in the early 1930s had some similarities with the field-site Philip Mayer and his colleagues would describe when they worked there in the mid-1950s (Figure 3.1 shows us how it looked seven years after Monica worked there). A couple of years before the Mayers arrived in East London, the location had been torn apart by the rebellion of 1952 which saw dozens of African killed on the streets by police. The rise of the IICU in the early 1930s was 17 18

See Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles. WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).

City Dreams, Country Magic

103

Figure 3.1. East Bank at the outbreak of the Second World War.19

not unlike the late emergence of the radical ANC Youth League in the late 1940s that galvanised the East London location into political action against the state. 20 One of the differences between Monica and the Mayers was that she had strong local political connections among the African elite through her father, as we have seen, including the link with Walter Rubusana (Figure 3.2). But, as noted, Rubusana was not the figure he had been during the 1910s and early 1920s. By 1932 he was already in his seventies and his political influence, as well as that of fellow elites in the location, was on the wane. Rubusana, his wife and other mission-educated Africans could not therefore secure Monica the kind of access to East Bank social networks that Mary Dreyer had been able to provide in Ntibane.21 Clements Kadalie and the IICU were the location gatekeepers and it appears that it was only after Kadalie himself intervened and introduced Monica at a rally that a broader engagement with the residents was possible. In later years she recalled the decisive role Kadalie played. When I began working in East London township, my work really depended on Kadalie’s blessing since he had become far more influential than some people supposed . . . he called a meeting on a Sunday. And there was a great crowd there. And he said they could answer any of my questions . . . 22

19 20 21 22

East London Museum Collection, East London. Anne Mager, Gender and Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945–59 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 148. See Chapter 2. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.

104

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 3.2. Walter Benson Rubusana (1862–1936) around the time he worked with Monica Hunter in East Bank.23

Even so, her close association with the mission-educated elite remained a primary axis in her work and she would find them to be her most reliable and influential informants. It was with this group that Monica felt most comfortable and it was they who opened up most easily to her questions about the trials and tribulations of location life. The fact that Mrs Rubusana often accompanied her on her field trips ensured that she was seen and understood to be a ‘daughter of Lovedale’. Her two primary advantages as a fieldworker in East London were that she was fluent in Xhosa and already had an excellent understanding of Xhosa and Pondo cultural practices and, second, that she had a secure social and protective base among the local elite on whom she could rely for

23

W. B. Rubusana Collection, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.

City Dreams, Country Magic

105

support and information. Against this backdrop I now turn to consider her fieldwork strategies in some detail, as seen from her fieldnotes. Typing Up Fieldnotes and Constructing a Master Narrative We know from Monica’s letters that she went home to the Hogsback for Christmas at the end of 1931 when her father gave her a Corona typewriter and insisted that she learn to use it properly.24 She had not had one in Ntibane and all her notes there were handwritten. Adding a typewriter to her armoury as a fieldworker was a significant development because it allowed her to commit certain kinds of notes to typing and thus prioritise them over others. As James Clifford explains, the ‘turn to the typewriter’ may be seen as marking off a particular moment in the process of recording and description. Most writing is a sedentary activity. Unlike storytelling, it cannot be done while walking along a path. The turn to the typewriter involves a physical change of state, a break from the multi-sensory, multi-focal perceptions and encounters of participant observation . . . In crucial respects, this sort of writing is more than inscription, more than the recording of a perception or datum of evidence. A systematic re-recording goes on. Fieldnotes are written in a sense that will make sense elsewhere later on.25

Here Clifford draws a clear distinction between notes that are typed and those that are not. He suggests that the former are often written with an external audience in mind. They become ‘a distanced, quasi-methodological corpus, something to be accumulated, jealously preserved, duplicated, sent to an academic advisor, cross-referenced, selectively forgotten or manipulated later on’. ‘This (type) writing’, he continues, ‘is far from a simple matter of recording: the facts are selected, focused, initially interpreted and cleaned up.’26 So how did Monica set about doing her fieldwork in East London, and what notes and facts did she choose to record in type, and what did she leave as handwritten notes? Unlike her Ntibane work, where she spent a great deal of time listening to gossip and everyday chatter at the village store and rituals, she entered East London with a focused approach. It seems that her first object was to gather general information on the demographic, social and economic conditions in the location. To this 24

25 26

The latter we can glean from a letter she wrote to him from London between bouts of fieldwork in Bunyakyusa. ‘I am so grateful to you for giving me a typewriter and insisting that I learn to use it properly!’ WC, B5.1 Monica Wilson/David Hunter, London, 30 April 1936. We know that it was a Corona from WC, A2.22 Customs forms: – requesting permission to export Corona typewriter, 6 Dec. 1932. Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 62. Ibid., 64.

106

Inside African Anthropology

end, she set up appointments with people from the local municipality, spoke to the location medical officers and interviewed knowledgeable African leaders, including of course the Rubusanas. She spoke to lawyers and consulted court records as well. Her aim was to quantify certain key indicators of social and economic life in the location. For example, she wanted to be able to establish how many members of a given household were permanently in town and how many were temporarily there. Her inquiries led her to conclude that some 43 per cent of household residents were permanent and 57 per cent were temporarily in town (migrants).27 She then went to bus companies and the train station to find out how many people left East London at the weekend and month-end, and how many tickets were sold. She found out, for example, that in three successive weeks in February 1932, 234, 245 and 369 people had travelled to Middledrift on return tickets. She also learned that average wages in the city were in the region of £5 per month, and that men generally earned considerably more than women, whose formal employment was almost exclusively confined to domestic service. Inquiries with local medical personnel revealed that infant mortality rates were shockingly high – averaging around 333 per 1,000 and peaking at over 500 per 1,000 in 1931.28 She then constructed a complex social map of religious groups and affiliations, where she listed all the denominations and tried to determine their membership and the range of social and religious activities in which they engaged. Other inventories included a list of social and sports clubs, as well as notes on the booking of various community halls: Hire of St Phillips Hall. 1931 February 13 Florence Mdayi Concert March 28 Mali Mango Teachers Concert April 11 Coloured Concert May 15 Scots Msuto concert and dance etc.

These facts were neatly typed out and accumulated as information that would be included in her overall description of town life. Interestingly, she made little effort to develop similar inventories of labour or political organisations, with their memberships and social activities, or to gather information about the burning political issues. She did, however, write about the IICU strike of 1932 and the rise of African nationalist organisations in the concluding section on ‘Tendencies’ in her published study. 27 28

Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 434. WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).

City Dreams, Country Magic

107

In between rushing around to source demographic, economic and social information about the locations and the city, she worked on a survey that recorded basic information on the social, economic and cultural orientation of urban households. She wanted to find out the income levels of each household, their health profiles, the changing position of women and children, their adherence to customary practices, their connections to the countryside and their involvement in social and religious life. Many versions of her basic questionnaire structure appear in her notes with varying degrees of detail in the types of questions to be asked. In the end, she reported that she had visited 213 households in East London and Grahamstown. In a section of her notes called ‘Visits with Mrs R’ (Mrs Rubusana in East London), she lists a set of topics: Group Relationships Relations in the location Temporary or permanent Period spent in the location Intend to go home? Land in the reserves? Prefer town or country? No. in working group Wages How far wages pooled? Unemployed Labour histories Money sent out of the location Kazi (bridewealth) Kind Who provided? Cooked for mother in law Marriage age No. of births per mother No. survived Observance of custom29

This typed list reflected the basic lines of questioning she had in mind for the household survey. In her typed notes, converted from handwritten ones taken during the interviews, she tried to compress the answers to these questions into a few key words in vertical columns under each heading. When this summary technique was not working, she resorted to compressing the survey findings even further into the following topics: group, temporary or permanent, labour, custom, births, with a few other categories like education and general creeping in now and again. These concise case histories were then typed out with about ten lines given to 29

Ibid.

108

Inside African Anthropology

each. She seems to have typed up some fifty such case studies. Perhaps she felt the trends were already coming through clearly and there was no need to do the other cases in the same way. Maybe she typed them all out and the rest have been lost somewhere. A typical entry looks like this: Group: man, wife and three children; labour, hus. [husband] piece work, wife does not know wage, she does not work – beer. Custom – married amaxoseni, 8 kazi, all cattle, husband dead, she came straight to town with him. Wedding rings. Children: 3, none died.

The fact that she compressed her case studies in this way suggests a selection, a choice of clear categories and a frame for conversion of notes into a narrative text. Besides the compressed case studies, she used her typewriter to record important pieces of information and interviews with key informants. These are what Clifford calls ‘inscriptions’. It seems that when she felt she had come across an authoritative voice on a particular topic – social life, religious beliefs, the 1930 workers’ strike, social groups or community divisions – she recorded these on her typewriter. Her inscriptions also record observations made in the field. These small bits of text, disparate facts and opinions picked up on the flow of social discourse. They appear to have been written up usually in one or two short paragraphs, which she later tore into strips of one or two sentences, mini ‘sound bites’ on particular topics. The utterances and observations were then pinned together, sometimes with handwritten notes that were also torn into strips and then pinned together. The individuals who provided the information, their social position, whether they were Qaba (Red) or School,30 workers or teachers, men or women, were lost in this process of stripping and re-categorisation for analysis. Eagerness to get Dispatch [the local newspaper]. Try to pinch each other’s copies. Number of elderly men who sit at home and do nothing but talk politics. Work still a necessary evil – a means to an end – money. Dances most Saturday and Friday evenings. Not by invitation. When hear music come along. No dance clubs but social services league and sports clubs give the dances. Each one gives more than one a year. Some churches oppose this. Mrs Rubusana says nothing.

Notice the presence of Mrs Rubusana in the last quote. It is as if Monica is waiting for her comment. In the typed excerpts there is no consistent attempt to group together the opinions of certain sections of the population, or to compare or contrast views and opinions. One of the 30

In Monica’s shorthand classification, Red or qaba meant people who resisted modernity, were pagans and had little or no schooling. They were traditionalist in town. School, on the other hand, was used to refer to people who embraced modern ways and attended church and school. For further discussion of this distinction see Philip Mayer with Iona Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen and Leslie J. Bank, Home Spaces, Street Styles.

City Dreams, Country Magic

109

Figure 3.3. A selection from the hundreds of fieldnotes that Monica recorded in East London, some typed, some handwritten, all preserved on strips of paper. Note the references here to ‘Interpreter’, ‘Dr R.’, ‘R.’ in the typed notes, and to ‘Mrs R.’ in the handwritten note.31

consequences of this is that the views of socially dominant sections of the location community are more strongly represented in her ‘description’ and final analysis. This is not, it would seem, because Monica did not have an appreciation for differences of class, social upbringing and the like, but rather that she did not systematically attempt to document these differences in her analysis. The focus in her typed notes on the activities of social groups is also significant. On this topic, she felt that religious affiliation and membership was the key determinant of location social life. She noted that one of the main developments in the 1930s was the growth of independent Churches and sects that were breaking away from the mainstream Churches and developing their own congregations and 31

WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).

110

Inside African Anthropology

micro-social worlds around them. Most Churches offered much more than weekly services. There were prayer groups, weekly meetings for boys and girls, teas and other social activities. Sports clubs offered access to a social world. She notes that the social life of the club, which involved an endless string of matches, dances, fˆetes and other social gatherings, kept people together. In her book she reported as follows: Christians form a group marked off from pagans, but within the Christian community there are many sectarian divisions, and the effective social group is the congregation. In East London there are 57 sects whose adherents total approximately 2,080. A common faith and common activities draw the members of a congregation together. In all the larger congregations there are Sunday services, associations of women, girls and young men, which meet weekly for prayer and bible study. Practically all the schools are associated with a church . . . Friendships tend to be made within these groups.32

In her notes we hear that the ‘Qaba [Reds] have their spaces’, but there is little attempt to map these out in the same detail as she did with the more urbanised sections of the community. This is perhaps because she had already gathered so much information on rural life and relationships that she was more interested in capturing the dynamics of social change, the new kinds of groups and associations in town, rather than showing how those which already existed in the countryside were replicated in the city. This may also be because she spent so much more time at women’s tea parties and very little time at male-centred beer drinks. She often reported on the unbearable smells in migrant ‘hovels’ and backyard shacks, but in any case, as a woman she would have found it difficult to access the sexist world of migrant life in the town. It is also unlikely that ‘Mrs R’ would have been keen to spend too much time with illiterate, hardened male migrants. In fact, it is only with the publication of the Mayers’ Townsmen or Tribesmen that this aspect of urban life became fully visible. The kinds of groups and associations he refers to were certainly there in the 1930s, but they were not the spaces that Monica was keen or able to visit. In any event, for Monica the city was not about the retention or reinvention of tradition. It was about social change. She was struck by how very different the city was to the countryside and was alarmed at how quickly the ‘superficialities’ of urban culture were imbibed by the urban poor. She was astonished at the power of money and repeatedly remarked on how everything in town rested on money. The insatiable desire for cash seemed to corrupt even the most resilient rural migrants. There are many typed inscriptions on this topic which are translated into text in her monograph. 32

Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 462.

City Dreams, Country Magic

111

Money gives power to obtain so many of the desired things of European civilisation – better clothing, housing, furnishing, food, education, gramophones, motor-cars, books, power to travel – all the paraphernalia of western civilisation is coveted. Again and again old men spoke to me of how intense was the desire for money in the younger generation.33

In relation to money she noted that there was an appetite for gambling and that betting games were common on the streets. Many men spent their Saturdays at the tote betting on the horses, while the Chinese betting game fah-fee was also popular. Big crowds turning out to watch football matches. Interpreter lost 1 pound at the Easter horse racing . . . Keep their dreams [of money] because they play fah fee (3 Chinese run fah fee), attend horse racing, much betting on cards, many tickets sold for the sweep stakes.34

In the city there seemed to be the desire and hope that money could come quickly. She noted that ‘in town it is smart to be as europeanised as possible. In their dress men and girls follow European fashions – “Oxford bags”, berets, sandal shoes. Conversation is interlarded with European slang . . . Houses, furniture, and food are as European as earnings permit.’ The ‘raw tribesmen’ found themselves in a marginal position. The values in town are European, not tribal. Status depends largely on wealth and education and these entail Europeanisation . . . Knowledge of tribal law, skills in talking, renown as a warrior, and even the blood of a chief’s family, count for comparatively little in town. These conditions make for the speedy transference of at least the superficialities of culture.35

Even in terms of social life and entertainment, Monica argued, tribal influences were on the wane. She observed that few tribal rituals were held in town. There is little Native dancing . . . Young people gather in private houses, particularly on Friday and Saturday evenings, for parties, but here European fox trots [sic] were more often performed than the old Bantu dances. And the music is European or American ragtime. About the street one more often hears ragtime hummed than an old Bantu song.36

The cosmopolitan cultural influences she alluded to in Reaction to Conquest seem to have deepened significantly during the 1940s and 1950s. The Second World War was a political and cultural watershed, a period when location residents became more aware of their rights and were profoundly affected by popular transnational cultural forms. One of 33 34 35 36

Ibid., 455. WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter). Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 437. Ibid., 455.

112

Inside African Anthropology

the great virtues of Monica’s work in the 1930s, compared with that of the Mayers in the 1950s, was that she was acutely aware of the powerful impact of modernity and cosmopolitan cultural influences on African life in the city. The focus of her analysis and ethnography was not on the reconstruction of tradition in the city, but rather on the breakneck speed with which social life was changing, and the new social and cultural forms that were beginning to emerge. Yet she was not necessarily alert to this virtue. In common with, or perhaps partially influenced by, her mission-educated peers in the location, she found most of these changes alarming, as we will see below. Inscribing Social Categories from Fieldnotes For Clifford, fieldnotes are prepared and served up in various ways. Fieldnotes, less focused and ‘cooked’ than published ethnographies, reflect more diverse, often contested, contexts of authority . . . Fieldnotes contain examples of three kinds of writing: inscription (notes not raw, but slightly cooked or chopped before cooking), description (notes saut´eed, ready for the addition of theoretical sauces) and transcription (reheated leftovers?). But the cooking metaphor is inexact because there are no ‘raw’ texts.37

Extending this culinary metaphor, he suggests that description, especially thick description, is usually covered with a sauce or a glaze, the nappe (in French cuisine), which smoothes over and hides ‘the productive and transformative process of cooking’.38 So, on the one hand, Clifford is telling us that there are really no ‘raw texts’ in fieldnotes because all writing is shaped to some extent by selection and pre-coding, while on the other, he asserts that delving into fieldnotes allows one to get behind the ethnography to view its semi-cooked ingredients. With the above in mind, it is useful to consider how Monica constructed her social categories in both her ethnography and her fieldnotes. One of the reasons why this is interesting is that, when Philip Mayer and his teams conducted extensive fieldwork in East Bank twenty years later, they were struck by the overwhelming salience of a single social divide, that between Red (abantu ababomvu) and School (abantu basesikolweni) people. Monica did not see this divide as clearly. Was it not there in the early 1930s? Or was it because, as she asserted later, the Mayers had exaggerated the significance of the Red/School divide in the East London locations? It seems to me that, unlike the ‘Xhosa in Town’ Trilogy writers, Monica was not looking for a fractured community but was planning to describe 37 38

Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 58. Ibid., 59.

City Dreams, Country Magic

113

and account for the different aspects and dimensions of urban social life in an integrated fashion. She was obviously acutely aware of the division between what she called ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’ urbanites. For the former she anticipated close social connections with the countryside and frequent return visits to family and kin. Her interest in bus and railway timetables and the flows of migrants and commuters between town and country bear witness to this interest. But, while recognising this distinction, Monica also noted that many of the temporary urbanites were family members of the more permanent ones and that the contours of these categories were constantly changing as the process of urbanisation intensified.39 Among those temporarily in the city, she identified a category called qaba (pagan), sometimes written xaba, which appears quite often in her inscriptions (typed and written) as a classificatory shorthand. Consider the following inscription from her notes on hlonipha, the language of deference and respect used by Xhosa women. Hlonipha is still carried out by red and school, who only hlonipha the bed, some the back of the house as well. – this speaks to male power and authority in town. School people hlonipha too. ‘hlonipha in town – turned me off ’. ‘Never went to school . . . intombe ya xaba. Was from a school family, but never went to school.’40

This is one of the rare passages where she explicitly used ‘red’ and ‘school’ as opposing or twinned categories in a way which seems to suggest that it would capture all of those who were not from the city, as if there were only two categories of temporary residents – Red and School. In most other cases, she uses the term qaba or xaba as a shorthand to identify non-Christians and traditionalists on their own. She clearly sees a qaba type and notes that there are particular places in the location where these ‘xaba types’ hang out. She does not make a particular effort to visit these sites or to map out their social contours and cultural dynamics. Part of the reason for this might have been, as I have suggested, that Mrs Rubusana and Monica were not all that welcome there. In Ntibane she worked around the gendered nature of social power and institutions by accessing sites of male power and influence through indirect means. Her work with healers, quite a number of whom were women, rather than chiefs and headmen, gave her insights into political power and organisation which she could not access directly from male informants. There were, however, also meetings and activities in the cattle byre which she could not attend and had to find out about even more indirectly. In East London, the vast majority of qaba migrants were men and they tended to hang out together at exclusive beer drinks with other men from 39 40

Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 456. WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).

114

Inside African Anthropology

their home areas. These gatherings were the urban cultural equivalents of meeting in the cattle byre, marking men from the same home area off from others, with their own beer, male kin and amakhaya (‘home-boys’). It would have been difficult for Monica, despite her considerable skill and experience as a fieldworker, to access these spaces, especially given the limited time she had for her fieldwork in East London. By contrast, she felt very much at ease in the homes of the middle class, especially those of female nurses and teachers who either came from Lovedale or Healdtown, or were on their way back there for further education and training. Consider the following inscription: Pleasant home. Clean. Good taste. Intense interest in her work. Daughter at Healdtown [school]. Going to Lovedale to nurse . . . Two teachers and a teacher’s sister, a nurse, visiting for tea. Jolly party. Feel at home.41

Among the urban-born population she made a clear distinction in her fieldnotes between what she called the ‘Christian obedient types’ and the ‘townee type’. She writes that one ‘could tell by looking. How? Stout women, furnished houses, bolder – less dignified and reserved [than the country women].’42 Later she confirms her categories: ‘There are three kinds of categories here: reds/qaba, Christian obedient types, and then the townee kind.’43 She continues: ‘Qaba tend to collect in certain parts [of the location]. Qaba feel it is wrong to give money instead of cattle for lobola. They also expect hlonipha.’44 The elite, the category with which she identified most strongly, is seen to have complex and subtle internal divisions, represented in the different ‘dialects and slang of graduates from different mission stations and schools such as St Matthews, Lovedale, Healdtown’. The ‘townee type’ seemed to be a much broader and inclusive social category for Monica and, despite various passing remarks, is never properly defined in her notes or her book. In one interesting inscription, she recorded how the ‘decent people’ (such as the teachers) were in favour of segregation from the less respectable members of society. Sunday afternoon dress parade in the location. Last Sunday fight with sticks between two women over which was the smartest. Teachers and Mayaka strongly advocate the segregation of decent people from Gomorra and Xabeni types.45

Categories, such as ‘Gomorra and Xabeni types’, are unfortunately never fully elaborated on in her book (‘Gomorra’ – see below – was a section of 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

City Dreams, Country Magic

115

the location where independent brewers and prostitutes ruled the roost). There are other cryptic references to different kinds of social and cultural styles and identities in her notes that also do not make the journey into the final ethnography. While one is disappointed at the loss of these cultural nuances in the process of translation, it is clear that Monica was not a big fan of the ‘townee type’. Her views here would certainly have been influenced by ‘Mrs R’ and the young women she encountered at tea parties and other social events of the location elite, whose own position was under threat in a time of a swell of popular anger and unrest. Her dislike of the ‘townee type’ was also reflected in her view of location matriarchs. One of her main areas of interest was the changing position of women in town. She would publish an article on ‘the effects of contact with Europeans on the status of Pondo women’ the following year.46 In her book she provides valuable details about how women start to enter the labour market and the competition between women for access to domestic service in town, despite the very low wages paid there. In her notes she provides the following description: Frequently a girl may leave a mistress, another comes in her place. Later No. 1 may wish a place again, and the Mistress meeting her, finding her ready to work again wish to take her back, but No. 1 will refuse to go for fear of being takata [accused of witchcraft] by No 2. ‘There are girls walking about now looking for places whose mistresses have wanted them back, but they are afraid to go lest the girl, who is turned out, takata them.’47

There is a strong sense in her ethnography of the competition among girls and young women and their strong desire for money, and their willingness to do anything to get it. She is critical of this tendency and believes it undermines the dignity of women in town. She was also appalled at the number of teenage pregnancies and the children born out of wedlock, and the general disregard among the youth of a proper sense of culturally appropriate paths to motherhood and adulthood. In her account of gender relations, it appears that adult women in town basically have two options. They can pursue marriage and submit to the will of their husbands, who will demand their obedience and support. For instance, as this note suggests, they will want money from their wives and information about where they are and what they are doing. Married women hand over their wages to their husbands. Not necessary to ask. Wages of women living with a man unmarried, entirely her own to 46 47

Monica Hunter, ‘The Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Status of Pondo Women’, Africa, 7, 3 (1933), 259–276. WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).

116

Inside African Anthropology

do what she chooses. Again no need to ask. Interpreter. . . . [later] If a wife wants to go anywhere to visit must always ask her husband’s permission.48

Or, as unmarried and independent women, their money is their own and, as we know, many women in town with independent means chose to avoid marriage and permanent liaisons with men in order to build up ‘matrifocal’ families.49 This trend was obviously more pronounced in the 1950s than when Monica was in the location in the early 1930s, but there were nevertheless quite a number of independent women in this earlier period who lived off the rents they could extract from migrants and the income they made from beer. It is interesting to compare Monica’s accounts of independent women in town with those of Ellen Hellmann, who researched the independent brewers and matriarchs of Rooiyard in inner-city Johannesburg a few years later, in 1933–34. For Monica the breakdown of family, the increasing incidence of teenage pregnancy, the commercial sale of beer and the loose morals of those associated with the social economy of places like ‘Gomorra’ did not endear her to ‘stout’ and ‘bold’ urban matriarchs. Her views were surely influenced by those of Dr and Mrs R and their associates, but the lifestyles of these women also collided directly with her moral compass and her sense of the urban nucleur family as a critical social institution. Monica’s strong views on the family later underpinned her impassioned critique of the migrant labour system and its impact on African life, a topic taken forward in the work of her son Francis.50 What Monica saw, through the eyes of the Lovedale-schooled missionary’s daughter, as morally tainted and socially suspect, Hellmann embraced as heroic and inventive, a completely rational and informed response to social and economic conditions in the city.51 It is interesting how the views of two leading South African pioneers and female anthropologists differed on this topic. Hellmann certainly did not have a mission education, nor was she influenced by mission-educated elites in the Rooiyard slum. She came from a Jewish family and community on the Reef that had once lived in the inner city suburbs in the early period of industrialisation in the city. Jews has lived in slums and were labelled ‘dirty and uncivilised’ by the city fathers and moral watchdogs, but had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.52 For Hellmann, the matriarchs of Rooiyard seemed to be doing the same, and this was something she 48 49 50 51

52

Ibid. See Pauw, The Second Generation. See Francis Wilson, Labour in the South African Goldmines, 1911–1969 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slumyard (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, Rhodes Livingston Institute Papers, No. 13, 1948). Her study had been completed in 1935 and submitted as a Wits MA thesis. Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews of South Africa: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008), 84–103.

City Dreams, Country Magic

117

wanted to celebrate. For Monica the backstreets of East London raised greater concern, where a shift away from culturally accepted notions of the family and established social norms and values seemed much more problematic. What perturbed Monica most was the position of the youth. By 1930, almost 40 per cent of location youths were not in school but out and about, roaming the streets. There was a lost opportunity here that concerned her. Yet she was much more worried about the disrespect and disobedience expressed by these youths, their apparent refusal to listen to their parents and the absence of a ‘proper system of socialisation’ such as she had found in Pondoland, a system that integrated the youth into family and community life. In both her notes and in the ethnography itself she raises the issue of the deteriorating situation of the youth in the city. Some of the manifestations of the ‘youth as social problem’ are seen in rising rates of teenage pregnancy, disrespect for parents, petty crime and more generally in having a young generation idle on the streets. At one point she records what may be her own views or perhaps those of an informant: ‘When young boys and girls arrive at a strange town wanting work, magistrates should ask them where they have come from and repatriate them at once.’53 Her concern about the position of the youth and also of children remained important themes in her work and also in urban studies more generally in the years to come. The problem of ‘juvenile delinquency’ in urban areas became the subject of numerous investigations and commissions in later years.54 One of the links that was commonly made in these inquiries was that between the ‘fatherless family’ and the ‘troublesome youth’. It is not a link that Monica explicitly made in her analysis, but it is certainly implicit in her approach to the family. Her view on the youth in the city was that they were thrust into a cultural vacuum where there were neither the institutions nor the mechanisms for effective social integration. This is why she might have felt the need to advocate the repatriation of rural youth back into the countryside where a system of socialisation was in place and there seemed to be a certain integrity and coherence to youth socialisation. The problem for Monica was not the matrifocal family but the negative consequences of urbanisation and ‘de-tribalisation’. Hidden Transcripts: Dreaming in East London Most Christian people do not believe in the possibility of being killed by amatongo [dreams]. Though they do believe in death by supernatural 53 54

WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter). See A. S. Welsh, Report of the East London Municipal Native Commission of Enquiry (Native Affairs Department, Pretoria: Government Printers, 1949), also known as ‘The Welsh Commission’; see also Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000).

118

Inside African Anthropology

means. But some do. Eg Padre of the Ethiopian church went to igqira who said he was guliswa [made sick] by amatango [dreams] and should wear an intambo yobulungu. He did so, and recovered.55

If we return finally to Clifford, we will note that his third type of field writing is what he calls ‘transcription’. This is different from inscription, which captures and translates observations and social discourse in the field. The process of transcription is associated with the recording of myths, rituals or other extended indigenous texts, and tends to be characterised by a one-on-one interview between the fieldworker and the informant. Open-ended or structured interviews also allow for transcription, where the views of informants will be collected in full and written down. Clifford sees transcription as a form of copying, which involves the least transformation of the original meanings, but is still no innocent process of translation.56 In Monica’s notes the household case studies offered opportunities for transcription, for taking down life stories and other social and cultural information in a coherent and sustained way that was not interrupted or distracted by the flow of social discourse in situations of participant observation. Unfortunately, she did not rewrite her household interviews in full in the days after they were collected and seems to have worked directly from the cryptic notes when writing up her Cambridge doctoral thesis and later her book. Perhaps there was just not enough time in East London to interrupt opportunities for fieldwork with the laborious transcription of fieldnotes. Whatever the reason, the strategy adopted by Monica in 1932 was one of compression rather than extension. She used her typewriter to summarise each case into about five or six lines rather than expand her notes into a longer discursive translation of the interview. This is a great pity because there is much more in these notes for us to reflect on in retrospect than she was able to analyse in the time available. More specifically, I have found an intriguing and, in my view, highly significant process of omission in the compression of Monica’s fieldnotes, namely her decision to leave her detailed discussions with her informants about dreams out of her summary of the content of her household interviews. Significantly, in virtually every household she entered in her 1932 research, she asked her informants what they had been dreaming about and what they made of their dreams. In a number of cases the informants said they could not remember their dreams, while others simply refused to divulge their dreams. In her fieldnotes she acknowledges that there was often some suspicion around the collection of dream material, and 55 56

WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter). Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 59.

City Dreams, Country Magic

119

she was asked more than once if she was training as a sangoma (healer) or working for one. Despite resistance, she pushed ahead with this line of inquiry and managed to collect dreams (sometimes more than one per household) in over seventy households. Unfortunately, as I have suggested, she never wrote out the dreams in full, leaving only traces and outlines of the dream material in her notes. It is difficult to tell exactly when she developed her interest in dreams. We do know she had read some of Freud’s work on dreams at Cambridge and also written an undergraduate essay on E. B. Tylor and the role of dreams in primitive society.57 We can be reasonably sure she would have read Malinowski’s discussion of ‘Dreams and Deeds’ in his Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927). Malinowski wrote that he had often tackled the subject of dreams directly in his work in the Trobriand Islands, where ‘I asked my informants whether they had dreamt and, if so, what their dreams had been.’ He claimed that the Trobrianders were infrequent dreamers and wondered whether this was because they were a ‘non-repressed society’, ‘a society among whom sex as such is in no way restricted’. He also made a distinction between what he called ‘free dreams’ and ‘official dreams’, the latter being relatively fixed fantasies, which followed the contours of tradition.58 It is a moot point how much Monica was influenced by these readings. But we do know she had found in her Pondoland research that dreams offered important clues towards understanding the everyday lives of people. Dreaming and the interpretation of dreams by healers and diviners was a critical aspect of pronouncing on fortune and misfortune. It is perhaps because of this that she set out to ask every member of every urban household she entered what they were dreaming about. Given that Monica invested a great deal of time and energy in collecting dreams, it is surprising that dream narratives do not feature more prominently in her ethnography on East London. There are accounts of dreams in the text that relate to the continued role of rural magic and superstition in the interpretation of urban life. The case mentioned above of domestic workers who were reluctant to take each other’s jobs because they feared being bewitched by other women is one of the examples used in the text to show the pervasiveness of belief in witchcraft in the location. Monica also showed how dreams feature in the circulation of magical interpretations of good fortune and misfortune. It is clear from her analysis that there was a widespread belief in magic despite the new rationalities of modernity that dominate the urban space, and that these beliefs were held not only by pagans (qaba) 57 58

WC, G1, Monica Hunter, Student Essays. Bronislaw M. Malinowski, ‘Dreams and Deeds’ in his Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 30–55.

120

Inside African Anthropology

but Christians too. She concluded her section on magic in her book thus: We see then that magical beliefs held under tribal conditions survive practically intact under town conditions. There are some new developments to meet new needs, and old medicines are put to new uses, a few ideas are absorbed – the iziporo [ghosts] along with its antidotes, the horseshoe and the hymn – but very few if any of the old ideas have disappeared.59

The dreams collected in East London in 1932 lend themselves to more analysis than the simple confirmation that magical beliefs travelled well between town and country. In the 1960s Max Gluckman observed that urbanisation produced new anxieties that tested the limits of traditional belief systems and encouraged Africans to turn in new ‘directions for supernatural aid’. He stressed that, in the city, ‘fears of witchcraft have burgeoned and magic has blossomed’.60 He recognised, as EvansPritchard once remarked, that ‘new situations require new magic’. More recently, scholars like Jean and John Comaroff, Peter Geschiere and Filip De Boeck have connected dreams, anxieties and enchantments with the uncertainties of modernity and the forces of millennial capitalism, seeing them as part and parcel of the ‘frenetic construction of local modernities’.61 Clearly the proliferation of anxiety and witchcraft predates the arrival of neoliberalism or millennial capitalism in African cities and is perhaps less closely connected to large-scale economic forces than some of these scholars have suggested. Indeed, in the 1940s, one of Monica’s students at Fort Hare, Livingstone Mqotsi, found that the growth of independent Churches in Port Elizabeth, a coastal city near East London, was connected to the proliferation of witchcraft and spiritual insecurity there.62 Luise White has written about the circulation of stories of vampires and blood suckers in colonial Nairobi and how these accounts critique the colonial state and the exploitation of African people.63 In her analysis 59 60 61

62 63

Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 496. Max Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London: Cohen and West, 1963), 141, 143. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds, Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Post-Colonial Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-Colonial Africa (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 1997); Filip De Boeck, ‘The Divine Seed: Children, Gift and Witchcraft in the Democratic Republic of Congo’ in Filip De Boeck and Alcinda Honwana, eds, Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Post-Colonial Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2005). See also Terence Ranger, ‘Scotland Yard in the Bush: Medicine Murders, Child Witches and the Construction of the Occult’, Africa, 77, 2 (2002), 272–283. See Chapter 7 in this volume. Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

City Dreams, Country Magic

121

vampire stories and magic are related to perceptions of the city and interpersonal relations within it, especially gender and generational relations and tensions. The construction and circulation of vampire stories in East Africa, White notes, were deliberately used to undermine the progress and power of women in formerly male-dominated domains. Steve Pile writes more generally of the image of vampires and the Dracula story in the history of Western cities. Cities are dense nodes in a wider web of bodies, information, goods and ideas. This is not a new point in itself, but I am suggesting an underside – an other worldliness – to all these arrangements. The vampire stories show that the idea of mixing blood is feared and also desired in a variety of ways. Desire and fear go hand in hand is the psychoanalytical point. The vampire stories speak to very specific geographies that might not be best hunted in the cold light of day, for some will barely reveal anything and others will lurk in the shadows.64

In the same way that vampire stories reveal anxieties around the mixing of blood, interacting with strangers and the general struggle of coping in the city, so the dreams recorded by Monica speak directly about urban fears, desires and changing identities. On the topic of desire, Monica records a large number of dreams about informants travelling to the countryside in search of their rural homesteads and kin. These dreams often centre on the call of a ritual or the need to return home due to sickness in the family. I quote some examples from her household interview notes. In these notes Xhosa and English are used interchangeably, expressing the tension between inscription and transcription. There is also a slippage between first and third person (I and he/she). Her aim was to get the gist of the dreams, while also wanting to translate the story in full using vernacular terms and categories. He dreamed he was home yesterday in Centani. Umda wabona ikhaya nabantu [Mda saw a house with people]. Means that izihlobo zethu [our friends], still visiting you and you are still in good health . . . [Interpretation] Sometimes I feel very homesick. Dreamed yesterday, many people at the umzi, meat killed. Killed to lungisa umzi [heal the homestead]. While the beast was being killed saw two of her deceased brothers. They also attended – lungisa umzi done time after death. Thinks that the visit from the late brother means that another dini [sacrifice] must be made as well as what must be done for the sick man. Does not know whether killing will help the man. Did not see the bala [colour] of the heart. – Wake up in the middle. 64

Steve Pile, ‘Perpetual Returns: Vampires and the Ever Colonised City’ in Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Wei Wei Yeo, eds, Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (London: Routledge, 2003), 285–286.

122

Inside African Anthropology

Dreamed this before he was at home. Dreamed of umfana [young man] who was in the country then. We went to the lands together, going to inspect the lands. Came to a valley where there was long grass. I felt as if I had caught a cold – was coughing badly. My friend asked what was the matter. I said I do not know. I sneezed and wiped my nose. My whole body was feverish (I was dreaming all along . . . ) When I returned home I found that the friend, who I identified in the dream was very, very sick. He thinks his dream had anticipated that.65

These dreams also articulated experiences of travel, like embarking on the train to Johannesburg, looking for lost relatives on the Reef or most commonly of the dangers and trepidation of crossing rivers. In the first dream the fear of travelling to Johannesburg and falling in the river are clearly connected, suggesting fear and an image of being swallowed. Dreamed of going to JHB and felt uncomfortable leaving EL. Dreams of the train leaving, waiting to catch the train. Also dreams of falling into water, like a river in flood. As I was standing on the bank of the river, it seemed to give way and I fell in. Had not seen a flooded river recently before I fell in. Dreamt that the wife of her father’s eldest brother who died in Johannesburg came here, and she ran out to see her. They were still on their way to meet each other when she woke. She thinks her targo[?] was visiting her, coming to see abantwana [children]. Not afraid glad it was only an ordinary visit. She dreamed of great river with a high bank. She was afraid to wash in it. She crossed it in spite of being afraid. She was alone. Thinking of the sea, she has never seen the sea.66

A number of Monica’s other respondents said they dreamed about being harassed or arrested by the police. This dream was pervasive and must be seen as a reflection of the extent to which residents feared, on a daily basis, being caught without their passes or residents’ permits. There were also dreams of running away: ‘Dreamed of the police and running away. Not biswa [accused of theft], but swept away. Woke up afraid. Also dreamed of crossing a river and running away.’ Another young woman: ‘Dreams of the police chasing her, also dreams of being caressed by her mother and father.’ Another informant dreamt of a specific African detective named Seluku finding her and sending her to jail.67 Quite a number of women dreamed of becoming isolated in the city or of losing children. One woman ‘Dreamed of umanyano young women [women’s church group] walking through the valley, all dressed in white to hold revival meeting in Cambridge [a suburb of East London]. Woke up when they were going up the hill. No other women there (perhaps 65 66 67

WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter). Ibid. Ibid.

City Dreams, Country Magic

123

being alone?). These men do not dress in white. Does not know what it means.’ There were dreams of snakes and money, of the umamlambo [waterwomen] and the desire of wealth and material success in the city. A common version of these dreams is this: Dreamed of onyaka [a snake] . . . was gliding over some trees, did not look exactly like a snake, but rather like a fish with fins. There were tall trees outside the houses. Also fah fee (scheme for money making) gold money and won. She woke up anxious because dreaming about a snake means temptation. She woke up with the snake gliding over the trees.68

By choosing not to document this material in published form, Monica missed an opportunity to show how the social and imaginative fabric of the urban and the rural were intertwined in the everyday worlds and interpretative frameworks of urban residents who operated across different cultural fields and experiences. Instead of showing how the ‘townee category’ was catapulted from the moral world of the countryside to the immoral world of the city, she might have used this information on dreams to comment more on the limits of change. Such a discussion would have added a layer of complexity to her analysis of ‘the townee type’, revealing how notions of the rural were reworked in the city by people who were not necessarily part of the qaba category. This might have thrown light on the complex politics she encountered in the location, where the rights and concession politics of African urban elites was losing ground to the politics of African independent Churches and radical labour unions. A more detailed exploration of dreams might have revealed how people were grasping for the city while longing for the countryside in different ways and how their sense of identity was not adequately addressed by the rights-based politics of ANC elites. Such a discussion would have provided an interesting prelude to later discussions of the politics of the 1940s and 1950s when new expressions of Africanism swept through East London’s locations with the rise of the ANC Youth League and the launch of the Defiance Campaign. Confronted by an increasingly repressive state, many ordinary East Bank residents turned back to their roots to redefine and re-evaluate their social and political identities as they united behind the call Mayibuye iAfrica – Come Back, Africa. In these records of dreams there are important clues as to how such identities were formed as in-between imaginaries of town and country. In Monica’s defence, one should mention that she did openly acknowledge the pre-planned focus of her urban fieldwork and admitted that the process was unsatisfactory by her own exacting standards. She would later comment that her urban fieldwork was too 68

Ibid.

124

Inside African Anthropology

short and too limited in scope to unravel all the social contradictions she encountered.69 Conclusion Cities are scary and impersonal, and the best most of us can manage is a fragile hold on our routes through the streets. We cling to friends and institutions; exaggerate the importance of belonging, fear being alone too much.70

This chapter has revisited Monica’s 1932 East London fieldnotes and the ethnography she wrote up on that basis in Reaction to Conquest. We may well wonder why this early urban anthropological research in a South African city has been virtually forgotten (by contrast say with that of her contemporary Ellen Hellmann), while Monica’s rural ethnographies remain a constant source of reference for academics, development workers and communities themselves as they struggle to reclaim their land rights. True, in the Cambridge tradition of her day, she went into the field relatively unprepared in terms of the background reading of classic works in rural and urban studies. When she arrived in East London to study the urban locations there, she had not read any of the standard sociological texts on urban life. The main reason why Monica’s urban anthropology of East London’s locations has been largely overlooked is that it was not written up as a separate urban study, but as part of a book which is known in the discipline as a classic rural ethnography. In fact, when a popular paperback third edition of Reaction to Conquest was published in Cape Town in 1979, the entire social change section of the book, over a hundred pages, was cut out. In the Preface, Monica wrote that the decision was a direct result of the publishers’ opinion that the full text would make the publication uneconomic; but she was also quick to explain that she felt her account of town and farm life was more superficial than her work in Pondoland and therefore less significant. Monica’s early urban ethnography has thus remained hidden partly because she downplayed its importance compared to the Pondoland ethnography. She concluded: ‘What is in demand is an account of a way of life that no longer exists.’71 A detailed reading of her fieldnotes can reveal some of the underlying assumptions and approaches in her work. Using Clifford’s distinction 69 70 71

For her expression of this sense of dissatisfaction to Pamela Reynolds in later years, see Chapter 10. Jonathan Raban, Soft City (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 225. The first edition of 1936 and the second edition of 1961 were unabridged, although the second edition had fewer photographs. The third edition cut out the social change section: see Monica Wilson, Reaction to Conquest (Cape Town: David Philip, 1979, 3rd edition, abridged), xiv–xv.

City Dreams, Country Magic

125

between different types of writing in the field – inscription, transcription and description – I have tried to piece together a perspective on her urban research: it appears that Monica instantly recognised the power of the city as a vehicle for social change and was somewhat shocked at how rapidly the superficialities of modern life had been absorbed in the city. Immediately, like Simmel in his classic work on money and mental life in the city, she recognised the power of money and commodities there – how nothing was free in the locations, how everyone desired money, and how it seemingly eroded social relations and mutual obligations. The contrast between the money-driven urban environment and the obligation-driven rural environment was forcefully brought home to her. She maintained that not even beer was transacted for free in the city. She was also amazed at how everyone tried their luck on the horses, with fah-fee or some other ‘get rich quick’ scheme. Monica’s urban anthropology is very different from that of the Mayers and their colleagues who came to East London in the 1950s and focused on processes of the re-invention of tradition in the city and the continued power of rural outlooks and orientations there. She was astonished and, to some extent, frightened by the speed of change and the possible consequences of the breakdown of social values and institutions. Her analysis of the internal workings and social dynamics of the locations could have been a little more critical and reflexive. Reading her fieldnotes, it seems to me that she essentially worked with an idea of three broad social categories in town: the qaba or xaba (rural-orientated, pagan) type, the mission-educated type (well-groomed, decent, upright Christians) and the ‘townee type’ (which she personalised in one note as a stout woman with a house full of furniture). These categories were rather morally loaded and never really properly developed sociologically in this context of social change. Indeed, as I see it, her prejudice against the so-called ‘townee type’ was infused with the ideological perspectives of the likes of Mrs Rubusana and her Lovedale friends in the location. But Monica was ultimately more interested in social groups than social categories and felt that participation in localised social groups fundamentally shaped how people experienced urban life. This tenet continued to guide her later research with Archie Mafeje on Langa in Cape Town, which resulted in a book with the subtitle, ‘Social Groups in an African Township’.72 Given the amount of time she spent collecting dreams, she had relatively little to say about them in her academic text by way of interpretation and analysis, and relating these to perceptions and politics of urban life. In fact, comparing Monica’s East London fieldnotes with the text she

72

On her collaboration with Mafeje on the Langa book, see Chapter 8.

126

Inside African Anthropology

eventually produced, I found that the most striking omission was her failure to translate the transcripts she collected on dreams into sociological and political analysis. There are critical insights within this material that could have been used to strengthen her central thesis of social change in the city. As I read the dreams, they provide evidence of a high level of anxiety among her informants, who are fearful of what the future in the city might hold for them. They dreamed of being chased by policemen, being arrested, and being isolated and alone in the city. Their dreams included the dangers of travel and the appetites of rivers and snakes for swallowing them up. There were also many dreams of the integrity of rural social relations, of absent kin and of the warmth and congeniality of the family and friends at the rural umzi. Monica could have used this material to emphasise the anxieties and contradictions of social change and relate these more closely to the political mobilisation and upheaval taking place in the location then. Her inability to realise a broader perspective was not only related to the limitations of the fieldwork, but also, as I have argued, had much to do with her interpreters, who inevitably mediated her view of city and its social and political contours. .

Part 2

Bunyakyusa

Figure P.2. A gifted young fieldworker: Monica’s future husband Godfrey during his first five months of fieldwork in Bunyakyusa, September 1934 to January 1935. He returned to South Africa to marry Monica in the Hogsback in February 1935 before they went on honeymoon and then resumed fieldwork in Bunyakyusa as a husband-and-wife team from March 1935 in what would be ‘one of the most intensive ethnographic field studies ever done’. Photographer (likely): Godfrey and Monica’s future research assistant Leonard Mwaisumo. WC, uncat. From box of ‘Negatives belonging to Mr. G.B. Wilson’.

4

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers: Monica and Godfrey in Bunyakyusa Rebecca Marsland Well anyway I’ve roped Monica in and we are working out a theory of society as an equilibrium together. She sets her teeth in face of my more flighty phrases and, muttering ‘rhetorical idiot’, proceeds to probe them with Pondo pins and break them with Nyakyusa hammers and then comes to me saying ‘Well of course the original formulation was absurd and meaningless but there is just this grain of sense I found in it – and lo, on her palm the truth!’ Godfrey Wilson to Audrey Richards, 26 March 19401

Monica and Godfrey Wilson worked together in Bunyakyusa, southwest Tanganyika (now Rungwe and Kyela districts in Tanzania) between 1934 and 1938.2 This extract from Godfrey’s letter to the anthropologist Audrey Richards was written from the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, where Godfrey had been appointed director. They had flown there direct from Bunyakyusa and were now working on their jointly authored ‘Analysis of Social Change Based on Observations in Central Africa’.3 Godfrey describes aspects of their working style that are central to this chapter. He, perhaps unwittingly, refers to the gendered nature of their fieldwork sites. Monica had carried out her first research on her own in Pondoland. The analytical tools that Godfrey attributes to this field-site are ‘Pondo pins’ – pins 1 2

3

WC, B4.7 Correspondence to and from Audrey Richards: Godfrey Wilson/Audrey Richards, 26 March 1940. A conference grant from the University of Edinburgh and a research grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland funded two trips in 2008 and 2009 to visit the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers held at the University of Cape Town. Many thanks to Lesley Hart and colleagues who made archival research so easy for a novice. I must also thank Andrew Bank for his ‘good company’ in the archives, and beyond: he has picked out more archival extracts in this chapter than I have acknowledged in the text, and offered close reading and commentary on drafts. Lyn Schumaker, Janet Carsten, Toby Kelly, Richard Baxstrom and Ian Harper have all made useful and critical comments on early drafts. Timothy Mwakasekele was a close companion during the writing of this chapter, and translated some of the more difficult passages in Kinyakyusa. Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change: Based on Observations in Central Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945).

129

130

Inside African Anthropology

being most usually associated with the feminine pastime of needlework. In contrast, in their joint fieldwork in Bunyakyusa, Monica had access to ‘Nyakyusa hammers’, an apt metaphor given that Bunyakyusa was more easily approached with a masculine sensibility, as we will see. One of the themes of this chapter is the gendered division of labour that Godfrey and Monica undertook during their years in Bunyakyusa, and the way in which this interacted with the gender roles of Nyakyusa men and women.4 Godfrey’s vignette also reflects the habit of joint authorship that he and Monica were developing. It is probable that they intended to publish both joint and separate publications on their Nyakyusa research, but after Godfrey’s untimely and tragic death in 1944 Monica wrote up and published their findings in four major monographs. Even though she is the only author named on the title pages of these books, they are in a way co-authored. In this chapter, I take up her colleague David HammondTooke’s suggestion that this work can be seen as a memorial to her beloved Godfrey.5 The Nyakyusa years represent a period of their life together when Godfrey was at his happiest. After his death, Monica took on the considerable task of transcribing and organising material from his 78 field notebooks, bringing her knowledge of Bunyakyusa to bear on his material.6 This labour of the heart was one way for her to keep him, and her memories of these precious times together, close to her for the rest of her life. As a consequence, data from much of her own fieldwork appears as little more than an appendage to Godfrey’s, especially in the first three of the Nyakyusa monographs. The chapter is based on my reading of the Monica and Godfrey Wilson archives at the University of Cape Town. I have examined much of the Wilsons’ correspondence with their contemporaries, mostly written while they were in Bunyakyusa, and later when Godfrey took up his position as director of the RLI. The letters open up a fascinating picture of the closeknit world of anthropologists working in Central and southern Africa in the 1930s and 1940s. Unfortunately, yet for understandable reasons,7 I was not permitted to read the very personal letters between Monica and Godfrey themselves; it is likely that these would reveal otherwise inaccessible discussions about their research in Bunyakyusa during the period when Monica was invalided out of the field, being the time they were communicating by letter. 4 5 6 7

The importance of the masculine fieldwork style of Godfrey Wilson is the subject of a paper that I am preparing for publication. Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists, 1920–1990, 82– 83. WC, D1.1 GW’s notebooks 1–79 (no. 12 missing). See the Introduction to this volume for further discussion of these restrictions on public access.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

131

Figure 4.1. Settlement of a dispute. The anthropologist (Godfrey Wilson) is sitting with the court. On his right is the chief Mwaihojo, on his left Kasitile, the rainmaker. Behind him (in a topee) is Mwaisumo the clerk, and Mwakionde, famous as a doctor and maker of lions. In the background is a half-built hut. (Original caption in the 1951 monograph Good Company.)8

Like Monica, I have transcribed Godfrey’s notebooks, in addition to a considerable proportion of the thousands of looseleaf pages that make up her own field material, and so have some insight into the scale of the task she took on in publishing (almost exhaustively) their field material. Reading the Wilson fieldnotes also proved an evocative experience for me, as I have spent about three years between 2000 and 2009 carrying out ethnographic research in the southern, lowland part of Bunyakyusa (now Kyela District). Even though over sixty years separate our time in the region, there are continuities that make it possible to imagine quite clearly some of the fieldwork scenes as they reveal themselves in the archives. One of the few photographs of Godfrey Wilson in Bunyakyusa shows him at the court of the chief Mwaihojo (Figure 4.1). Seated on the ground and flanked by three figures, who all feature in the monographs, he is clad in the tropical gear familiar to us from images of colonial Africa – topee, khaki shorts, long socks and a crisp white shirt. The only wardrobe item distinguishing him from the chief Mwaihojo, sitting to his right, and

8

Monica Wilson, Good Company: Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957), Figure 15.

132

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 4.2. Monica Wilson taking notes during an interview in Bunyakyusa, 1955.9

his translator and research assistant (the ‘clerk’) Leonard Mwaisumo behind him, are his polished shoes. You have to peer closely to identify the white anthropologist. Seated to his left is Kasitile the rainmaker, a ritual specialist – a man whom Godfrey, Monica noted, regarded as akin to his own grandfather – in a robe and fez. Standing and facing them are presumably the court officials and participants in the case. Godfrey does not appear to be writing – there is no visible notebook. None of the photographs of Monica in Bunyakyusa have been published in any of her four well-illustrated monographs. This seems in keeping with how the monographs prioritise Godfrey’s work. One shows her facing away from the camera, shaking hands with a man. In another we see her sitting on a chair outside a man’s house (Figure 4.2). Holding her notes with one hand, she is staring intently at her informant, who is sitting on the same kind of chair. In the foreground a man and a woman stand – the woman is watching Monica, the man stares towards the camera. Behind them all is a small audience of children in the shadows of a tree. These photographs invite an interpretation based on my own knowledge of the field-site and a reading of Godfrey’s notebooks and Monica’s fieldnotes and reminiscences. Godfrey, seated on the ground, does not 9

WC, Photograph by Francis Wilson who accompanied Monica when she revisited Bunyakyusa in 1955.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

133

distinguish himself from his three close friends and informants. All four men are looking up at the court from the same position. He is in ‘Good Company’ – sharing a sociability that Monica later argued, in the first Nyakyusa monograph, was so important to ‘Nyakyusa values’.10 In contrast, we can see that Monica’s relationship to her informants is more awkward. She cannot do fieldwork by behaving like a Nyakyusa woman as Godfrey can by behaving like a Nyakyusa man. A Nyakyusa woman would not sit on a chair. In order to speak to any man, she would crouch close to the ground, at a respectful distance, and wait for him to notice her. She would avoid his gaze, not fix him with what was presumably her ‘own peculiar hunting look’11 as Godfrey once described Monica’s expression when she was looking for ‘social facts’. These photographs remind us that Monica was less able to develop the same kind of intense and intimate relationship with her informants as her husband. This chapter traces how the different fieldwork styles of Monica and Godfrey emerged. Sharing a common project and ideals, they nevertheless diverged as their backgrounds, training, personalities and gender pushed them in different directions. Godfrey was gregarious, thriving in the masculine company of his Nyakyusa informants, and engaging them in conversation. Monica was more reserved, standing back a little, observing life in all its forms as it went on – not just of her informants, but of the plants and landscape around her. The Nyakyusa Trilogy Monica and Godfrey’s fieldwork in Bunyakyusa has been described by J. D. Y. Peel as ‘one of the most intensive ethnographic field studies ever done’.12 Between them they carried out over four years of fieldwork, which Monica was later to write up as four monographs: Good Company (1951), Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (1957), Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (1959) and For Men and Elders (1977).13 Andrew Bank has dubbed the first three of these ‘the Nyakyusa Trilogy’, justified 10 11

12 13

Monica Wilson, Good Company. Letter from Godfrey Wilson to Monica Wilson cited in Se´an Morrow, ‘“This Is from the Firm”: The Anthropological Partnership of Monica and Godfrey Wilson’ (unpublished paper presented at the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June 2008). J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Wilson [n´ee Hunter], Monica (1908–1982)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004). Monica Wilson, Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1951); Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957); Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959); For Men and

134

Inside African Anthropology

because the last monograph was published some twenty years later.14 The trilogy is of interest here, because it reflects most closely the product of Monica and Godfrey’s anthropological marriage, especially when read together with their research fieldnotes. The years in Bunyakyusa were a golden period for them. They were warmly welcomed into Nyakyusa life. They divided up the fieldwork – Godfrey was primarily interested in ‘pagan’ religion, and Monica was to look at Christianity, education, and women.15 Apart from Monica’s severe bouts of malaria, fieldwork was easy for them, especially for Godfrey, who was quickly drawn into a world of masculine sociability, establishing a wide network of informants and friendships. This was despite the fact that they were in Rungwe District at a time when major political and economic changes were being introduced there by the British administration, and religious values were under challenge from Moravian, Lutheran and Scottish missions.16 They travelled all over the district, working from three main bases – Mwaya on the shore of Lake Nyasa, Isumba (Selya) further north in the highlands, and Ilolo in the highlands near the Moravian Mission at Rungwe (see Figure 4.3). In her letters home, Monica regularly told her father that ‘the days are full’ – fieldwork in rural Bunyakyusa was eventful then, as now, and fieldworkers can find themselves struggling to keep up with a ‘steady stream of visitors’, marital conflicts, court cases, weddings and funerals. Thus happily occupied, Godfrey, who had earlier suffered from what he described as a ‘nervous breakdown’,17 seemed to find an equilibrium. Events took a tragic turn, however, after they left Bunyakyusa. On 1 May 1938, Godfrey took up an appointment as the first director of the RLI in Northern Rhodesia. Here he investigated labour conditions on the mines. Sadly his sociable research style proved to be too much for the white settlers of the Copperbelt, and he was criticised for ‘fraternising with the Africans’. Furthermore he had gathered ‘explosive’ evidence that Africans were becoming permanently urbanised, which contradicted the premises of colonial labour policy.18 This, combined with Godfrey’s

14

15 16 17 18

Elders: Change in the Relations of Generations and of Men and Women among the NyakyusaNgonde People 1875–1971 (London and New York: International African Institute and Africana for the IAI, 1977). Andrew Bank, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson’ in Robert Gordon, Andrew P. Lyons, and Harriet D. Lyons, eds, Fifty Key Anthropologists (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 255–260. WC, D11, Correspondence with International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Monica Wilson/Mrs Hoernl´e, 9 May 1935, Isumba. Marcia Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika 1891–1941: Lutherans and Moravians in the Southern Highlands (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’, 11. Monica Wilson, ‘The First Three Years, 1938–41’, African Social Research, 24 (1977), 283.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

135

Figure 4.3. Map of the Rungwe District in Bunyakyusa showing the three main fieldwork sites of the Wilsons: Mwaya on the lake shore, Isumba in the highlands near the village of Lupata, and Ilolo village near Rungwe Mission Station.19

pacificism and his unwillingness to advise African men to sign up for the military, made his position untenable and he resigned in April 1941.20 After that, Godfrey enlisted in the South African Medical Corps and was posted in Egypt and South Africa. He found the boredom of army life and his separation from Monica ‘quite intolerable’, but they continued to correspond and work together on the manuscript for the ‘Analysis of Social Change’. On leave over Christmas 1943–1944 his depression returned, and continued in a severe form until in May 1944 he took his own life.21

19 20

21

Map III in Monica Wilson, Good Company, insert between pages 16 and 17. Richard Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule: Godfrey Wilson and the RhodesLivingstone Institute’ in Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanity Books, 1973), 173–197. Morrow, ‘This is from the Firm’, 12.

136

Inside African Anthropology

As we have seen, all four of the Nyakyusa monographs were published after Godfrey’s death. In addition Monica and Godfrey published a total of 18 articles on the Nyakyusa research: he wrote seven papers between 1936 and 1939;22 she one book chapter,23 and ten journal articles between 1937 and 1976.24 Their co-authored ‘Analysis of Social Change’ fits uneasily into these publications. Drawing on material from Pondoland, Bunyakyusa, Audrey Richard’s work on the Bemba, and Godfrey’s work on the Copperbelt, it can be read as a reaction to the unpleasant race relations they encountered in Northern Rhodesia. Monica continued to work on the Nyakyusa material right up to her death in 1982, hoping to produce the Kinyakyusa–English dictionary and grammar – but this last task was never accomplished.25 The best known of the Nyakyusa trilogy, Good Company, deals with the unique ‘age villages’ through which political authority was handed over from old to young men once a generation. Curiously, this created its own little controversy, as some scholars found it difficult to believe the Wilsons’ account.26 The failure of any of these new scholars to offer

22

23

24

25

26

Godfrey Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Law: A Theoretical Introduction to the Study of Law in East Africa’, Man, 36 (1936), 50; ‘An African Morality’, Africa, 9, 1 (1936), 75–99; ‘An Introduction to Nyakyusa Society’, Bantu Studies, 10, 3 (1936), 253–291; ‘Introduction to Nyakyusa Law’, Africa, 10, 1 (1937), 16–36; ‘The Land Rights of Individuals among the Nyakyusa’, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, 1 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 (1938)); ‘The Constitution of Ngonde’, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, 3 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 (1939)); ‘Nyakyusa Conventions of Burial’, Bantu Studies, 13, 1 (1939), 1–31. Monica Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Kinship’ in Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 111–139. Monica Wilson, ‘An African Christian Morality’, Africa, 10, 2 (1937), 265–292; ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 79 (1949), 21–25; ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56, 4 (1951), 307–313; ‘Nyakyusa Ritual and Symbolism’, American Anthropologist, 56, 2 (1954), 228–241; ‘Joking Relationships in Central Africa’, Man, 57 (1957), 111–112; Divine Kings and the Breath of Men (The Frazer Lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); ‘Traditional Art among the Nyakyusa’, South African Archaeological Bulletin, 19 (1964), 57–63; ‘The Expansion of the Nyakyusa’, Journal of African History, 14 (1973), 331; ‘Letter’, Africa, 45, 2 (1975), 202–205; ‘Zig-Zag Change’, Africa, 46, 4 (1976), 399– 409. The dictionary consists of index boxes full of cards each containing items of vocabulary, and there is also a draft of a Nyakyusa grammar. Both can be found in WC. Monica had hoped to publish the ‘Ki-Nyakyusa English Dictionary’ in the University of Cape Town’s Centre for African Studies series (WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson Correspondence with Audrey Richards, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 12 Feb. 1981 [Hogsback]). Simon Charsley, The Princes of Nyakyusa (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969) and ‘Letter’, Africa, 44, 4 (1974), 422–423; Michael G. McKenny, ‘The Social Structure of the Nyakyusa: A Re-evaluation’, Africa, 43, 1 (1973), 91–107 and ‘Letter’, Africa, 44, 4 (1974), 423–424; Wright, German Missions and ‘Nyakyusa Cults and Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century’ in Terence O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo, eds, The Historical Study of African Religion (London: Heinemann Educational, 1971).

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

137

any evidence to back up their reinterpretations of the Wilsons’ material clearly irked Monica who, in a letter to Africa, painstakingly went through her evidence – including Godfrey’s eyewitness accounts of a part of the ubusoka [‘coming out’] ceremony27 – and pointed out that none of these scholars had even visited Bunyakyusa.28 Her two subsequent volumes on ritual, Rituals of Kinship29 and Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa, represent the richest ethnography that the Wilsons produced. Their symbolist analysis anticipates the turn to meaning in anthropology, and the nuanced accounts of localised variation in ritual make it difficult to accuse Monica and Godfrey of holding onto any simplified notion of a singular ‘Nyakyusa’ identity.30 These volumes had a considerable influence on Victor Turner, who dedicated The Forest of Symbols to Monica and followed Godfrey’s method of asking indigenous specialists to interpret symbols for him.31 Although authorship for the trilogy is attributed to Monica alone, the books read as if they were co-authored. They had written together ‘before’ – The Analysis of Social Change was the most notable of their collaborations.32 Their posthumous joint authorship seems to be more than just a product of their joint fieldwork – Godfrey’s voice is evident in the analytical sections where Monica discusses the conclusions drawn from the empirical material presented, and much of the text was originally written by Godfrey – his fieldnotes are frequently reproduced, sometimes word for word. More substantially, the second chapter, ‘Burial Rites’, in Rituals of Kinship is a shortened version of Godfrey’s 1939 paper, ‘Nyakyusa Conventions of Burial’. 27

28 29

30

31 32

In Communal Rituals of the Bunyakyusa Monica Wilson described this as ‘the ritual which arose the greatest excitement in Bunyakyusa and in which every man woman and child participates . . . when the heirs of a chief are acknowledged as rulers and the government of the country is handed over to them and to their village headman’. It was, she continued, something that occurred but ‘once in a generation’, ‘thrice in a century’ (49). Monica Wilson, ‘Letter’. This was originally to have been titled To Whom Do They Pray?, but Oxford University Press considered this ‘too romantic’ and feared it might ‘put off the more scholarly public’ and hinder sales (WC, uncat. corr., Box 1, International Africa Institute/Monica Wilson, 2 March 1955, London). The anthropologist James Ellison argues that the Wilsons contributed to the invention of a ‘coherent’ and singular Nyakyusa identity, but the fieldnotes suggest otherwise, as does the presentation of complexity in the monographs, most notably in Rituals of Kinship in which Monica goes to great lengths to document the difference between rituals in Kukwe, Selya and Ngonde. See James G. Ellison, ‘Transforming Obligations, Performing Identity: Making the Nyakyusa in a Colonial Context’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Florida, 1999). Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 19; Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 83. The other co-authored piece was a short article advising amateur anthropologists on field method. Godfrey Wilson and Monica Hunter, ‘The Study of African Society’, RhodesLivingstone Papers, 2 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 [1939]).

138

Inside African Anthropology

It is difficult, therefore, to avoid surmising that there was a shift in the balance of the co-authorship after Godfrey’s death. Godfrey’s work takes precedence, in contrast to The Analysis of Social Change and ‘The Study of African Society’, where his work on ‘conservative’ customs of the Nyakyusa is presented as a preliminary to understanding the social change on which Monica’s research was focused. In the trilogy, the ‘conservative’ is foregrounded, with social change taking a back seat. In the sections where Monica’s research is directly addressed we can see that in Good Company just ten pages out of 177, tagged on at the ends of chapters, are devoted to Christianity and change; in Rituals of Kinship a mere two pages of 233 address Monica’s work on Christians; while in Communal Rituals she allows herself a more substantial section – the penultimate two chapters making up almost a quarter of the whole book.33 Any appreciation of the Nyakyusa trilogy must seek explanation for this curious self-effacement. On the one hand this could be interpreted as a consequence of her shorter and less intense period in the field, compared with his. Certainly her research agenda, which addressed social change (the influence of Christianity and education), was arguably more innovative than Godfrey’s emphasis on ‘pagan’ ritual, which was a more conventional reconstruction of an idealised past. Their joint endeavours however, contradict this simplified distinction: The Analysis of Social Change points in a different direction, one that puts Europeans and Africans in the same frame, a direction that was to be pursued by Max Gluckman and the Manchester School.34 One wonders therefore whether the Nyakyusa monographs might have been different, with less emphasis on reconstructing Nyakyusa ‘pagan’ ritual, had Godfrey lived on and Monica and Godfrey written them together. If we consider the Nyakyusa trilogy as a memorial to Godfrey, that reflected Monica’s ‘obligation’ to get his work out, as opposed to their work out, then the relative analytical conservativism, and the positioning of Monica’s work as supplementary rather than central, is easier to understand. However, if we compare her early draft chapters on her Nyakyusa work with Reaction to Conquest, and her fieldnotes with Godfrey’s, it is also difficult to avoid concluding that her data, for example on Christians, was simply not as rich as her notes on Pondoland and Godfrey’s on ritual.35 Reasons for this include differences in gender and personality as well as fieldwork style. Given this, we can appreciate Monica’s achievement in writing the Nyakyusa trilogy. It was a remarkable

33 34 35

Monica Wilson, Good Company, 38–45, 127–132; Rituals of Kinship, 197–199; Communal Rituals, 166–202, 203–215. Hugh Macmillan, ‘Return to the Malungwana Drift: Max Gluckman, the Zulu Nation and the Common Society’, African Affairs, 94, 374 (1995), 39–65. Andrew Bank, personal communication.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

139

feat of empathetic writing that drew more closely on Godfrey’s findings than on her own. The Anthropological Marriage Husband and wife teams loom large in anthropology, but wives tended to contribute ‘both scholarly and domestic labour to their husbands’ careers’ rather than focusing on their own work.36 Godfrey and Monica’s relationship seemed to have been quite different, with each taking the lead at different phases of their life together. Important differences in their education, family background, and gender shaped their fieldworker personalities. Trained in anthropology and history at Girton College, Cambridge with Jack Driberg (himself a student of Malinowski) and Thomas Hodson,37 Monica was the more experienced ethnographer. She was carrying out fieldwork in Pondoland when Godfrey graduated from Oxford with a first in classics in 1931, and her resulting monograph Reaction to Conquest was published while they were working in Bunyakyusa. She was already established as an anthropologist by the time they married, so it is unimaginable that she would ever have described herself, as did Edith Turner, as merely ‘“an (unofficial) anthropological fieldworker” who had done “quite a lot of research in Africa”.’38 Nevertheless, Monica was not to be quite her husband’s equal in the field. Godfrey’s interest in anthropology developed from his interest in Monica.39 After Oxford, he rose quickly within the small world of anthropology under Malinowski’s wing at the London School of Economics. Malinowski soon came to the opinion that Godfrey ‘is the coming man in anthropology, he is bound to become, barring unforeseen accidents, the leading British anthropologist of British extraction. I have not had a really first-rate student both as regards intelligence, application and character, of purely English nationality and heredity. Godfrey Wilson is one. He is, in every respect, a first-rate man’ (my emphasis).40 Sadly, this period in London was marred by Godfrey’s clinical depression, which must have led to serious doubts about his suitability for the demands of fieldwork, and in retrospect we can see that his eventual and 36

37 38 39 40

Richard Handler, ‘Anthropology’s Other Others’ in Handler ed., Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 3. See Chapter 1. Matthew Engelke, ‘The Endless Conversation: Fieldwork, Writing and the Marriage of Victor and Edith Turner’ in Handler, ed., Significant Others, 6–50. Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’, 6. WC, B4.4, Godfrey Wilson Correspondence with Bruno Malinowski, Malinowski/Mr N. H. Hall of the Rockefeller Foundation, copied to Godfrey Wilson, 20 Feb. 1935, [London].

140

Inside African Anthropology

tragic death was eerily predicted in Malinowski’s recommendation. The historian Se´an Morrow has described Godfrey’s feelings of ‘despondency, self-disgust, tentativeness and dependency’, which were to disappear on his arrival in Bunyakyusa to even Monica’s surprise. Before she joined him in the field she wrote, ‘I was so afraid you were too modest for an anthropologist.’41 As we will see, Bunyakyusa was an environment where Godfrey was able to thrive. Monica’s childhood at the liberal Lovedale mission in South Africa seemed to have the effect of cultivating a familiarity with the Africans with whom she had been schooled, and later went on to study, while paradoxically inhibiting her ability to feel equally at home in all social contexts in Bunyakyusa. Unlike Godfrey, she already had a ‘place’ in African societies. As with her work in Pondoland,42 she appeared to have been most comfortable working close to a mission. The cool highland landscape evoked memories of her childhood home in Hogsback. At Ilolo, near the Rungwe mission, they had a small Nyakyusa-style house with a chimney, a ‘mudded floor’ and a thatched roof that leaked during the rains. She wrote to her father that ‘it even smelt like Hogsback, which has an immense vista not unlike some of those that can be seen from Rungwe’.43 In a sense, Monica was never very far from home and, given her natural reticence, this may have reinforced her tendency to stand back and observe. Godfrey spent a period of time working in Mwaya on the lake shore. In contrast, Monica spent very little of her time in the lowlands, apart from a month in Karonga, when in a letter home to her father she complained that there was ‘no view at all’.44 Perhaps the novelty of Godfrey’s situation meant that he could not seek familiarity in the landscape, quite simply because there was none. It is tempting to speculate that it was this emotional ‘distance’ that gave Godfrey the scope to range freely, both in his intimacies with his informants, and across the landscape as he moved from one site to another. Godfrey’s family and educational background also shaped his orientation. He came from a literary family: his father was the Shakespearean scholar John Dover Wilson.45 Furthermore his study in Oxford would have included linguistics. This revealed itself both in his ability to learn and document languages, and his analysis of ritual symbols. Se´an Morrow has described the literary content of Godfrey’s early letters to 41 42 43 44 45

Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’, 9. See Chapter 2. WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson Family Correspondence to her father (David Hunter), Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 18 Sept. 1936, ‘off Beira, Union Castle Line’. Ibid., Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 3 Sept. 1937, Ilolo, near Rungwe. John Dover Wilson taught Renaissance literature at King’s College, London and the University of Edinburgh.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

141

Monica as ‘an engaging mixture of the imaginative, the practical and the intellectual. He creates a fanciful dialogue between characters spun from the work and supposed personae of the poet Robert Bridges, and Mary Webb, the Shropshire novelist, full of mannered pre-Raphaelite images’ and suggested that Monica sometimes ‘struggles to find words to match the wit, humour, imagination and sensuality of her husband’.46 I imagine that Monica saw a strength that his literary skills brought to bear on his ethnographic analysis, in particular that of ritual symbols. One feels she had Godfrey, the son of the Shakespearean scholar, in mind when she wrote about rainmaking and symbolism. The rain instrument that helped the Kyungu was called Mulima. Its holes were its eyes. If they were empty it would be empty in the sky above also, there would be no clouds; [ . . . ] if all were full then there would be many clouds and rain. If it were raining and he put it in a tree so that its eyes looked up, then the sun would shine . . . If he opened its eyes that they might be empty and put it in a tree so that it looked up then the clouds dried up above, the sky also became empty. The imagination of the Nyakyusa doctor who invented this magic was near enough to that of Shakespeare to be intelligible to an Englishman. The sun is an ‘eye’. Clouds may close it. Holes in a rain instrument are also ‘eyes’ and if these are closed the ‘eye of heaven’ will also shut – with clouds.47

This literary virtuosity was combined with an extraordinary linguistic skill. When they returned together to Bunyakyusa after Godfrey’s first six months of study, Monica was to find that he had prepared a dictionary and grammar, which she could use to help her learn the language. This linguistic ability gave Godfrey an extraordinary advantage – years later when he visited Audrey Richards’s old field-site, Audrey wrote to him that he must be ‘some kind of linguistic genius’, and he had gathered far more information in just two months than she would have managed when she was working there.48 Monica’s gender was to prove a disadvantage. Despite her greater experience as an ethnographer, once she was married, her status was diminished. There was the matter of money. She was no longer entitled to a full fieldwork allowance from the International African Institute (IAI) as she would have been had she followed her original plan to study independent Churches in South Africa,49 and Godfrey was forced to 46 47 48 49

Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’, 8, 13. Monica Wilson, Communal Rituals, 114–115. WC, B4.7, Godfrey Wilson Correspondence with Audrey Richards, Audrey Richards/ Godfrey Wilson, 13 Dec. 1938, ‘Back on the Rand’. Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson, ‘Bunyakyusa’, Hogsback, 4 Jan. 1982, CD in Manuscripts and Archives Department, UCT Libraries, my transcription (henceforth ‘Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa’).

142

Inside African Anthropology

write to the IAI to ask them to cover her travel and living expenses when they went to London for a six-month break from fieldwork in 1936. As Lyn Schumaker has noted, women anthropologists often found it difficult to get academic positions if they were married, and one wonders if Monica would have received any funds from the IAI at all, had she not already established a working relationship with them.50 As a wife, Monica now had housekeeping responsibilities. She later described a traditional division of roles in which Godfrey was oriented towards the outer world, and she inwards towards the home. Godfrey looked after the outside housekeeping, that is organising supplies coming in from elsewhere. I looked after the inside housekeeping – seeing to the cooking of the supplies that arrived. You had to be a reasonably good housekeeper, because if you ran out of a packet of matches it meant sending a messenger for 50 miles to buy some more matches.51

This inward and outward orientation was reflected in their fieldwork. While Godfrey often travelled around with his tent for days at a time, Monica seemed to have stayed closer to home, working with the clerk Leonard Mwaisumo or walking around the village and observing women as they went about their daily business. And as we will see, gendered values in Bunyakyusa made it easier for Godfrey to get to know his male informants than it was for Monica to become close to her female informants. Despite these differences, there were important values that Monica and Godfrey shared. Godfrey was influenced by R. H. Tawney’s Christian sociology52 – interested in, but never becoming a Marxist or member of the Communist Party. He developed what Richard Brown described as a dialectical approach to functionalism: a ‘marriage of Marx and Malinowski’.53 Monica’s upbringing at the relatively liberal Lovedale mission in South Africa included schooling with Xhosa children, and later her membership of the Labour Study Circle at Cambridge as an undergraduate underwrote her sympathy towards African nationalism and labour movements.54 From his very arrival in Africa, Godfrey showed an interest in race relations, wages and the standard of living of migrant workers. This was no doubt influenced by Monica’s greater experience of race relations in southern Africa, with the Lovedale mission so firmly set against the separation of Africans from Europeans. There were labour riots around the time of her fieldwork in East London,55 50 51 52 53 54 55

Lyn Schumaker, ‘Women in the Field in the Twentieth Century: Revolution, Involution, Devolution?’, 281. Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa. Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 59. Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule’, 195. See Chapter 1 in this volume. See Chapter 3.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

143

and she must have discussed labour conditions and wages with Godfrey, who recorded notes on wages and labour conditions in the mines and townships during a short tour of South Africa before travelling up to Bunyakyusa.56 To sum up: Monica’s familiarity with the African missionary landscape gave her a place, in contrast with Godfrey whose unfamiliarity allowed him to move about more freely. Monica was the more experienced ethnographer, but Godfrey’s linguistic skill gave him an advantage in language learning, often enabling him to establish close relationships with his informants quickly. Gender roles also inhibited Monica. As a married woman she was now more oriented towards the home and, as we will see in the next section, it was difficult for her to find a female role in Bunyakyusa culture that would be compatible with the role of a researcher. Certainly Monica does not seem to have produced as rich an archive of fieldnotes as Godfrey, whose Nyakyusa notebooks are full of the most intimate and revealing conversations. Mwaipaja and Kagile: A Participant and an Observer Anthropological fieldnotes reveal more than simply the data that are recorded during fieldwork. They offer clues to the fieldworker’s personality and fieldwork style.57 When Godfrey and Monica arrived in Bunyakyusa they were given Nyakyusa names by the chief Mwaipopo: Godfrey was named Mwaipaja, and Monica was Kagile.58 This signified a shift in identity from their British and South African origins to one with a ‘Nyakyusa’ inflection. Through a close reading of their fieldnotes and letters, we get a picture of the landscape they inhabited, the various personalities with whom they engaged, and the emergence of their very different fieldwork styles as ‘Godfrey’ and ‘Monica’ brought their differences in background, gender and personality to Bunyakyusa and its inhabitants. As they became part of the Nyakyusa local scene, Mwaipaja and Kagile emerged as complementary fieldworkers, with Mwaipaja the sociable participant and Kagile the more reserved observer. Between them they spent four years in the field, from August 1934 to January 1938. Megan Vaughan has described this region of Tanganyika as a ‘colonial fantasy land’. The lush green highland landscape was easily reshaped to European tastes, it could be ‘Scotland, Chamonix, Ireland’,59 and in the administrative centre Tukuyu one could live in 56 57 58 59

WC, A1.5, Godfrey Wilson, Personal Papers, ‘African Diary 1934–1935’. Lyn Schumaker, ‘The Director as Significant Other: Max Gluckman and Team Research at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute’ in Handler, ed., Significant Others, 91–130. It is not clear from the genealogies in the fieldnotes who Mwaipaja was. Kagile was Mwaipopo’s paternal aunt (Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa). Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 3.

144

Inside African Anthropology

a stone cottage with rosebushes on the lawn. The highland scene was dotted with European personalities such as the district officer Mr P. M. Huggins and his wife, Mr Eustice of the Tanganyika Agricultural Department, the Reverend and Mrs Marx of the Lutheran mission at Rungwe, and the officers of the King’s African Rifles in Masoko.60 From their base in Ilolo, Monica and Godfrey were able to spend weekends in Tukuyu, playing tennis and attending social events with Major Wells, a former district officer, and Mrs Wells, who kept a rest house and coffee plantation in Tukuyu.61 Godfrey had arrived in Bunyakyusa six months before Monica, setting things up, learning the language and preparing a vocabulary and grammar. He spent most of this time down in Mwaya on the lake shore. In February 1935 he travelled down to Hogsback, where they were married, returning to Bunyakyusa together in March. They spent the next six months mainly in Isumba (Selya), after which there was a five-month break in London, allowing them to write up and reflect on fieldnotes, for Godfrey to present papers at Malinowski’s seminars at the London School of Economics,62 and for Monica to work on the proofs of Reaction to Conquest. On their final return they resumed a period of intense research, and travelled to several different sites. There were two long stints in the highlands, in Ilolo near the Rungwe mission where they spent six months (September 1936 to February 1937), and five months back in Isumba (February to May 1937) where Godfrey worked on ritual with the rainmaker Kasitile. In early December 1936, Monica was invalided out of the field with malaria for six months, returning only in June 1937.63 Godfrey and Monica spent their last six months in the field moving around the country. They spent the month of June in the Lupa goldfields in Chunya, and moved from there to Karonga across the border of northern Nyasaland. From there they split up: Monica travelled to the Livingstonia mission and Godfrey returned to Rungwe. Godfrey then made a month-long trip down to Kilwa in the lake plain, where he visited the chief Korosso and then went by canoe to the Pali Kyala cave in the 60 61 62

63

Monica Wilson, Good Company, viii–ix. WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 23 Oct. 1936, ‘Near Rungwe’; Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa; Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 4. WC, C1 Malinowski seminars: notes on/papers presented for. The titles of his papers give a clear sense of his deep interest in the theoretical and methodological issues at the heart of Malinowski’s functionalist approach: ‘The function of law’ (10 March 1936), ‘Ten elements of social life: a suggested guide to research in the field’ (17 June 1936); ‘The nature of an institution’; ‘Paper defining various concepts: religion, religious and magical symbolism etc., necessary for an understanding of the connection between religion and society’. Monica must have travelled down towards the lake at some point or she would not have caught malaria. The highlands are far too cold and wet for malaria to be transmitted.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

145

north-east corner of the lake to investigate ritual. They ended with a final stop in Isumba. In an interview with Francis and Lindy Wilson in 1982, Monica described how she first flew to Bunyakyusa with Godfrey, from Johannesburg to Lusaka and then on to Mbeya in a ‘small aeroplane that bumped around the countryside’. From here they travelled over the pass at 2,400 metres to Tukuyu in an ‘Indian-owned truck’, which ‘slithered and skidded over the hills’. After resting in the guesthouse kept by Mrs Wells, they went by ‘foot safari’ for 24 kilometres to Masoko, the base camp for the King’s African Rifles station, where they spent the night. Megan Vaughan has described how at that time Europeans were often carried in ‘hammock-like devices, up and down the steep mountain ridges’, and of Monica’s relief that ‘she was fit and could walk because “it would be dreadful to be large and fat and have to be carried”’.64 Later, perhaps because her six months’ recovery from malaria had returned her to the field with warnings from her physician to take great care of her health, she was happy to be carried when she travelled to Karonga. My mode of transport here is a ‘bush car’ – a cross between a bath chair and a rickshaw pulled by one man and pushed by another. Quite comfortable and very efficient in flat country tho’ useless in the hills and when crossing rivers. The Faulds most kindly lent us one of theirs for the time we are about Karonga. It’s much lighter on carriers than a machilla and so I much prefer it – also one sees more than when lying in a hammock.65

This was a far cry from Monica’s first journey through Bunyakyusa. Monica remembered the extra 24 kilometres on foot from Masoko to Isumba, where Godfrey had established their household before leaving at the end of January 1935. With them were 20 porters, each with an 18-kilogram package. The heaviest items – sheets and notebooks – had been divided up to distribute the load evenly. And what did those packs contain? Godfrey itemised them in his notebook when they moved on to Rungwe: 1–3 Table and Chairs; 4–6 Bed and bed rests; 7–9 Tent; 10–14, 16, 19– 22 (M’s) Tin boxes; 15 Cartridges; 18 Medicines; 23 Box books; 25 Box (gramophone); 27–29 Cook’s box; 31–32, 37 Mats; 33 Pails; 34 Lantern; 35 Cameras; 36 Waterbottles; 38 Typewriter.66

In Isumba she was greeted by her new household – Alidi the cook, Leonard the clerk and Kabiki the houseman.67 A feast was prepared by the chief Mwaipopo’s wives, where Monica tasted the local beer for the 64 65 66 67

Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 9. WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 10 Aug. 1937, Karonga mission. WC, D1.1, Nyakyusa Research, Godfrey Wilson’s Notebooks, Notebook 32. Monica Wilson, Good Company, viii.

146

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 4.4. Inside the small house at Isumba that was their ‘principal headquarters’. Godfrey Wilson gave a brief account of its history: ‘Here in 1913 the Berlin Mission began a hospital station and completed one house before the outbreak of war. Then the work had to be abandoned . . . In this house, three miles from our single neighbour, we spent eight months in all, at various times.’68

first time: ‘the only criticism was that they said the level of beer didn’t go down when I sucked through my straw’. Her new home was a small brick house, abandoned during the First World War, which Godfrey had renovated for the sum of £10. It was close to the village, just 45 metres from the ‘native gardens’. The house (see Figure 4.4) must have had at least two rooms, with one bedroom facing over the Rift Valley. The sun rises are magnificent – every morning the whole sky over Nyasa and behind the Livingstones is ablaze. I sit up in bed and watch it. I hear Godfrey next door wrestling with the law governing the property rights of men and women . . . It takes time to work out all the details and check them and find how custom differs in pagan and Christian families.69

Monica was to work very closely with Leonard Mwaisumo in Isumba. As Peter Lekgoathi, Timothy Mwakasekele and Andrew Bank describe in Chapter 5 of this book, she depended on him as her teacher, interpreter and fellow researcher. No doubt he helped her get to grips with the voluminous notes on language that he and Godfrey had prepared. Isumba 68

69

Godfrey Wilson draft book on Nyakyusa society (WC D8.5) cited in Rui C. de N. Assubuji, ‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography: Monica Hunter Wilson’s Photographs in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa, 1931–1938’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010), 65. WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 3 Dec. 1937, [Isumba].

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

147

was where Godfrey established his closest relationships, in particular with Kasitile the rainmaker, and they had a ‘constant stream’ of visitors at their house for tea and shared meals. The other important site for their research, and for Monica in particular, was Ilolo at the Rungwe Moravian mission. This was at a much higher altitude. When they first arrived they must have stayed in a tent, as a notebook entry records a ‘Discussion between chief and 2 friends (stimulated by the sight of Kabiki and co. putting the fly on the tent) on the subject of “European times”)’.70 They found a more permanent residence ‘in the main thoroughfare of the village’ in a Nyakyusa-style house.71 Inside such a house there are normally three rooms: a ‘living room’ where a family eat at night and in winter, and two bedrooms to one side. One imagines that when Monica arrived, the domestic arrangements became more organised. There were no longer any entries in Godfrey’s notebooks about hunting for meat, or struggling to buy food from neighbours who were used only to exchanging it as gifts (upon which he could not rely for regular meals). As Monica recalled in her interview with Francis and Lindy Wilson, they kept hens and employed a messenger who went out to buy meat at the market at Tukuyu, vegetables from the missions, oranges from the lake shore, and wheat grown on top of the Livingstone Mountains that ‘was ground between two stones and we baked our own bread’. They bought honey and small quantities of coffee which, as Monica remembered, ‘was roasted and ground in the household and we had the most marvellous fragrant coffee to use’. Since Godfrey was often away during the day, and occasionally overnight, Monica had to learn the basics of Kinyakyusa fast, because ‘the cook couldn’t take orders from the clerk [and she had] to order the dinner’.72 Monica’s arrival signalled the resumption of intense fieldwork and the production of reams of fieldnotes. Reading through the notes, the influence of differences described in the previous section – in their training in anthropological methods, personality and gender – emerge unmistakably. Monica’s Cambridge training with Driberg and Hodson had oriented her towards an observation method. Godfrey entered the field fully informed by Malinowski’s method. Famously, Malinowski advocated leaving the verandah and living like ‘the natives’ and yet was, to say the least, ambiguous about the process.73 Godfrey was able to come 70 71 72 73

WC, D1.1, Notebook 33, 40. Monica Wilson, Good Company, vii. Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa. Malinowski’s diaries famously shocked anthropologists for they revealed much of his distaste for the Trobrianders, contradicting his advice to live like the ‘natives’. Bronislaw M. Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, trans. N. Guterman (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).

148

Inside African Anthropology

much closer to his teacher’s ‘mythic’ character.74 His notebooks give the overwhelming impression of a man who quickly slipped into local social life. His life was full of beer parties, sharing meals and confidences with other men. He did not need to compensate his informants for their conversation with tobacco as did Malinowski with the Trobrianders, or Evans-Pritchard with the Nuer, and indeed as Monica had done in Pondoland.75 This male world of ‘Good Company’, however, was not so easily accessible for Monica. She clearly found it much more difficult to gain entry to Nyakyusa women’s social lives. Without a ‘natural’ social space for herself, she seems to have spent a lot of her time with Leonard Mwaisumo ‘the clerk’, and gravitated towards more educated men and women around the missions. She ‘didn’t much like the beer which was made like tea with hot water’. Beerdrinking, which was such a central part of male social activity, became one of the obstacles that excluded her from many of Godfrey’s networks. In a brief revealing note in her ‘Economic Calendar’ she wrote, ‘April 4th. Beer at Mwaihojo’s. 8 men and me present. Evening. Drums going at two places: singing at a third’. That she felt out of place is evident in the ‘8 men and me’ comment. The brevity of this note is also revealing, given that Godfrey devoted six pages to the same event.76 As she explained, the women and men led very separate lives and it wasn’t easy for a woman to mix with a man who wasn’t part of her family and it became quite clear that it would be much more efficient for me to do most of my fieldwork among the women and Godfrey to do the greater part of the fieldwork among the men.77

This division of labour was not to be as convenient for Monica as for Godfrey. She complained that the Nyakyusa women were difficult to work with, because ‘they found it difficult to give an account of their customs’.78 Her description of Nyakyusa women is contradicted by the contemporary Tanzanian stereotype of them as strong-willed and ‘difficult’ for husbands to manage, but in the 1930s Monica was dismayed to find that they had little or no interest in politics (unlike women in Pondoland) and little autonomy. Furthermore, they were extremely subservient to men and would not speak in their presence.79 That being 74 75 76 77 78 79

George W. Stocking, Jnr, ed., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). Ibid., 102; Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), 12–13; Chapter 2 in this volume. WC, D1.1, Notebook 16, 2–4; 15–17. Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa. Monica Wilson, Good Company, ix. Since the fieldnotes are full of stories of women running away from their husbands and taking lovers, it is tempting to imagine there was another side to the image that Monica drew of Nyakyusa women.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

149

so, Monica could not possibly have performed the gender role of a Nyakyusa woman; she even ‘spoke Kinyakyusa like a man’ and it is plain to see that many women found it awkward to speak in her presence. Her main female Nyakyusa friend was ‘Maria the elder’, a literate Christian woman who used to travel widely proselytising for the Moravian Church. This must also have contributed to the difference in data that Monica gathered, with a greater emphasis on observation than on conversational familiarity. Putting these differences in orientation aside, there is rarely any hint in the archives that either Godfrey or Monica had such violent extremes of feeling towards the locals as did Malinowski. There are but a couple of exceptions, as in The Analysis of Social Change80 where they describe six days’ worth of drumming for a death ritual. They wrote that ‘to us the monotony became intolerable. By the end of the week we were remembering jobs that had to be done outside the village!’ And again on New Year’s Day in 1937, they are awakened in the night by a ‘[f]oul noise outside – drums and shouting’; but such complaints are rare.81 Johannes Fabian has written about Europeans’ objections to African music and ‘refusal to join the dance’, noting that such forms of ‘abstinence’ and ‘refusals of ecstatic experience’ can be construed as a kind of hygiene.82 Perhaps the drumming took participation a step too far for Monica and Godfrey’s Christian faith. In any case, the Wilsons had brought with them their own music to enjoy: ‘22 gramophone records packed among the clothes (all used) . . . 1 phonograph for recording Native songs, and 50 wax rolls for records in 2 wooden boxes.’83 This, as Monica was to record in a fieldnote, was to give their friends a glimpse into the world of Europeans, along with the desirable luxuries of evening dress and tennis so easily available to the Wilsons. Servants came in after supper saying: ‘People are talking about the gramophone here and we have not heard it.’ Two classical records played. Kabiki and Alidi began to discuss European ukumoga [dance]. Relate[d] to the admiring Timothe and Donald. Kabiki always let’s [sic] drop casually in 80

81 82

83

The Wilsons wrote the book to advise amateur anthropologists. These included other interested Europeans such as missionaries, colonial officials, farmers, housewives, all of whom has a vested interest in understanding local African cultures, and might be drawn in more systematically to the project of applied anthropology. Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change, 85–86; WC, D1.1, Notebook 45, 1 Jan. 1937. Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 2000), 109–118. WC, A1.15, Personal Papers, Godfrey Wilson: Invoices, correspondence re goods ordered, receipts etc, 1936–1944, ‘Customs Declaration’ of goods taken to Livingstone from Bunyakyusa, 1938. There are, sadly, no surviving records of recordings on these wax cylinders.

150

Inside African Anthropology

every conversation the fact that he has been to Cape Town. Very much man of the world. He mimics Europeans dancing and dance band[s] . . . Alidi tells of fancy dress, of tennis by night in Mombassa [sic], of fancy dress at which Major Wells appeared as an Ngoni warrior. Timothe and Donald agape. Kabiki ‘Tukuyu is just the back veld compared to Cape Town.’ Admiring comments on dance floors (ndisu) [lawn] and E. dress clothes. ‘Even if Mwaipaja dressed up in dress clothes you would not know him.’84

We get a glimpse of their daily notetaking practice in ‘The Study of African Society’. The emphasis there was on ‘facts’, best recorded as near as possible to the place where they were produced. Whenever possible notes should be made during a ceremony or during conversation with an informant. We ourselves often find it possible to take down long statements at the time they are made, when friends go slowly for us and pause while we write. Otherwise rough notes made at the time can be written up the same evening. And as far as possible statements should be taken down in the vernacular. They will ultimately have to be translated, but hasty translation inevitably means the loss of fine shades of meaning.85

The fieldnotes clearly illustrate their different styles. Godfrey’s notebooks are mostly much easier than Monica’s fieldnotes to mine for clues to the ‘story’ of their fieldwork. In addition to his ‘African Diary’, which he abandoned after Monica joined him in the field, there are 78 notebooks in all – numbered from 1 to 79 (12 is missing, apparently lost when he went to South Africa to get married).86 They are chronological, which immediately makes them more useful than Monica’s folders (ordered retrospectively by subject) for piecing together the sequence of events. Godfrey’s impossible handwriting, however, means that anyone working with them must make slow progress, although they are easier to read when he wrote in Kinyakyusa and took greater care.87 Sometimes Monica’s presence softly insinuates itself, with lightly pencilled ‘translations’ above indecipherable squiggles and scrawls. The notebooks are roughly A5 in size and reporter style, bound at the top. Godfrey would flip each page over, writing on only one side, which helpfully gave him space to add additional notes on the blank sides, perhaps when discussing the day’s events with Leonard or one of the other clerks. These extra notes often include new vocabulary, 84 85 86 87

WC, D4.2, Christian Amusements, dated 16 March [1935]. Thanks to Andrew Bank for the note from the archive. Godfrey Wilson and Monica Hunter, ‘The Study of African Society’, 15. Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa. A colleague looking over my shoulder asked if they were written in Arabic! Godfrey’s correspondents clearly shared this problem – in response to a fieldwork report, Malinowski complained, ‘I was able to decipher it not without some assistance from my staff of secretaries but at the end everything became clear, clean and transparent’ (WC, B4.4, B.M. Malinowski/Godfrey Wilson, [London], 20 Jan. 1935).

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

151

additional explanations, or information he had forgotten to record. The notebooks are numbered on the outer cover, usually with the date and place as well. Some, although not all, are indexed, and most of them have the page numbers written in by hand. Reading through them, different ‘scenes of writing’ as Clifford puts it, begin to distinguish themselves: most notably language learning; transcription of information dictated by informants; and inscription, when Godfrey turns from a social event and makes a note about the occasion.88 Less frequent are scenes of ‘thick description’, where Godfrey turns away from the field-site and reflects on his data. There are some notes recording reflective conversations with his informants, notably Leonard Mwaisumo, and there must have been discussions with Monica, but these are not recorded. Notes on language are prominent at the start of Godfrey’s fieldwork, and we can imagine Leonard and Godfrey working together through vocabulary and practising grammatical constructions. To begin with he writes out new vocabulary and sentences using the phonetic alphabet,89 but as he becomes more proficient he slips between this and use of other standardised symbols. Monica, arriving to find Godfrey’s dictionary and grammar already prepared for her, also used phonetic notation intermittently. Lists of new words are grouped in subject areas – parts of the body, animals, kinds of food – and there are lists of verbs, which are conjugated in example sentences. Although language learning dominates Godfrey’s first four notebooks, it continues to punctuate his later entries as he moves into a new area of inquiry or discovers another interesting grammatical point. The scale of his endeavour to command basic Kinyakyusa in the first month is occasionally revealed in lessons where he learns phrases such as ‘kisita kwi jola ukimana okokaba – without endeavour you cannot gain’90 and when he is learning to conjugate the verb ukufwan’a (to satisfy, or to comfort): ‘gafuan’aga lenga naman’ilaga amasyo gaga – I would be satisfied if I could learn these words’.91 His determination to learn Kinyakyusa and frustration at the process shows up in Notebook 4: ‘fikuti mman’ilege panandi mbusiku bosa – I must learn a little each day . . . naliganile ukuman’ila ikinyakyusa mbebembebe – I wish I could learn Kinyakyusa faster’.92

88

89 90 91 92

James Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’ in Roger Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 50. Leslie J. Bank expands on Clifford’s ‘scenes of writing’ in Chapter 3 of this volume. The advantage of the phonetic alphabet is that words are spelt according to the spoken sound, making it easier for a beginner to remember the correct pronunciation. Usually spelt ukukaba, but here Godfrey has substituted ‘o’ for ‘u’ in his use of the phonetic alphabet. WC, D1.1, Notebook 2, 12. Ibid., Notebook 4.

152

Inside African Anthropology

With language mastered, his fieldnotes richly combine transcriptions of narratives told by informants: complex genealogies, origin myths, tales of battles and explanations of custom. The final batch of fieldnotes are dominated by Kasitile, Godfrey’s main source on ‘pagan’ ritual. Interwoven with these transcribed pieces are other items that are much more revelatory of Godfrey’s place in the field setting, and of the social scene generally. These include diagrams, lists of participants at an event, short descriptions of emotions demonstrated by participants, and the occasional reference to material culture. These inscriptions often turn into transcriptions, in particular when visitors arrive in the evening or he goes to a beer drink. Conversations are recorded seemingly verbatim. These notes offer fascinating clues to the personalities of his almost exclusively male friends and informants, their personal troubles and conflicts, opinions on political change, and troubling moral issues of the time. Sometimes they slip into petitioning, and it becomes clear that people come to Godfrey hoping he will be able to intervene in some way, perhaps by putting in a word with Major Wells or some other influential European.93 Andrew Bank has noted the influence of Godfrey’s father, the Shakespearean scholar, in these notes,94 which are often composed like a scene from a play. New entries begin with a cast list, followed by dialogue in the form of direct quotations, complete with stage directions – ‘enter’, ‘exit’. Monica picks up this device in the chapter on Kasitile in Communal Rituals, listing the cast ‘dramatis personae’ and then scripting conversation between Godfrey and Kasitile as characters in a play. In contrast, Monica’s notes are much less verbal, more observational.95 She did not use notebooks but instead wrote on slips of paper that were later cut and filed into different folders under headings. This was a common mode of notetaking at the time because it lent itself so easily to later data analysis through ‘cut and paste’ techniques,96 although it must often have been unwieldy – it is easy to imagine loose pieces of paper being blown around in the wind of Bunyakyusa. Unlike Godfrey’s notes, not all of Monica’s are in longhand; many are typewritten and organised into tables and lists. It is in this way that Godfrey’s notes made their way into Monica’s own folders, as she typed them up, also on separate sheets of paper, and reorganised them alongside her own, under subject headings. Thus we can imagine Monica as a relatively quiet figure watching and listening in Bunyakyusa, less gregarious than her husband. There is a 93 94 95 96

Missionaries were also petitioned in this way; see Charsley, The Princes of Nyakyusa and Wright, German Missions. Andrew Bank, personal communication. This assessment is based on a very selective reading, as I have not read through all Monica’s folders as I have Godfrey’s fieldnotes. A. F. Robertson, personal communication.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

153

Figure 4.5. Monica observing Nyakyusa girls washing clothes at the river.97 This is most likely a scene dating to a September 1936 visit to a school which Megan Vaughan describes. ‘Monica went with the girls to the river where they pounded and scrubbed the boiled clothes and laid them out to dry. They took off the clothes they were wearing and washed them too with the school soap, and then washed themselves. The bathing took an hour and then they returned to the school, hung up their clothes to dry and sat down to eat the food they had all brought from their homes.’98

sense of anonymity in her notes. Godfrey usually knew the names of the people who appear in his notebooks, but Monica had a narrower range of informants who were also acquaintances. In an extract from September 1936, shortly after they returned from their break in London, we see that she spent the morning walking around Ilolo village to see what women were doing. Maria [the church elder] just come in from service 8am (sun rose 7am) Abombile already gone to forest to get poles for building ikibaga [hut]. 4 boys and 2 girls at home eating potatoes with mother. Mother goes off to fetch firewood.

97 98

WC, N11 Negatives of photographs taken in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa. Megan Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and others in south-west Tanganyika’, 13–14. Leonard Mwaisumo accompanied her on this school visit and it is therefore likely that he was the photographer.

154

Inside African Anthropology Next house, no adults One woman gone early to work w Marx [the Reverend Marx at the Lutheran mission]. Next house Man gone kumatapwa mmatengela [to get firewood] Woman gone to work in fields Next house Man hoeing maize w two friends Wife preparing food to take to men. porridge. Eat a little herself, gives a little to child, leaves porridge telling child it is for her later in day. Next house Woman away planting maize Man mending stockings Next house Woman going off w hollow tree trunk to leave in forest for bees. Next house woman gone for firewood. Many children at home. Girls up to c 10 years with babies.

There is a feeling of distance and impersonality to these notes. In a similar household survey, in Mwaya, Godfrey walks around the village and asks for all the names of those he talks to, and the others in the household as well. Monica is more interested in everyday activities: collecting firewood, making porridge, caring for babies, hoeing maize, mending stockings, and collecting bamboo poles for building. In other instances, Leonard Mwaisumo (‘L.’ in the notes) accompanies her. By now an experienced research assistant, he comments and instructs Monica on what she sees. Women’s work. April 30th [1935] Wife of [the chief] Mwaihojo making door of a hut, – c 2” thick, mud and dung. Pattern made with finger nails, mealy cob, or serrated piece of banana stalk. She has already filled the loft with very thick logs of wood – ornament and to use in emergency. Will make a work party to mud walls, – call her women friends. L. Making floor will take 3 to 4 days according to other work woman has to do. Will last 6 months, perhaps a year if very well done. – Not resmeared – only fill up cracks if they appear (N.B. floors seen all been damp.) Walls remudded several times during first three weeks, to fill up cracks – after that all right.99

The folder on ‘Family Economics’ has many such fragments. The overarching sense is that Leonard is there with her much of the time, pointing 99

WC, D5.1, Family Economics.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

155

things out, talking and explaining as perhaps two women (Monica and Mwaihojo’s wife) stand by and listen. Godfrey’s rapid entry into Nyakyusa society in Rungwe and the great intimacy he developed so quickly with his informants must surely be linked to his ability to learn Kinyakyusa. Monica was later to single out his linguistic ability100 and her knowledge of plants and gardening as a key difference in their fieldwork styles. Godfrey noticed grammatical constructions when people spoke,101 eventually identifying almost forty different tenses, and she noticed what was growing in the fields. July 14th. Saw castor oil plants w small berries growing near Mwaihojo’s. Small boy said they enyemba. Wild, but a variety w larger berry introduced by Europeans is planted. Banana grove of man who moved within the last year, almost disappeared. July 22nd. A few maize and beans near Rungwe but do not look so healthy – not nearly so many as in Selya. One small lot of maize in flower. Bananas scantier than in Selya. Much more rank grass than in Selya. Impression country much less heavily stocked. In Selya signs of erosion on hillsides. Probably due to non-contoured cultivation. Near Rungwe tree w red flowers like umsinisi in full bloom. In fields seen dry manure sprinkled on ridges. L says this done to keep cattle from straying on to them.102

‘A Sacred Trust and a Labour of Love’ Following Godfrey’s sudden death it fell to Monica to write up the product of their fieldwork. They had always planned to work on this together, and it seems that she continued in this spirit. This was to prove a lifetime’s work, and one which paid more tribute to Godfrey’s life than to her own. It is possible that Monica was unable to begin work on the Nyakyusa monographs until she was established as a lecturer at Fort Hare Native College, some ten years after she left Bunyakyusa. She makes reference to this project in a letter to Audrey Richards in which her struggle to keep up 100

101 102

When Godfrey started to learn ChiBemba for his work at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Audrey Richards wrote, ‘I think you must be a linguistic genius like Fortune, or I hope not so much like him. You probably beat me in Cibemba now, apart from having a more accurate ear and knowing when nouns are in the locative (I never knew there was a locative. Yes I suppose I did but kutontonkayaye!)’ (WC, B4.7, Audrey Richards/Godfrey Wilson, 13 Dec. 1938, ‘Back on the Rand’). By this stage he had been in Northern Rhodesia for ten months. Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’; Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa. WC, D5.1, Family Economics.

156

Inside African Anthropology

with the Nyakyusa writing becomes apparent, given her other responsibilities in teaching and administration.103 In 1946 she confided to Audrey that ‘I’ve been feeling depressed about my Nyakyusa work, for administrative jobs are swallowing a shocking amount of my time and I long to be getting on with Nyakyusa villages. Also I’ve been working slowly. “Leisure to write” looks like a will o’ the wisp always a year ahead.’104 It is clear from their plans that she and Godfrey intended to write up the Nyakyusa material together.105 Although the first articles came out as single-authored pieces, once they had left Bunyakyusa for the RLI co-authorship became increasingly important as their mode of writing. In 1939 Monica wrote to her father that ‘Godfrey is very anxious we should write together’.106 Until then Godfrey had been responsible for what Monica saw as the most ‘significant’ publications on the Nyakyusa, addressing age-villages, law, morality (witchcraft and magic) and politics. Indeed, ‘An African Christian Morality’ was the only Nyakyusa publication that Monica authored during this period. Her article addressed the changes to Nyakyusa values that conversion to Christianity had brought, including the shift from polygyny to monogamy, the effects of belief in Heaven and Hell in contrast to the ‘pagan’ beliefs in the ancestral lands of the ‘shades’, and the attribution of powers of the Nyakyusa curse ekegune to missionaries, Church officials and God. Her material is modestly framed although it does anticipate her and Godfrey’s later interests in social change, and it contrasts with many of her contemporaries who wrote in the ethnographic present. There are a few clues in the footnotes that she considered this piece as secondary to Godfrey’s publications: a note in the bibliography of Good Company does not include it among ‘the more substantial accounts of Nyakyusa-Ngonde people’;107 and a note in the article itself states that her work is framed by pieces already published by Godfrey, adding: ‘This article is complementary to these and is not fully intelligible apart from them.’108 In other publications, key findings are also attributed to Godfrey: in ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’ she writes, ‘It [organisation into age-villages] had not been noticed among the Nyakyusa before my husband went there’ (my emphasis).109 While Godfrey was alive, Monica continued to publish under her maiden name, Hunter, but after his death she changed to Wilson, even 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

This period is addressed by Se´an Morrow in Chapter 6 of this volume. WC, B6.14, Letters to and from Audrey Richards, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 14 Sept. 1946. Monica Wilson, Good Company, ix. WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, [Livingstone], 24 Feb. 1939. Monica Wilson, Good Company, 276. Hunter, ‘An African Christian Morality’, 266, footnote 1. Monica Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, 24.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

157

revising this in later bibliographies. Thus, ‘An African Christian Morality’ was attributed to Monica Hunter when it was originally published in Africa, but to Monica Wilson in the bibliography of Good Company.110 This shows a conscious decision to move from Hunter – by which she was already known for her Pondoland work – and an independent writing identity, to Wilson, the name signifying them as a couple who continued to produce together after Godfrey’s death. In 1940, when they were working on The Analysis of Social Change, Monica wrote to Audrey Richards, ‘I divide my time between Francis [Monica’s first son, born in Livingstone in 1939] and this theoretical stuff. Having something so very concrete as Francis to play with seems to make me somehow more capable of excursions in the air. Anyway I can’t get on properly with Nyakyusa writing until we’ve got the theory a bit clearer – fatal to contradict one’s husband’s pronouncements!’111 Her rather wry comment about her husband is good-humoured, with a sense that she was having to rein in some of Godfrey’s theoretical ideas. A new complementarity was developing, as Monica was pursuing the ‘facts’, to keep Godfrey’s ideas in check. I imagine Monica working in her study in the garden in Hogsback, transcribing Godfrey’s notes, working with material from these relatively untroubled years that they spent together, with Godfrey’s chair close by. She must have gained considerable comfort from reliving that period. Rereading fieldnotes can be a highly evocative experience, bringing you straight back to a moment in the field; you can hear the voices and see the facial expressions of the people present, picture the scene, the weather, the aromas, and recall the emotions and atmosphere of a particular event. It is therefore difficult to imagine anything other than that these 78 notebooks were a way of keeping in touch with Godfrey after his death. As her colleague and longtime friend, the anthropologist David HammondTooke, commented: The two books on ritual reflected Monica’s deep interest in religion. She was a committed Christian with a profound sense of the existence of an after-life . . . It was clear she felt Godfrey’s presence continually with her and that she regarded the writing up and publishing of the material they gathered together as a sacred trust and a labour of love.112

It is clear from letters she wrote towards the end of her life that she viewed the publication of his work as a kind of memorial, as well as an obligation. Her efforts to publish the Kinyakyusa dictionary express her 110 111 112

‘The Study of African Society’ was also attributed to Godfrey Wilson and Monica Hunter. WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, [Livingstone], 29 April 1940. Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 82–83.

158

Inside African Anthropology

loyalty to the last remnants of Godfrey’s data. As she put it, 37 years after his death, ‘I felt I owed it to Godfrey to get splendid material out.’113 Given her considerable responsibilities at Fort Hare, we must acknowledge the extraordinary task that Monica undertook in trying to ‘get [Godfrey’s work] out’. They had carried out a significant proportion of the fieldwork together. True, Godfrey had also spent a lot of time alone in the field, either when Monica was in South Africa or when he went off to work by himself, sometimes overnight. Yet Monica was able to bring to the writing her own fieldwork experience, her knowledge of Kinyakyusa, and familiarity with Godfrey’s interpretations and analyses from conversations in the field, letters while she was in South Africa, and afterwards when they were together at the RLI. One of the first tasks that Monica must have taken on was typing up all Godfrey’s 78 surviving notebooks. Assuming she was a fast typist and worked solidly, she could have typed up one notebook a day, which over a normal working week would have taken her about three months to do.114 With her other responsibilities – the children, her university work – it probably took much longer. Monica had already used a typewriter during her Pondoland work. It is tempting to connect her fondness for her typewriter, the use of these machines by anthropologists in order to ‘turn away from the scene of action’,115 with her cooler, more detached fieldwork style. Transcribing fieldnotes from handwritten notes to typed sheets is a process familiar to many anthropologists. For Monica an important aspect of this was what Clifford calls a ‘moment of ordering’. As she wrote to her father from London in 1936, she enjoyed the process. Getting rough notes into shape and finding out exactly what one knows and does not know takes a great deal of hard work. I find tabulating schemes neatly on the typewriter helps a lot and I can do duplicates (for G to have a copy of my notes on it). I am so grateful to you for giving me a typewriter and insisting that I learn properly!116

We can imagine that some of these tables were like those found in the back of the monographs; – in Good Company, for example, she tabulates five pages’ worth of characteristics of ‘Villages in Mwaipopo’s Chiefdom’ and 16 pages of ‘Misfortunes Attributed to Mystical Causes’. It is at this stage of ordering and tabulating that an anthropologist can get a sense of the scope of their data and draw out themes and patterns for further analysis. Because Monica included such tables in her published work, we 113 114 115 116

WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 12 February1981 [Hogsback]. I have based this estimate on the time it took me to transcribe Godfrey’s notebooks on a computer keyboard, but it must have taken longer on a heavy manual typewriter. Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 67. WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 26 March 1936, [London].

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

159

can also assume that she saw them as a vital source of evidence, backing up claims in the book. Thomas Hodson had advised Monica on the importance of collecting case studies as a form of evidence.117 The value she attached to this can be seen in her insistence on including almost a hundred pages of appendices devoted to case studies at the end of Good Company, and another 34 pages at the end of Rituals of Kinship. The case studies are attributed mainly either to Godfrey or the ‘clerks’ Leonard Mwaisumo, Timothy Mwanjesi and John Mwaikambo. Malinowski had emphasised the collection of native texts, and Godfrey transcribed these directly as informants dictated to him, or the clerks collected and wrote down case studies themselves. As Clifford describes, in the course of typing ‘the “facts” are selected, focused, initially interpreted, cleared up’.118 By comparing extracts from Monica’s typewritten sheets of Godfrey’s notes with his longhand originals, we can see how this happened. For Monica to put this vast quantity of rich material to use, there had to be some selection and ordering, but inevitably the immediacy of the social interaction and the uncertainty surrounding rituals were lost in the process. We can compare extracts from Monica’s folder ‘Death of Enesi’ and Godfrey’s account in Notebook 17, for example. Godfrey’s Notes Mwakyonde placed pot with medicines in cold water on ground by door, first drawing these lines and patterns and putting medicine fr the horn (ilipengo) on the centre. Made Mwani. stand i/on pot for 5 minutes holds on to roof. Before this Mwak. prepared medicines. ‘I have about 20 ifipiki here’ all roots and 2 kinds of spiny cactus. He cut roots up to length (2” – 3”) and put in water. He saved other bits and had them tied up again. His assistants there helping. First he put in a stone onto the pot (endeko then they cut up pieces of ifipiki). Then the cactus, piercing the narrow [one] onto a spine of the big leaf. (M thinks L protested at this and Mwan. said quickly ‘yes we want this’ ?offensive medicines?) Then he put in [pricks of medicines] fr 6 [plants] of embondanya. Mwal. [Mwalisisile] threw his weight about a lot, especially w Mwabelile. Mwaky. held out 1st [pl’t] to Mwan: and he took a piece and put it in pot. Mwal. looked at him reproachfully and said he shouldn’t have done it. Then he told Mwam. to do this always in an unintelligible way. Mwan. and L protested ‘we don’t know this work at all, please speak clearly.’119 117 118 119

See Chapter 1 in this collection. Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 63. WC, D1.1, Notebook 17, 76–77.

160

Inside African Anthropology

Monica’s Typed Transcription Mwakyonde placed pot with medicines in cold water on ground by door, first drawing these lines and patterns. Put about twenty roots and twigs into pot, mostly unrecognizable, but included spiny cactus.

We can see how Monica picks out what for her is the gist. She omits discussions between participants on how their work should be carried out and skips over the little controversy about whether the medicine should be prepared at all – this short conversation being part of a much larger one on the nature of burial and mourning that had been provoked by the influence of Christianity. The work of typing up Godfrey’s notes was thus more than mere transcription. It was an important stage in Monica’s analysis, involving the assimilation of his material, ordering and tabulating, and a process of decision making, tidying up, discarding some material and choosing others. The latter often had ‘used’ pencilled in the top corner of the page, the former being tagged ‘considered’. I guess that would have been a very personal process as well. The anthropologist Robert Smith has described how retyping someone else’s notes is a way of appropriating their field experience, making it your own.120 Transcribing Godfrey’s notes will have been, through Monica’s fingers on the typewriter, a mode of absorption, of remotely reliving his experiences and following him as he got to know different personalities in the field, listening in to his often very intimate conversations and tracing events as they unfolded. Coupled with the immediacy of his writing and Monica’s own friendships with his informants, this must have been a most evocative experience for her. Conclusion The Nyakyusa trilogy was written by Monica for Godfrey. In it she foregrounded his richer field material while minimising her own. This was perhaps at the expense of the analytical direction in which their partnership had been heading – the books emphasise the ethnographic present, and social change is added on almost as an afterthought. Reading the trilogy it is easy to overlook the labour that goes into turning fieldnotes into a written monograph. This was a work of almost half a century spanning the period 1934 to 1982. And yet it was work that was poignantly precious to Monica. Her time in Bunyakyusa with Godfrey must have been among her happiest. Godfrey was in his element, and this is reflected in his data. Monica, more reserved, complemented 120

Robert J. Smith, ‘Hearing Voices, Joining the Chorus: Appropriating Someone Else’s Fieldnotes’ in Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes, 363–4.

Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers

161

him perfectly. Together they overcame the anthropological contradiction within the method of participant observation. Her work of writing up the Nyakyusa trilogy must thus have been an exercise in nostalgia as well as an obligation she intended to honour. That she continued to return to Godfrey’s Nyakyusa material right up until her death in 1982 suggests that she hoped to find him in the notebooks and her memories. The reality of this is perhaps best rendered in a passage in a letter to Audrey Richards, who had returned some of Godfrey’s letters to her in 1977: His letters gave me the greatest pleasure, and also Francis and Timothy, who said they had never read a letter from him. Those to me were too intimate to show around, and they still hurt too much to go through. I loved him very deeply. The letters are fun for they tell so much about him and my mother. Yes, my mother was very beautiful, with great natural gaiety, and she and Godfrey got on splendidly. Neither her eyes (deep blue) nor Godfrey’s (lighter blue) have turned up again yet, but I keep hoping they may.121

121

WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 8 Oct. 1977 [Hogsback].

5

Working with the Wilsons: The Brief Career of a ‘Nyakyusa Clerk’ (1910–1938) Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Timothy Mwakasekele and Andrew Bank

Just as this book takes its general theme – ‘the interpreters’ – from Monica Wilson’s early attention to colonial intermediaries, so this chapter follows her interest in the ‘personal histories of native clerks’ in Central Africa. In the opening paragraph of a draft manuscript of the study on Nyakyusa Christians which Monica never published, she explained the origins of her research project and the general focus of her work: In 1933 it was suggested by the Directors of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures that an anthropological study should be made of Christian missions in an African community . . . [T]he method adopted is to describe the life of the Christian section of the community, to compare it with the pagan section, and to analyse the differences between them.

Her interest in ‘native clerks’, who were invariably converts, was a late outgrowth of this. In her final quarterly report to the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (which became known as the International African Institute (IAI)), written in October 1937, she wrote of an ‘investigation into the histories of clerks in Government service in Tukuyu district’, a branch of research which had possibly been prompted by the decision of Leonard Mwaisumo, their primary research assistant, to take up an appointment as a clerk of the highest native court, the appeal court of senior chiefs that sat some kilometres out of Tukuyu. Monica found that higher salaries and greater authority were the main reasons why such an occupation was highly coveted. Government clerkships are the best paid posts open to Africans in the country, and both clerks in the chiefs’ courts, and the clerks in the boma, who form as it were the ‘permanent civil service’ while district officers come and go, have very great influence on administration. Also, a clerkship is the only position in which a Christian commoner can share in administration in Bunyakyusa, because one of the chief functions of a ‘great commoner’ or councillor, is to protect the country from witches, and he must publically [sic] drink medicines to give him power to do this.1 1

WC, D11 Correspondence with the International African Institute [henceforth IAI], Monica Wilson’s quarterly report, n.d. [but probably Oct. 1937].

162

Working with the Wilsons

163

Her interest in ‘native clerks’, as in interpreters generally, has been taken up in recent scholarship. In their edited volume Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts explore the multiple and complex roles that African employees played in ways that unsettle the old binary of collaboration and resistance, or ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’. Although African employees in the colonial bureaucracy often may have occupied positions that bestowed little official authority, the authors argue that in practice [they] functioned, somewhat paradoxically, as the hidden linchpins of colonial rule. African colonial employees bridged the linguistic and cultural gaps that separated European colonial officials from subject populations by managing the collection and distribution of information, labour, and funds. These intermediaries, who were almost without exception male, influenced colonial rule because they shaped the interactions of subject populations with European officials. African intermediaries did so as they translated, mediated, and recorded those interactions. In executing their duties as official representatives of the colonial state, these African employees consequently blurred colonial dichotomies of European and African, white and black, ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’.2

While working in the lower ranks of the colonial bureaucracy, these African men were at the intersection of power, authority and knowledge. At the same time that they were delivering services to their European employers, they ‘often strategically used their influence and authority to enhance their personal wealth, political power, and status’.3 The essays in that volume document the life histories of African middlemen of two generations: the intermediaries of the period of conquest from 1870 to 1918, who were able to exercise considerable influence on colonial knowledge production; and the clerks of the 1921–1952 period, who had ‘some degree of formal, Western education’ but whose work was usually subject to ‘more sustained supervision’.4 Monica’s interest in career trajectories, ‘personal’ (or life) ‘histories’ collected on a case study basis has also been a theme in recent African historiography. As noted in the introductory chapter to this volume, Megan Vaughan has written about the work of Kenneth Mdala, a Nyasa clerk who worked in Tukuyu from 1916 to 1945 and remained a staunch British loyalist while passionately promoting his Yao ethnic identity through historical research.5 Roger Levine provides a book-length biography of 2 3 4 5

Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks, 4. Ibid., 3–36. Ibid., 30. Megan Vaughan, ‘Mr Mdala Writes to the Governor’, 171–189. See the Introduction in this volume for further discussion of the edited collection referred to above, Vaughan’s article and Levine’s biography of Jan Tzatzoe.

164

Inside African Anthropology

the life of Jan Tzatzoe, the son of a minor Xhosa chief, who imprinted his own theological readings on Biblical texts in his work as a translator with successive London Missionary Society missionaries on the Cape Colony’s eastern frontier during an earlier colonial period.6 The other emerging literature on which this essay draws is that on research assistants in the history of the social sciences in Africa, in particular, African anthropology. Although there has been a proliferation of literature on the fieldwork experiences of European anthropologists in colonial Africa,7 more work needs to be done on the biographies of African research assistants who played such a pivotal role at field-sites in translating local cultures and histories. Mostly multilingual, these assistants continued to be used by European anthropologists – as well as by missionaries and government researchers – even after their extended stays in Africa.8 It has become a clich´e among anthropologists to give symbolic recognition in the prefaces of their published monographs to those who contributed to their studies. Such fleeting acknowledgments do not begin to do justice to the key role that the assistants played in shaping cultural knowledge, let alone allow space for substantive explorations of the identities of the interpreters and their motivations in taking up employment as researchers. One of us (Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi) has written about the ‘native texts’ of African writers – here mostly schoolteachers – in the first half of the twentieth century who recorded oral histories and ‘folklore’ of the ‘Transvaal Ndebele’ as part of the wider ethnological research project of Nicholas van Warmelo of the Native Affairs Department in South Africa. These richly detailed texts were recorded in the dominant local African languages (including Northern Sotho) and fill some 11,500 manuscript pages.9 The emphasis was on the agency of these African recorders of folklore and oral history who, because of van Warmelo’s position as armchair ethnologist rather than anthropologist in the field, were able to exercise a considerable degree of control and authority over the way they chose to collect and record these materials, prompted only by the broad 6

7

8

9

Roger S. Levine, A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011). See, for example, Audrey Richards, ‘Monica Wilson: An Appreciation’, in Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 1–13. James G. Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants and “Tribal” Bodies in Colonial Tanganyika’, paper presented at the African Studies Association meeting, Chicago, 25 October 1998, 1, http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/∼ellison/bodies.html (accessed 10 January 2010). Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, ‘“Colonial” Experts, Local Interlocutors, Informants and the Making of an Archive of the “Transvaal Ndebele”, 1930–1989’, 61–80.

Working with the Wilsons

165

guidelines given in van Warmelo’s questionnaire. A reading of their data unsettles any overly simplistic image of van Warmelo’s research project as an ideological justification for apartheid, as this extensive cast of African knowledge producers were able to imprint their own constructions on the notions of tribe, custom and folklore in their work as researchers. Lekgoathi’s essay also explores the dual status of the authors of these vernacular texts as ‘insiders’ who had lived and grown up in the communities they were writing about, and ‘outsiders’ who had been schooled at missionary institutions and had taken on middle-class values that set them apart from their elderly interviewees. This chapter takes up the themes of the production of vernacular texts and the ambiguous insider-outsider status of the ethnological or anthropological research assistant. These two themes are also a subject of ongoing research by one of us (again, Lekgoathi), who is studying the complex career of Sophonia Poonyane, Isaac Schapera’s primary research assistant, informant and author of vernacular texts in Mochudi village in the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1930 to 1934.10 Sophonia appears as one of many characters in Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera by John Comaroff, Jean Comaroff and Deborah James, a volume that brings into focus many photographs in Schapera’s long-forgotten collection from his work in colonial Botswana.11 However, Lekgoathi’s work develops a fuller understanding of Sophonia’s biography and personal motivations, as well as the complex relationship and the influence he had on the white anthropologist as his ‘cultural commuter’.12 This it has in common with our current chapter. Where Elias Sethosa, C. M. Mokgohlwe and others emerge as authors but not as full personalities in Lekgoathi’s earlier research,13 Leonard Mwaisumo’s life story is of as much interest here as his dynamic work as a research assistant to the Wilsons. He was in this position from September 1934, when he was first employed by Godfrey as his language tutor, until November 1935, when he left to take up a position as a government clerk near Tukuyu. He has been chosen as our biographical subject because he recorded some seven hundred pages of vernacular text which, translated by one of us (Timothy Mwakasekele), can be read alongside the wealth of detailed information about him in the notebooks and African diary 10

11

12 13

Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, ‘Sophonia Poonyane and the Researches of Isaac Schapera in Colonial Botswana’, paper presented at the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom Biennial Conference, University of Oxford, September 2010. Comaroff, John L., Jean Comaroff and Deborah James, eds, Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), 110, Plate 3.11. Lekgoathi, ‘Sophonia Poonyane’. Lekgoathi, ‘Colonial Experts’.

166

Inside African Anthropology

of Godfrey Wilson and, to a lesser extent, in the fieldnotes and field reports of Monica Wilson. The record here is much richer than that on the Wilsons’ other primary research assistant in Bunyakyusa, John Brown Mwaikambo, both because Leonard Mwaisumo was involved in a more formative stage of learning about language and culture, and also because (the notebooks suggest) he was a much more assertive personality and presence in their fieldwork. Leonard Mwaisumo’s Early Years, 1910–1933 Glimpses into Leonard’s early life are captured in an important biographical text that he wrote in January 1935, five months after taking up employment as Godfrey Wilson’s research assistant. Godfrey was preparing to leave the field in late January to get married in South Africa and now, for the first time, encouraged his research assistant to record information in Kinyakyusa while he was away. Godfrey provided Leonard with one of the standard notebooks he had been using for his own record. From this notebook labelled ‘L1’, which begins with an account headed ‘Leonard Mwaisumo’s Personal Life’, several themes are revealed which profoundly shaped Leonard’s world. The first concerns his dual heritage as a pagan and a Christian. We learn that he was born around 1910 in the area of Selya.14 A genealogical diagram recorded by Monica in her early days in the field indicates that Leonard’s parents were ‘commoners’ and that he had three siblings: an elder brother and two sisters. His mother converted to Christianity around the time Leonard started teaching Godfrey Kinyakyusa.15 The rest of the family remained ‘pagan’.16 Linked to Leonard’s double heritage is the naming process, which has much to say about his changing identities. Leonard was just one of six names by which he had been known. He adopted this name at the age of about fourteen and recalls having come across it while reading a local Swahili newspaper.17 This is what Godfrey Wilson recorded of his succession of personal names, each of which relate to a change in his life history. I was (1) Podyali – ‘It has been here’ (2) Sagisan’a – ‘Put a second one on top’18 14

15 16 17 18

That Leonard Mwaisumo was a commoner is also stated by Monica in the acknowledgments for Good Company. She contrasts this with Mwaikambo’s status as son of a chief. Leonard’s approximate date of birth can be inferred from numerous references in Godfrey Wilson’s notebooks. In March 1935 Leonard is said to belong to the 25–28 year old age group (WC, D1.1, Notebook 15). A reference elsewhere to his having been ‘before puberty’ in the early 1920s suggests that he is more likely to have been around 25 than 28 in 1935. WC, D11, Monica Wilson/Dr Oldham of the IAI, 16 April 1935, Isumba. WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 1 (L1). Ibid. This may be a reference to his being the second son.

Working with the Wilsons

167

(1) from birth, I was given it after my birth (2) given me also by my parents, but later (as far as I can remember) and (2) was the one they used (and still people call me that) (3) Man’ogopa – I took this myself ‘I like it’; in about 1923 (?) before puberty (4) Matai (or Matadji) = Matthew – I took it myself – quite soon after (3) – when I went to school (school 1 Feb. 1924) (5) Tulinagwe – March 23 1928 was then baptized (6) When I went to Swahili school (Sept. 1924) I began to take the name Leonard. I heard the name from Mamboleo (the Swahili paper). Still [uses] both (5) and (6), but (5) began to fade in 1933. (1) and (5) must stay always; they are my names.19

While the different names that Leonard adopted at various times reflected his changing and overlapping identities, his conversion to Christianity did not signify a repudiation of his pagan background. In fact, Leonard was a pagan when he started school and, even though the school was run by missionaries, conversion was not a prerequisite.20 Not long after commencing with his schooling Leonard started contemplating conversion to Christianity. ‘By joining with the missionaries’, he believed, ‘I will have the opportunity to learn very quickly at school’. It was a decision he took for practical reasons to advance his educational ambitions. As he saw things then, ‘it was more difficult for those people or children who were not Christians to get a better education than those who had already registered with missionaries’.21 Leonard’s view of Christianity was therefore pragmatic. He saw the religion as a vehicle for accessing education and securing a place within the tiny but influential new African elite. Literacy and the ability to speak and write a European language (English in this case, but also a local language, Swahili) definitively set Leonard (and others in his class) apart. This opened up employment in the lower echelons of colonial government as a court interpreter (native clerk). Monica aptly captured some of the reasons that African converts in the Rungwe District gave for conversion to Christianity. One ambitious man I know well [Leonard] said that he had been baptised because he thought he would learn quicker in school if he were. He saw that those who were baptised learnt quickly. Baptism, he believed, gave greater power to learn. Another [said] that he had been baptised because he wanted to learn English, and the only school in the district which taught English at that time only admitted converts. Both men are now, I think, Christians for other reasons, but the initial impulse towards baptism was 19 20 21

WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson Notebook 1, 103–4. WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 1 (L1), ‘Leonard Mwaisumo’s Personal Life’, 1–16. Ibid.

168

Inside African Anthropology

given by the desire for education, and to many education is a tool for getting on in the European world.22

Leonard was a convert with an unusually liberal theology. Godfrey’s notebooks reveal that Leonard rejected the fire-and-brimstone version of Christianity espoused by many of the missionaries.23 His was a more generous and hybrid version of theology. ‘We Christians don’t fear the power of chiefs . . . I see some pagans as better in character than Christians.’ When asked by Godfrey how he had come to this view, Leonard explained: ‘No one taught me this. I thought about it and read the Bible.’ He later said that he believed in ‘eternal life’ but not ‘in hell’, and that we (‘I and other people like me’) ‘learnt this a little from the Gospel and Catechism (where it is written), but I have never heard it preached by a missionary or an elder . . . Myself I really learnt it from looking at people and their lives’.24 This rather remarkable and freethinking homespun combination of Christian conviction and lack of judgement of traditional culture made Leonard (fortuitously for the Wilsons) an ideal intermediary. He could serve not only to bridge the distance between them and their potential informants in his community, but as an informant himself with a personal history of living in one of the Christian communities being studied by Monica, as well as with a deep knowledge of the ‘pagan’ communities being studied by Godfrey. The third key theme that shaped Leonard’s life was his pursuit of literacy and multilingualism.25 This allowed for an unusual degree of mobility. He left home in the early 1920s and stayed with relatives in Mundamba village in the region of the small town of Ipinda whose location is shown in the map reproduced in the previous chapter (see Figure 4.3). This is where he started school. In 1926, when the British colonial government introduced a system of indirect rule in Tanganyika, Leonard stayed in Tukuyu for a month so that he could attend a Swahili school. When this failed to bear fruit, he left for the Itete District, where he lived with a relative for several months. This would have been within walking distance of the later Isumba field-site base of the Wilsons.26 On 23 March 1928 he registered at an informal Swahili school in Mwakyembe and in 22 23

24 25 26

WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson’s first quarterly report, 16 June 1935. A striking example of this theology of damnation features in a paper by Megan Vaughan that quotes from the sermon of a local evangelist: ‘God looks in your heart and your sin stinks before him . . . And he might come at any time to get you – 2 o’clock or 4 o’clock or at 8 in the evening, or even at 2 o’clock in the morning.’ Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others in South-West Tanganyika’, 16. WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 37. Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants’, 2. See Chapter 4.

Working with the Wilsons

169

early 1929 joined a formal Swahili school established by the Germans.27 This strong impulse for literacy facilitated Leonard’s mobility between different areas, which in turn enhanced his wider knowledge of other cultural groups in the region. Leonard narrates his efforts to get an education as a victory against the odds. Take, for example, his account of the creative ways in which he raised his own school fees, which included selling his most prized cloth, brewing beer, trading in honey, and growing and selling cabbages and potatoes to local whites.28 He recounts his short stint of two months spent as a labour migrant on the Lupa goldfields before resuming his studies in October 1929.29 Leonard then took a break of about two months at home in Selya before being offered a job as a teacher. After only four weeks he received a message that he had been accepted at a school in Tabora in the Rungwe District. He was at that school on and off until he completed Standard 7, a very high level of education for a young African man in this period.30 He was probably still in his early twenties when he started working as Godfrey’s language teacher in September 1934. What made Leonard such a suitable candidate for the position of research assistant was thus the combination of his dual identities, his literacy and multilingualism, and his knowledge of the world beyond his home district of Selya. It is to his relationship with the Wilsons and his little-known contribution to their researches that we now turn. Working with Godfrey, September 1934–January 1935 Godfrey’s early fieldnotes and a diary he recorded during his first four months in the field provide an unusually vivid source of information about his collaboration with Leonard Mwaisumo. Two days after arriving in Tukuyu he engaged Leonard as his language teacher along with Alidi, a

27

28 29 30

The Germans had long followed a policy of promoting Swahili rather than German among their converts, with all new missionaries having to take a Swahili language course. One of the missionaries was Oscar Gemeseus, who would have been Leonard’s teacher at Rungwe Mission School in the late 1920s. He returned to the mission in 1925 and would remain there after the Wilsons had left, having been appointed bishop in 1933. Gemeseus was the leading figure of the ‘German restoration’, the return of the German missionaries to Tanganyika in the mid-1920s after their expulsion at the end of the First World War. He explained their reasons for promoting Swahili as follows: ‘We were all fully convinced that it was our duty to keep the natives in their own nationality as much as possible; to deliver to them a genuine and adequate knowledge of Christian life, and to prevent with all means to breed a kind of black European. Therefore we preferred Swahili, as an African language, to German, and had good experiences with it.’ Marcia Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika, 1891–1941: Lutherans and Moravians in the Southern Highlands (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 126, 159–180. WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 1 (L1), ‘Leonard Mwaisumo’s Personal Life’. Ibid. Ibid.

170

Inside African Anthropology

Yao man from Northern Rhodesia, as his cook. Godfrey stated in his first report to the Rockefeller Foundation, ‘I engaged an interpreter at once and spent a month in Tukuyu learning the language’.31 Given that Godfrey had no published grammar or dictionary to work from, Leonard’s services as a language teacher were indispensable. Godfrey’s ‘African diary’ reveals that Leonard gave him daily lessons except on Sundays. Many of the daily entries simply read: ‘Language with L. – fine.’32 A working dictionary entitled ‘Nyakyusa Research Vocabulary’ indicates the kind of subjects they collected information on in the early months. These included domestic and basic conversational topics (‘Once, Twice etc.’, ‘Food and Cooking’, ‘Parts of Body’), anthropological topics of the day (‘Tenure of land’, ‘Values’, ‘Proverbs’), but also themes that expressed their common biblical interest like ‘Words I Don’t Know in Old Testament’. The sense of a shared masculine space of conversation that Rebecca Marsland refers to in Chapter 4 was evident from the outset. This was expressed, for example, in the open and explicit vocabulary Godfrey recorded under the heading ‘Sex and Child Birth’: ‘to copulate, to menstruate, the penis is erect, region of sexual organs, buttocks, testicles, pubic hair, clitoris, vagina (word only used by women – L. He would not speak it but wrote it down)’.33 This was a dialogue and the sense of curiosity was mutual. When Godfrey began to establish a system for classifying Kinyakyusa grammatical forms in early December, Leonard is quoted as saying: ‘None ever at any of the schools made me think about Kinyakyusa grammar at all. I’d never thought about these things before.’34 Other notes suggest that Leonard had an interest in grammar even before he worked daily with a man who was a highly talented linguist.35 When Godfrey and Leonard attended the funeral of one of Leonard’s relatives in April 1935, Godfrey provided a record that captures something of the spirit of the male bond of sociability that the two were able to establish, and reveals that Leonard’s interest in books went beyond his role as an assistant to an eager young anthropologist: Two assistants and the old man did most of the drinking. Ngemela, L. and I helped. One of the assistants had brought tobacco and wanted paper for wrapping. L. provided an old English exercise book from Rungwe. He [L.] refused my offer of paper, but read it [his old exercise book] all greedily before giving a couple of pages. ‘I don’t like to lose it. I have forgotten some of it now (it was English grammar).’36 31 32 33 34 35 36

WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Godfrey Wilson/Rockefeller Foundation Offices, Paris, 9 Jan. 1936. WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, ‘African Diary 1934–1935’. WC, Godfrey Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Research Vocabulary’. WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 10, 83, 93. On Godfrey as linguist, see Chapter 4 in this volume. WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 17, 70–71.

Working with the Wilsons

171

Figure 5.1. Leonard Mwaisumo with his mother and two sisters, 24 September 1934.37

Leonard was also, of course, Godfrey’s translator when they went visiting informants or friends. On 24 September 1934 Godfrey recorded, ‘We (L and I) went to visit his mother who asked me to stay’.38 Godfrey took several photographs of Leonard and his family including that reproduced above (Figure 5.1). At this point Leonard’s position was probably beginning to shift from just being a language teacher to being an interpreter. On 4 October 1934 Godfrey, accompanied by Leonard (and possibly by other employees as well, including porters and a cook), began the journey from Tukuyu on foot down to the shore of Lake Nyasa. The road ended at Tukuyu. They went past local places such as Muselela, where Godfrey read the former district administrator Major Wells’s old records and tasted some new local foods that he pronounced as ‘pleasing’. (He also shot pigeons and partridges.) At Ipande (today’s 37

38

The photograph was taken by Godfrey Wilson during his first month in the field. He recorded in his ‘African diary’: ‘Monday 24 [Sept. 1934] Language with L. Visited his mother + sisters (Kiponsa and Isumo or Enesi) at . . . the home where L. is staying.’ (WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, African Diary, 1934–1935). The occasion seemingly corresponds to the following entry in his second notebook. We have added just the names of the speakers. ‘[Godfrey Wilson] Okewega bole lenga nogkewga ikifwani? How if I take you, your reflection? i.e. photograph. [Leonard Mwaisumo] Ukahi ba = You have been quick!’ (WC, D1.1, Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 2). D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 1, 97.

172

Inside African Anthropology

Ipinda) he met with Mwalatunda, the son of the local chief.39 He later reported, For six weeks after I reached Mwaya [at the coast], I carried out my investigation entirely through an interpreter. After that I made myself talk the language, keeping the interpreter in the background to help me over difficulties. It was five months altogether before I could dispense with him.40

In only six months he was in a position to do the work of translation himself. ‘14/3/35 Conversation with Mwaihojo [the local chief] and his friends at Isumba. Missed a little as I was interpreting for myself, not much.’41 Leonard took on many other roles in these conversations. He would frequently comment on recently conducted interviews, usually in relation to the accuracy or falsehood of a given informant’s testimony. On 18 October 1934 Godfrey wrote down Leonard’s comment that ‘Mwalisisile is hiding something’, and then ‘L’s comment – Don’t believe. It is never done . . . ’42 Leonard would often add asides in the midst of interviews. Godfrey would typically record ‘L. explains’ or just quote L. as in ‘this is the custom always (L.)’. Significantly, he also took on the role of interviewer and Vaughan’s description of him as ‘an (indigenous) anthropologist’ certainly does seem apposite.43 We cite just two of many examples. ‘Interview with Mwangulile and Paoli [young men] . . . L. asked are you not BaMwela?’44 After hearing evidence of Chief Mwaipopo’s hostility to Germans, he asked, ‘Why then do some people say we liked the Germans?’45 The age, sex and status of the interviewees would have had an influence on his role as questioner in interview situations. Leonard’s familiarity with the local terrain enabled him to serve as a guide on what Godfrey termed ‘safaris’. We should recall that throughout his school years he was constantly on the move and his short stint at the Lupa goldfields had brought him into direct contact with a range of migrants and cultural groups. Leonard also served as a tutor of cultural etiquette. On 10 October 1934 Leonard accompanied Godfrey from Ipinda to Mwali. They arrived at ten thirty in the morning. Godfrey recorded in his diary: Food showered on me – bullock, bananas, fruit, eggs, chicken . . . When I arrived and all was set in the clearing under the trees, L. said, ‘see Mwali 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

WC, D11 Correspondence with IAI, Godfrey Wilson/Rockefeller Foundation Offices, Paris, 9 Jan. 1936. Ibid. WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 13, 74. WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, ‘African Diary 1934’. Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 14. WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 6, 21. Ibid., Notebook 16.

Working with the Wilsons

173

[shortened version of the name of the local chief Mwalisisile] won’t wish to greet you . . . They can’t . . . [illegible] + greet you. It is not the custom.’ So I went to them where they sat just among the bananas crouching to greet me. All women crouch to greet men. And often a young man will crouch to greet a chief.46

In Nyakyusa society, giving and receiving presents was an essential part of every social relationship. Refusing a gift implied that one wanted to break off all friendly relations. It would take someone who was a cultural insider at some level to interpret such nuances and Leonard clearly fulfilled that role. But in other ways Leonard was an outsider. The fact that he identified the Mwali people as ‘they’ implies that he viewed himself as a cultural outsider, as a native of Selya and a Christian who saw ‘their’ customs as different from his own. In his own notebook record, which we explore in detail later, Leonard placed strong emphasis on the importance of local identities in making distinctions between the customs [ikikolo] of the various cultural groups living in Selya, Kukwe, Ngonde, or the groups referred to as Penja, Kinga, Ndali, Lambya, Lugulu, Bembe, Gogo, Hehe, Nyika, Nyamwezi, Yao and others. Contrary to what the anthropologist James Ellison argues, the Wilsons did pay close attention to his emphasis on the importance of local rather than wider ‘tribal’ identities.47 Leonard’s contribution as an informant is the aspect of his anthropological work that has been least appreciated, even in the relatively generous acknowledgment of his work in the preface to Monica’s Good Company. Before the rainmaker Kasitile became Godfrey’s main informant about ‘pagan’ rituals from around June 1935, it was Leonard who was Godfrey’s, and then Godfrey and Monica’s, most trusted informant about Nyakyusa culture. Even the most casual reading of Godfrey’s notebook record, and to a lesser extent of Monica’s fieldnotes, reveals that he provided substantial amounts of rich ethnographic data. He is far and away the most significant other in these records. In fact, his notebook presence far eclipses that of Monica herself (who features only in occasional asides from March 1935 onwards) and certainly contrasts markedly with the muted presence of their second main research assistant, John Brown Mwaikambo, in Godfrey’s later notebooks. 46 47

WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, ‘African Diary 1934’. James Ellison argues that the Wilsons should have paid closer attention to the local variations in cultural practices that their research assistants were more fully attuned to, and recorded in some details in their own notebooks. Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants’, 6–7; James G. Ellison, ‘Transforming Obligations, Performing Identity: Making the Nyakyusa in a Colonial Context’, Introduction (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Florida, 1999). But as Rebecca Marsland emphasises in Chapter 4, the published monographs do take regional and local variation into account. Monica’s detailed descriptions of the distinctions between ‘rituals of kinship’ in Selya and Kukwe are a notable example of this. See Monica Wilson, Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957).

174

Inside African Anthropology

Leonard told Godfrey about sexual practices, material culture from building to pot-making with performative demonstrations at each point, traditional stories and folktales. He would later give Monica detailed information about crops, drawing on his experience of farming in his teenage years. He appears to have shared with Monica a genuine interest in agriculture and botany. As we shall see, he also served as her guide and a main informant in her work on churches and Christian communities. The data gleaned in conversations with Leonard did make its way into the published monographs but sometimes without direct acknowledgment. He is identified as the author of detailed commentaries on witchcraft that feature in the ‘Selected Documents’ in the appendix to the first book in the Trilogy, but his accounts of boys’ villages which provide the theme and subtitle for Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (1951), his information about Nyakyusa moral values that features at chapter length in that study, about Nyakyusa mythology addressed in Rituals of Kinship of the Nyakyusa (1956), and rainmaking and communal life discussed in Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (1959) – were equally crucial, but are much more difficult to track from the field to the published text. In October 1934 Leonard told Godfrey stories and folktales and provided material on kinship. The following month Godfrey wrote of ‘Cogitations with L.’ on religion and missionaries. In January 1935 Leonard supplied him with information on the ‘sacred grove’ at Lubago and the chiefly lineages associated with the road to Lwembe, and about rainmakers and rain-stones. Significantly, it was Leonard who introduced Godfrey to the rainmaker Kasitile and filled in important background details about him in January 1935.48 What of the more affective aspects of the relationship between Godfrey and Leonard? The texts provide much evidence of a bond between the two men that went far beyond their formal relationship as employer and employee. We can see this, for example, in Godfrey’s brief record: ‘When I was sick, L. came and talked in English.’49 A later notebook entry about witchcraft provides a glimpse of the bond that had formed between these two young men over the preceding months. The scripting is from Godfrey, son of a Shakespearean scholar, and there is a sense of ease and lightness in the conversation. G– L–

48 49

Why are people shy of talking about obolosi [witchcraft] to me? Is it because I am a stranger or because I am a European? It is because you are a European. I would be shy of talking to a Henga about it, but much more shy of speaking to a European about it . . . Obolosi is a thing we speak about among ourselves.

WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 11, 44. Ibid., Notebook 10, 79.

Working with the Wilsons

175

To strangers and especially to Europeans we only speak what is necessary. G – Some people think we [he and Monica] are abalosi ourselves! L – (Laughed heartily and then said seriously) But they do say on the Lupa that if a man, a European, finds a large nugget of gold he always dies, is this not so? G – No, probably he dies of drinking too much whiskey . . . L – Oh, in that case (seriously and reflectively). But then they say that the African who finds the nugget too is killed – you see the one who finds it gets a reward. If a big nugget he gets 100/-; and there is a boy who has just died. He found a big nugget, but he was working with a gang all together, and the others said, ‘We all saw it too. We will divide the “prize” between us.’ So they went to the European and he decided to give the 100/- to the boy who’d actually found it, and 90/- to be divided amongst all the rest. They each got about 6/- I heard. Then the boy started home with his 100/- and on the way he died. What about that? G – Perhaps fear killed him – my psychologists believe that fear can make a man sick or die. L – (Happily) Yes, I see, perhaps it was that.50 We also see, in Leonard’s own notebook record about sex, expressions of the degree of openness between the two men. We have already noted their early collaborative work in recording vocabulary relating to sex. Leonard’s texts, which we analyse much more fully in a later section, provide detailed and explicit information for Godfrey about Nyakyusa sexual practices. For example, he wrote: ‘Linga unkikulu akanile ukusanuka linga mulipakubomba imbombo, kabuki kukubabula abakamwana bako ukuti syesi umwaninu ikumbombele’ (If your wife refuses to turn around during sexual intercourse, or refuses to have sex from the back, you may go and inform your in-laws about what their daughter does to you). Leonard also wrote about the usually taboo subject of ‘ukugonana mbunyambala’ (homosexuality) among young boys. He began by noting that homosexuality was not permitted in traditional Nyakyusa culture and that young boys could be expelled from their families if they were found to engage in such practices. However, he claimed that many young boys did experience homosexual sex, especially when they were out tending cattle. They would learn by watching bulls mating with females and then would start to practise themselves by asking their friends whether they wanted to copy this behaviour.51 50 51

Ibid., Notebook 23, July 1935, 94–97. WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo, Notebooks 4 and 5 (L4 and L5). The translation of Kinyakyusa into English is our own (Timothy Mwakasekele). For evidence of Godfrey’s equally explicit discussions with the rainmaker Kasitile about sex, though not about homosexuality, see Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 16–17, where Kasitile talks

176

Inside African Anthropology

Leonard appears passionate and energetic in his work. He was educated and ‘ambitious’ (in Monica’s view), so working for an anthropologist offered the potential for social mobility which, as we have seen, he eagerly seized. He was also not as well off as his successor, John Brown Mwaikambo, and financial considerations were undoubtedly important. Leonard was one of four assistants employed by Godfrey in the early months. He was paid 30 shillings per month, as opposed to the 33 shillings a month paid to the cook Alidi, the 25 shillings paid to the domestic worker Kabiki and the 12 shillings paid to the messenger named Timothy.52 There is, however, firm evidence of Leonard’s genuine interest in learning for its own sake, quite apart from the salary it could bring or the opportunities it might offer for social mobility. Godfrey recorded at one point that Leonard ‘has read the book of MacKenzie’, referring to The Spirit-Ridden Konde, the standard ethnological text on the region that had been published in 1925 by this Scottish missionary.53 It is possible that Leonard owned a copy. Godfrey noted during a visit to Leonard’s brother Mwambelile that this was where ‘L. keeps his books’.54 Monica wrote of their visit in April 1935 to a preacher at the Kabembe mission station who lived in a square modern house with a verandah, a bicycle strung from the roof, photographs on the walls, a treadle sewing machine on a table and European trees and flowers in his garden. ‘Two copies of Swahili paper lying about. Leonard immediately pounced on them and began reading.’55 Later references suggest that Leonard liked writing letters and that he used a mix of Swahili, Kinyakyusa and English when writing to friends.56

52 53

54 55 56

of a man’s right to beat his wife if she does not agree to have sex, and asks Godfrey how Europeans like himself would handle this kind of difficulty. WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, ‘African Diary 1934–1935’. WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 7, 2. The reference is to David R. Mackenzie, The Spirit-Ridden Konde: A Record of the Interesting but Steadily Vanishing Customs & Ideas Gathered during Twenty-Four Years’ Residence among These Shy Inhabitants of the Lake Nyasa Region, from Witch Doctors, Diviners, Hunters, Fishers & Every Native Source (London: Seeley, Service, 1925). Mackenzie was one of the most influential evangelists in the region and was known to many of the Wilsons’ informants. In fact, Godfrey and Monica had made a special trip to Aberdeen in 1933 to visit Mackenzie and his wife in order to get background information about the peoples and cultural practices of south-west Tanganyika while planning their fieldwork. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Bunyakyusa’. WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 7, 30. WC, D4.2 Monica Wilson Nyakyusa fieldnotes, Folder headed ‘Christian Amusements’, typed note headed ‘21/4/35 Lunch with Asagene’. A cluster of letters written to the Wilsons in Kinyakyusa, but almost all addressed to ‘Mwaipaja’ [Godfrey’s Kinyakyusa name] confirms that a culture of letter writing had begun to develop in the region (WC, D10, ‘Letters to Godfrey Wilson mostly in Nyakyusa, 1934–1939 including from John Mwaikambo, Timothy Mwanjisi, W. Ambilikile Mwaisemba and T. L. Mwaisumo’). On the culture of letters and ‘tin-trunk

Working with the Wilsons

177

Working with Monica, March–November 1935 At the end of January 1935 Godfrey interrupted his fieldwork in Bunyakyusa, where he had spent the past months, and travelled to South Africa to marry Monica Hunter at St Patrick’s-on-the-Hill in the Hogsback near Alice, Eastern Cape. After a honeymoon in the Drakensberg the newlyweds flew to Mbeya to start their collaborative anthropological research in the first week of March 1935. While Godfrey was to concentrate on Nyakyusa men and ‘pagan’ customs, Monica would focus on the women and the Christian community. As indicated in the previous chapter, the nature of Nyakyusa society dictated that Godfrey should focus mainly on men while Monica worked with women. She later recalled that ‘the women and men led very separate lives and it wasn’t easy for a woman to mix with a man who wasn’t part of her family, and it became quite clear that it would be much more efficient for me to do most of my fieldwork among the women and Godfrey to do the greater part of the fieldwork among the men’.57 Their arrival signalled the continuation of the intense fieldwork among the Nyakyusa that Godfrey had begun. For Monica it was a new fieldsite after the late stages of completing her Pondoland study. This new research entailed making a broad comparison between Christian and pagan life and observing where conversion and membership of a Church entails fundamental changes in behaviour. In order to make any headway in this new area, however, she needed to immerse herself in the local language first, and again the task fell on Leonard’s shoulders. His role as her language teacher commenced as soon as they had set up their base camp at Isumba in March. This was the research site where they spent most of their first six months in the field. Leonard and Monica had the advantage of being able to work with Godfrey’s vocabulary and grammar. In an interview with her son Francis and his wife Lindy in January 1982 (the year she died), Monica recalled the significance of the ‘clerk’ as a key member of her household besides the cook, the houseman and the ‘tweeny’ (the drawer of water and firewood). ‘My first job was to learn the language, because until I could talk [Kinyakyusa] I could talk to nobody except Godfrey and the clerk [Leonard] . . . And nobody else spoke any second language except Swahili.’58 The learning process proved to be rather slower and more cumbersome than in Godfrey’s case in spite of the language notes. That Leonard was at the core of this enterprise is revealed in her first report to the IAI, submitted three months after her

57 58

literacy’ in Africa in this period, see Karin Barber, ed, Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and the Making of the Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). Monica Wilson interview: ‘Bunyakyusa’. Ibid.

178

Inside African Anthropology

arrival in Bunyakyusa. ‘Up till now I have been giving the bulk of my time to language, working at texts, on different aspects of the culture written by one very competent interpreter, conversing with this interpreter and with visitors, studying grammar, concentrating attention on language when going about the villages with the interpreter.’59 As the above quotes suggest, Leonard was more than a language teacher: he was just about the only other person besides Godfrey with whom Monica could communicate in the early days. Leonard could speak good English, given his level of education, and he was an invaluable companion: her conversations with him facilitated the difficult process of cultural adjustment. Godfrey often went off without her to conduct research in remote places. Monica confessed that ‘quite often he was away for a night or more and I had nobody to talk to except the clerk’. There were certain situations in which his assistance as interpreter was less helpful than in others. Monica was responsible for housekeeping. This included taking charge of the domestic servants. She recalls that Alidi, their Yao cook who was paid a higher wage than Leonard, ‘refused to take any orders from the clerk. So I quickly had to learn enough Kinyakyusa, at least to order the dinner’. In interviews with Nyakyusa women, Leonard was of less assistance than he had been in the interviews he had done with the Nyakyusa men who formed the vast majority of Godfrey’s informants. Monica recalled that ‘the women wouldn’t talk when the men were there, certainly not when the clerk was there’.60 To manage both her domestic sphere and her ethnographic research effectively, she had to learn the language quickly. Leonard continued to be a pivotal figure in teaching her the language. He had regular language lessons with her and spent quite a lot of time working with her on vocabulary. And, as we have mentioned, she could use the language notes which Godfrey had compiled on his first field trip – the same notes that the adjunct district officer, one of the many government officials that the Wilsons had known in Isumba, was keen to borrow after learning of their existence.61 A letter Monica wrote to her informal mentor, Winifred Hoernl´e, in May 1935 gives a candid account of her struggles with the language and her degree of reliance on Leonard in the early months. Godfrey is getting ahead fast now that he has the language. I have been concentrating on language, and can read texts, and understand quite a lot now; conversation is just beginning to come. Many roots are similar to 59 60 61

WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson’s first quarterly report, 16 June 1935. Monica Wilson interview: ‘Bunyakyusa’. WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson’s first quarterly report, 16 June 1935.

Working with the Wilsons

179

Xhosa roots and that makes it easier to understand, but when apparently similar verb forms turn up with different meanings speech is difficult. Godfrey has found over seventy tenses and a new one appears every two or three days – the table is somewhat alarming to the beginner! We have a very efficient clerk who writes texts, and is teaching me. He and his wife and mother are Christian, the rest of his family pagan. Through him I am getting to know about mission contact.62

Where Leonard features primarily as a fellow conversationalist in Godfrey’s record, or perhaps even fellow ethnographer, he appears mainly as a kind of all-purpose guide in the notes of Monica Wilson, a role analogous to that performed by Michael Geza during her earlier work in Eastern Pondoland. One important difference, however, was that in Bunyakyusa she was still almost entirely dependent on her guide’s language skills. In April and May 1935 we read of Leonard taking Monica on tours of the local schools in the Isumba region. Her fieldnotes reveal that he was constantly explaining how things worked based on personal experience and insider knowledge. ‘Visit to school. 1st April 1935, tumbled down, 17 boys, 13 girls, learning letters. Boys using Swahili reading book. L. says no roll kept . . . L. says teachers getting no pay now.’ Later she recorded: ‘Kabembe school, May 24. Senior class. L. says all would be in standard I if went to Rungwe . . . Kinyakyusa New Testament [read] aloud. Teacher chooses pages – L. . . . Kinyakyusa riddles not seen before by him. “Thinks it is a way of making children think” – L.’63 He also accompanied her to church services and explained aspects of the Christian rituals to her. Under a subheading ‘Leonard. Christian death ceremonies’, we read ‘L. says Christians talk of not weeping too much at funerals.’64 Monica attended the funeral of Leonard’s sister Enesi (see Figure 5.1 above) and later that of one of Leonard’s nephews. She reported on the conflicts associated with ‘the opening of the bodies of the deceased to discover the cause of death, consultation with diviners, and the drinking of medicine as protection against sorcery, and against the anger of neighbours over the failure to fulfil a kinship obligation.’65 62 63 64

65

WC D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Mrs Hoernl´e, 9 May 1935, Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika. WC, D4.7, Monica Wilson Nyakyusa fieldnotes, Folder labelled ‘Nyakyusa Christians’. This is one of the fullest folders containing fieldnotes she recorded in Bunyakyusa. WC, D4.6, Monica Wilson Nyakyusa fieldnotes, Folder labelled ‘Christian Funerals’. This was by contrast with (what she would later term) ‘the stylised wailing’ of women at traditional funeral ceremonies in Bunyakyusa. Here she drew heavily on Godfrey’s descriptions and early published ethnography. See Monica Wilson, Rituals of Kinship, Chapter 2; Godfrey Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Conventions of Burial’, Bantu Studies, 13 (1939), 1–31. WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Dr Oldham, 16 April 1935, Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika.

180

Inside African Anthropology

Leonard’s pragmatic attitude towards Christianity and openness about embracing elements of the pre-existing African religious practices is evident from Monica’s account of an incident where his brother came to the Wilson household to inform Godfrey about a diviner who was reputed to be ‘a famous lion maker’ (Mwakionde, shown in Figure 4.1). The diviner whom Leonard’s brother consulted apparently ‘diagnosed sorcery worked by the deceased’s ex-husband. It was believed that the sorcery had been directed against other members of the family’ and for that reason the entire family had to partake in drinking protective medicine.66 Godfrey and Monica were in fact present at the specific ‘ceremony for driving away sorcery after the death of the daughter’ of Leonard’s brother, and they saw the two Christian members of the family (Leonard and his mother) ‘taking a partial share in the proceedings’.67 Monica could still not quite tell where the Christian brother (Leonard) stood in relation to these old Nyakyusa customs, though she noted that ‘we [meaning Godfrey and herself] are learning a good deal about his actions, and feelings in the matter’.68 By the time she wrote to Mrs Hoernl´e three weeks later (9 May 1935), she was less hesitant and could give a more vivid picture of Leonard’s and other Christian converts’ attitude towards beliefs in witchcraft. Contrary to missionary expectations that sorcery was a superstition that converts would inevitably reject, Leonard and others saw no contradiction in being Christian and continuing to drink the protective medicine given by the diviner. Ironically, when the nonChristian chief saw this he complained to a deacon of the church that these people were ‘behaving like pagans’, to which the deacon replied that everyone drank protective medicines. From the point of view of the deacon, Leonard would have been suspended from church membership only if he had taken the lead in going to a diviner.69 It is clear from the above that in having Leonard as their research assistant Godfrey and Monica had the added advantage of closely studying the impact of European conquest and reactions to it as well as drawing in both sides of the family as informants, which greatly enhanced their comparative project. Through getting to know them all, wrote Monica, ‘I am learning about mission contact’. Whereas the non-Christian side of the family provided the data that Godfrey required for his analysis of Nyakyusa ‘pagan customs’, the Christian side served as informants for Monica’s work on the changes in behaviour brought about by mission contact. 66 67 68 69

WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Mrs Hoernl´e, 9 May 1935, Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika. Ibid., Monica Wilson’s first quarterly report, 16 June 1935. WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Dr Oldham, 16 April 1935, Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika. WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Mrs Hoernl´e, 9 May 1935, Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika.

Working with the Wilsons

181

As Monica’s language ability gradually improved, her dependence on Leonard diminished. He still played a role as facilitator as late as November 1935, after they had moved their primary field-site from Isumba to Rungwe Mission Station, some ten kilometres north of Tukuyu. It was now a full fourteen months since Leonard had begun working with Godfrey. The Wilsons had learnt a great deal from Leonard in that time, but he had also learnt from them, notably skills of research and writing. The ‘Native Clerk’ as Author: Leonard Mwaisumo’s Kinyakyusa Texts We need, finally, to assess Leonard Mwaisumo’s contribution as an author of ‘native texts’. Alongside his multiple interpretive roles, his work as author was particularly important – and it is with this contribution that he is most strongly associated in the published record. James Ellison has made a case for the significance of texts recorded by Africans about ‘tribe’ and custom in the making of cultural knowledge in interwar Tanganyika. He locates the 28 notebooks (containing some three thousand pages of documentary records on Nyakyusa customs) written by the Wilsons’ research assistants in the wider context of writings about culture by Africans authored at the time. Provincial and district commissioners in southern Tanganyika were influenced by a 10-page analysis of the Mchapi witchfinding movements in the wider region written by Edward Shofa, a clerk at Sambawanga. The ideas of another local cultural interpreter, Mwambenja Mwaisabile, had played a significant role in shaping the decisions of Rungwe district commissioners in the selection of paramount chiefs, with the coming of indirect rule in 1926. We have already noted Megan Vaughan’s analysis of the prolific writings of the Tukuyu clerk Kenneth Mdala, promoting a specific tribal identity with an emphasis on his own Yao lineage. Ellison reads the texts of the Wilsons’ assistants, the bulk of which were recorded by Leonard Mwaisumo and John Brown Mwaikambo, as ‘political’ interventions designed to promote particular conceptions of identity, both ‘tribal’ and highly localised. Assistants did not merely convey the ‘practices, meanings and values’ which people of some culture ‘held to be of central importance’, they intervened in the production of knowledge and of texts from idiosyncratic positions, determined in part by their own agendas or more subtly by their backgrounds and experiences . . . The three assistants of the Wilsons [including Timothy Mwanjin, who recorded just one notebook] were all mission educated, had worked for the colonial government, and all had lived outside their home districts. They all spoke, wrote and read English, Swahili and Kinyakyusa, and aspired to lives that involved literacy and multilingualism. From 1934 to 1938 they wrote fieldnotes for the Wilsons that included

182

Inside African Anthropology

interviews with informants. Their notebooks were highly though subtly political; they contained messages about their own and their informants’ positions as well as their opinions about European racism.70

He goes on to note that the research assistants saw their role primarily in these terms, citing Leonard Mwaisumo’s comment about ‘the work we are doing of writing down customs’, identified variously as ‘old’, ‘European’, ‘school’, ‘Christian’ or ‘government’ customs.71 Our own emphasis has been on the complexity of Leonard’s roles and motives. While one can make the case for his interventions being ‘subtly political’, his comments and texts were seldom motivated by an attempt to promote any broad notion of tribal or lineage identity (in the same sense, say, that Mdala was attempting).72 They were highly situational and varied significantly, as we have seen, according to whether he was working with Godfrey or Monica, and to suit the stage of the research process as he focused on language learning or information gathering. The concept of the ‘intimate politics’ of knowledge introduced by Nancy Jacobs and discussed in an earlier chapter,73 one which relates closely to a small and changing network of social relations at particular sites, seems more useful here than the more general notion of politics associated with ‘inventing tradition’, the framework within which Ellison locates his discussion. Leonard began his notebook record in January 1935 at the time Godfrey was preparing to leave the field. His record of customs that followed the brief autobiographical account discussed above was thus conceived as an independent supplement to the data collected by Godfrey. Monica’s description of his writings in the middle months of 1935 confirms that this was how they saw his texts. In the collection of dreams and in the writing of vernacular accounts of customs, songs, reports of law cases, statements of experts, etc., we find our clerk – the interpreter – invaluable. He now spends the bulk of his time on this work. Efforts to use other informants to write accounts have not been successful because no-one in this immediate area except the man we have can write fluently.74 70 71 72

73 74

Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants’, 2. Ibid., 2. Ellison provides little more than the occasional evidence of these subtle political motivations in the case of Leonard, as in his comment cited in relation to burial customs in Notebook 3: ‘All we who are of the tribe of Selya . . . ’ (113). He also refers to the involvement of Timothy Mwanjin in multiracial politics in the Tanganyika United Party some fifteen years after having worked for a short time with Wilsons (Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants’, 2). Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’, Comparative Studies of Society and History, 48, 3 (2006), 564–603; Chapter 2 in this volume. WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson’s second quarterly report, 30 August 1935.

Working with the Wilsons

183

Leonard’s seven notebooks contain the rich and highly textured narratives one might expect from a cultural insider. The perspective is distinct from that of the Wilsons. In Good Company, as noted earlier, there is a strong reliance in the subsection ‘Procedure in witchcraft cases’ on Leonard’s voice. This section includes a case where Leonard’s mother was accused of bewitching the village cows and one of her younger sons having to drink the umwafi on her behalf.75 Leonard had drunk the umwafi as a child.76 What is most striking in this notebook record is the depth of detail in the discussion of gender relations among the Nyakyusa, and the open, straightforward accounts of polygamy, witchcraft, divorce and sexual behaviour including sections on incest and homosexuality. Divorce, a subject that is explored at length in the fourth notebook, appears in the text as a very common phenomenon, something that neither Christians nor ‘pagans’ were anxious about. On the whole Nyakyusa society seems to have had a very liberal attitude towards divorce, perhaps the traditionalists more so than the Christians. This was also a matter where in-laws and the chiefs’ courts had a major role to play in providing counsel or annulling a marriage. Leonard gives a sense that divorce could be initiated by either a wife or husband if she or he was unhappy in a marriage. Lack of sexual fulfilment features as one of the major causes of divorce. He provides many stories (told by his informants) whereby grievances concerning sex ended in a divorce – a major topic of discussion especially among women.77 Notebook 5 deals with women’s attitudes towards polygamy. Most of Leonard’s female informants disliked polygamy because of the conflicts and jealousies that often arose within such marriages. Most preferred onkeja, meaning marriage to a man who had never married before. Some, however, said they preferred polygamous marriages, something which is hardly surprising given the arduous nature of agricultural work (performed by both men and women) that was at the core of their livelihood. Even so, those women who favoured polygamy still preferred to be first wives, a position which accorded senior status and authority over junior wives within a household. Leonard cited many examples of women who sued for divorce because their husbands had decided to get additional wives. Often such a woman would not initiate a divorce unless she had found another suitor who was prepared to marry her after the annulment of the marriage. Women in such a position, he writes, ‘try to keep away from their husbands while 75 76 77

Monica Wilson, Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1951), 109–121, 241–243. Ibid., 244–245. WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 4 (L4).

184

Inside African Anthropology

they struggle for divorce’ out of fear of falling pregnant and missing their opportunities of remarriage.78 Most of this information about witchcraft and divorce was derived through sittings in local courts and collected at Godfrey’s request. In equal measure, the notebooks deal with the issues closest to Monica’s heart. In the latter part of Notebook 1, presumably recorded in March after Monica’s arrival, we read accounts about cooking and other domestic matters, as well as information about customary ways of treating crops. In Notebook 3 we read of the customs used to stop children crying, recorded at a time when Monica was collecting data about children’s education, and later of dreaming and dreams, again a distinctive interest of Monica’s dating back to her East London days (Notebook 4).79 One should also note that numerous texts authored by Leonard feature not in his own notebook record but in Godfrey’s notebooks or on the loose-leaf pages filed in folders as Monica’s fieldnotes. These insertions were sometimes brief, but often they ran into numerous pages. Some were written for Godfrey as in the case of the burial customs ‘written by L. when I was away on 4/2/35’ but most were written for Monica, to judge by their themes: a five-page text on women’s property, an eight-page one on ‘Christian amusements’ (the title she later chose for one her files), a text on a Christian funeral, another on ‘Education at home’. They were all recorded in Kinyakyusa, but occasionally there was some introductory information in English. Here, for example, is an extract from a two-page text on a Christian funeral written by Leonard on 31 October 1935. This was just a few days before he left the Wilsons to take up his job as a government clerk. [Funeral of] Tupilike 31/10/35 Carrying her to N.[Nyakyusa] doctor who is a woman. Water in doctor’s hut. Dream of the doctor before anything happened (Samotela) Carrying her to her own father. Another girl going to see her and said the girl was about to die. Quarel [sic] when dead [sic] between husband and brother of hers, saying we want to weep here first for some time and then hours of waiting to cary [sic] the body direct to his father who is at Ipenja.80

This is followed by ten pages of text in Kinyakyusa describing these events in more detail. If these additional notebook and fieldnote inserts 78 79

80

Ibid., Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 5 (L5). See Chapter 3 in this volume. She used some of this information when she wrote about Nyakyusa dreams in her first article based on their Bunyakyusa fieldwork. See Monica Hunter, ‘An African Christian Morality’, Africa, 10, 3 (1937), 265–291. WC, D4.6 Monica Wilson Nyakyusa fieldnotes, Folder labelled ‘Christian Funerals’.

Working with the Wilsons

185

are taken into account, Leonard Mwaisumo’s written record on Nyakyusa ‘customs’ (ikikolo) would number close to a thousand pages. Eighteen Months as Government Clerk, November 1936–April 1938 In mid-November 1936 Leonard Mwaisumo was accompanied by Godfrey to the boma outside Tukuyu to take up an official position as a government clerk. As we have seen, Monica established that this was the most coveted position available for the small emerging literate African elite, one that commanded a superior salary to any other position. One clerk [Kenneth Mdala] in Tukuyu Boma who had passed Std. VI in Nyasaland (10 years of schooling) was earning 18 pounds a month; another who had passed Std. III was earning 17 pounds 11 shillings a month. These two were exceptionally competent, but the possibility of rising to such positions is naturally a very great attraction to the capable and ambitious.81

These were sums far in excess of the 30 shillings a month that Leonard had earned as a research assistant, and Monica’s correspondence suggests that they clearly regarded him as competent, efficient and ambitious. In short, he had a promising career ahead of him. Leonard had probably had his eye on such a position when he began working with the Wilsons, however passionately he might have acquitted himself as indigenous anthropologist. Two days after meeting Godfrey, he shared his close knowledge of the history and sociology of government clerks. ‘Five years ago [1929] there was no Nyakyusa in the Boma except the messengers. Most of the clerks were Nyasa. Some married Tukuyu women and made friends with the Nyakyusa and got their friends jobs.’ This is the Nyasa diaspora of the late 1910s and 1920s that Vaughan describes, and of which Kenneth Mdala was a prime example. In recent times, however, the British government had reversed its policy and employed almost entirely ‘local men’ so that of the ‘about 30 men (clerks) in the Boma [in September 1934], all but one [Mdala] is Wanyakyusa (L.)’.82 Even after he had moved to the boma, Leonard kept in contact with the Wilsons and occasionally came over for a visit and conversation over a meal. Monica wrote to her father about Leonard’s new job and a conundrum that he found himself in. Leonard, our former clerk, who is now clerk of the highest native court (i.e. an appeal court of senior chiefs) some miles out of Tukuyu, came in 81 82

WC, D11 Correspondence with the International African Institute, Monica Wilson’s quarterly report, n.d. [but probably Oct. 1937]. WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 1, 50, Monday 10 Sept. 1934.

186

Inside African Anthropology

to see us. He, poor man, is having a tough time avoiding bribes. Friends of his who have cases arrive with a hen or a little rice ‘to greet him’. Such presents are customary, and it is considered very high handed to refuse them, but it’s impossible to draw the line between such presents and bribes. He’s doing the only thing – refusing all presents from people who have cases – but in consequence is getting the reputation of being standoffish, and unfriendly with poorer and less-educated friends. It’s obviously a very difficult situation. I hope he does not succumb. I think he will survive though few clerks do.83

Her subsequent comments give some sense of the friendship the Wilsons had developed with Leonard, but of course one that could never be on equal terms given their much more privileged backgrounds and financial position. ‘Leonard is very much a friend and poured out his difficulties. They are hardly the sort of thing that could be confided to a [British] government official, but he was badly wanting a little sympathy.’84 In the (never published) draft manuscript on Nyakyusa Christians that Monica penned a year or two after leaving Bunyakyusa, she noted in passing that ‘one government clerk I knew expressed his intention of returning home and growing coffee and rice on a large scale for sale after having worked for some years for the government, but he died before [he had] been two years a clerk’.85 This was Leonard Mwaisumo. We have unusually detailed accounts about the circumstances surrounding his death in April 1938. The Wilsons’ domestic assistant Kabiki, a man who had worked with Leonard during all his months with the Wilsons, wrote to them in Livingstone the month after Godfrey had officially taken up his prestigious new position as the first director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. He informed them of the sad news. Leonard was suffering from pneumonia. He suffered only three days. At that time he wanted to go to [the hospital at] Mbeya where there were white people, but he started suffering. Then after that he died . . . They took the body to the hospital . . . they found his lungs were damaged since he was coughing.86

John Brown Mwaikambo was an age-mate who had known Leonard from school days at the Swahili school and at Rungwe. He also wrote about Leonard’s tragic death. His letter was also addressed to ‘Mr G. B. Wilson’ rather than to both of the Wilsons and his tone towards Godfrey was warm. 83 84 85 86

WC, B5.1 Correspondence from MW to her father, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 23 Oct. 1936, Rungwe, Tanganyika. Ibid. WC, D4.7 Draft manuscript, Section on ‘Schools’, Folder labelled ‘Nyakyusa Christians’. WC, D10 Letters to GW mostly in Nyakyusa, Angumbwike Kabiki Mwambandile/Mr G. B. Wilson, 24 June 1938, Tukuyu.

Working with the Wilsons

187

You know that in the letter of Kabiki he narrated everything about Leonard. Then I also want to write since you know that I like to understand. When he died the whole area was terrified. He started to get ill on the 15th of April. It started when he was typing; it was like someone injected something into his chest. He was learning through correspondence since they wanted to send him to Mbeya. He died on the 21st of April at 15:03. He was suffering from pneumonia. Leonard used to claim that they had bewitched him. Then I also believed that it is true they have bewitched him since many people were against him. He claimed that Mwakatumbula is the one who did that. After his death, he was carried to Nselya where he was buried.87

Were these suspicions and claims about bewitchment not directed at those people whose bribes he had earlier refused? In any event they again provide evidence of the complex combination of investment in ‘old customs’ (here witchcraft) along with his active engagement in ‘government customs’ in his official job as a clerk recording and archiving government documents. Conclusion: Leonard Mwaisumo as Insider Ethnographer We began the chapter by discussing an emerging recognition of the importance of figures in African history, and in particular in the history of literacy and of knowledge production in Africa. In keeping with the significant recent collection on the role of literate Africans in colonial rule (Lawrance et al., eds, Interpreters, Intermediaries and Clerks), our approach has been biographical and textual as we sought to narrate in some detail the story of one Nyakyusa ‘native clerk’, first as assistant to anthropologists and then as an official government functionary who acted as one among that substantial cohort of African intermediaries whose ‘collaborative bargains’ made colonial rule in Africa possible.88 The emphasis has been on that period of 15 months between September 1934 and November 1935 when Leonard Mwaisumo worked as a paid research assistant, first for Godfrey Wilson and then for both Godfrey and Monica Wilson. Their rich records allow for a reconstruction that is probably fuller than is possible in most other cases. This evidence suggests that, while Leonard was indispensable to the research work of both Wilsons, his relationship and precise roles varied according to whether he was working with Godfrey or with Monica. In his collaboration with Godfrey there is much more sense of intimacy 87 88

WC, B10 Letters to GW mostly in Nyakyusa, John Brown Mwaikambo/Mr G. B. Wilson in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, 24 June 1938, Ibungila. Lawrance et al., eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks; see also Emily L. Osborn, ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History, 44, 1 (2003), 29–50.

188

Inside African Anthropology

and dialogue, of their joint immersion, after the early weeks of one-onone language learning, in a male world of conversation and conviviality, ‘good company’ that was distinctively masculine. Godfrey’s linguistic gift and early fluency facilitated a kind of ease and warmth of relations. His interactions with Leonard are characterised by a balance of serious intent and lightness of spirit, with laughter a frequent feature in Godfrey’s record of their conversations. Monica was, in Marsland’s terms, more of an ‘observer’ than a ‘participant’. Her outsider status ensured that Leonard played an essential role as a companion and guide on her field trips to school and church. There is little sense here of ‘intimacy’ and more sense of dependence. She comes across in these records as an anthropologist on the margins relying on her skilled insider to serve as her eyes and ears. ‘L. says’ echoes through her fieldnotes. This dependence can also be seen in the extent to which she came, in the later stages of her research, to rely on Leonard as author, as he recorded information at her request about the Christian communities that were at the centre of her research project. Our case for complexity, based on a very close reading of these notes recorded on site, relies on documenting the multiple functions that Leonard Mwaisumo performed in the making of the Wilsons’ cultural knowledge. He taught both of them the language, and co-authored the Kinyakyusa manuscript vocabularies and dictionaries that Monica would use in the writing of her four Nyakyusa monographs and still intended to have published in the final years of her life. He guided them both through the landscape and instructed them in matters of cultural etiquette. He served as the epicentre of the social networks through which they worked, especially Godfrey, who established the community of ‘friends’ with whom Monica could later work. He was a skilled translator and active interviewer who took it upon himself to ask questions of informants. Above all, though, we have argued that he was himself a treasure trove of cultural information, a cultural insider who recorded information that went beyond the selected texts on witchcraft. Leonard straddled not just the European and the Nyakyusa worlds, but the worlds of the ‘pagan’ and Christian sections of the Nyakyusa communities. It was his dual insider identity that made him such a valuable intermediary. His insider knowledge was expressed in interviews and conversations, but also (as we have said) in his work as an author of ‘native texts’, predominantly recorded in his own notebooks but also in hundreds of pages interspersed in the fieldnotes of the Wilsons. The voice in these texts is distinctively that of the insider commenting with a deep and detailed knowledge on matters ranging from sexual customs, divorce and marital relations to Christian funerals and European-introduced crops and schools.

Working with the Wilsons

189

What should we call such a figure in the light of these rich records of his contribution and recent debates over terminology?89 He was certainly a ‘cultural broker’ who taught the Wilsons the Nyakyusa language and about local customs and cultural etiquette. He was a ‘middleman’ as he facilitated the bridging of the European/Nyakyusa and ‘pagan’/Christian worlds. There is a strong case to be made that he was an ‘intellectual’ in his own right, his love of reading and long-standing interest in books but also his sophisticated and open-minded reading of biblical texts being evidence of an independent mind and love of scholarship for its own sake. He can surely also be considered an ‘indigenous anthropologist’ in posing his own questions, with his patent passion about ‘customs’ old and new, and especially with his skill in recording ethnographic information, albeit still as raw data that was partially analysed rather than a finished report or analytical monograph. What form of acknowledgment would have been right for this man who performed multiple roles? And, as Pamela Reynolds reflects in the concluding chapter of this volume, by what criteria and ethical standards do we judge a given acknowledgment to have been ‘adequate’ or otherwise?

89

The most helpful discussion on the respective merits of the terminological debate is to be found in Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 11–15.

Part 3

Fort Hare and the University of Cape Town

Figure P.3. Monica’s first graduate student in anthropology, the late Livingstone Mqotsi (1921–2009) in conversation with Leslie J. Bank and Andrew Bank in June 2007. Scholars have paid insufficient attention to Wilson’s contribution as a mentor of South African anthropologists, including a generation of black anthropologists who wrote important but hitherto hidden insider ethnographies. Photographer: Rui Assubuji, June 2007.

6

‘Your Intellectual Son’: Monica Wilson and Her Students at Fort Hare, 1944–1946 Se´an Morrow

This chapter is about Monica Wilson at the South African Native College, Fort Hare, from July 1944 to December 1946. It looks at why she went there and the effects of the experience on her and on her students; her choice to stay in South Africa rather than become a figure in British or American anthropology, her origins perhaps hardly remembered by her colleagues and readers; her students at Fort Hare and her non-racial Christian liberalism in a South Africa where space for critical voices was shrinking; and the tenuous thread that continued to join black and white in a society where it was easy to retreat into nationalist laagers. The chapter also considers the self-mastery of a woman of 36 with two small children, left widowed and in penury by the suicide of the brilliant husband to whom she was devoted, faced with writing, alone, studies based on more than three years of joint fieldwork and intense intellectual and personal commitment in Tanganyika. At Fort Hare she had to teach university students, for the first time, within six weeks of her husband’s death. However, she had been born and grown up in the Tyumie Valley, whose river flows from the Hogsback Mountain past Lovedale Mission, Fort Hare and the town of Alice. This was where she had conducted her first field research. She was linked to local people and to Fort Hare by Lovedale’s religious and social networks, and to the best of her students by a common fascination with the changing South Africa of which they were all part. She was, in many ways, an ‘insider’ anthropologist.1 Death, Family and Locality In early 1938, after a break in South Africa, Monica joined her husband Godfrey in Northern Rhodesia where he had been appointed the first 1

This chapter is based largely on documents contained in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection (WC) in the Department of Manuscripts and Archives, University of Cape Town. A substantial part of this extensive record remains uncatalogued, and references to this material are provisional. Interviews have also been helpful, some with informants – Mr Joe Matthews and Mr Livingstone Mqotsi – who sadly have since died. I would like to thank all interviewees, and the exceptional Manuscripts and Archives staff, for their assistance.

193

194

Inside African Anthropology

Director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), based in Livingstone. She had a child, Francis, in May 1939. In Northern Rhodesia, Monica focused on the role of wife and homemaker in the enervating Livingstone climate, a somewhat isolated figure amidst the intensely hierarchical and for the most part intellectually limited community of colonial civil servants and their wives. This was relieved by lengthy visits to her parents in South Africa, and by the presence of the archaeologist Desmond Clark and his wife Mary, and, somewhat later, when he was not on fieldwork, that of Max Gluckman and his wife, also Mary. Monica also went with Godfrey to the mining town of Broken Hill where she helped him with his research. There she attended the dances of the clerks, medical orderlies and other members, men and women, of the incipient African elite of the town, making acute observations that were reflected in Godfrey’s pathbreaking The Economics of Detribalisation in Northern Rhodesia. Above all, Monica focused on her child, Francis: she was a devoted and hard-working mother. Work on the Nyakyusa material, for instance, was subsidiary at this stage to her parental role. Early in 1941 Monica shared the trauma of Godfrey’s resignation from the RLI on account of his pacifism and perceived closeness to Africans. They returned to South Africa, spending a year working together on The Analysis of Social Change and living in a cottage on her parents’ land at Hogsback. She remained at Hogsback when Godfrey joined an ambulance unit in the South African army in April 1942. After training he was based first in Port Elizabeth and then, in 1943, in Egypt. The couple continued to work on the book by post. In August 1943 their second son, Timothy, was born. Late in the year Godfrey was accepted for the Army Education Service and returned to South Africa for training following which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Overwhelmed by the depression to which he was intermittently subject, he took his own life in Pretoria in May 1944.2 The South African Native College was founded in 1916, in part to deflect the initiative of a group of educated Africans and keep higher education for Africans in the hands of missionaries and their associates.3 It was 2

3

This and the previous paragraph are based on material in the Wilson Collection at UCT Manuscripts and Archives, and on Wilson family papers. Richard Brown’s chapter, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule: Godfrey Wilson and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Northern Rhodesia’ in Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), 173–197, is essential on Godfrey’s directorship of the RLI. See also Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change: Based on Observations in Central Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945); Godfrey Wilson, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia, parts 1 and 2 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 [Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia: RLI Series, 1941 and 1942]). Les Switzer, Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1993), 177–181;

‘Your Intellectual Son’

195

built on the site of a large nineteenth-century fortification, its name redolent of the frontier wars.4 In keeping with missionary conceptions of Africans as essentially rural and cities as destructive of the supposed rural virtues of hierarchy and ordered morality, the college was established in Alice in the rural Eastern Cape, close to the influential Free Church of Scotland educational centre of Lovedale.5 It served not only South Africa but also British Africa as far as Kenya and Uganda, and was the only higher education institution for Africans in the region. In some respects, though, for many years it was like a secondary school, preparing students for matriculation as well as teaching towards University of South Africa degrees. Monica taught at Fort Hare from July 1944 to the end of 1946 in the immediate aftermath of the death of her husband. This was a time of great personal difficulty for her. Joanne Tyler, then Hardwich, a playmate of Monica’s son Francis, remembers her as ‘very sad’.6 Yet Fort Hare had been part of Monica’s life from childhood. On leaving school, she attended lectures part-time at Fort Hare, where according to her mother she got ‘more help in Latin and History than she did at school’.7 She had friends there, and on one visit home had given a talk about ‘Magic’ to staff and students in March 1934;8 in 1937 she had been asked by the principal, Alexander Kerr, to serve on a committee with Zachariah Keodirelang (‘Z. K.’) Matthews and others on the employment of Fort Hare graduates as fieldworkers.9 With Godfrey’s death, Monica needed money quickly. They were not well off, as is clear from Godfrey’s many detailed messages about the paltry army pay which she collected at Alice post office. She badly needed the £72.19.8 due to Godfrey’s estate from the army.10 Her writing was another source of income. In September 1944 John Dover Wilson, who had been looking after her interests with Cambridge University Press,

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

Songezo Ngqongqo, ‘Mpilo Walter Benson Rubusana 1858–1910: The Making of the New African Elite in the Eastern Cape’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Fort Hare, 1996. Colin G. Coetzee, ‘Forts of the Eastern Cape: Securing a Frontier, 1799–1878’, unpublished typescript (1994), 451–492. In the later nineteenth century, Lovedale missionaries founded the equally influential Livingstonia in Malawi, on the borders of Monica’s later research area in southern Tanzania and northern Malawi. See John McCracken, Politics and Christianity in Malawi 1875–1940: The Impact of the Livingstonia Mission in the Northern Province (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Interview with Professor Joanne Tyler, Hogsback, 16 August 2008. Unless otherwise stated, all interviews are by Se´an Morrow. WC, BB3, Letters Jessie Hunter/David Hunter 1900–1940, Jessie Hunter/David Hunter, 12 May 1926, Lovedale. Ibid., Jessie Hunter/David Hunter, 28 March 1934, Lovedale. WC, B1, Monica Wilson/Godfrey Wilson, 22 May 1937, Lovedale; ibid., Monica Wilson/Godfrey Wilson, 18 May 1937, Lovedale. WC, A1.14, Officer in charge of War Records/Monica Wilson, 1 Dec. 1944, Pretoria.

196

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 6.1. Godfrey Wilson during the War.11

advised her to accept the terms offered for the forthcoming The Analysis of Social Change.12 Monica also tried unsuccessfully to obtain an army pension, arguing that Godfrey’s condition had been directly aggravated by military service. In particular she asked for help with her children’s education. She solicited the testimony of Dr Leonard Browne of the Tavistock Clinic, who had treated Godfrey in London from June 1932. She was also aided by the philosopher, psychologist and family friend Bernard Notcutt, a captain in the Army Education Service during the War. The pension was refused on the grounds that Godfrey’s death ‘did not arise out of and in the course of the discharge of his military service and was not aggravated thereby’.13

11 12 13

WC, N3 Photographs of Godfrey Wilson. There are numerous copies of this image in the Wilson Collection. WC, uncat. corr., John Dover Wilson/Monica Wilson, 27 Sept. 1944, Balerno. WC, A1.14, Papers re Godfrey Wilson’s Death, Commissioner for Pensions/Monica Wilson, 24 Oct. 1944, Pretoria. See also ‘final and binding’ disallowance by the Appeal Board, ibid., Secretary, Military Pensions Appeal Board/Monica Wilson, 29 Jan. 1946, Pretoria.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

197

In response to Monica’s desperate need for a regular income, almost immediately after Godfrey’s death the director of Fort Hare, Alexander Kerr, offered her a temporary appointment as lecturer in social anthropology from July 1944, and wardenship of Elukhanyisweni, ‘Eluk’, the women students’ hostel. Kerr had known Monica ‘practically all her life’14 and had approached her with a job offer in February 1943 that she might have accepted if she had not been pregnant.15 He promised substantive appointment from January 1946 on the post’s receiving ministerial approval. She accepted.16 Z. K. Matthews, husband of her Lovedale school friend Frieda (n´ee Bokwe) was her head of department, and, chosen by Godfrey, godfather of her younger son Tim.17 Elizabeth Colson, seeking background to her new job at the RLI, stayed with Monica on her way to Northern Rhodesia and was introduced to Monica’s father and to her Lovedale and Fort Hare friends, including Matthews.18 Z. K.’s son Joe, born in 1929, remembered the friendship between his mother and Monica, grounded in the ties between their fathers David Hunter and John Knox Bokwe, missionary and minister in the same Church. As Joe said and Francis Wilson confirmed, it was an intimate and enduring bond, focusing on mutual friends, children and domestic concerns. Friendships of this kind, a counterpoint to her intellectual relationships, are apparent through Monica’s life.19 These were powerful ties of emotion, religion, friendship and duty. In working at Fort Hare, Monica was consenting to the Christian vision it represented. She had no choice, if she was to teach Africans at tertiary level. She may have remembered earlier interactions with the then communist Eddie Roux, who applied for a Fort Hare job in 1929. Though one of his referees was the illustrious W. M. Macmillan, he was also asked to provide a testimonial from a Church minister, an impossibility for the irreligious Roux. If he did not get the job, which he did not, ‘I shall console myself’, he said, ‘by saying that they have found a better Christian though probably a worse biologist’.20 The following year, in their flirtatiously sparring correspondence, he upbraided Monica on 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

University of Fort Hare Staff Files, M. Wilson Personal File, Alexander Kerr/[Registrar, Rhodes University College], 11 June 1946, [Fort Hare]. WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 11 Feb. 1943, Port Elizabeth. Ibid., Alexander Kerr/Monica Wilson, 27 June 1944 [Fort Hare]; Monica Wilson/ Alexander Kerr, 28 June 1944, Lovedale. WC, uncat. corr., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/Dr Tom Alty, 21 Jan. 1977, Hogsback. Telephone interview with Professor Elizabeth Colson, 19 November 2006; email message Elizabeth Colson/Se´an Morrow, 20 December 2006. Interview with Joe Matthews, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 20 November 2006; interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008; Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews: Southern Africa 1901 to 1968 (London: Rex Collings; Cape Town: David Philip, 1981), 225–226. WC, B6.15, E. R. Roux/Monica Hunter, 30 Oct. 1929, Johannesburg.

198

Inside African Anthropology

the contradiction between what he supposed would be her defence of the religious qualification at Fort Hare and ‘general liberal principles of political and religious toleration’.21 On 15 November 1944, she was offered the permanent post, at £400 per annum on the scale ‘for women lecturers’ of £325 rising to £500. Though Monica suffered like all South African women academics from pay scales lower than those for men, for the time Fort Hare was relatively liberal on gender questions. Of the 30 academic staff at Fort Hare for some or all of the time that she worked there, seven, and the registrar, were women. This compares with six black staff members during the same period, none of whom were female.22 Monica stipulated that she would need ‘to finish certain research work begun by my husband and myself and not yet complete’, by which she meant their Nyakyusa studies. She believed she could do this providing her lecturing load was not too heavy, and that she could soon relinquish the wardenship. The college agreed, though she never gave up her Eluk post.23 The appointment helped Monica at a time of great difficulty, but also gave Fort Hare a staff member on a par with the best of the younger South African and British social anthropologists. Her academic weight is indicated, for example, by Isaac Schapera, the doyen of South African-based anthropologists, agreeing to act as her external examiner.24 Monica had been living at Hogsback with Godfrey since 1941,25 and then, when he joined the army, by herself with Francis and Timothy, born 1939 and 1943. The house, according to Francis Wilson, was little more than a bywoner’s (poor tenant’s) cottage in the grounds of David and Jessie Hunter’s Hunterstoun estate. There was a drop toilet eighteen metres away, no running water, and a kitchen floor of polished dung. From a child’s point of view, the life was idyllic: running barefoot, free and safe with the workers’ children, speaking isiXhosa, eating monkey meat in a local house, bathing in a zinc tub by the fire, watching 21 22

23

24 25

Ibid., E. R. Roux/Monica Hunter, 9 Aug. 1930. For more on Roux and Monica, see Chapter 1. Alexander Kerr, Fort Hare 1915–48: The Evolution of an African College (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1968), 275–277. Women students had been admitted to Fort Hare from the beginning. For contemporary gender attitudes in a leading South African university see Bruce K. Murray, Wits, the Early Years: A History of the University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg and Its Precursors 1896–1939 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1982), 327–334. University of Fort Hare Staff Files, M. Wilson Personal File, Monica Wilson/Alexander Kerr, 25 Oct. 1944, Fort Hare; ibid., Alexander Kerr/Monica Wilson, 15 Nov. 1944, [Fort Hare]. See also Kerr, Fort Hare 1915–48, 253. WC, uncat. corr., Isaac Schapera, Isaac Schapera/Monica Wilson, 18 Nov. 1946, Rondebosch, Cape Town. For Godfrey Wilson’s fraught resignation from the directorship of the RLI before going to South Africa with Monica, see Richard Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule’.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

199

meals cooking on a wood-burning Welcome Dover range.26 For Monica, Hogsback and Lovedale would have been saturated in memories of her husband.27 We glimpse Godfrey at Fort Hare, his striking ideas and personality eclipsing those of Monica in the recollections of Joe Matthews. He remembered that ‘even when he had joined the army and came in uniform to visit . . . he and my father . . . would argue from Fort Hare, across the river, right up to the Hunters’ house at Lovedale, continue the . . . furious arguments . . . about all kinds of things . . . sit down, have tea with the Hunters, and back again’. ‘It’s funny’, he said, ‘I knew more about his views than the views of Monica’.28 Monica started teaching at Fort Hare six weeks after Godfrey’s death. At the same time she was caring for her two small children, looking after the Eluk students and negotiating the bureaucratic and financial aftermath of her husband’s death with the military. She showed a stoical face to the world. Even within the family, she confronted traumatic facts directly. Not more than a month after her return from the funeral, 5year-old Francis asked directly about his father’s death. He recalls the ‘rock-like straightness’ with which she answered: ‘I want to know: how did he die?’ And she said, ‘He committed suicide.’ And I said, ‘Yes, well, but how did he do it?’ And Monica didn’t flinch: she said, ‘He hanged himself.’ So I said, ‘How did he do that?’ She didn’t flinch: she said, ‘Well, he would have stood up on a chair with a rope around his neck and kicked the chair away.’29

Rural Hogsback was now partly replaced for the boys by life on the campus, at times cared for by female students like Gaositwe Chiepe. In Alice, with a major mission station and its unique ‘Native College’ but otherwise similar to other small South African towns, the Wilson and Matthews children roamed freely, and the bicycle Mrs Paul Robeson gave Joe Matthews in 1936 was passed on successively to Francis Wilson, Joe’s brother Knox, and Tim Wilson.30 Francis collected snails and locusts for the biology lecturer and explored the laboratory of Professor James Davidson, who taught physics and mathematics. People like Davidson, Ellen Radloff, founding Professor of Physiology and a particularly close friend of Monica’s,31 and Donald Stuart, Professor of English, comprised Monica’s social circle. Godfrey’s death loomed, however. Francis 26 27

28 29 30 31

Interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008. See Se´an Morrow, ‘“This is from the Firm”: The Anthropological Partnership of Monica and Godfrey Wilson’ (unpublished paper presented at the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June 2008). Interview with Joe Matthews, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 20 November 2006. Interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008. See also Frieda B. Matthews, Remembrances (Bellville: Mayibuye, 1995), 27–28. http://www.aluka.org/action/showMetadata?doi=10.5555/AL.AP.PERSON.BM00012 8946&pgs=&cookieSet=1 (accessed 15 October 2008).

200

Inside African Anthropology

remembers seeing a man coming from Lovedale with a coffin on his head. For six terrifying hours, until his mother returned, he was convinced she had died and that the man had come to collect her body: ‘the tenuousness of life . . . if your father can vanish one morning just like that, why not your mother?’32 Monica coped by measured and unsentimental discipline of herself and her children. She insisted on her afternoon nap, and Francis ‘learned, from a very early age, to work within the limits of the time that was available’. He remembers the pain when he got tar on his legs. She did what she could, but he stood outside her bedroom window and howled. ‘“There’s nothing more I can do for you”, she said, “I’m having my rest – go away”.’ She had a tough side, ‘but when she was available she was totally available’. She was supported by her parents and by Jessie Hunter’s English housekeeper Miss Harber, ‘Haba’ to the children, who had lived many years in Alice. Monica and the children went back to Hogsback whenever time allowed, so there was no sudden break with the mountain environment and people. She delighted in Hogsback: ‘Oh perfect joy to be here’, she wrote in the visitors’ book of relatives Kenneth and Cherrie Houghton on 24 June 1946, signing her family nickname, ‘Moch´e’.33 Hunterstoun did not belong to Monica until 1949, though; at this stage, Fort Hare was her home. Committing to South Africa Monica might have had a completely different career. She had a strong sense of the obligations of marriage,34 and it seems that Godfrey had not wanted to stay in South Africa after the War.35 He was contacted in November 1943 about a job at the University of Witwatersrand at the end of hostilities, but was told his wife would never be permanently appointed. ‘I don’t know whether one could be happy in such a medieval atmosphere’, he wrote.36 There are hints that Monica was approached informally a little earlier about the possibility of an official post, perhaps in the Colonial Office.37 In the following month, however, Godfrey 32 33 34 35

36 37

Interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008. Innisfree Visitors’ Book. I am grateful to Mary Leslie for this reference. WC, Talks and Addresses (partly cat.), talk to National Council for Women, and notes on ‘Part Time Work for Married Women’, Nov. 1955. Monica Wilson’s library at Hogsback, uncat. corr. between Monica Wilson and Francis Wilson, Francis Wilson/Monica Wilson, 11 July 1964, Cambridge: ‘I’m beginning to see how Daddy just couldn’t live in South Africa.’ WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 24 Nov. 1943, Military College [Voortrekkerhoogte]. WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 19 Sept. 1943, [Egypt]; ibid., Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 18 Nov. 1943, Military College [Voortrekkerhoogte]: ‘nice to have people seeking you out; very nice’, Godfrey wrote.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

201

reacted enthusiastically to a letter Monica had received from Professor John Hutton, sounding the Wilsons out for jobs at Cambridge. ‘The prospect of working with you in Cambridge,’ Godfrey wrote, ‘is excessively alluring’. ‘I think we have a good chance of getting it’, he wrote later.38 She would have accompanied him to England, working with him on the Nyakyusa material. It might have been one of the great British social science partnerships, rivalling the Webbs or Hammonds. Even after being widowed, if she had gone to Britain or America she might have become still more of a leading figure in metropolitan anthropology than she did.39 Difficult though it would have been to relocate during or immediately after the War, she had at least three opportunities. There had been a possibility of employment at Makerere University in Uganda that she and Godfrey had been considering in 1943–1944, which she might have revived.40 Max Gluckman, writing to Alexander Kerr from the RLI in the immediate aftermath of Godfrey’s death – ‘he was a most brilliant man and as I know full well, a generous and loyal friend’ – said that the Institute had just received a large Colonial Office grant and ‘if she can find nothing else to do she might return to do research here’.41 In June 1946, Evans-Pritchard wrote from Cambridge that there were now more anthropological jobs than could be filled. He urged her, ‘as one of the very few first class Social Anthropologists in the British Empire today’, to consider applying for the post he would vacate when he moved to the Oxford Chair. He had heard, though, that she would not leave South Africa: ‘Is this so?’42 Audrey Richards also told Monica that the Cambridge readership would be ‘hers for the asking’, adding with characteristic humanity, and as a single person herself, ‘do things get any better or is the loneliness worse in some ways? . . . I feel it as I never did, and yet it is not the loneliness of missing which is so much worse’.43 Though Monica was pursuing the option

38

39 40 41

42 43

WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 8 Dec. [1943], Military College [Voortrekkerhoogte]; ibid., Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 10 Dec. 1943, Military College [Voortrekkerhoogte]. Interview with John and Jean Comaroff, Gardens, Cape Town, 4 September 2007. WC, B4.13, Principal Makerere [Turner]/Dr Monica Hunter [sic], 23 Dec. 1943, Makerere, and subsequent exchanges. University of Fort Hare Staff Files, M. Wilson Personal File, Max Gluckman/Alexander Kerr, 30 May 1944, Livingstone. Monica was with Godfrey in Northern Rhodesia from 1938 to 1941, when he was first director of the RLI and Gluckman assistant anthropologist. Ties continued with Gluckman during his succeeding directorship and thereafter. See Monica Wilson, ‘The First Three Years, 1938–41’, African Social Research, 24 (1977), 279–283. WC, B6.5, E. E. Evans-Pritchard/Monica Wilson, 4 June 1946, Cambridge. WC, B6.14, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 25 June 1946, London. When Monica had already left Fort Hare, Audrey Richards suggested she might apply for her readership at the London School of Economics when she moved to the East African Institute of Social Research (EAISR), of which she was founding director, at Makerere:

202

Inside African Anthropology

of Rhodes University College, she also applied for the Cambridge job, recruiting her in-laws to investigate the price of houses and domestic help in postwar Britain.44 ‘[O]nly your sex could bar you!’ Audrey Richards wrote.45 Yet Monica withdrew her application, ostensibly because of inadequate remuneration since the job was finally offered only as a lectureship,46 and Evans-Pritchard wrote a testimonial supporting her application for the chair of social anthropology at Rhodes. She was, he said, scattering capitals, ‘one of the leading Social Anthropologists of today, both as a Fieldworker and as a Theoretical Thinker’. Rhodes would be lucky to get her.47 Fort Hare was, therefore, a transition not to Cambridge but to Rhodes, and thence to the University of Cape Town. This was a decisive move in Monica’s life and work, and separates her from the many other South Africans such as Gluckman, the Kupers, the Comaroffs, and even Schapera late in his career, who opted for Britain or America. In the end, her decision seems to have been as much political and social as academic. She felt grounded in and committed to South Africa and, though she devoted herself to completing her and Godfrey’s study of the Nyakyusa, with the last monograph appearing as late as

44

45

46 47

‘Let me know if you are remotely interested.’ It seems she was not (WC, BC880, B6.14, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 25 March 1949, London). Later still, when Richards was leaving Uganda she wrote that Monica was the only person to whom she would willingly hand over her ‘precious child’. Monica replied that the suggestion was attractive, ‘[b]ut Audrey I don’t want to be in a different country from my boys at present’. She had no siblings to substitute for her ‘and I wouldn’t want them to anyway’ (WC, B6.14, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 6 June 1954, Makerere); ibid., [Monica Wilson]/Audrey Richards, n.d., n.p. [draft attached to Richards’s letter]. For Richards and the EAISR see David Mills, ‘How Not to Be a “Government House Pet”: Audrey Richards and the East African Institute for Social Research’ in Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills and Muftafa Babiker, eds, African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2006), 76–98. WC, B5.6, Prof. and Mrs John Dover-Wilson/Monica Wilson, 15/16 July 1946, Balerno; John Dover-Wilson and Audrey [Lawson]/Monica Wilson, 21 July 1946, Balerno. The servant situation would improve, thought Mrs Wilson, when men were demobilised, ‘and women go back to their homes’. WC, B6.14, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 11 July 1946, Co. Donegal, Ireland, as from London. Richards, the obvious candidate, had herself been barred by her sex from directorship of the RLI. She wrote to Godfrey: ‘You know I wanted that job and had been promised it, but at the last moment Hubert [Hubert Young, governor of Northern Rhodesia] told me his financial backers wouldn’t stand for a woman.’ She added, ‘I do hope you get it because it would be fun . . . starting anything new is a real chance which I envy you’ (WC, B4.7, Audrey Richards/Godfrey Wilson, 3 Sept. 1937, Pralognan, Haute-Savoie). WC, B6.20, Monica Wilson/Prof. J. H. Hutton, [c. July 1946], [Alice]; WC, B5.6, John Dover-Wilson and Audrey [Lawson]/Monica Wilson, 21 July 1946, Balerno. WC, B6.5, E. E. Evans-Pritchard/[Registrar] Rhodes University College, 25 June 1946, Cambridge. Evans-Pritchard signed himself ‘Reader in Anthropology at Cambridge and Professor of Social Anthropology (elect) at Oxford’. Audrey Richards also wrote an enthusiastic reference (WC, B6.14, Audrey Richards/[Registrar, Rhodes University College], 15 June 1946, London).

‘Your Intellectual Son’

203

1977,48 from the mid-1940s her new work was for the most part on South Africa. Notable were the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, the urban sociology of Langa, the increasingly historical work epitomised in the Oxford History of South Africa and her work on the autobiography of Z. K. Matthews.49 Fort Hare was pivotal to this, representing and reinforcing the choice for, and vision of, a South Africa in the liberal Christian tradition of Lovedale. Criticising inconsistent liberals as much as the openly racist thinking of those in power, she affirmed this tradition at the opening of the Missionary Museum in King William’s Town in 1976. She wrote to Audrey Richards that ‘most whites looked puzzled’ at her address and that John Brownlee’s descendants, celebrating the 150th anniversary of his mission station, ‘looked much more conservative than he was when he arrived in 1818’.50 Teaching and Students Monica came in 1944 to a Fort Hare where, in spite of challenges, Christian, liberal, paternalistic African higher education still seemed to hold firm and where black social and economic advance did not yet seem completely obstructed.51 It was a short period of apparent equilibrium, even optimism. However, this appearance masked deep-seated tensions and was soon to disintegrate. In the 1940s, Fort Hare was a conservative and hierarchical institution. It also encapsulated the aspirations, discontents and frustrations of the growing South and even southern African black elite. It was a college where Gaositwe Chiepe – a forceful young woman who studied zoology and botany, became SRC (Student Representative Council) secretary and went on to a prominent administrative and political career in Botswana – could be asked by the chemistry professor’s wife, ‘Why are you wasting your time instead of doing home economics?’52 Resentment at paternalism broke out in protests over food quality and the prohibition 48 49

50

51 52

Monica’s works on the Nyakyusa are listed in Chapter 4 in this volume. Of books alone, she was the editor and author, with others, of vol. 3, Social Structure and vol. 4, Land Tenure of the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1952); with Archie Mafeje she wrote Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963); edited with Leonard Thompson (and substantially wrote) The Oxford History of South Africa, vols 1 and 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969 and 1971), and edited and partly wrote Freedom for My People. She also wrote Religion and the Transformation of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Monica Wilson, ‘Missionaries: Conquerors or Servants of God?’ (King William’s Town: South African Missionary Museum, 1976); London School of Economics Archives/Richards/16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 28 Feb. 1976, Hogsback. For the national context see Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves, eds, South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005). Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006.

204

Inside African Anthropology

of dancing, and in events such as the 1941 student strike over an alleged assault on a kitchen worker by the dining hall boarding master, and a 1942 class boycott precipitated by a ban on Sunday tennis. It may have masked a deeper sense of alienation.53 The tone had already sharpened in the 1930s. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was one focus of protest,54 and laws such as those ending African voting rights in the Cape and limiting African residence in towns another. As Monica wrote in May 1937, ‘anti European feeling is increasing fast. Fort Hare feels more electric than ever’.55 Earlier students, such as Govan Mbeki and I. B. Tabata, had developed wider political agendas and the moderate All African Convention, which in 1943–4 incubated the radical Non-European Unity Movement, had a student following.56 Discontent was too dispersed and disconnected, however, to generate a sustained critique of the institution. This came with the foundation of the Fort Hare branch of the ANC Youth League in 1948, after Monica’s departure from the college.57 Robert Sobukwe, ‘a man of influence among his fellows’, as Principal Clifford Dent wrote on 2 November 1949, had yet to arrive on campus,58 although Monica would recall that, already in her time, Z. K. Matthews was being ‘sniped at’ as a ‘stooge’ by some campus radicals.59 At Monica’s Fort Hare, most though not all students still tended to seek improvement within the existing system. The stories of some of Monica’s Fort Hare student ‘significant others’ illustrate her academic and pastoral roles at the college. Gaositwe Chiepe (see Figure 6.2) was one of Monica’s charges in Eluk. She remembers Monica as ‘firm, a disciplinarian, but very tender . . . she respected people, and you just felt you loved her, and didn’t want to do anything that would displease her’. When she and her friend Pauline Masinyane ‘had one penny between us . . . we went to town to buy penny fish-bones . . . put in salted flour and fried . . . So we came back

53

54 55 56

57 58 59

For student radicalism at Fort Hare see Daniel Massey, Under Protest: The Rise of Student Resistance at the University of Fort Hare (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010), esp. 35–40. Nelson Mandela, a Fort Hare student at the time, refused to sit on the Students’ Representative Council in protest against the poor quality of dining hall food. For food as an issue in mission schools, see Jonathan Hyslop, The Classroom Struggle: Policy and Resistance in South Africa 1940–1990 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1999), 15–17. Massey, Under Protest, 34–35. WC, B1, Monica Wilson/Godfrey Wilson, 10 May 1937, Lovedale. For Govan Mbeki at Fort Hare see Massey, Under Protest, 30–34. Isaac Tabata was a student from 1930 to 1933: University of Fort Hare Student Records, Alice, Tabata, I. B. For Tabata, see Ciraj Shahid Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/Biography and History in South Africa’, Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2004. Massey, Under Protest, 42–44. The Youth League was founded in Johannesburg in 1944 and expanded substantially under A. P. Mda from 1948. Alice, University of Fort Hare Student Files, Sobukwe, R. M. Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, 228.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

205

Figure 6.2. Monica and the House Committee of the women’s residence Elukhanyisweni (Place of Enlightenment) at Fort Hare Native College, 1946. The other women who appear in the photograph are, from left to right, Gaositwe Chiepe, Jeanette Sello, Violet Nikani, Beatrice Ntloko and Eunice Kuzwayo.60

and . . . were happily tucking into the fish-bones when lo and behold the door opened with a knock and there was Monica Wilson. We froze. She looked at us and she said, ‘I like fish too but I don’t eat it in my bedroom. You know it shouldn’t be here.’ We apologised. It showed that . . . kind words, or simple words, are more effective, more corrective, than crescendos of indignation.’ 61 Compare this nostalgic reflection with Monica’s recollection of being a Fort Hare warden. She felt that where racial isolation is the rule, discipline is often difficult because ‘the enforcement of any rules (whether by whites or Africans) tends to be regarded as “persecution”’. Such institutions ‘are liable to become the cradels [sic] of exclusive nationalisms’.62 Gaositwe and Pauline looked after Francis and Timothy ‘when she perhaps wanted to be quiet and alone, or when she was doing something else at work’. At bath time ‘I’ll tell your Mummy that you were splashing’ was enough to quell the brothers.63 Gaositwe often stayed with

60 61 62 63

WC, N2 Photographs of Monica Wilson in groups. Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006. WC, Talks and Addresses, Box 1 (partly cat.), Monica Wilson, ‘South African Universities and the Colour Bar’, n.d. [but c. 1959]. Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006. Also WC, uncat. corr., Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaositwe Chiepe/Monica Wilson, 22 Sept. 1975, Gaborone.

206

Inside African Anthropology

Monica at Hogsback during the holidays instead of returning home to Bechuanaland. At the time this was unusual and, to many whites, unacceptable: ‘It was like being at home . . . like being, perhaps, the senior member of the family . . . and doing the chores happily, and everybody being happy.’ This family, however, was haunted by Godfrey’s death. Monica never talked about it, though it was clear that it had profoundly affected her, ‘and this is what drew me to her’. She was vulnerable, Gaositwe thought, ‘but being the woman she was, she was determined not to go under, and to fight it – and the children must not suffer because of that’.64 Monica’s concern for her Fort Hare students did not end when she left the college. In 1954, at UCT, she pushed for the Oxford Bantu Scholarship Trust scholarship, intended primarily for a woman, to be awarded to Gaositwe who was now an education officer at Serowe in Bechuanaland. She was an ‘outstanding student’, Monica wrote to the UCT vice-chancellor.65 She lobbied Z. K. Matthews to write on Gaositwe’s behalf and was herself a referee, writing that so strongly did she feel that she was ‘an eminently suitable candidate for the scholarship’ that she had sent her an application form ‘though she is not connected with us here’. She considered her a woman of complete integrity, with notable powers of leadership, and thought she would ‘hold her own without difficulty in any women’s college in Oxford or Cambridge’.66 The scholarship was awarded to a man.67 Gaositwe Chiepe saw Monica as warden, widowed mother of two small children and supportive professional. For Livingstone Mqotsi, a political nonconformist from an early age, Monica was teacher and intellectual influence. Alienated by the atmosphere at the St Barnabas Anglican Primary School in his Keiskammahoek home, as a young man he refused to go to one of the prominent mission schools. Instead, to his father’s chagrin, in 1939 he went to stay with a sister in Port Elizabeth and attended the mainly coloured Paterson Technical High School as a day scholar. There he became interested in music and began to play the violin, mixing with fellow-student Dennis Brutus and his circle. Though he qualified for Fort Hare in 1943, he mistrusted what he took to be its cloying missionary atmosphere. However, he eventually abandoned his

64 65 66 67

Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006. WC, uncat. corr., Gaositwe Chiepe, Monica Wilson/T. B. Davie, 12 May 1954 [Rondebosch, Cape Town]. Ibid., Gaositwe Chiepe/Monica Wilson Reference for Gaositwe Chiepe for Oxford scholarship, 18 May 1954. Ibid., Z. K. Matthews, Z. K. Matthews/Monica Wilson, 15 May 1954, Alice; interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006. This was an instance of wider marginalising of women: see, for example, their absence among the male research assistants in Lyn Schumaker’s Africanizing Anthropology.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

207

musical ambitions and went to the college in 1945, supported throughout his Fort Hare career by Mr E. M. Holland of Port Elizabeth.68 At Fort Hare, Mqotsi met Monica and got ‘terribly interested in social anthropology: it gripped my imagination’. He believed she was an incomparable teacher for those willing to engage with her intellectually. She respected any seriously argued and well-supported viewpoint: ‘whatever she said, in matters of theory, was not a final statement – it was a suggestion – “I suggest that these things correspond”, “I suggest to you that this is . . . ”. And then of course it was an attempt to get you to look at whatever the problem was, to judge it . . . from all angles. And to examine her own statements as well’. She made no concessions to intellectual laziness: a lot of people . . . had curious ideas about social anthropology. They thought it was an easy subject, because it was about them. And they thought they knew what their life was, and what their institutions were. But when Monica Wilson started talking about the functions of institutions, that was a different matter . . . What stimulated me really . . . was the requirement that you should look at your social institutions from an objective standpoint, and it was no use saying . . . ‘I know these customs’, which was the attitude of a number of friends.69

She argued vigorously with Mqotsi about his Marxist views, an approach he thought alien to Z. K. Matthews whom he found ‘superficial’, teaching from notes which he would get students to read out if he was unable to attend class. Matthews’s style, Mqotsi thought, was that of a high school teacher rather than a university lecturer.70 Monica arranged for him to move straight into social anthropology, normally studied only in second and third years, and he completed all available courses during Monica’s time at Fort Hare. Mqotsi’s intense involvement with social anthropology led him, on his own initiative and with Monica’s support, to study a separatist Church in 68

69 70

Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 June 2007. See also WC, uncat. corr., L. Mqotsi, Mr. L. M. Mqotsi, curriculum vitae, enclosed in L. Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 10 Aug. 1965, Lusaka. For Holland, see University of Fort Hare, Student Files, Mqotsi, L. Chapter 7 in this volume deals more fully with Mqotsi’s fieldwork and texts; this section of this chapter looks at his relationship with Monica in a particular institutional context. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 June 2007. Others found Z. K. ‘an exceedingly good teacher’, as Monica Wilson notes. See Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, 115–116. However, Hilda Kuper, as external examiner, was ‘very disturbed’ by the standard of Fort Hare anthropology examination papers in 1954: ‘they gave me the impression of most slip-shod teaching’ (WC, uncat. corr., Hilda Kuper, Hilda Kuper/Monica Wilson, 25 Jan. 1954, Durban), maybe fulfilling Monica’s 1937 foreboding that Matthews could have ‘enormous scope’ academically but she was afraid ‘he will diffuse his energy in lots of outside things and do nothing very well’ (WC, B1, Monica Wilson/Godfrey Wilson, 22 May 1937, Lovedale).

208

Inside African Anthropology

Port Elizabeth with his friend Nimrod Mkele. Mkele had been at Paterson High School with Mqotsi, followed by a tumultuous personal life and career at Fort Hare, where he was suspended in 1943 after accusations of involvement in student agitation. Following an acrimonious correspondence, he was readmitted only when he apologised the following year.71 Using the prominence of Mqotsi’s brother-in-law in the Church as an entry point, the friends did fieldwork during the holidays and later wrote an article which Monica sent to African Studies. This substantial study, a most unusual achievement for two black – or any – undergraduates in South Africa at the time, was published in June 1946.72 Mqotsi said that Alexander Kerr actively discouraged him from undertaking such research, arguing that it was a distraction from the teaching career upon which he should focus. The contemporary record confirms this, though it seems that Kerr eventually relented and forwarded his application for a bursary, which he obtained, to the Bureau for Social Research.73 If Monica had remained at Fort Hare, she would have supervised Mqotsi’s MA. Instead, she left for Rhodes and Mqotsi embarked on a career of many frustrations and eventual exile in Zambia and England, where he became deputy principal of Thetford Secondary School in Norfolk. Monica wrote references for him for the RLI and elsewhere, and advised him on his subsequent studies, but hostility to his Unity Movement politics blocked him repeatedly.74 Her loyalty to Mqotsi is notable because Monica thought him a considerably less capable student than Godfrey Pitje.75 Pitje is best known as an important figure in the ANC Youth League at Fort Hare in the late 1940s, and later as the legal partner of Tambo and Mandela and founder of the Black Lawyers Association.76 He graduated from Fort 71 72 73 74

75 76

University of Fort Hare Student Files, Mkele, N., Principal/N. Mkele, 9 Feb. 1943, Fort Hare; ibid., N. Mkele/Registrar SANC, 13 July 1944, Johannesburg, and other corr. Livingstone Mqotsi and Nimrod Mkele, ‘A Separatist Church: iBandla lika-Krestu’, African Studies, 5, 2 (1946), 106–142. WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, L. Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 21 June 1947, New Brighton; ibid., Livingstone Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 3 Feb. 1948, New Brighton. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 June 2007. See also correspondence Monica Wilson and Mqotsi from 1947 to 1980 in WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi. ‘Like most exiles’, she says in a 1980 reference, ‘I think he has suffered much’ (Monica Wilson/Chair, Postgraduate Studies, Univ. of Warwick, 28 July 1980, Hogsback). Some of Mqotsi’s difficulties are described in ibid., L. Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 1 July 1954, Nqamakhwe, where he notes his summary dismissal after nine months from his research post at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) ‘on the ground that I was politically persona non grata with the mines where the bulk of our work has to be done’. WC, uncat. corr., Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Monica Wilson/Secretary RLI, 27 July 1950, [Grahamstown]. K. S. Broun, Black Lawyers, White Courts: The Soul of South African Law (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000), Chapter 1: ‘Godfrey Mokgomane Pitje: Teacher, Scholar, Attorney, Father’; Gail M. Gerhart and Thomas Karis, eds, From Protest to

‘Your Intellectual Son’

209

Hare with anthropology as a major in 1944, the year Monica began to teach there. He came, he said, ‘under the strong influence’ of Monica, who was ‘obviously more learned in the subject than Z. K.’ He taught at Orlando High School in 1945, where his already strong political interests intensified through contact with activist senior students. With Monica’s encouragement, he enrolled for honours in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. When his teacher Hilda Kuper left at the end of 1946, replaced by the ex-colonial civil servant Mervyn Jeffreys,77 he abandoned the degree and returned to Fort Hare to study for an MA in anthropology.78 At this stage he was ‘not a formal member of any political group, but . . . was restless and itching to find a political home’. At Fort Hare, Pitje was once more in the domain of Z. K. Matthews, who was ‘very, very moderate’ but exposed his students to the realities around them ‘just through an exposition of his subjects’. Matthews encouraged him to start an ANC Youth League branch at the college.79 Monica considered Pitje a first-rate ethnographic fieldworker, though lacking in analytical ability.80 She was implacable on questions of academic quality and, while giving full credit to her students’ abilities and achievements, did not allow wishful thinking and what would later be called political correctness to cloud her judgement. It was her sense, later, that in Archie Mafeje she had a first-class student that made him so important to her.81 She did not regard either Mqotsi or Pitje in this way. While she had left Fort Hare by the time Pitje was doing his MA under Matthews, she helped him greatly from Rhodes. He ‘had to travel between Rhodes and Fort Hare’, and asked her directly what he should do when her advice clashed with that of Matthews.82 Thus his postgraduate

77 78

79

80

81 82

Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1964, vol. 4: Political Profiles, 1882–1964 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1977), 127; P. M. Mojapelo, ‘Profile: Dr Godfrey Mokgonane Pitje – a Vital Cog in the Liberation Struggle’, African Law Review (Bumper Issue), (1988), 4–8. http://www.bla.org.za/ uploads/newsletter/TRIBUTE TO OUR FIRST PRESIDENT DR G M PITJE.pdf (accessed 1 March 2011). For Jeffreys, see Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 202–203. University of Fort Hare Staff Files, G. M. Pitje, South African Native College, Form of Application for Staff Appointment (of Museum Sub-Curator), signed by Pitje 10 Oct. 1947. University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, SAIRR: Oral History Programme, Transcripts, AD 1722/1, transcript 3: Interview by A. Manson with G. M. Pitje, Johannesburg, 28 Jan. 1982. WC, uncat. corr., tests, misc., MW reference for G. M. Pitje, 14 Feb. 1950, Grahamstown; ibid., Max Gluckman, draft letter Monica Wilson/Daryll Forde, n.d. [but late 1946], n.p. See Chapter 8. University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, SAIRR: Oral History Programme, Transcripts, AD 1722/1, transcript 3: Interview by A. Manson with G. M. Pitje, Johannesburg, 28 Jan. 1982; WC, uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 25 Sept. 1948, Fort Hare.

210

Inside African Anthropology

studies, formally under Matthews but in fact substantially under Monica, parallelled his political work, where Matthews was the inspiration and A. P. Mda encouraged him from outside the college.83 T. R. H. White’s claim that Pitje and Matthews ‘were hardly on speaking terms’ seems exaggerated.84 When Pitje’s MA was accepted, he told Monica that she had been his ‘inspiration’ and thanked her for supervising his fieldwork and for her attempts to find work for him at the RLI.85 Monica’s role was formally recognised by Fort Hare: she wrote to the secretary of the National Council for Social Research saying that Godfrey Pitje ‘has been a very diligent and . . . successful field worker’ and that the college principal had asked her to report on Pitje’s research ‘which I have been supervising’.86 Pitje’s MA thesis was on male education among the Pedi, his own ethnic group. African Studies, the leading contemporary South African journal in its field, thought the work sufficiently important to publish as a three-part article.87 The study reveals him as a capable and sensitive fieldworker who in other circumstances might have had a solid academic career ahead of him. Monica cited it in her work, as have subsequent scholars.88 The section in the thesis on ‘Sex Education’ was not published in African Studies, but appeared in the International Journal of Sexology, a journal in the tradition of Magnus Hirschfeld, Alfred Kinsey and others, edited from Bombay by A. P. Pillay from 1947 to 1955.89 Pitje had a limited range of published material with which to work. The 19 references in the published article were probably those he 83

84 85 86 87

88

89

For Pitje’s political work at Fort Hare, see Donovan Williams, A History of the University College of Fort Hare, South Africa: The 1950s (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 34–35, 38–43; D. E. Burchell, ‘The Emergence and Growth of Student Militancy at the University College of Fort Hare in the 1940s and 1950s’, Journal of the University of Durban-Westville, 3 (1986), 149–167; Benjamin Pogrund, How Can Man Die Better: The Life of Robert Sobukwe (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2006 (1990)), 28–30. T. R. H. White, ‘Z. K. Matthews and the Formation of the ANC Youth League at the University of Fort Hare’, Kleio, 27 (1995), 136. WC, uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 26 Jan. 1949, Fort Hare. University of Fort Hare Student Files: G. M. Pitje, Monica Wilson/Secretary to the National Council for Social Research, 11 Sept. 1947, Grahamstown. Godfrey M. Pitje, ‘Traditional and Modern Systems of Male Education amongst the Pedi and Cognate Tribes’ (MA thesis, University of South Africa, 1948); G. M. Pitje, ‘Traditional Systems of Male Education Among Pedi and Cognate Tribes’, part 1, African Studies, 9, 2 (1950), 53–76; part 2, African Studies, 9, 3 (1950), 105–124; part 3, African Studies, 9, 4 (1950), 194–201. As in Monica Wilson, Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1957), 231. See also, for instance, references in Peter Delius, A Lion amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996). Godfrey M. Pitje, ‘Sex Education among the Pedi’, International Journal of Sexology, 4 (1951), 212–216; for Pillay see S. Devadas Pillai, Indian Sociology through Ghurye: A Dictionary (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1977), 166.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

211

considered particularly significant from the 86 in his thesis.90 He cited works by two ethnographer educationists, sons of Berlin Missionary Society missionaries, and both important apartheid educational bureaucrats: Werner Eiselen, chair of the commission that shaped Bantu Education, and Gottfried Franz, whose work emphasised traditional Pedi values and education.91 Other citations included publications of Native Commissioner Major Donald Hunt and the ‘renegade’ founder of the Lutheran Bapedi Church, Johannes Winter.92 Surprisingly, neither in the article nor the thesis did he cite Monica’s Reaction to Conquest, which includes material that seems to have comparative importance, though in the thesis he did mention Eileen and Jack Krige and Isaac Schapera. Nor did he cite Lucy Mair, the anthropologist of the time most directly interested in education, nor Malinowski himself – who, in the 1930s, particularly at the 1934 New Education Fellowship conference in South Africa, also turned his attention to education.93 Neither, outside anthropology, does he appear to have read the important work of Victor Murray.94 Two elements in the thesis were not included in the article. First, in the introduction Pitje discussed what came to be known as ‘insider anthropology’, an approach which some of Monica’s work comes close to exemplifying. In spite of the obvious advantages of linguistic and cultural familiarity, he met with suspicion from ‘pagans’ for being different to themselves, and from Christians for fraternising with pagans. His mother urged him not to risk poisoning by eating with strangers, a necessity in 90 91

92

93

94

Pitje, ‘Traditional Systems’, part 3, 200–201; Pitje, ‘Traditional and Modern Systems’, 153–157. Cynthia Kros, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010); http://esaach.org.za/index.php?title=Franz, Gottfried Heinrich (accessed 20 September 2011). For Hunt see references in Delius, A Lion; for Winter, see Peter Delius and Kirsten ¨ Ruther, ‘J.A. Winter – Visionary or Mercenary? A Missionary Life in Colonial Context’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 2 (2010), 303–324. Winter as ‘renegade’ is in Peter Delius, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the NineteenthCentury Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press and London: Heinemann, 1983), 20. See, for instance, Lucy Mair, Native Policies in Africa (London: Routledge, 1936); Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Native Education and Culture Contact’, International Review of Missions, 25 (1936), 480–515. See Peter Kallaway’s work in this area, especially ‘Science Policy: Anthropology and Education in British Colonial Africa during the Inter-war Years’, forthcoming in Paedogogica Historica; also his ‘Education, Health and Social Welfare in the Late Colonial Context: The International Missionary Council and Educational Transition in the Interwar Years with Specific Reference to Colonial Africa’, History of Education, 38, 2 (2009), 217–246; ‘Welfare and Education in British Colonial African and South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s’, Paedogogica Historica, 41, 3 (2005), 337–356; ‘Conference Litmus: The Development of a Conference and Policy Culture in the Interwar Period with Special Reference to the New Education Fellowship and British Colonial Education in Southern Africa’ in Kim Tolley, ed., Transformations in Schooling: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 123–149. A. Victor Murray, The School in the Bush: A Critical Study of the Theory and Practice of Native Education in Africa (London: Longmans Green, 1929).

212

Inside African Anthropology

fieldwork. Belief in witchcraft, easy to dismiss in the educated circles in which he normally mixed, was ubiquitous. Mostly, he maintained the dispassionate tone characteristic of academic writing. Once, in the context of witchcraft, the stresses of field research can be glimpsed through his orderly text: ‘Pedi teachers and ministers are not immune, and it was not an easy matter for one to maintain one’s balance of mind in the face of these suggestions.’95 The difficulties of field research for an African student at the time are apparent in his Fort Hare student file. He asks for a letter to protect him against police harassment96 and writes anxiously about the impossibility of responding to demands for receipts, for example, for travels by donkey cart and purchases of traditional beer for informants.97 Second, the three chapters on modern education and its effects were omitted, making the published article read entirely in the ethnographic present. Pitje echoed The Analysis of Social Change, using the concept of ‘social maladjustment or disequilibrium’. Concluding, Pitje pictured the Pedi boy ‘with his one leg in town and another in the Reserves’. Traditional education was conservative but appropriate; modern education was imposed from outside and too theoretical. The future depended on a more relevant modern education that should take account of the traditional system.98 This humdrum conclusion suggests that Monica was correct in thinking that Pitje’s strengths lay more in fieldwork than in interpretation. Nevertheless, it is surprising that Monica, who was well aware of the educational literature and, for example, knew Lucy Mair and Victor Murray personally, does not appear to have directed Pitje to this literature, or if she did, that he did not appear to pay attention to it. Ethnographically detailed, his study does not engage with contemporary educational thinking. This was the end of Pitje’s published work in the field of anthropology. He later published short pieces on education and on the pass laws.99 The connection between Pitje and Monica was not limited to the supervision of his thesis. Two episodes relating to research posts for which he applied suggest the atmosphere of colonial southern Africa. In October 1946, Max Gluckman, who succeeded Godfrey Wilson as director of the RLI, asked Monica if she knew of African students who 95 96 97 98 99

Pitje, ‘Traditional and Modern Systems’, viii, and see in general i–xvi. University of Fort Hare Student Files: G. M. Pitje, Pitje/Alexander Kerr, 13 Jan. 1947, Middelburg. Ibid., Pitje/Miss B. D. Took, 26 May 1947, Middelburg; ibid., Pitje/Bursar, Fort Hare, 14 June 1947, Middelburg; ibid., Pitje, memorandum on ‘Expenditure’, 17 June 1947. Pitje, ‘Traditional and Modern Systems’, 142, 150. Somarsundarum Cooppan, Godfrey M. Pitje and Richard E. van der Ross, Four Essays on Education (Wynberg: Teachers’ Educational and Professional Association, 1959); Godfrey M. Pitje, ‘The Effect of Pass Laws on African Life’, Address to South African Institute of Race Relations Council meetings, 1961, Cape Town: SAIRR, 1961.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

213

could work for the International African Institute’s Ethnographic Survey of Africa.100 Monica recommended Pitje, along with Tennyson Hlabangana from Southern Rhodesia, writing that their cultural backgrounds and command of an African language made them ‘less likely to make mistakes in interpretation than all but the most experienced European students’. Embarrassed, Gluckman replied, asking if Pitje would be prepared to live in ‘a poor hut’, isolated from most Europeans apart from the Gluckmans and a few others who would welcome him to their homes. He would ‘ask Government whether they object to an African working on the survey and possibly using the files’.101 Nothing came of the Ethnographic Survey initiative, though it reveals the racism saturating the Central African colonies at the time. In 1950 Pitje applied for a post at the Institute as a fieldworker on the Copperbelt with Clyde Mitchell, leading to an episode that shocked Monica at the time and is no less shocking today. Monica wrote a reference for him, saying that he was ‘extremely well fitted’ for the post: ‘[h]e would be able to live in a Compound as a white anthropologist can not do, and he would express the point of view on the inter-racial situation which no white person, however sympathetic, can express’. His limitations in terms of organising and presenting material were more than compensated for by his excellent fieldwork.102 On 18 August, David Rheinallt Jones, founder of the South African Institute of Race Relations and the doyen of establishment liberalism, wrote to Monica on behalf of the RLI trustees ‘to ascertain the political and racial attitudes of certain Africans’ who had applied for research posts under the institute. He asked her if Pitje, specifically, ‘could be relied upon to be discreet in his conduct in respect of political and other controversial issues’, and he attached a list of all applicants in case she could give information on any or all of them, as well as the names of their referees.103 We do not have a record of Monica’s direct response to this request but Max Gluckman, now in Manchester, wrote to her on 28 September saying Pitje had told him that he had not been appointed: ‘It is pretty sickening that no African who does not thank the Whites for kicking him around is going to get appointed . . . when it comes to condemning blacks on the South African police reports without protest then I think we have come to the edge.’104 He wrote later that ‘I feel like you disgusted’ 100 101 102 103 104

WC, uncat. corr., Max Gluckman, Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 26 Oct. 1946, Livingstone. Ibid., Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 4 Jan. 1947, Livingstone. Ibid., Godfrey Pitje, Monica Wilson/Sec., Inter-University Committee for Higher Education in the Colonies, Toronto, n.d. Ibid., J. D. Rheinallt Jones/Monica Wilson, ‘Confidential’, 18 Aug. 1950, Johannesburg. Ibid., Max Gluckman, Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 28 Sept. 1950, Manchester.

214

Inside African Anthropology

by the affair, and that he could not ‘add anything to your indignant comments’.105 Monica wrote directly to Pitje that she was ‘very sorry indeed’ that he had not got one of the RLI posts: ‘I thought you should have got one of the jobs there and said so repeatedly.’106 Later, contacting Monica once more for a reference for Godfrey who wanted to apply for a research assistantship at Manchester, Gluckman perspicaciously asked whether it was worth Pitje’s while to continue with anthropology after what had happened over the RLI.107 Though with an MA and publications on which Monica had given him substantial advice,108 Pitje was eventually obliged to return to school teaching, becoming principal from 1952 of Jane Furze combined primary and secondary school in his native Sekhukuneland, where he found his duties ‘so taxing that I do not have much time in which to read anthropology’.109 Even in this field, difficulties about which he probably never knew were put in his way. In 1950 the then Fort Hare principal, Clifford Dent, wrote damningly of Pitje as a political agitator when the inspector of Native Education at Krugersdorp requested a confidential report in relation to Pitje’s application for principalship of a large Witwatersrand primary school.110 Nevertheless, he tried repeatedly to return to academia and Monica wrote many references for him.111 In 1952 he proposed registering as her doctoral student at UCT. Monica said she would accept him, but advised him not to come: ‘I would feel extremely unhappy if you spent your savings on two years’ work and then did not get the degree in the end, and I am not sufficiently confident that you can make it to encourage you to go on. I am afraid you will take this hard, but I do feel that I should tell you my opinion . . . I have found it very difficult to write this letter.’112 In 1954 Pitje was accepted for a position at Rhodes, where he would have worked towards his Ph.D. However, Oliver Tambo, asking ‘how long can you last at Rhodes before 105 106 107 108 109 110

111

112

Ibid., Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 12 Dec. 1950, Manchester. Ibid., Godfrey Pitje, Monica Wilson/Godfrey Pitje, 1 Dec. 1950, n.p. Ibid., Max Gluckman, Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 16 July 1951, Manchester. Ibid., Godfrey Pitje, Monica Wilson, ‘Points for Pitje for publication’, n.d. [1949]. Ibid., Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 28 April 1952, Jane Furze. University of Fort Hare Staff Files: G. M. Pitje, G. A. McDonald, Inspector of Native Education/Principal, SANC, 30 June 1950, Krugersdorp; Clifford Dent/G. A. McDonald, Fort Hare. Wits Historical Papers, Kb5.27 (file 2), SAIIR: Education: Bursaries, Trust Funds, Rhodes Trust, 1947–1949: Applications for African Research Fellowships: G. M. Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Director SAIIR, 7 June 1949, Fort Hare, application for fellowship; WC, uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 8 Aug. 1951, Wilberforce Inst., Transvaal; ibid., Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 27 Oct. 1952, Jane Furze; ibid., Monica Wilson/‘To Whom it May Concern’ [for post as Senior Social Research Scholar at Univ. of Natal], 28 July 1953, n.p. Ibid., Monica Wilson/Godfrey Pitje, 3 June 1952, n.p.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

215

Figure 6.3. Godfrey Pitje in his later years as a lawyer.

there are problems there?’, persuaded him to join his Johannesburg law firm instead.113 Through all this, Monica and Pitje continued to correspond. The last substantial episode in their relationship concerned not Fort Hare but 113

University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, SAIIR: Oral History Programme, Transcripts, AD 1722/1, transcript 3: Interview by A. Manson with G. M. Pitje, Johannesburg, 28 Jan. 1982.

216

Inside African Anthropology

another bantustan institution. On 3 December 1977, Godfrey wrote to Monica ‘in a state of confusion’, seeking advice. He had agreed to allow his name to go forward as a nominee for chancellor of the University of the North. He did not know whether he should allow the nomination to proceed or what the job might entail: ‘Kindly give me your motherly as well as professional advice . . . [t]here is nobody else I can turn to.’114 Monica wrote a long and thoughtful letter in reply. She said it was the old question of how far to cooperate with a bad system, and when to reject cooperation totally. Who, she asked, makes the decisions at Turfloop? ‘It’s no use your agreeing to stand if effective decisions are still made in Pretoria, or if the younger generation has decided they cannot use the university as at present organised.’ It was, she said, essentially a political decision ‘as to how best to use position and influence in public life, and I’m no politician! . . . I shall be remembering you and’ – ending with an unusual, oblique and we can assume correspondingly heartfelt religious reference – ‘asking for light for you’.115 Pitje replied saying he was withdrawing his name. He had, he said, always held Monica’s view that the younger generation should be listened to seriously, and, in the only overt reference to his political activities in this correspondence, noted that this had been the essence of his relationship with Fort Hare in the early 1950s, when he had been accused of fraternising with students.116 There is a final letter in the file. Monica sent Pitje a copy of her recently published For Men and Elders. ‘I shall start reading it tonight’, he said, signing himself, ‘Your intellectual son, Godfrey’.117 These accounts make it clear that, through her professional life, Monica was diligent in helping black students who faced many barriers if they wished to move beyond areas like the school teaching and nursing regarded as appropriate for educated Africans. Examples can be multiplied. A Fort Hare psychology student wrote to Monica of her hope for a job in child guidance or similar, where she could use her academic discipline. ‘I imagine that no such jobs are yet available to Africans but I wanted to make sure.’ Monica wrote to Quinton Whyte, assistant director of the Institute of Race Relations. Whyte suggested that the student contact the National Council for Child Welfare, and Monica 114 115 116 117

WC, uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 3 Dec. 1977, Johannesburg. Ibid., Monica Wilson/Godfrey Pitje, 13 Dec. 1977, Hogsback. Ibid., Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 28 Dec. 1977, Johannesburg. Ibid., Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 6 March 1978, Johannesburg. Monica sent Pitje other material as well, such as her Religion and the Transformation of Society (WC, uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 2 Aug. 1974, Johannesburg). Near the end of her life, Monica asked the British publisher of Freedom for My People to send a copy to Pitje (WC, uncat. corr., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/Rex Collings, 26 Feb. 1981, Hogsback).

‘Your Intellectual Son’

217

pursued the issue with this organisation.118 She wrote to Max Gluckman at the RLI recommending the Southern Rhodesian Stanlake Samkange, who was completing his first anthropology course at Fort Hare, for vacation work.119 She did her best to help Solomon Skosana, her student at Fort Hare and later a researcher on the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, who was dismissed by the Department of Bantu Education on spurious grounds. She made enquiries to confirm the facts and wrote to Skosana that she was ‘most distressed’ to hear of his situation: the system, she said, ‘is a terrible one’.120 She kept in touch with Curnick Ndamse, who graduated in 1944 and later lectured in social anthropology and native administration at Fort Hare. He remained in employment after the 1960 government takeover, but was sacked in 1965 for ‘insubordination’ and ‘reprehensible’ professional conduct, going on to an ambiguous career in Transkei politics.121 Monica accepted Ndamse as a Ph.D. student in anthropology at UCT but he did not respond to her attempts to help and ‘produced nothing whatever’ before his untimely and some thought suspicious death in 1974.122 Monica’s attempts to assist her black students to achieve the places to which their talents and experience surely entitled them were often frustrated by racism and discrimination. Given the politics of the time, it is hard to know to what extent those whom she helped had the potential to become significant figures, but the environment for black scholarship had certainly deteriorated. It is difficult to imagine, say, a Z. K. Matthews or an A. C. Jordan being able to achieve, in and after the late 1940s, what had been possible in an earlier era. Some of Monica’s Fort Hare students kept in touch with her for many years. She was seen as sympathetic to their sensibility and aspirations. 118

119

120

121

122

University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, SAIRR Collection, Aa.3.1.14 (file 3), Head Office Corr.: General, 1945, Monica Wilson/Quinton Whyte, 18 June 1945, Fort Hare; ibid., Quinton Whyte/Monica Wilson, 21 July 1945 [Johannesburg], ibid., Monica Wilson/Quinton Whyte, 21 July 1945, Fort Hare. WC, uncat. corr., Tests, Miscellaneous, Monica Wilson/Max Gluckman, 28 Aug. 1946, Alice. For more on Stanlake and the Samkange family, see Terence Ranger, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe 1920–64 (Harare: Baobab, 1995). WC, uncat. corr., Solomon Skosana, Solomon Skosana/Monica Wilson, 7 Aug. 1962, Middledrift; ibid., Monica Wilson/Solomon Skosana, 21 Aug. 1962, [Rondebosch, Cape Town]; ibid., Kenneth Mali/Monica Wilson, 25 Sept. 1962, Fort Hare. WC, J6.1, Papers concerning Academic Freedom Committee and Open Universities, 1956–1966, cutting from East London Daily Dispatch, 22 April 1965, ‘Senior Lecturer at Fort Hare gets the sack’, and press statement by J. H. du Preez, Registrar, Fort Hare. WC, uncat. corr., Colin Murray, Monica Wilson/Colin Murray, 1 June 1974, Hogsback. See also ibid., J2, Social Anthropology Report: Students, Monica Wilson/Registrar, UCT, 4 Oct. 1972, [Rondebosch, Cape Town]. Ndamse, for whom Jack Simons externally examined, was also in touch through him with Monica (ibid., J13.1, [Curnick] Ndamse/Jack Simons, 22 Feb. 1961, Fort Hare). Thanks to Isaac Ntabankulu for information about Ndamse.

218

Inside African Anthropology

Francis Wilson remembers the Eluk students presenting Negro Caravan, the landmark anthology of black American writing of its time, to his mother when she was leaving Fort Hare, indicating some of the intellectual currents among the students and the ease with which they shared these with Monica.123 Although Monica did not teach him, Joe Matthews remembered her as ‘a Christian . . . very unusually close to the black people in the area . . . She was really a true-blue liberal . . . believing that people should be equal . . . and you might say she was . . . a type of English radical. You know, the English have produced a kind of radical who was loyal to Church and Queen . . . but . . . radical in relation to racial matters.’124 Teaching, Researching, Writing Monica was at Fort Hare for only two and a half years, but, as Livingstone Mqotsi perceived, her approach to teaching and her ambitions for the institution were different to those of Alexander Kerr. Some of her teaching notes from 1945 survive. They give an academically rigorous and socially involved introduction to the anthropological literature of the day. Anthropology and sociology are ‘[o]ne and the same subject’ using the same methods, she wrote. It is ‘[o]nly by understanding society that we can control it’, arguing that the development of the social sciences is the ‘basis of a more reasonable social order. Not to suggest that knowledge will cure all our ills, but knowing what to do [is the] first step’. Social anthropology has the ‘immediate practical value’ of promoting understanding between Europeans and Africans. Working before subsequent advances in African history, the lack of written records in African society meant to Monica that the comparative method typical of social anthropology was ‘[c]omparable to study of English history in [an] English University’, an interesting coda to her undergraduate study of history at Cambridge, and a link to the subsequent Oxford History and other attempts to marry history and anthropology.125 There would be no special dispensations for African students, ‘no spoon feeding’, and she expected to learn from as well as teach them. Her ambition for the African Studies Department at Fort Hare was that it should become ‘a centre for research. That is a centre where exact knowledge is accumulated and digested’, a view at odds with Fort Hare policy at the time.126 123

124 125 126

Interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008; Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, eds, Negro Caravan (New York: Dryden, 1941). Interview with Joe Matthews, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 20 November 2006. See Chapter 9. WC, J5, Monica Wilson Lecture Notes, notes from Fort Hare, 1945.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

219

Monica’s ambitions to make Fort Hare an important centre for African studies were not realised. This is not surprising given the teaching rather than research role the institution claimed; her intense workload, including the self-imposed task of writing up the Nyakyusa material; the pressures of raising her sons and caring for the young women of Eluk; and her brief time at the college. When Monica began at Fort Hare, she already had an excellent publication record, particularly the classic Reaction to Conquest127 and The Analysis of Social Change, written with her husband. This appeared in 1945 when Monica was at Fort Hare but was substantially complete by June 1943, when Godfrey, in Egypt, urged her to publish as soon as their second child was born: ‘the book is yours now, to be delivered in your own time’.128 Though it never had quite the impact that Godfrey and Monica hoped for, it remains an early and important attempt by anthropologists to grapple with change, using the concept of ‘enlargement of scale’. Written in the midst of professional disaster, unemployment, pregnancy, childbirth, parenthood and wartime service, with the authors geographically separated for long periods, this taut and compact book is a remarkable achievement.129 From Fort Hare, Monica announced that she was working on a twovolume book on Nyakyusa society for which the theoretical standpoint was outlined in the Analysis of Social Change. The books would be supported by field documents, which would probably not be published but deposited in the British Museum or elsewhere as ‘detailed evidence for the more general account’. This idea evolved into a continuing project not completed until her fourth Nyakusa monograph appeared in 1977. While at Fort Hare, she published an article on ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, writing to Max Gluckman that when she had finished it she would move on to family and public rituals.130 In reporting her areas of expertise to the Royal Anthropological Institute, she noted that as well as teaching and working on the Nyakyusa material, at Fort Hare she was ‘in close touch with educated Africans from the Union, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and other parts of Africa, as far north as Uganda’.131 ‘I find arguments in 127 128 129

130

131

Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008 [1936], 4th edition). WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 14 June 1943, UDF, MEF (Union Defence Force, Middle East Forces) [Egypt]. Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change. For an appreciative but critical contemporary review, see Audrey Richards, ‘Social Change in Central Africa’, Spectator, 15 February 1946, 16. WC, uncat. corr., Max Gluckman, Monica Wilson/Gluckman, 20 Oct. 1945, [Alice]; Monica Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 79 (1949), 21–25. Royal Anthropological Institute Archives, London, Census of British Anthropologists, A71/399, Dr Monica Wilson, n.d. [but 1945/6]. For more on Fort Hare’s pan-African

220

Inside African Anthropology

class on such subjects as magic and science, or the social function of lobola illuminating,’ she said.132 She also worked on her contribution to the pivotal African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, and sent a draft to the joint editor, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Attempting to maintain her professional credentials in an isolated corner of the Eastern Cape, she wrote to Audrey Richards that she might not be up to date with current professional jargon. She was willing to adapt her chapter, but had received little information from Radcliffe-Brown. ‘Have you any of the dope?’, she asked.133 Monica was also involved in public affairs. In October 1946, she and Z. K. Matthews gave evidence to the Native Laws Commission of Enquiry, or Fagan Commission, in its sitting at King William’s Town. She prepared thoroughly, scanning the most recent material on migrant labour,134 and with Matthews submitted a cogent memorandum in advance of the hearing. Matthews responded to questions of law on Africans in urban areas. Citing her late husband’s work on Northern Rhodesia, Monica wrote on migrant labour, focusing on its destructive effects on family and social life.135 The two gave oral evidence together in a lengthy interaction with the commissioners. Drawing on their Fort Hare experience, they rejected the argument that higher education makes Africans want to sit behind desks and order others to work. ‘No’, said Matthews: ‘We . . . have been in close contact with the people who have taken that training, and it is not correct to say that people who have a degree have got that impression.’ They advocated private ownership of land by Africans in rural areas, and improved marketing for African produce.136

132

133

134 135

136

dimension to 1960, see Se´an Morrow and Khayalethu Gxabalashe, ‘The Records of the University of Fort Hare’, History in Africa, 27 (2000), 491–493. WC, uncat. corr., Max Gluckman, document by Monica Wilson, Oct. 1945, Department of African Studies, Fort Hare, in Monica Wilson/Max Gluckman, 20 Oct. 1945, [Alice]. This in response to copy Melville J. Herskovits/Max Gluckman, 29 June 1945, Evanston, forwarded with Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 6 Oct. 1945, Livingstone. WC, B6.13, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown/Monica Wilson, 10 Aug. 1946, Dolgelly, and Monica Wilson/A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, n.d., Alice, with which Monica Wilson sends Radcliffe-Brown her chapter; WC, B.6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, n.d. [1947?], Grahamstown; Monica Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Kinship’ in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and D. Forde, eds, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 111–139. WC, Additions, Information Files (partly cat.), Migrant Labour, Quinton White (SAIRR)/Monica Wilson, 14 Aug. 1945, Johannesburg. WC, Files on Various Subjects, L–N (partly cat.), Migrant Labour, Native Laws Commission of Enquiry: Questionnaire, [1946]; Native Laws Inquiry Commission, Statement by Prof. Z. K. Matthews and Dr M. Wilson, 17 Oct. 1946; Godfrey Wilson, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization. University of Witwatersrand Historical Papers, Union of South Africa, Department of Native Affairs, Native Laws Commission of Enquiry, Minutes of Evidence, Sitting of 24 Oct. 1946, King William’s Town, 1466, 1468, 1472.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

221

Monica and Fort Hare after Her Departure Monica maintained links with Fort Hare when she left for Rhodes, from where weekend trips to Hogsback were possible. From 1949 to 1957 the college was affiliated to Rhodes and Monica served on its council for as long as she remained there.137 However, when Fort Hare was incorporated by government into the ethnically based system designed to produce graduates to administer the bantustans, and when friends and ex-colleagues like Z. K. and Frieda Matthews felt obliged to resign or were dismissed, her connection virtually ceased. Monica wanted nothing to do with Fort Hare as an ethnic college. She saw the tribal ideology on which these colleges were based as cynical and ‘mostly nonsense’.138 In 1980 she wrote to Frieda Matthews from Hogsback that ‘I weep over Fort Hare . . . [t]here are a few good members of staff – one or two live up here – but I think there are many idle passengers, and the whole atmosphere is totally wrong. Money has been poured in . . . as though buildings made a university’.139 The year before her death, Monica read the inaugural address of Professor J. A. Lamprecht, the new Fort Hare rector. She started to annotate it, noting its many factual and interpretative errors, such as that Fort Hare had been ‘managed and paid for by the Church of Scotland’, but stopped after three pages. The detailed manner in which she tackled the document, and the abrupt cessation of her notes, imply passion followed by sudden revulsion.140 Only when the Federal Theological Seminary, ‘Fedsem’, was launched on the Fort Hare campus, separate from and often in conflict with the university proper, did she become involved. She spoke at the opening in 1966.141 She was a close friend of Fr Aelred Stubbs, of the Anglican section of Fedsem,142 and was an associate of the seminary, acting as an academic referee and commentator.143

137

138 139 140

141 142

143

WC, uncat. corr., Fort Hare Council, South African Native College, Minutes of Meeting of the Governing Council held in Stewart Hall, Fort Hare, on Friday 2 Nov. 1951; R. F. Currey, Rhodes University 1904–1970: A Chronicle (Grahamstown: Rhodes University, 1970), 112, 137–138. WC, Talks and Addresses (partly cat.), TS, notes for talk on ‘Bantustan?’, n.d. [but filed with report of talk in Argus, 5 Nov. 1959]. WC, uncat. corr., Frieda Matthews, Monica Wilson/Frieda Matthews, 4 June 1980, Hogsback. Ibid., Misc. Corr., Press Release, not to be released before 11.00, 25 April ’81 – inaugural address of new Rector, Prof. J. A. Lamprecht, 25 April ’81, Fort Hare, annotated in Monica Wilson’s handwriting. WC, Talks and Addresses, Box 2 (partly cat.), outline of speech ‘The Implications of the Gospel in South African Conditions’ for Seminary opening, 1966. WC, uncat. corr., Aelred Stubbs, Stubbs/Monica Wilson, 24 May 1978, Maseru; Steve Biko, I Write What I Like, ed. Fr. Aelred Stubbs, C.R. (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1987 [1978], v. WC, uncat. corr., Federal Theological Seminary, Arthur W. Stops/Monica Wilson, 3 Nov. 1973 and other documents in this file.

222

Inside African Anthropology

Monica’s links with Fort Hare after 1960 were mainly with students and staff from the past, above all with the Matthewses, who had also known Pitje.144 Her relationship was such that even her most intense and private grief could be touched upon in the context of the disaster that had descended upon Z. K. and Frieda. In mid-1960, when the Matthewses were running out of money and Frieda was reduced to giving piano lessons and selling insurance, she wrote to Monica that ‘[w]hen I think about your great sorrow years ago I tell myself I have nothing to complain about!’145 Z. K. kept her in touch with the impact on himself and his family of his departure from Fort Hare, and Monica got UCT to offer him a temporary fellowship in social anthropology from January 1960.146 Monica’s last substantial work was Freedom for My People.147 This was an edited version of the autobiographical material that Z. K. Matthews left after his death in 1968, with additions by Monica where there were gaps. His account, she notes, was ‘thinnest where his contribution was perhaps greatest’, including his time as lecturer, professor and acting principal at Fort Hare. Some of the most substantial material added by Monica related to Matthews at Fort Hare, as student and teacher. Of her four additional chapters, two mostly, and the conclusion partly, were about his time there.148 In the search for material, she mobilised numerous Fort Hare graduates and others, in South Africa and elsewhere, visiting Switzerland to investigate Matthews’s work for the World Council of Churches, staying en route with Charles Njonjo, the Kenyan attorney-general and a Fort Hare graduate of Monica’s time.149 Monica herself appears fleetingly in the book, showing Tshekedi Khama, who was planning a new school in Bechuanaland, around Eluk; attending a dinner at the Matthewses’ home for visiting Shakespearean scholar John Dover Wilson (who, she does not say, was her father-in-law); giving

144

145

146

147 148 149

Ibid., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/Dr Tom Alty, 21 Jan. 1977, Hogsback; Monica Wilson, ‘Preface’ in Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, viii. WC, uncat. corr., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Frieda Matthews/Monica Wilson, 5 Aug. 1960, Alice. For the Matthewses’ financial position see ibid., Frieda Matthews/Monica Wilson, 19 June 1960, Alice. Ibid., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Z. K. Matthews/Monica Wilson, 21 Oct. 1959, Fort Hare; ibid., draft letter UCT Registrar/Z. K. Matthews, n.d. [but late 1959, Rondebosch, Cape Town], with note to Monica Wilson asking for advice and requesting her to tell Matthews about the letter. Matthews did not take up the UCT offer. Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People is discussed from the perspective of Monica’s historical writing in Chapter 9 in this volume. Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, vii. Chapters 6 and 7 in this volume describe Matthews’s career at Fort Hare. Chapter 12 stresses his connection with the college. WC, uncat. corr., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/Charles Njonjo, 15 Feb. 1978, Hogsback.

‘Your Intellectual Son’

223

evidence with Matthews on behalf of the Fort Hare senate to the Fagan Commission in 1946; noting the distress of her Eluk students, reflected in their prayers and hymns, after the shooting dead of nine striking African mine workers on the Rand in November 1946.150 ‘The expectation of achievement, through education, of equal political rights for black and white’, she wrote, ‘was nourished at Fort Hare.’151 For many pages she lists graduates, men and women, who went on to prominence, many of them South Africans whose careers were disrupted by white supremacist politics.152 The book is an elegy for the Fort Hare she had known and for the national leadership manqu´e, African and Christian, symbolised by Matthews, that it had produced.

150 151 152

Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, 120, 123, 124–125. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 127–36.

7

Witchcraft and the Academy: Livingstone Mqotsi, Monica Wilson and the Middledrift Healers, 1945–1957 Leslie J. Bank

During the apartheid years, black academic advancement was actively discouraged and progress beyond a basic Bachelor’s degree was seen as socially and politically threatening by the white state and its tertiary educational authorities.1 If Africans showed exceptional academic ability, they were generally steered towards teaching in secondary schools or training colleges in their own communities. The aim was to keep African intellectual talent out of the white academy. It is not surprising then that many potential African academics ended up as teachers in high schools rather than as lecturers at universities, and that the various African teachers’ associations were among the most vibrant intellectual and political spaces in South Africa in the 1950s. The glass ceiling of academic opportunity under apartheid was very difficult to break through, and it was only a handful of Africans with committed and influential white patrons, like Archie Mafeje or Bernard Magubane,2 who made it to good universities in Britain or America and so opened up opportunities for international academic careers. The passing of the Bantu Education Act of 1953 was a watershed moment. It drove many budding South African intellectuals in schools into underground politics or into exile. Many ended up as frustrated academics in black high schools or political activists in the liberation movements.3 One promising young African scholar caught in this predicament was Livingstone Mqotsi. He was Monica Wilson’s most talented social anthropology student at Fort Hare in the 1940s. Mqotsi made a name for himself there in 1946 when, as a second-year student, he authored 1 2

3

I would like to thank Iris Mqotsi for her comments on this chapter, as well as Andrew Bank for his critical comments and suggestions on a previous draft. On Mafeje see Chapter 8, this volume; on Magubane see his autobiography Bernard Magubane: My Life and Times (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010), 169–174. Z. K. Matthews was one of the few local exceptions who began his career as a school teacher after training at the University of Fort Hare. He later returned to that university as an academic, after serving as principal at Adams College in Natal. See Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews: Southern Africa 1901 to 1968 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1981), 83–92.

224

Witchcraft and the Academy

225

and published a seminal essay on an African separatist Church in Port Elizabeth in the prestigious academic journal African Studies.4 It was unusual enough for an African to do so, but exceptional for one who had not yet completed his undergraduate degree. It was Monica Wilson, his teacher and mentor, who inspired him to pursue his research interests independently and submit his undergraduate essay for publication. Monica nurtured Mqotsi but, before he could mature fully as a student of anthropology at the graduate level, she left Fort Hare to become the first female professor at Rhodes University. Without adequate supervision, Mqotsi’s academic career drifted off course in the 1950s before he submitted a thesis on healing and witchcraft among the Xhosa of the Middledrift district in the Ciskei to the University of the Witwatersrand in 1957. In this chapter I focus on Mqotsi’s academic development and frustrations as an anthropologist and explore his close intellectual relationship with Monica over the period between 1946 and 1957. On the evening of 24 June 2008 Livingstone Mqotsi, now in his late eighties, paid tribute to Monica at the conference commemorating the centenary of her birth at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape. He delivered a moving address in which he spoke of her seminal influence on his intellectual development as a young man and of her humanity, integrity, professional commitment and engaging intellect. I was surprised to hear Mqotsi speak with such academic passion for anthropology and the sociocultural study of African societies because I knew him only as a liberation movement leader, a schoolteacher and a political journalist from the Eastern Cape. Later I learnt that he was also one of the most talented young African anthropologists of the apartheid era in South Africa and that his work had begun under Monica’s wing. In the months after the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Mqotsi and I became firm friends. We met frequently to discuss his life and work. I would arrive at his house in Baysville in East London in the mornings. We would sit and talk in the conservatory or the lounge about his childhood in Keiskammahoek, his days as a teenager in Port Elizabeth, his political involvement with the Non-European Unity Movement and the African Teachers’ Association, the enormous frustrations and disappointments that came with being a black intellectual in early apartheid South Africa, his time in exile and of course his anthropological fieldwork in New Brighton and Middledrift. Our discussions ran deep. They usually started and ended with Fort Hare, with its intellectual promise and broken dreams, our common connection to the institution, and its politics and history. But our discussions drifted in all sorts of other 4

See Livingstone Mqotsi and Nimrod Mkele, ‘A Separatist Church: Ibandla lika-Krestu’, African Studies, 5, 2 (1946), 106–142.

226

Inside African Anthropology

directions as well. I seldom arrived at his house with a clear list of questions. I had issues to discuss, and we had open-ended conversations rather than tightly structured interviews. He was quick to take on the mantle of teacher with me as student. In September 2009, while I was on sabbatical in the United States, he died at his home in East London at the age of 87. Tributes were carried in all the major national newspapers.5 He was celebrated as a political figure, a leader in the Non-European Unity Movement, a former secretary-general of the All African Convention and an extraordinary teacher who mentored Chris Hani. None of the obituaries mentioned his academic achievements and his fascinating anthropological work. This chapter seeks to help remedy that imbalance. A full biography of Mqotsi will no doubt appear in time as his story is well worth telling. Here I focus on just one aspect: his life and work as an anthropologist and one of Monica’s prot´eg´es. Clearly, after a very promising start at Fort Hare in the mid-1940s, Mqotsi failed to break through into the South African academy in the 1950s. What kind of anthropology did Mqotsi write as a student of the discipline? How were his interests shaped by his training under Monica? What stalled and frustrated his progress? How did his work develop intellectually, and what role did his early mentor play in his scholarship? Why did he never get an academic job in South Africa? And how does his story differ from that of the more famous Archie Mafeje, Monica’s celebrated student at the University of Cape Town and co-author with her of the Langa study that will be discussed in the next chapter? My account is based on a close reading of correspondence between Mqotsi and Monica between 1945 and 1955, more than thirty hours of interviews with Mqotsi at his East London home between July and December 2008, and a close analysis of his academic and political writings. Mqotsi’s story is fascinating for many reasons, not least because it reveals intriguing aspects of a hidden history in South Africa anthropology. It documents the early involvement and interest of African scholars in the subject and in the production of insider ethnographies. I see Mqotsi as one of a cast of characters from the early apartheid years, which included Godfrey Pitje, Absolom Vilakazi, Bernard Mugubane and Archie Mafeje, who were attracted to the discipline because it promised, on the one hand, to lay a foundation for a genuine sociology of African societies that embraced indigenous concepts and categories (an ‘insider perspective’), while enforcing scientific rigour through generalisation and comparison. In a society where African social and cultural life was often 5

Sunday Times, 4 October 2009; Daily Dispatch, 30 September 2009; Eastern Cape Herald, 30 September 2009.

Witchcraft and the Academy

227

derided in public and demeaned in academic discourse, anthropology seemed to be a progressive intellectual space that promoted cultural relativism and tolerance while offering Africans a means of documenting their own lives and histories in a form that was credible and scientific. In her work on Pondoland, East London and Tanzania, Monica relied on Africans, as we have seen, as field assistants, translators and the interpreters of local social and cultural practice. They were fellow travellers on field trips and offered insights and perspectives on everyday life that made their way into her finished ethnographies. However, in the mid-1940s when Monica came to Fort Hare as a teacher rather than a researcher, she went out of her way to persuade and train her African students to become anthropologists in their own right as researchers who were familiar with the language, concepts and methods of anthropology. She wanted them to know how to apply what they had learnt in class in their own communities. To develop her students in this direction, she required that all those majoring in social anthropology should design, implement and complete a mini field-research project and write up an ethnographic report. It was this commitment to making students do their own research, an activity virtually unheard of in undergraduate courses at Fort Hare at the time, that ignited a flame in the mind of Livingstone Mqotsi (and others) and started him on a journey of anthropological enquiry. This chapter is devoted primarily to the story of Livingstone Mqotsi and his intellectual endeavour, ingenuity and determination in the face of a system that simply would not accept him, and ultimately forced exile and academic exclusion on him. But the chapter is also about Monica and her relationship with this emerging African anthropologist and political activist. It reveals how she shaped his intellectual focus and inculcated an appreciation for the value of fieldwork and ethnography as a basis for knowledge production in Africa. The chapter also reveals some of the tensions and stresses in Monica’s own academic career as she moved from Fort Hare to Rhodes in the late 1940s and then to the University of Cape Town. In the process a certain distance developed between her and Mqotsi, who became immersed in liberation politics in the 1950s and was now struggling to complete his study of witchcraft and healing in the Middledrift district of the Eastern Cape. The story I present is a South African tragedy, where witchcraft and sorcery feature not only as topics of Mqotsi’s anthropological research but also as features of his experience within the academy. His life serves both as a reminder of the intellectual deprivations of apartheid and of the position of anthropology as a site of intellectual curiosity and endeavour amongst the postwar universitytrained African elite of the 1950s. This chapter and the one that follows it also focus attention, more generally, on the role of hidden ethnographies and ethnographers in the making of southern African anthropology.

228

Inside African Anthropology

Living in a Sister’s House, 1930–1945 Livingstone Mqotsi was born in 1921, the last child of a large peasant family in Keiskammahoek. His father had been Christianised, attended church and had some exposure to Western-style schooling, but was neither a timid nor an apologetic man. Mqotsi remembered him as a fiercely independent farmer who regularly clashed with the native commissioner over land allocations, grazing rights and forestry policies on the outskirts of Keiskammahoek town. He was poor and owned a small herd of cattle and farmed some maize, struggling to feed his growing family.6 Mqotsi recalled his father’s tense relations with the authorities, but also that he worked closely with some of the German settler farmers in town who were supportive. They lent his father ploughs and tools. As a child Livingstone played with ‘some of these German kids, who were neighbours’.7 He could speak some words of German before he was five. Unlike his siblings, who did not make much progress at school, Mqotsi was a talented scholar. He went to Grandville Junior Primary and then to St Barnabas Higher Primary in Rabula village in Keiskammaheok. His father was keen for him to progress to St Matthews or one of the other prestigious mission high schools in the area, but given their financial position the only hope was for him to win a local scholarship administered through the colonial government. These awards tended to go to the children of senior clerks or interpreters in the colonial service rather than to children of troublesome peasant farmers. He remembers his father’s disappointment when the native commissioner announced that the scholarship had been awarded to the son of Mr Pateni, a senior clerk in the commissioner’s office.8 With no scholarship or funds to study further, he left home to join his sister in Port Elizabeth in 1935. Two of his siblings had already moved to the city to find work. His eldest sister Esther worked in a factory and was prepared to support him with clothes and school fees, but she did not want him to stay with her. He moved in with Miriam, a sister who was married to a certain Guston Majombozi, leader of the Limba Separatist Church in New Brighton. The Limba Church was one of the largest in Port Elizabeth with a congregation of over 1,500 in the mid-1930s. Mqotsi recalled: 6

7 8

For an account of Keiskammahoek in the 1930s, see Monica Wilson, Selma Kaplan, Theresa Maki and Edith M. Walton, Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, vol. 3: Social Structure (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1952) and Chris de Wet, Moving Together, Drifting Apart: Betterment Planning and Villagisation in a South African Homeland (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995). Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 15 September 2008. All interviews cited in this chapter are by the author. Ibid., 28 September 2008.

Witchcraft and the Academy

229

It was very busy in the house and it was difficult for me to concentrate on my school work. There were so many congregants, services and prayer meetings . . . Living in this house was, I suppose, my first real anthropological experience. It was so different. This was not my home culture. It was something different, quite foreign to me really, I was not a Limba Church member and never wanted to be one. This irritated Guston, who wanted me to be one of his disciples, even his successor. I became immersed in it anyway. I always wondered how my sister coped, but she was so devoted to Guston and his mission.9

Since there was no high school nearby, he was sent to Paterson High School in the ‘coloured area’ in Port Elizabeth. This was the best school for black children in the city.10 Here he rubbed shoulders with outstanding students including Dennis Brutus, and was profoundly influenced by two teachers from the Cape Teachers’ League and the Non-European Unity Movement, Mr Arendse and Mr Jafta. His political consciousness was formed and fixed at Paterson as a loyal Unity Movement activist. Mqotsi found school very stimulating and would stay until late in the afternoon participating in cultural activities and debating current political issues with his teachers. As the years passed, he found the gap between his own social and political consciousness and his Limba Church home life increasingly uncomfortable. The authoritarian and orthodox rules of his uncle felt more and more restrictive. In the Limba version of Christianity, the male head priest, known as Tata, was all-powerful. He got his directive from God and had to be obeyed;11 there was no scope for debate or discussion. Mqotsi recalled that Guston did not approve of the way he wanted to dress and wear his hair. So he eventually decided to leave Miriam’s house and went to stay with his brother, who was now also in Port Elizabeth. His sister Esther continued to support him financially. The social and political scene in New Brighton location was vibrant.12 Mqotsi was enthralled by the optimism and openness of urban life. Increasingly, he sought to widen his social circle and, together with George Pemba, the South African artist and former Paterson High School student, he started the Bantu Social and Cultural Club of New Brighton in 1940. Pemba was ten years older than Mqotsi and had already trained as a teacher at Lovedale. He had also received numerous awards and scholarships to work with artists at Rhodes University and in Cape Town (where in 1941 he spent some time at Maurice van Essche’s studio). 9 10

11 12

Ibid, 28 September 2008. Paterson High School was predominantly for the so-called ‘coloured community’ but did also serve the location of New Brighton. The school produced many coloured political leaders, intellectuals and activists, including Dennis Brutus, Jakes Gerwel and Allan Hendrickse. See Mqotsi and Mkele, ‘Separatist Church’. See Gary Baines, A History of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 1903–1953 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2002).

230

Inside African Anthropology

Mqotsi was inspired by Pemba’s creativity and used his own organising skills to host a series of cultural events, everything from exhibitions to poetry readings and political debates. He remembers how artists like Gerald Sekoto, who had a similar style to Pemba’s, came to work in New Brighton in the early 1940s.13 In 1942 Mqotsi finished school at Paterson with excellent marks. His father urged him to get a bursary and go to Fort Hare Native College, but he was not yet ready to leave New Brighton. He remembers being singularly unimpressed with the Fort Hare students he had met with in Port Elizabeth. He found their political arguments unsophisticated and was more taken with his new Non-European Unity Movement colleagues and their political and intellectual tradition. In any event, Pemba had become something of a role model for Mqotsi, who at this stage felt he wanted to pursue a career as a classical musician. He had learnt the violin and in 1944 trained with the Port Elizabeth Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Robert Sally. Sally’s assistant was prepared to work with him, helping him master the violin, while he took a part-time job as an assistant with a firm of lawyers. As the year drew to an end, the pressure from his father to go to Fort Hare became overwhelming. At the end of 1944, Mqotsi was literally instructed to report for studies at Fort Hare. He won a Cape scholarship of £20 a year. His father was willing to meet the rest of the bill. Monica and the Limba Church Study, 1945–1946 When he started at the University of Fort Hare as a freshman in 1945, Mqotsi was a suave city-slicker with political experience and a sense of cultural sophistication. He registered for history, English, anthropology and psychology in his first year. He had always had a natural flair for languages and writing. He was often asked to take the minutes at meetings or do translations from Xhosa to English, was widely read and had been an acknowledged Shakespeare enthusiast and poet at his school. He had helped inculcate an appreciation for English literature in the New Brighton Bantu Social and Cultural Club, too. English was always going to be one of his majors, but he did not really know what to expect of social anthropology. As we have seen in Chapter 6, Mqotsi was deeply influenced by his new lecturer in the subject. He told me that he was immediately impressed by the academic style and acumen of Dr Monica Wilson. He felt that she was serious about her subject and presented fascinating cross-cultural material in lectures. He found it easy to relate to her anthropological perspective, given his own encounters across cultures from his early years with the sons of German settlers in Keiskammahoek, 13

Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 15 September 2008.

Witchcraft and the Academy

231

his early teens in the company of Limba Church members and converts in New Brighton, and high school days with coloured kids at Paterson to his post-school years with cultural icons in the location and white musicians in the Port Elizabeth Symphony Orchestra. He found Monica approachable and would often go up at the end of a class to ask a question or discuss things. Building on his New Brighton experience, Mqotsi started a cultural club at Fort Hare in his first year. He asked Monica to be a guest speaker on the topic of ‘dinner etiquette’. She accepted the invitation and this cemented their connection. He recalled how marvellously she presented the lecture with a practical demonstration of English upper-class table manners. No doubt she drew partly on her time at Cambridge. She then compared this with African cultural practices, which had students talking about her lecture for weeks afterwards. Mqotsi was also impressed by how fully she immersed herself in the life of the university. She was willing to engage with students outside the classroom, unlike some other white lecturers. He also quickly realised that she was a significant intellectual, the most serious one he would encounter at Fort Hare. He wanted to work more closely with her. He recalled liking her lectures because she so often illustrated points with vivid examples from her own fieldwork among the Pondo and Nyakyusa. Her experience in the field and passion for research came through clearly in the classroom, all of which made her teaching very different from that of others at Fort Hare whose focus seemed to be on training students to do nothing better than cope in a small set of jobs (as clerks, teachers, priests or social workers) rather than developing them for the academic world as critical thinkers.14 In her introductory lecture to Social Anthropology I students, Monica explained that her ambition was for ‘the African Studies Department at Fort Hare’ to become a ‘centre for research . . . where exact knowledge is accumulated and digested’.15 Her lecture notes express the spirit of critical enquiry that she sought to impart. Lectures to give you a general idea of a subject. I hope to interest you. Guidance for reading. But you cannot expect to get along simply by coming to lectures. No spoon feeding. Must also read for yourself. In the natural sciences, they do practicals. In sociology, we expect you to read and write essays.16

She expected her students to hand in essays each Wednesday and she would not accept late work. In her lectures she explained that she saw no clear distinction between social anthropology and sociology. They 14 15 16

Ibid., 4 November 2008. WC, J5, Monica Wilson Lecture Notes, Monica Wilson, 1945, Fort Hare Lecture Notes, under a section entitled ‘Warnings’. Ibid., ‘Lectures’.

232

Inside African Anthropology

are ‘one and the same subject,’ she wrote in her notes, with ‘the same methods’.17 She emphasised that only by ‘understanding society [scientifically] can we hope to control it’ and felt that, while the natural sciences had forged ahead, the ‘social sciences were lagging behind’.18 To develop anthropology, she repeatedly stated, it was essential that exact and reliable knowledge be collected in the field, most of all for social anthropology. Clearly, what Monica offered her students and expected of them in return was considerably more challenging and demanding than in most other courses they attended.19 By the end of his first year Mqotsi was well acquainted with Monica. His outstanding ability as a student had captured her attention, as had his skills as a writer. For him, Monica emerged both as an intellectual and a multi-dimensional person. She was a many-sided sort of person, mother, teacher, social worker. And she never instructed people, you know, do this or do that. She would lay the matter of the discussion on the table and then would ask what you think before putting her own important view across. She always suggested things. You always felt good, like you are invited to come in and consider this proposition. But she was also quite focused, she knew what she wanted.20

Mqotsi had no doubt that he wanted to major in social anthropology. He remembers arguing with Monica about religion and using examples from his own experience with the Limba Church to support his views.21 As he thought more deeply on the topic, he believed he could produce a historical and ethnographic account of the Limba Church for his second-year research project (see Chapter 6). He was excited at the prospect and did not want to tell Monica too much about what he was planning to do. He discussed the matter with his Fort Hare roommate Nimrod Mkele, who was not registered for anthropology but was a close friend from New Brighton. In 1946 they made several trips to Port Elizabeth and conducted lengthy interviews with congregants and leaders in the Church to gather or verify information. Mqotsi spent the entire June vacation doing 17 18 19

20 21

Ibid., ‘Aims and Methods of Anthropology’. Ibid. Mqotsi often said that the rest of the arts faculty at Fort Hare seemed to want to train Africans to be civil servants or teachers in their own communities, not independent researchers and intellectuals. He felt Monica was different. She genuinely wanted her students to become researchers in their own right. One criticism he levelled at Z. K. Matthews was that he did not challenge his students enough intellectually, while Monica was always pushing boundaries. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 14 October 2008. After completing Reaction to Conquest, Monica had planned to undertake a major study on African independent Churches in South Africa, but then chose to work in Tanzania with Godfrey. African Christianity interested her enormously and she would have been fascinated by Mqotsi’s work on the Limba Church.

Witchcraft and the Academy

233

Figure 7.1. African Studies Department faculty and senior students, Fort Hare, 1946. Mqotsi is seated at the end of the middle row, far left in the picture. Monica is in the centre of the middle row, with Z. K. Matthews on her left.22

fieldwork in New Brighton, staying with his sister Miriam and Guston.23 Working with Mkele seemed to make the project easier, although Mqotsi led the research and wrote up the entire study himself. On returning to Fort Hare, he presented their findings to Monica as an undergraduate research essay. She was greatly impressed by the quality of the research, which he had done without even informing her or asking her advice. He had wanted to prove that he was an independent thinker who could take initiatives and do fieldwork on his own. Monica immediately sent the research paper to the premier anthropology journal in South Africa, African Studies, with a letter to the editors encouraging them to publish it as an article. It appeared under both Mqotsi and Mkele’s names in a 1946 issue and received considerable praise as a pioneering study of an Eastern Cape African independent Church. Publication confirmed Mqotsi’s status as an up-and-coming researcher and intellectual in African studies. In Figure 7.1, a photograph taken in 1945, we see Mqotsi (middle row, far left) sitting alongside senior faculty who were many years his senior. He was only 25 years old at the time. He is also dressed in a manner 22 23

WC, N2 Photographs of Monica Wilson in groups. Mqotsi said Mkele had secured a Cape Education Department scholarship to study science at Fort Hare but failed to complete his degree and ended up at the University of Natal, where he graduated in social anthropology under Eileen Krige (Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 28 September 2008).

234

Inside African Anthropology

befitting a seasoned professional, while some of the other senior students look more casual on the floor in the front row. Monica stands out not only as the only white figure in the photograph, but as a formal presence in her hat and with her erect posture. Preparing for Fieldwork in Middledrift After completing his Honours year Mqotsi started to communicate with Monica, by then Professor of Social Anthropology at Rhodes University. He was keen to start a research project on African healers. She suggested that he combine his interests in psychology and anthropology by embarking on a study of Xhosa practitioners. She emphasised that this would require in-depth and careful fieldwork but felt it could make an important contribution. On 17 March 1947 he wrote to her for advice in setting out a work plan on the subject for his Masters thesis. As you advised me to take a senior degree in Psychology, I have since interviewed Dr Jansen [psychology lecturer at Fort Hare] on the subject and intimated to him what I am particularly interested in investigating, namely the problems involved in those people who thwasa [heal] and pass as diviners. He is quite appreciative of the undertaking, but would like me to submit a plan of work in which a definite set of questions will be formulated.24

She wrote back a week later with several suggestions. She said that he should begin with at least twelve detailed case histories of individuals who had been through initiation as healers, focusing on their life experiences and medical histories, close interpersonal relationships and standing in the community at large, as well as their perceptions, experiences and practices as traditional doctors. She also wanted him to include their actual dreams and their ideas about the ancestors. Then, she felt, he should collect the views of neighbours and relatives on what they thought of these healers, and what sense they had of their power and success. She advised him to participate in healing sessions and s´eances. On the basis of this work, she expected he could start analysing the social functions of doctors (abathwasayo), as well as the psychological causes and effects of ukuthwasa.25 Mqotsi wrote back a mere four days later, thanking Monica 24

25

WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, Livingstone Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 17 March 1947, Fort Hare. In the letter Monica encourages him to visit her at 7 Constitution Street in Grahamstown. In his reply, he indicated that he would be in Grahamstown on 3 May and would drop in then. I assume the visit did take place and that they were able to discuss his project and his upcoming fieldwork in Middledrift in more detail. Unfortunately I only consulted this correspondence after Mqotsi’s death and so could not check such details with him. WC, uncat corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, Monica Wilson/Livingstone Mqotsi, 26 March 1947.

Witchcraft and the Academy

235

for her input and suggesting it would be better for him to pursue the project in a rural setting rather than in New Brighton, where his previous field experience now persuaded him that healers in a rural area ‘would be less suspicious of outsiders and community responses would be easier to map than in the city’.26 He said he had heard of a famous family of healers in Middledrift, the Njajula family, and he wanted to include them in his study. My reading of the correspondence is that this project was as much Monica’s idea as it was Mqotsi’s. In fact, in this letter of 30 March 1947 he goes as far as to call the proposal ‘our project’ (my emphasis).27 In February 1948 he wrote to Monica from New Brighton, where he had a teaching job, to say that he had won a scholarship for his Masters and was looking forward to getting back to the university. A month later he arrived to enrol for a Masters in psychology at Fort Hare, only to discover that Professor Jansen (his shadow adviser) had taken a job at Natal University and would be leaving in June. With no formal supervisor to guide his work, he became increasingly drawn into student politics in 1948. Throughout his time at Fort Hare, Mqotsi had championed NonEuropean Unity Movement politics on campus and helped establish a cadre of supporters. They argued on political issues with students from the African National Congress (ANC), the dominant political presence on campus. Mqotsi remembered the intensity of these political debates at the very time when the Afrikaner Nationalist government came to power. He was also attracted by the possibility of participating in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), ‘belonging to an organisation which had international standing and aimed to unite students across racial boundaries and borders’.28 He was appointed onto the national executive of NUSAS in 1948, along with Philip Tobias and Sydney Brenner (a Nobel laureate in 2002), and was given the ‘general culture portfolio’. In that year he attended numerous political meetings and congresses, delivered speeches and initiated a cultural survey of the Transkei, which he compiled into a report and had published.29 After the NUSAS congress in the latter half of 1948, Mqotsi returned to his research and started to prepare for his first field visits. Monica had encouraged him to present himself to the healers as an urbanite, an outsider who had lost contact with his own cultural roots but had a deep abiding interest in understanding and reconnecting with his own cultural background. He liked this approach, but first he needed to get an introduction to people in the village of Debe Nek. This is where

26 27 28 29

Ibid., Livingstone Mqotsi/Monica Wilson., 30 March 1947. Ibid. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 October 2008. Mqotsi presented the results of the survey to the annual NUSAS congress in July 1948 in a paper that was published in the NUSAS Research Journal in 1951.

236

Inside African Anthropology

Z. K. Matthews played a key role. Z. K. had made contact with chiefs in the area in the course of his work on the Native Representative Council, a separate government administrative body on which Africans could serve. (Mqotsi recalled that people knew Z. K. as ‘u-Matthus’.) ‘This is what I mean when I say that Z. K. was a decent man’, he said, ‘this kind of generosity was not necessary, but it was the sort of thing he would do. Z. K. immediately put the community leadership at ease and gave me legitimacy by getting the headman to give me permission to enter the area’. In the interview, Mqotsi remembers that the village was split down the middle between a Christianised section (amagqoboka) and a traditionalist, Red (amaqaba) section. I moved straight in with the Christians that day, setting myself up in a household. This would be my base for the next nine months while conducting my fieldwork . . . I would make contact with people who believed in the powers of special people, and would then go to sessions and s´eances where they would heal people . . . And I, of course, had a special sort of training there because I had to understand what the process was, but I never had a calling to become a healer myself, nor did I undergo training to be a healer.

He explained there was no problem with acceptance in the community. The strange irony in this divided community, he suggested, was that the Christianised families who went to church often seemed to be ‘more passionate about witchcraft than their pagan neighbours’. Conversely, he was puzzled by the enthusiasm of non-Christians, who were usually alleged to have no interest in Britain and the West, to ‘perform their culture for the Queen’. I explained that I was an urban person who wanted to understand and document my culture better . . . I was accepted completely and they [the amaqaba people] would ask me why I was not taking notes or writing down what they were saying. They thought that the research was going to be presented to the Queen of England. So I wrote, and because this was going to be recorded for ‘the queen’ (of England) . . . they gave their best. They performed their culture and put it down as best they possibly could and insisted that I record it. So they gave their best for the Queen!30

Mqotsi was intrigued by the paranormal and the extrasensory capacity of healers. He said that people came from far and wide to consult them. The healers would organise a session for divination and get their apprentices to work on their patients first before intervening themselves if the cases were complex. Mqotsi attended many of these consultations. He explained that he was actually far less interested in the recipes they 30

Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 28 September 2008.

Witchcraft and the Academy

237

dished up, telling patients to perform this or that ritual for the ancestors, than in the insights they generated into people’s lives. He said he was endlessly amazed at their sixth sense, their ability to quote the names of their clients’ children without knowing them at all, of being able to locate the position of scars on the body, to list family disasters and the timing of deaths, and so on. It was like magic to him. He was also intrigued that white farmers in Middledrift came to see them and have their fortunes told or misfortunes explained. Some of the white farmers were asked to perform Xhosa rituals to address their spiritual and social insecurities. He likened the healers’ sessions to s´eances in Europe and was forever thinking about cross-cultural references for local practices. He recalled one incident in a church. I remember very vividly. I used to attend church services and there is this particular Sunday. There was this young fellow who came from a nonChristian background and became converted. He could hardly read or write, but suddenly started to preach. Somehow he seemed to be able to read the Bible even though he was illiterate. He read this passage: ‘you Galatians, who has bewitched you?’ Now ‘bewitched’, that’s umthakathi in Xhosa. He interpreted this literally and had the congregation spellbound, saying that it happens today. For example, when men and women leave the village and forget about their relatives this is because they are bewitched.

Mqotsi went on to comment: Witchcraft is not actually practised, it is a metaphor. The whole idea of people carrying strange things in their bodies, it’s so weird, it doesn’t happen. It is just in the mind but sorcery is practised. For example, a young man who is head-over-heels in love with a girl but the girl doesn’t respond appropriately, he goes and mixes a love potion made from herbs and other things and feeds it to her – that is the sorcery and that is actually practised.31

After completing his fieldwork, Mqotsi returned to Alice to start writing up his thesis when the university opened in 1949. But there were distractions on the political front. The ANC had called a watershed conference in Port Elizabeth to discuss a ‘Programme of Action’ for the Defiance Campaign. Mqotsi had been asked to participate by the ANC leadership, despite not being a party member. He was close to many youth leaders in the movement and his views were respected, hence the privilege of the invitation. It gave him an opportunity to engage directly with leaders like Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. There were other changes in his life at this time. In 1949 he proposed to a young woman from Nqamakwe in the former Transkei and was 31

Ibid.

238

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 7.2. A gathering of Eastern Cape healers, East London, 1940.32

involved in bridewealth negotiations. This put him under financial and personal pressure. To address these challenges, he applied for a post in the F. S. Malan Museum at Fort Hare. He was keen to get the position but was declined in favour of Godfrey Pitje (whose life and work have been discussed in Chapter 6). Mqotsi felt that his old friend Z. K. Matthews had favoured Pitje as a leading light in the ANC Youth League rather than because of superior qualifications for the job. He recalled having felt embarrassed by his failure, which undermined his confidence and sense of well-being. Monica was, unfortunately, overseas in 1949 and not available to answer letters, offer informal advice and comment on his thesis work as she had done before. With no supervision, he submitted a hurriedly completed Masters thesis to the Department of Psychology at the University of South Africa (where he finally ended up registering) at the end of 1949. The writingup process was rushed and he was very unsure about the quality of the work he submitted. But he also had little choice. His research bursary had run out and he urgently needed a paying job to support himself and his new wife. He was under enormous pressure to get the thesis out of the way. He was aware there had been too many political and personal distractions in his life in 1949 to produce his best work, but still felt he had done enough to pass the degree and move on to his Ph.D. He was 32

East London, Fort Hare Institute for Social and Economic Research, Moyikwa Collection, No. 241.

Witchcraft and the Academy

239

surprised when the examiners ruled that the thesis should be resubmitted with major revisions because it did not seem to be based on adequate original scientific research. The examiners expected a larger sample of healers as well as the use of a formal questionnaire to gauge local perceptions in relation to traditional healing and witchcraft. This was not the approach that Monica had advised. She had placed the emphasis on in-depth interviews, participation and analysis of the lives, activities and social networks of a small group of healers. But even Monica, who later read the referred thesis, said she was disappointed in the quality of the ethnography he had presented.33 Mqotsi was unsure how to proceed but knew that he had wasted an opportunity and now had no choice but to leave the university and find a job. Healdtown and Bantu Education, 1950–1954 Mqotsi returned to Port Elizabeth in 1950 to take up a temporary teaching job at Newell High School, where he worked as an unqualified high school teacher and earned a mere £12 a month. After a year in Port Elizabeth he returned to Fort Hare, this time to the Department of Education to study for a professional teacher’s qualification. He now remembered Dr Kerr’s words: ‘Get a professional certificate and go and teach amongst your people.’ He resented that kind of thinking because it set the bar so low for Africans. But he now felt that qualifying as a teacher was not such a bad idea. During this year he made contact with the educational anthropologist Professor Otto Raum, whom he had met when applying for the museum job.34 Mqotsi discussed his thesis with Raum and his disappointment at not managing to complete it to the satisfaction of the examiners. He spoke of his desire to become an academic and researcher working in a university. Raum said he should return to his field-sites, continue his fieldwork and perhaps change his registration to anthropology. Raum seemed convinced that there was enough in Mqotsi’s topic to suggest that it had the potential to be upgraded to a Ph.D. Following Raum’s advice, Mqotsi returned to Middledrift during his university breaks to revisit the healers, attend s´eances and meet communities in the Debe Nek area. By the end of 1951 he was convinced he had filled some of the gaps in his knowledge, wanted to shift his registration from psychology to social anthropology, and thought about upgrading his registration from a Masters to a Ph.D. 33 34

Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 4 November 2008. Otto F. Raum, Chaga Childhood: A Description of Indigenous Education in an East African Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1940). The volume was reprinted in 1952 and 1961, and again in 1996 with a new introduction by Sally Falk Moore.

240

Inside African Anthropology

However, before the end of the year he was offered a position on the staff of Healdtown (Methodist) Training School, which was both a high school and a teacher training college. Mqotsi remained ambivalent about the Healdtown job because he really wanted to continue pursuing his research and academic career. He complained to Monica after only four months there. Healdtown is not a very stimulating place intellectually. It is a small rather secluded community, where everyone knows everyone else’s comings and goings. Relations are intense and hence conflicts, stresses and strains are quite rampant here. I am not speaking merely about relations between African members of staff, on the one hand, and European members, on the other. I am thinking particularly of intra-group relations. And if you are a newcomer, you are viewed with great suspicion for no other reason than that you may be cherishing new ideas!35

In this letter to Monica, who was by then the Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, he reflected for the first time in his correspondence with her on why he had struggled with his Masters thesis in 1949. ‘I now realize my difficulty (a) I rushed over it and (b) I did not have a clear conception of what a thesis ought to look like. Now I have been able to read through a number of theses and I think that has helped me a lot.’36 He also explained that he had returned to the field in 1951 and enclosed a questionnaire he had designed to document the nature and extent of witchcraft beliefs among the Xhosa. The questionnaire covered a wide range of beliefs about witches and asked respondents to agree or disagree with over a hundred propositions about the power and action of witches. The list included such detailed enquiries as: ‘When the teats of a cow are cut would you suspect a baboon [that carries witches] might have been milking it?’ or ‘When you have pains between your shoulders do you think it is because the impundulu [lightning bird] . . . is kicking you?’ or ‘Do more people die from witchcraft in your area than from natural causes?’. In designing the questionnaire Mqotsi was clearly seeking to address the charge made against his thesis in 1949 that the evidence was too anecdotal and not systematic enough to be scientific. While Mqotsi dreamed of completing his teaching qualification and Ph.D. and moving into an academic research job, Healdtown was his daily reality. He complained that he soon became unpopular among the Christian management at Healdtown because he was not a practising believer. The Healdtown authorities also did not like his unconventional teaching techniques, where he ran his classes as a debating society. He 35 36

WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, Monica Wilson/Livingstone Mqotsi, 15 Dec. 1952. Ibid.

Witchcraft and the Academy

241

devised an entirely new syllabus for the teachers which seemed ‘too political’ for the school leadership. To make matters worse, he was regarded as one of the heroes of the students in the hostel riots at the school in 1953. The student activists saw him as an ally and would come to his classroom for advice. They were aware that he had established himself through his work in the Cape African Teachers’ Association (CATA) as one of the leading critics of the proposed new Bantu Education system, the apartheid government’s much-hated system of segregated and inferior education for Africans. In 1952 CATA mounted a campaign against the Eiselen Commission’s recommendations on Bantu Education, while its mother body, the All African Convention, focused more on criticising the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 and the associated rehabilitation measures introduced in the reserves. Together with others including A. C. Jordan, Leo Sihlala and his close friend Nathaniel Honono, Mqotsi was at the forefront of this campaign against Bantu Education.37 He prepared a lengthy submission to the Eiselen Commission in 1952 criticising the political, educational and philosophical foundations of Bantu Education. He presented two significant formal addresses on the topic, the first at the 1953 CATA conference and the second at the 1954 All Africa Convention conference, both held in Queenstown.38 Mqotsi was evidently one of the ‘coming boys’ in the politics of noncollaboration and African unity in the early 1950s, a major strategist and intellectual in CATA and the Unity Movement. Skilled as an orator and public speaker, he wrote many of the key speeches and over time he held senior positions in the Unity Movement. His political profile and orientation made his Healdtown employers nervous, especially the headmaster Mr Pitts. Mqotsi began getting the sense that it was time to move on: he did not see a future for himself in Bantu Education. When he saw an advert for a research position as an industrial psychologist in the Personnel Institute of the Chamber of Mines in 1953, he decided to apply. Pitts encouraged him. His referees included Monica and Z. K. Matthews. To his surprise and after a long wait, he was offered the job, starting in April 1954 in a section of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research serving the Chamber of Mines. The Witches of Academia, 1954–1957 So it was that in early 1954 Mqotsi took his family and possessions to 645 First Street in the new Payneville location in Springs on the Reef. 37 38

African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA), ‘Tribute to Leo Sihlali (1915–89)’, APDUSA Newsletter, April 1989, 4. Ciraj Shahid Rassool, ‘Writing, Authorship and I. B. Tabata’s Biography: From Collective Leadership to Presidentialism’, Kronos: Southern African Histories, Special Issue: Making Histories, ed. Ciraj Shahid Rassool and Leslie Witz, 34 (2008), 205.

242

Inside African Anthropology

He recalled that his initiation into the Reef location environment was traumatic. He was grilled by racist Afrikaners at the pass office who were used to dealing with migrant workers and not educated Africans. He never forgot the way he was deliberately humiliated there. This feeling was exacerbated at work, where he felt like a fish out of water. He was supposed to be involved in occupational testing on the mines, exploring how workers adapted to their new environment by using a combination of psychological tests and anthropological research methods. He was still learning the ropes and felt uncomfortable with the procedure of submitting his data to senior scientists for scrutiny and analysis. He felt confident that he could analyse his own data and clashed with his supervisors over this issue. But these disagreements were minor, so one can imagine the shock he felt when after only six weeks, in the middle of May 1954, he received a letter from his supervisor Dr Hudson informing him that he was to be dismissed. He was told that the Chamber of Mines had raised certain ‘objections’ to his presence at the Institute. He later inquired and found that no such objections had ever been made by the Chamber. He wrote to Z. K. Matthews from Payneville in June 1954 and a month later drafted a letter to Monica, this time from the Transkei. In his letter to Z. K. he asked politely whether there might not be some position for him at Fort Hare. In his letter to Monica he sounded more despondent and openly wondered whether moving fully into politics might not be the best route for him, given the way he had been treated by the gatekeepers of the academy, these ‘witches of academia’. I quote from the latter half of his three-page, single-spaced typed letter. It is when things like this happen that one is sometimes persuaded to give up academic pursuits altogether, to cross the Rubicon and enter fully into political life, so that if one suffers one should at least be able to say that one has done one’s duty. For however much an African may try to restrain his feelings about things in a country like South Africa, where even to raise a voice against the complete retardation of the education of our children is a crime, the penalties of being black are sure to overtake him. As it is my future is already seriously at stake. Accustomed as we are to think of scientific organizations as more responsible than politicians it will be very difficult for people to believe that the CSIR, with its known personnel, could deal so shabbily with anyone. It is common knowledge that people who had actually been named under the anti-Red Act were, nevertheless, given a chance to look for employment elsewhere, and were not just turned out on the street. But then they were white and therefore a different set of moral standards had to be used. I have already suffered the repercussions of the CSIR stigma. When I left them, I applied to the Anglo-American Corporation for a job. They seemed eager to take me, but when I went to them for an interview they naturally wanted to know what I was doing and what jobs I had held. I explained everything, but not even this could help me wish away the suspicion.

Witchcraft and the Academy

243

I shall leave the Transvaal on Monday for the Cape, in order to take my family to my in-laws in the Transkei. I shall leave them there while I am still looking for a job. Our furniture we shall leave behind until we can see what to do about it. Thank you very much for your article on witchcraft [‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’]. I found it very interesting. I also caught hold of the report on the Keiskamma Survey. It makes interesting reading. I’ve also been reading Radcliffe-Brown on social structure, taboo and functionalism. Another book I found extremely interesting is the one by Wach called ‘The Sociology of Religion’. I also came across Mrs Krige’s D. Litt. thesis. Yours sincerely L. Mqotsi39

Mqotsi knew where to turn in his time of trial: to Nathaniel Honono at Nqabara Secondary School in Idutywa. In those days, he recalled, ‘priests rather than politicians were the heads of school boards’ and ‘it was still possible for me to get a temporary appointment as a teacher in the Transkei without too much government interference. My wife’s uncle was on a local school board and the school was close to her home at Nqamakwe’.40 But Mqotsi knew his days under Bantu Education were numbered because of his profile as an anti-apartheid leader in CATA and the Unity Movement. In fact, in 1955 he (along with many others) was prohibited from entering the premises of any government school in ‘white’ South Africa. His career as a teacher there had come to an abrupt end. Towards the end of 1955, Mqotsi got wind of a new set of opportunities that had been created through the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University (ISER). Two research fellowships were offered for Africans, to be supported by the Nuffield Foundation. One was a two-year post with Professor Raum of Fort Hare to study rural education in the Eastern Cape. Raum knew Mqotsi well and would certainly have been keen for him to get the job, except that he was now no longer allowed onto school premises and this would inhibit his effectiveness as a fieldworker. The second position was for a Xhosaspeaking graduate in social anthropology to work on questions of morality among the Xhosa with Professor Philip Mayer, Monica’s successor in the chair of the Anthropology Department at Rhodes. Mqotsi was well qualified, especially given his work on healing and witchcraft. He asked Monica for a reference and was invited for an interview with Professor Mayer, who immediately offered him the job at a more senior level than 39

40

Letter, Monica Wilson/Livingstone Mqotsi, 15 June 1954, shown to the author by Mqotsi at his home in October 2008. It is included in his personal papers, which are now a special collection in the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre at the University of Fort Hare. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 4 November 2008.

244

Inside African Anthropology

the one advertised. He felt excited at the prospect of joining the ISER and working towards his Ph.D. under Mayer’s supervision. To his dismay he was suddenly informed, early in 1956, that Rhodes University had now decided to rescind its job offer. The vice-chancellor, Alty, had vetoed his appointment because (as in the later and much more widely known case of Archie Mafeje’s rejection by the University of Cape Town in 1968) Rhodes had been threatened by the government. A statement issued by the external mission of the Unity Movement from its offices in Lusaka in 1965, published in the APDUSA newsletter and presumably written by a now exiled Mqotsi himself, explained the circumstances. The University of Rhodes in Grahamstown offered him a post as a Senior Research Officer. When his impending appointment became known, the officials of the Native Affairs Department together with the Broederbond who held high positions in the scientific field made strong objections to his appointment declaring that that this man had been dismissed by the highest scientific research body in the country for his political beliefs and activities. As a result work never started there.41

Back to the Middledrift Healers, 1956–1957 By 1956 Mqotsi had few options left. He was no longer able to work as a teacher in a government school. He had been prevented from securing academic jobs by virtue of his political profile and the failure of a white liberal institution, Rhodes University, to oppose the threats of the apartheid state. The temptation, as he expressed it to Monica, was to leave academia behind and submerge himself in a life of politics. However, he also felt that he owed it to himself, his family and all those who had supported him intellectually, especially Monica, to finish his Middledrift ethnography. Returning to the study and completing it in a fashion that did justice to all the hard work he had put into it since the late 1940s became his main priority in 1956 and 1957. He braved poverty and hardship to get his revised manuscript completed. His immersion in the work came after a meeting with Dr Mervyn Jeffreys and his colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand in mid1956, where he received detailed commentary on the newly reworked chapters he had drafted.42 Not counting the ad hoc support he had got from Monica, this was the only formal supervisory session Mqotsi ever received on his Middledrift study. He was excited and wrote to Monica about some of the issues they had discussed. One of his concerns was that Dr Jeffreys insisted he make a clear distinction between witchcraft and 41 42

APDUSA Newsletter, 1965. For details about Mervyn Jeffreys, see Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 202–203.

Witchcraft and the Academy

245

sorcery. Mqotsi told Monica he disagreed with this because the ‘Xhosa themselves do not make this distinction’ and ‘they have no words in their language to separate these phenomena’.43 He reminded Monica of her telling him to try understanding his topic the way the local people did themselves – ‘truth’, she famously insisted, was ‘in the field’.44 Monica wrote back saying that while there is no clear distinction in the Xhosa language, he would indeed be wise to make the distinction in his thesis. Mqotsi conceded the point and would express it thus in his text. Although the Xhosa do not make any verbal distinction between witchcraft and sorcery, they do however differentiate between one who specializes in witchcraft, associated with familiars such as the thikoloshe, baboon, impundulu [bird], and the ability to fly at night by means of a mysterious khetshi (a cage); and one that uses malevolent medicines and ritual, which are socially disapproved, whether used for social or individual purposes. The former I call witchcraft, the latter sorcery.45

He goes on to argue that witchcraft is never really ‘practised’ among the Xhosa whereas sorcery is, in the sense that actual magical medicines, herbs and concoctions are placed in food, drink or houses to effect changes in perception and behaviour. There is a materiality to sorcery, he argued, that is not there for witch beliefs. His study provided a detailed list of the medicinal plants and herbs used by healers to heal and conjure magic. After re-analysis and redrafting in 1956, Mqotsi submitted the new thesis to the University of the Witwatersrand in February 1957. Most of its 17 chapters were ten to fifteen single-spaced pages long. The early study had matured into a monumental work that tried to blend the insight of anthropological studies of religion, healing and the occult with perspectives and approaches from psychology. It begins by tackling Fraser and Malinowski on matters of magic, science and religion before arriving at a set of working definitions for the key terms and concepts. On his methodology, he notes: ‘I collected my data by joining the life of the people among whom I was working, attending their ceremonies, dances, initiations, beer drinking parties, church services concerts, public meetings, divination sessions and so forth.’46 In the end, he says, he spent nine months in the field interviewing people and attending local gatherings and events, as well as collecting genealogies and life histories. Most of this time was spent in the village of Mnqaba, a little over six kilometres 43 44 45

46

Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 26 January 2009. Monica Wilson, ‘ . . . So Truth Be in the Field . . . ’ (The Alfred and Winifred Hoernl´e Memorial Lecture, Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1975). The thesis, entitled ‘A Study of Ukuthwasa: Being a Syndrome Recognised by the Xhosa as a Qualification for Being Initiated as a Doctor’, was submitted for a Masters degree in social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in February 1957. Ibid., 16.

246

Inside African Anthropology

from Debe Nek station in Middledrift. He claims to have visited healers in about half of the 40 villages in the Debe Nek area, which had a total population of some 25,000 people in the late 1940s. He explained that most of his fieldwork was done during 1948 and 1949, but return visits to the field were undertaken in 1951, 1952 and also in 1956. In 1953 he had designed a detailed questionnaire on healing and witch beliefs that he administered to pupils and staff at Mnqaba Higher Mission School in Middledrift and to his trainee teachers at Healdtown.47 The thesis is well written, empirically detailed and clearly argued, and has since been published as a book with a foreword by the South African writer Es’kia Mphaphlele.48 It remains a mystery why Dr Jeffreys did not recommend it for a Ph.D. when he saw the extent of the empirical work involved and the sophistication of the argument. In the context of witchcraft studies at the time, the perspective adopted by Mqotsi is also very interesting and original. Having been ‘brought up’, intellectually speaking, under Monica’s direction, and remembering her lectures on the social functions of witchcraft, as well as her 1951 article on the contrast between Pondo and Nyakyusa witchcraft,49 he was alert to the relationship between witchcraft and social structure. Monica related witch beliefs and accusations to the structural feature of clan exogamy in Xhosa society. Mqotsi went further to argue that Xhosa society was, in fact, underpinned by deep-seated and pervasive structural contradictions that encouraged conflict and anxiety. He developed a perspective that placed conflict at the centre of his argument. On gender relations he arrived at the following conclusion after long and detailed discussion. From the foregoing discussion it is clear that the women are exposed most of all to frustration. They are denied equality of status with the men; their sexual desires are curbed; their marriage is uncertain; when they marry they are practically homeless since their own families hand them over to the husband’s family, where they are regarded as strangers; they are ordered about by mother-in-law and sister-in-law in one breath and accused of witchcraft (ukugqwira or ukuthakatha) in another; they are denied pleasure at any rate for some time, being assigned to the most unpleasant role of assiduousness; they are hemmed in on all sides with avoidance taboos, restrictions and customs. In a word, marriage throws . . . a veil of inhibition between her and many an avenue of ‘social gain’.50

It is not merely clan exogamy that creates tensions here but the entire system of gender relations. He explains that, rather than being characterised by social equilibrium and harmony, traditional Xhosa society is fraught 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 18. Livingstone Mqotsi, A Study of Ukuthwasa (East London: Iqula, 2007 [1957]), 16. Monica Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56, 4 (1951), 307–313. Mqotsi, A Study of Ukuthwasa, 44.

Witchcraft and the Academy

247

with tension and anxiety, and it is precisely this aspect that generates and encourages witchcraft and sorcery. The point I am trying to make here is that the relationship between a large number of categories of individuals in Xhosa society is calculated to give rise to emotional conflict and that conflict is the basis for all forms of neurotic behaviour. I suggest that the intensity of beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery accusation in Xhosa society, on the one hand, and the need for diviners and ritual specialists, on the other, are related to the prevalence of anxiety neuroses in this society.51

Later he points out that the essence of witchcraft and sorcery is conflict. But he also says that the beliefs regulate conflict and ensure that the person does not get too angry, too jealous or too rich. They enforce self-regulation. At the end of the book he returns to this theme, suggesting that, far from eradicating witchcraft and sorcery, ‘the chances are that the industrial, scientific and technological development which has drawn the African into the orbit of western institutions, simulations and frustrations, will prove to be one of the most veritable sources of anxiety and conflict, and this may well increase the incidence of witchcraft and sorcery accusation’.52 Mqotsi was drawing on his own research in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth in the 1940s, where he had lived in a community seeking spiritual security in the midst of the deep and pervasive uncertainties of social change and modernity in the city. In his 1946 study of the Limba Church, he noted that accusations of witchcraft actually seemed to have increased there and one of the challenges for the leaders of the Limba Church was to discourage accusations of witchcraft. The Church leaders insisted that those who see the impundulu (lightning bird) and the hili (hobgoblin) bring them to the preacher on a leash to be dealt with in church.53 If they failed to do so, which was always the case, the matter was dismissed by the bishop. The background knowledge of the urban context in his thinking about witchcraft and illness pushed his analysis beyond existing functionalist models. He wrote that witchcraft was an ‘island of irrationality’ in the countryside, but was pervasive and far-reaching in the city – and so required a more general sociological and psychological explanation than the culturally specific accounts that anthropology tended to provide. It is this dilemma, I believe, that drew Mqotsi to psychology in the first place, with its more universal modes of explanation, and also explains his intellectual shuttling between the disciplinary perspectives of psychology and anthropology. If his first attempt at exploring ukuthwasa 51 52 53

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 193. See also my analysis of this in Chapter 3, this volume. See Mqotsi and Mkele, ‘A Separatist Church’, 124–125.

248

Inside African Anthropology

was unconvincing within psychology, his second attempt at the thesis proved to be a subtle blend of perspectives from his two main disciplinary orientations. Thus in his treatment of ukuthwasa (the illness that provokes a calling to heal) he suggests that, while the links between the ancestor cult and the call to heal and be healed are important, we should not forget that ‘ukuthwasa is essentially a manifestation of a psychological disturbance’. He specifically links dreaming and schizophrenia to the calling of ukuthwasa. He suggests that ‘stripped of its magical and mythical trappings there can be no doubt about the genuineness of the ability of certain people to recognise beyond the range of what we have grown to regard as normal cognition’.54 Mqotsi sought to draw conclusions that extended beyond the frame of reference of the particular society and setting he was studying. For instance, he paid attention to Jack and Eileen Krige’s general assertion that witchcraft and sorcery among the Lovedu serve to ‘pardon the unpardonable’ and also argued that counter-magic is very powerful because it goes further than allowing people to believe they are able to counter misfortune by getting the correct antidote from the healer. There is an emotional satisfaction, he feels, which comes with explaining the inexplicable through witchcraft. He, interestingly, concludes this discussion by arguing that witch beliefs do not simply have social or psychological functions and effects but remain ‘a reality in their own right and have their own logic, which provides those who espouse them with a philosophy of life and a theory of psychology’. He goes on to claim, beyond the anthropological canon of the time, that witch beliefs are not only a response to conflict or structural disequilibrium in a social system, but can themselves be generative of conflict and social change.55 In addition to these important arguments, the text contains a wealth of empirical detail on individual diviners and healers, and describes the process involved in becoming a healer. Here he discusses whether the calling to divination is hereditary, a tradition perpetuated within particular families, or whether the process of entry is more socially open and unstructured. He comments in detail on the content of the training and the different types of traditional healers he encountered in the Debe Nek area. Mqotsi adds a comprehensive list and account of medicinal plants and herbs used by healers and the various properties associated with them. There is a scientific thoroughness and detail here that is impressive and valuable. In his conclusion, Mqotsi quotes the Victorian anthropologist Edward B. Tylor to the effect that ‘as men’s minds change in progressing 54 55

Mqotsi, A Study of Ukuthwasa, 192. Ibid., 63.

Witchcraft and the Academy

249

cultures, old customs and opinions fade gradually in a new and uncongenial atmosphere, or pass into states more congruous with the new life around them.’ This prompts him to comment that many forms of irrationality continue to lie embedded in modern society. They are not always as easily detectable as Xhosa accusations of witchcraft. Forms of racism that justify irrational behaviour against people classified as ‘inferior barbarians’, Jews, niggers and Communists were still common in so-called modern progressive societies. He insists that ‘the determining factors of this type of behaviour are the same as those that operate behind the nightmarish vendettas against witches and sorcerers’.56 Mqotsi’s call here is not only to displace the social anxiety, conflict and dysfunction associated with witchcraft, but to remove the ‘existence of primitive forms of life and thought’ (such as those that underpinned apartheid) as a pervasive form of irrationality induced by anxiety, akin to ‘the continued belief in sorcery and witchcraft’.57 In writing these words there is no doubt that Mqotsi was reflecting on his own experience of the irrationalities of the apartheid system and how he had suffered from these blind prejudices, both as a citizen and an intellectual. In the 1951 essay on witchcraft discussed above, Monica had declared that witch beliefs were the ‘standardized nightmare of the group’.58 Her article had set out to demonstrate the connections between belief in witchcraft and aspects of social structure amongst the Nyakyusa of Tanzania and the Pondo of the Eastern Cape. Monica argued that the fear of witchcraft, or its social equivalent, served as a powerful sanction against antisocial behaviour in all societies, and that such beliefs helped to enforce social conformity. She presented the idea that the witch was a scapegoat, a mechanism for social exclusion and vilification. She sent a copy of this essay to Mqotsi in 1954 when he had become the victim of an apartheid-driven witch-hunt aimed at keeping him out of schools and preventing him from securing an academic position in a South African university. While he did not write directly about his experience of ‘witchcraft in the academy’ in his Middledrift thesis of 1957, he certainly felt the power of state sorcery at this time. He had been formally banned from entering the premises of any school in the South Africa and, soon after, was effectively excluded from the university system. The rejection at Rhodes University was a critical moment. It was his final chance to realise his dream of becoming an anthropological researcher in South Africa. Had Mqotsi been allowed to take the job at Rhodes, he would surely have converted his Middledrift study into a Ph.D. and been able to launch his academic career. As we have seen, he never got the post – but 56 57 58

Ibid., 191. Ibid., 191. Monica Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, 313.

250

Inside African Anthropology

denial did not stop him completing, in 1957, what remains a significant anthropology study. The Later Years, 1957–2009 Cruelly, this achievement marked the end rather than the beginning of his academic career. Pushed out of the formal education system in South Africa, Mqotsi could not be employed at any school or university and was effectively banished to the Transkei, where he managed to negotiate his return into ‘white’ South Africa on a labourer’s pass in 1957. In East London he set up and edited two newspapers, Ikwezi Lomso (Morning Star), the monthly newspaper of the Unity Movement in the city, and Indaba Zase Monti (East London News), a weekly paper in English and Xhosa that was produced from a warehouse in the city where his pass book said he was employed as an ‘unskilled labourer’. These publications bravely attacked and exposed apartheid policies and injustices, paying special attention to developments in the Transkei and Ciskei reserves. He was banned in 1960 and detained without trial in the crackdown during the State of Emergency. His printing press was closed and his newspapers outlawed in the political repression that followed the shift to armed struggle in the liberation movements. He then retrained as a lawyer in East London (1961–3) and joined an African-run firm that took on some political cases. This was a period of intense political mobilisation and the persecution of activists in East London. When the South African police were closing in on him in 1964 he fled the country on an exit visa, first to Botswana and then to Lusaka in Zambia, where he continued working as a political journalist and Unity Movement organiser. He was employed as a teacher in Zambia.59 He was a tireless writer and political critic, and a leading figure of the Unity Movement in exile during the mid-1960s. It was in this period, when his career as an anthropologist was dead and buried, that Monica visited Mqotsi in Lusaka. She described him as an unhappy man who had suffered a great deal as a result of political persecution and academic misfortune.60 Others who knew him there described him as academically brilliant, an incisive thinker and a political opinion maker.61 The high esteem in which he was held by the ANC leadership was reflected in their decision to allow him to act as a

59 60 61

Magubane, My Life and Times, 134. WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, Monica Wilson/Livingstone Mqotsi, 12 May 1965, Cape Town. See Ciraj Shahid Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/Biography and History in South Africa’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2004).

Witchcraft and the Academy

251

mentor and ‘surrogate father’ to the charismatic Chris Hani in exile.62 In Lusaka, the young Chris Hani lived with Mqotsi, his wife and two daughters, where he was said to hold political meetings in the backroom while Mqotsi and his wife listened to ‘classical music and read poetry in the main house’.63 Bernard Magubane, the distinguished South African sociologist who made his career in the United States, writes in his recent autobiography about meeting with Mqotsi in Lusaka in the late 1960s. ‘Mqotsi was exceptionally bright, one of the best teachers in Zambia, and used to write all by himself this little monthly or bi-monthly newsletter, Unity, which made a plea for unity amongst all the liberation movements. I don’t know where he got the time.’64 Mqotsi remained in Zambia writing and teaching until the early 1970s, when he took a job as a teacher in London. When he finally retired as deputy headmaster in the 1990s, he wrote and published other books, including a historical ethnography of the resistance movement to rehabilitation in the Transkei in the late 1950s and 1960s.65 He only returned to South Africa in the 1990s, settling back in East London where he died on 25 September 2009. On 6 May 2010 he was posthumously awarded an honorary doctorate in the social sciences by the University of Fort Hare. Conclusion In telling this story of Mqotsi and his persistence as an ethnographer, I have emphasised the central role that Monica played in his development as a young African anthropologist. As with Mafeje (Chapter 8), there was little that Monica could have done to prevent the tragedy of Mqotsi’s frustrated academic career. There was no way that the apartheid state was going to allow a man with Mqotsi’s political profile and beliefs to secure a position in the white academy in South Africa. Monica continued to support his academic endeavours after the mid-1950s, although not as directly as Mqotsi sometimes hoped. She was by far the most influential figure in his development as an African intellectual and anthropologist in the 1940s and 1950s. He would probably never have written the Limba Church study in 1946 without wanting to prove himself to his respected mentor, and would definitely not have produced his intriguing ethnography on the Middledrift healers without her early support and informal

62 63 64 65

See Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, Hani: A Life Too Short (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2009), 147–155. Smith and Tromp, Hani, 148. Magubane, My Life and Times, 134. See Livingstone Mqotsi, House of Bondage (London: Karnak, 1991).

252

Inside African Anthropology

supervision. The study makes a valuable contribution to the documentation of indigenous knowledge systems of the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape. The meticulous and detailed manner in which he documented the activities and beliefs of Middledrift healers had a great deal to do with how he had been trained by Monica. He paid generous tribute to her in his speech at the centenary conference celebrating her life and work, calling her ‘the most significant intellectual influence’ in his life. One can only imagine what contribution Mqotsi might have made to South African anthropology in terms of articles, books and ideas, had he been writing African social science rather than teaching English and history to teenagers in Zambia and England from the 1960s to the 1990s. It is a great pity that an intellectual distance developed between Monica and himself in the 1950s and that she could not closely supervise his Middledrift study through to its completion. If this had happened, I am sure that, as with the study of the Limba Church in the 1940s, this work would not have had to wait half a century before getting published. What I am also certain of is that the training Mqotsi received under Monica had a lasting impact on his professional life as a political activist, teacher, journalist and writer. When he left anthropology to become a political journalist in East London in the late 1950s he produced his weekly paper, which was a kind of ethnography from below, documenting the stories of ordinary people and their experiences and resistance to apartheid policies. Later, when he retrained as a lawyer in the 1960s, he developed a keen interest in customary law and African indigenous notions of democracy and justice, which stayed with him for many years. Indeed, as he approached retirement in England in the late 1980s and wanted to write a book again, he combined his political and anthropological interests in a historical novel, House of Bondage. In the novel he returns to the draconian mechanism of the magistrate courts and the decrees of the native commissioners in the rural Transkei, and to the endless local struggles over chieftaincy, land and power recalled in so many editions of Indaba Zase Monti and Ikwezi Lomso, and in his own experiences of banishment in the Transkei in the 1950s and 1960s. House of Bondage was published in England in 199166 and may be read as an auto-ethnography. Together with the Limba Church study in the 1940s and Middledrift healers ethnography of 1957, it constitutes an important part of Mqotsi’s Monica-inspired anthropological contribution.

66

Ibid.

8

‘Speaking from Inside’: Archie Mafeje, Monica Wilson and the Co-Production of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township Andrew Bank with Vuyiswa Swana

Archie Mafeje was the only one of Monica Wilson’s former research assistants to establish a career as a university-based scholar.1 After working with Monica on Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township between 1960 and 1963, Mafeje went on to complete an MA in social anthropology at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1964 and a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge under Audrey Richards in 1969. Following the infamous rescinding of his appointment as senior lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology by the UCT senate in 1968, in what has become known as ‘the Mafeje Affair’,2 he took up posts as senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1969, later becoming head of department, and then as professor in the Institute of Social Sciences at the Hague in 1972, at the age of just 36. He published a series of highly influential sociological essays and books from the 1970s onwards in the fields of development and agrarian studies, and the politics of social scientific knowledge production in Africa. He died in Pretoria on 28 March 2007, but his intellectual legacy is still very much alive. He was posthumously awarded honorary doctorates by UCT in 2008 and Walter Sisulu University in 2010; a special issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin was published by way of obituary in December 2008, entitled ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’; and an edited collection is being produced 1

2

Thanks to Isaac Ntabankulu of UCT Manuscripts and Archives Department for many months of following up and seeking out archival materials on Archie Mafeje, to Mafeje’s friends and family who shared their memories with Andrew Bank (especially Nomfundo Mafeje, Archie Nkonyeni, Fikile Bam, Ganief and Ghaaronisa Hendricks, and Margaret Green) and to Adam Kuper, whose comments prompted a thorough rewriting of the chapter. See Fred T. Hendricks, ‘The Mafeje Affair: UCT, Apartheid and the Question of Academic Freedom’, African Studies, 67, 3 (2008), 432–452; for a critique of Hendricks’s account of Monica Wilson’s role in Mafeje’s exclusion see Andrew Bank, Archie Mafeje: The Life and Work of an African Anthropologist (1936–2007) (Alice: Fort Hare University Press, 2010), 12, 31.

253

254

Inside African Anthropology

on his work and legacy following a conference held at UCT in May 2011.3 This chapter returns to the beginning of Mafeje’s career as a social scientist and examines in detail his collaborative work with Monica Wilson on Cape Town’s Langa township during his years as a student of social anthropology at UCT. We examine the phases of knowledge production that went into the making of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township, that significant and undervalued contribution to South African urban anthropology that was published under their joint names by Oxford University Press in 1963 and re-issued in 1973.4 In particular we argue for a fuller recognition of the importance of Mafeje’s fieldwork between November 1960 and April 1962, and especially of his extended field report.5 As John Sharp has noted, the Langa project was in considerable difficulty when Monica enlisted Mafeje as a research assistant in 1960. Sharp recommends that we relate the creative turn in the project to the close personal relationship that developed between Monica and Mafeje. Here he mentions his own experience of ‘the intriguing combination of scholarly erudition, regal bearing and personal vulnerability that was manifested in the way she related to junior colleagues in whom she took an interest’.6 Most importantly, he draws attention to Mafeje’s status as an insider in Langa, being both a Xhosa-speaker and a NonEuropean Unity Movement activist working at a time of high political turbulence in the township. We explore in greater detail the complexities of the Mafeje–Wilson relationship and the more exact ways in which Mafeje was able to position himself as an ‘insider ethnographer’. We are centrally concerned less with the published text of Langa and Mafeje’s later retrospective reflections on the Langa project, published in a Monica Wilson Festschrift in 1975,7 than with Langa as a long-established anthropological field-site with which Mafeje engaged in particular ways. We draw on three concepts developed by Lyn Schumaker in Africanizing Anthropology: anthropology

3

4

5 6 7

On Mafeje’s career see Lungisile Ntsebeza, ‘Obituary: Archie Mafeje’, New Agenda, 27 (2007), 48–49; Adebayor Olukoshi and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, CDDESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007): ‘A Giant Has Moved On’, Dec. 2008 (3 & 4). Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (Cape Town, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963; second impression 1973). These materials are archived in the WC subsection on Langa as K3, Interviews and Notes: Archie Mafeje. John Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa: The Start of an Intellectual’s Journey’ in Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue, 32. Archie Mafeje, ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’ in Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975), 164–184.

‘Speaking from Inside’

255

as an activity in the field, anthropological social ‘networks’ defined in a non-technical sense as ‘interaction that enabled the fieldwork to be accomplished’ and interracial team research projects in African anthropology as instances of ‘the co-production of scientific knowledge’.8 The other central concern of this chapter is the importance of personal factors, including background, training and style, in the making of cultural knowledge.9 Once we take more seriously the fieldwork interactions as the generator of anthropological knowledge, working from the multiple social encounters on site rather than from the depersonalised finished texts, it becomes apparent that the personality of the fieldworker is crucial in this central phase of the process. This is particularly evident in the contrast that we draw between the failed fieldwork of A. R. W. (Robin) Crosse-Upcott and the successful work of Archie Mafeje in Langa.10 Personality is more than ever a vital factor when a study is co-authored (as with Mafeje and Monica here) and is the product of ongoing discussions over a period of years, with the relationship between the researchers changing.11 In order to reconstruct the personal background, training and the social (and thus associated fieldwork) style of Archie Mafeje we have drawn on the memories of Vuyiswa Swana, his younger sister and closest in age of his younger siblings,12 and on oral interviews with other family members and friends conducted by Andrew Bank. As for the changing relationship between Mafeje and Monica, we draw on an extensive correspondence which began during his first month of fieldwork in Langa and continued through his UCT student years and beyond.13 Who Wrote Langa? Reconstructing the relative contributions to Langa of the three primary researchers on the project has been complicated by a long-standing debate about the politics of its authorship. Archie Mafeje is identified as a full co-author on the book’s cover. Robin Crosse-Upcott would have been listed as the book’s third author had he taken up Monica’s overly 8 9 10

11 12 13

Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, esp. 246–259. See Chapter 1 for discussion of this theme in relation to Monica Hunter Wilson. John Sharp also refers to this contrast but we go into greater detail about their working styles, based on a close study of the fieldnotes and field reports of both researchers. See Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’, 31. For the standard textual approach, see especially Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters. Vuyiswa was born in 1940. Archie (born in 1936) had five other siblings: Mbulezi (born in 1942), Khumbuzo (1944), Mzandile (1947), Thozama (1949) and Nandipha (1954). WC, K1.2, Correspondence with Archie Mafeje, 1961–1962; ibid., uncat. corr., Correspondence with Archie Mafeje, 1960–1979 (includes some corr. with family members).

256

Inside African Anthropology

generous offer.14 Her Acknowledgements, written in April 1963, point to a hierarchy of roles corresponding to the academic status of each scholar. Field work was carried out by Dr. A. R. W. Crosse-Upcott from July 1955 until March 1957, and by Mr Archie Mafeje, who is himself Xhosaspeaking, intermittently between November 1961 and September 1962. The formulation of the problems, the direction of the field work, and the writing of the book was done by Professor Monica Wilson.15

Draft versions of this paragraph suggest that Monica was either genuinely unsure about the details or dithered about how best to convey an impression of ‘ethnographic authority’ in a study that relied most heavily (as we shall see) on a researcher who was still an undergraduate student when he began fieldwork. In one draft Monica leaves out the titles and dates; in another she records the period of Mafeje’s fieldwork as having ended in February 1962. An accurate statement would record that his fieldwork was fairly continuous and ran from November 1960 through to March 1962, a period of seventeen rather than ten months. In the case of Crosse-Upcott, the Acknowledgements exaggerate his role. His fieldwork was brief, being confined to little more than the six months between July and December 1955, and it was ineffective too.16 There is also the question of how much of the final text depended on Mafeje given the extent of reliance on his field report, as we discuss later. Partly because of this misleading formulation, but also because of Monica’s now well-established international reputation as a social anthropologist, most reviewers referred to the book as ‘Wilson’s study’ or ‘Professor Wilson’s study’. In a congratulatory review published in African Studies in 1963, Desmond Reader made no mention at all of Archie outside of the listed book title. He praised ‘Wilson’s compact and direct style’, attributing to her even those sections of the book like the ‘excellent analysis of home-boy relationships’ that most obviously drew on Archie’s research.17 For the American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, 14

15 16 17

Crosse-Upcott, rightly as we shall see, turned down the offer on the grounds that ‘I have had no hand in the real work involved.’ WC, uncat. corr., Correspondence between Monica Wilson and Robin Crosse-Upcott; ibid., A. R. Crosse-Upcott/Monica Wilson, 9 April 1962, Locust Control Office, Abercorn, Northern Rhodesia. We are grateful to Se´an Morrow for directing us to the uncatalogued folder of correspondence between Monica and Crosse-Upcott. Monica Wilson, ‘Acknowledgements’ in Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa, vii. WC, K7, Drafts and Langa Transcripts. Desmond H. Reader, ‘Review of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township’, African Studies, 22, 4 (1963), 190–191. Reader produced the first study in the ‘Xhosa in Town’ trilogy, The Black Man’s Portion: History, Demography and Living Conditions in the Native Locations of East London, Cape Province (Cape Town: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, 1961). We should read his comments partly in relation to his own highly dismissive attitude towards his African research assistants as expressed in the methodological appendix to his book:

‘Speaking from Inside’

257

the failings of Langa rather than its merits were laid squarely at Monica’s door. Powdermaker contrasted the book with Monica Wilson’s earlier ‘classics’ on the grounds that good ethnographic writing is impossible if one has not done the fieldwork oneself. (The preceding essays in this volume have shown quite how extensively she had relied on the fieldwork of others in her earlier projects as well.) She criticised Langa for its limited engagement with the more dynamic aspects of African urban culture in the mid-twentieth century,18 something she herself had been so successful at documenting in her recently published Copper Town: Changing Africa.19 A less eminent critic, writing in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 1967, again identified the book as ‘Professor Wilson’s Langa’, comparing it unfavourably with Sheila van der Horst’s African Workers in Town, a product of the UCT urban studies project from which Langa had developed.20 Mafeje’s claims to authorship changed over time. By the early 1970s he had come to distance himself from the book, something we associate with his increasingly critical attitude towards social anthropology as a field of study. In a handwritten inscription on the title page of the newly published second issue of Langa, dated to 1974, he dedicated the book to his second wife Shahida el Baz as ‘an affirmation of our belief in historical transformation and as a testimony to my youthful follies’.21 In an essay written a year later, he hinted at the limitations of Monica’s theoretical framework and underlying Christian liberal ideology.22 Then, in his famous debate with Sally Falk Moore two decades later, Mafeje distanced himself emphatically from the liberal social anthropologists of the British school including the Wilsons, whose ‘major crime was eurocentrism’, but ironically made fuller claim to co-authorship than he had in his 1975 essay: ‘In undertaking Langa we avoided what we thought was a procedural error on the part of the Mayers’, noting later on the use of the term ‘tribe’: ‘I might have prevailed upon Monica Wilson

18 19

20 21 22

‘In short, they had to be not too intelligent, and yet intelligent enough to complete the survey forms’ (169). Hortense Powdermaker, ‘Review of Langa’, American Anthropologist, 66, 5 (1964), 1199–1201. Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa: The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). See especially her fascinating exploration of the responses of townsmen in Northern Rhodesia to new forms of urban media, notably film, radio and newspapers. H. M. Jones, ‘Review of Langa, The Second Generation and African Workers in Town’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 5, 1 (1967), 157–158. The note is dated 1974. Inscription on the title page of the copy of Langa (1973 edition) in Archie Mafeje’s private library, Africana Library, Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha. Archie Mafeje, ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’ in Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 164–184. See Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’ for an analysis of his changing attitude towards social anthropology.

258

Inside African Anthropology

not to do the same [use the term] in Langa.’23 Mafeje’s reflections in hindsight exaggerate the degree of intellectual equality between Monica and himself at a stage when he was just beginning his graduate studies and she was a senior professor with a very well established international reputation. As we explain later, he came to social anthropology as a failing science student and his correspondence with Monica during his Langa fieldwork reveals a vulnerability and anxiety to please on his part, which these later reminiscences conveniently suppress. The authorship debate has been taken up again in the years since Mafeje’s death, most notably in the articles published in the obituary issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin. Sociologist Jimmy Adesina challenges Falk Moore’s riposte on the grounds that it ‘hardly reflects well on her own understanding of producing a manuscript. Authorship, if that is what this confers on Monica Wilson, does not mean exclusivity of even the most seminal ideas in a manuscript.’ He goes on to suggest that the ‘most seminal ideas’ in the book, those articulating what he terms ‘the pursuit of indigeneity’, came from Mafeje rather than Wilson.24 The editorial to this special issue refers to Langa as ‘his [Mafeje’s] ethnography’, a view the editors (mistakenly) attribute to John Sharp.25 The debate seems then to have come full circle. In the mid-1960s we had the striking silencing of Archie Mafeje’s contribution in journal reviews based in part on the formulation of the respective roles of fieldworkers and author in the book’s Acknowledgements. In the mid-1970s Mafeje implicitly seemed to endorse this, but then began making greater claims to authorship in the course of his debate with Sally Falk Moore in the mid-1990s. Since his death, essays published in recent years have recast Langa as Mafeje’s ‘masterly ethnography’ and Mafeje rather than Monica Wilson has been credited with the book’s most ‘seminal ideas’. We argue that the production of Langa is better seen as creative dialogue and co-production, rather than in terms of exclusive notions of authorship, because Mafeje collected the bulk of field data that went into the book and Monica did most of the writing. In Mafeje’s fieldwork, beginning in November 1960, this dialogue took the form of his taking Monica’s sets of questions and advice about anthropological interviewing methods into the field, and then of fortnightly progress reports that were recorded in rough note form with new sets of questions for the next 23

24

25

Archie Mafeje, ‘A Commentary on Anthropology and Africa’, CODESRIA Bulletin, 2 (1996), 12. Falk Moore responded by citing the book’s Acknowledgements quoted above. Jimmy A. Adesina, ‘Against Alterity – The Pursuit of Endogeneity: Breaking Bread with Archie Mafeje’ in Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin, 3 and 4 (2008), 21–29. Adebayo Olukoshi and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, ‘Editorial’ in Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue, 1–4.

‘Speaking from Inside’

259

stage of fieldwork. On the writing process, we will argue later that for numerous sections of the book, the published text followed the formulations in Mafeje’s field report almost to the word, blurring the distinction between fieldworker and author that the book’s Acknowledgements drew rather too starkly. Archie Mafeje and the Long History of the Langa Project, 1936/7 to 1957 We need to set this dialogue in the context of Archie’s background and an appreciation of the established networks in Langa that set him apart from the numerous other UCT-based anthropologists who had done research there. Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje was born on 30 March 1936 in a remote mountainous rural village in the Engcobo District of Thembuland, just a year before the newly appointed UCT lecturer in native law and government, Jack Simons, began doing fieldwork in Langa. When Simons introduced his graduate student Ruth Levin to Langa in 1945,26 Archie Mafeje was still a pupil at Gubenxa Junior School where his father Bennett, a wealthy peasant farmer, was the headmaster. Mafeje did his Junior Certificate at Nqabara Secondary School, a Methodist missionary school in ‘the backwaters of Willowvale District, close to the sea’27 in 1951 and 1952, a few years after David Hammond-Tooke had submitted his MA study on six independent Churches in Langa.28 Mafeje and his fellow pupils were first introduced to the politics of the Non-European Unity Movement by their headmaster at Nqabara, Nathaniel Honono, whom we met in Chapter 6. Here Mafeje was a star pupil with a passion for science subjects. His classmate Archie Nkonyeni records his first impressions of Mafeje as a confident, straight-talking teenager, one who was ‘tall, dark and ruggedly handsome’. Mafeje was ‘a civilizing factor’ at school. He liked to instruct his friends in table manners and dress sense.29 Archie and Nkonyeni were in their matric year at Healdtown Missionary College near Fort Beaufort (see Figure 8.1) when Monica, the newly 26

27

28 29

There is a striking contrast between the atmosphere in Langa during the time of Levin’s six months of fieldwork and a decade later when Robin Crosse-Upcott entered Langa. For a sense of the more benevolent politics of research in the pre-apartheid period, see Ruth Levin’s M.A. thesis (1945), later published as a book under the same title, Marriage in Langa Native Location (Cape Town: University of Cape Town School of African Studies, 1947), 1–8. Archie Nkonyeni, ‘Archie Mafeje’, Mafeje Panel Discussion, Anthropology Southern Africa Conference, East London, 10 September 2010 (Stanley Baluku, Video of the Panel Discussion, UCT Manuscript and Archives Department). W. David Hammond-Tooke, ‘Six Native Churches: A Preliminary Survey of Religion in an Urban Location’ (M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1948). Nkonyeni, ‘Archie Mafeje’.

260

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 8.1. Archie Mafeje (left) during his years at Healdtown Missionary College where he matriculated in 1954. Hudson Matabese (right) was another star pupil who went with the two Archies from Nqabara to Healdtown, and then later on to Fort Hare Native College. The trio of star students remained lifelong friends.30

appointed professor and head of the Department of Social Anthropology, submitted a UCT team research funding proposal to the National Council of Scientific Research for a project on ‘African Communities in the Western Cape’. Given her success with African research assistants as fieldworkers, from her time in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa through to her work with Theresa Maki in the recently completed Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, Wilson proposed the appointment of five African fieldworkers along with two senior researchers, Simons and the UCT economist Sheila van der Horst (see also Figure 8.2, caption). Monica thus saw no more than a distant supervisory role for herself at a time when her own primary research commitment was to ongoing work of seeing the Nyakyusa ethnographies through to completion. The amended proposal recommended the appointment of only two African research assistants. Wilson seems to have had Godfrey Pitje in mind as a possible candidate at this early stage, as well as Nimrod Mkele, Livingstone Mqotsi’s one-time research collaborator in Port Elizabeth. Mafeje was a first year BSc student at Fort Hare Native College when Robin Crosse-Upcott was introduced to Langa by Jack Simons in June 30

Vuyiswa Swana, private collection.

‘Speaking from Inside’

261

Figure 8.2. Monica (centre) and her colleagues at a Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) Conference in 1951. The other figures are (from left to right): A. J. B. Hughes, J. Clyde Mitchell, Ian Cunnison, Hans Holleman, Victor Turner, Jack Krige, Bubbles Hyam. The team research model of the RLI played an important role in shaping Monica’s planning of the Langa project in 1952–4, with its proposal for the active involvement of African researchers enabled by ‘insider’ cultural knowledge.31

1955. Crosse-Upcott was in the final stages of writing up a doctoral thesis on the ‘Social Structure of the ki-Ngindo-speaking Peoples’ in Tanganyika, which Monica had supervised.32 When Mafeje was expelled 31

32

Photograph from J. Clyde Mitchell’s private collection. Reproduced with permission from Jean Mitchell. This group photograph was first reproduced in Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 108. The names of the figures are taken from her book (except for Monica whom she mistakenly took to be Elsey Richardson and the ‘unknown man’ whom we save identified as Jack Krige). The photographer was most likely Eileen Krige. Thanks to Lyn for facilitating negotiations for permission and providing us with an original print to scan. On the importance of African research assistants in the RLI team projects, see also her article: Lyn Schumaker, ‘The Director as Significant Other: Max Gluckman and Team Research at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute’ in Richard Handler, ed., Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 91–130. A. Robin W. Crosse-Upcott, ‘Social Structure of the ki-Ngindo-Speaking Peoples’ (D.Phil., University of Cape Town, 1956).

262

Inside African Anthropology

from Fort Hare a year later for political activism on campus, the Langa project was not going well. Crosse-Upcott had done a year of training as an army cadet at Oxford in 1951 and had formerly worked as a colonial administrator in Tanganyika. He appears to have approached his Langa research as something of a military manoeuvre. His field reports reveal that he had begun to think in terms of the need to work from ‘HQ’ in order to begin ‘softening up’ or ‘pacifying’ informants, but was aware that he should avoid ‘shock tactics’. In short, he had come to see Langa as ‘a battle to be won’.33 Not surprisingly his fieldnotes are filled with descriptions of ‘chilly receptions’ and accounts of months of frustration in dealing with evasive, unpunctual or reluctant informants. He attended only three social events during his time in Langa and found them less than enjoyable. At the Christmas service of 1955 ‘the whole carnival atmosphere appeared to me grotesque’. His notes of the Easter Day service in 1956 read like a missionary’s account of pagan rituals with references to a ‘cowering throng’ and ‘spell-bound’ worshippers.34 Even the dynamic new young African jazz bands, the Tuxedo Slickers and the City Jazz Kings, failed to impress him. ‘On the whole, it was a dreary performance, excepting if viewed as satire. The performers looked like a lot of circus-monkeys giving a slip-shod imitation to my mind.’35 While Wilson’s Acknowledgements suggest that Crosse-Upcott only formally resigned from the Langa project in March 1957, we have found no record of interviews that date beyond May 1956. His last nine months on the project produced almost nothing and when he left for an administrative post in Tanganyika without having written up a final report, the UCT supervisory committee was in despair. Robertson [H. M., Professor of Economics]: He just learns enough to be useful and then goes. It is a pure waste of time . . . Simons: I wonder whether the National Council feels that we have been negligent in appointing a man who did not finish the job. Wilson: He was not particularly happy in urban work . . . I can only demand that he have everything written up to date . . . I feel so discouraged about the whole proceedings that I am not at all prepared to spend a great deal of time on it. So much work has gone into it which has been quite useless.’36

When Crosse-Upcott’s final report did belatedly arrive, it was of little value. Entitled ‘Social Harmony and Discord in an Urban Location’, the findings were in keeping with his military model. His only substantive 33 34 35 36

WC, K2.1, Church Interviews, M–S, Methodist Church of South Africa, Rev. Teka, 23 Aug. 1955; ibid., Rev. Damane, 18 Jan. 1956. Ibid., Rev. Teka, 1 April 1956. WC, K2.3, Interviews with Clubs, Scopus Group concert, Darling Street, 30 October 1955. WC, K1.1, Correspondence, Proposals, Reports etc., 1958–1962, Draft minutes, 3 June 1957.

‘Speaking from Inside’

263

chapter was a 30-page conclusion on ‘Discord’ in which he argued that, despite a ‘surface impression of relative quietness and freedom from open violence’, Langa township was in reality a seething bed of personal and institutional feuds, a place of schisms, splintering and instability, an altogether ‘boisterous state of affairs’.37 Mafeje’s Networks, 1958 to 1960 Crosse-Upcott’s failure as a fieldworker in Langa illuminates, by means of the starkest of contrasts, the success of Mafeje’s insider networks as well as, more generally, the importance of fieldworker attitudes towards their ethnographic subjects. We need to locate Mafeje’s fieldwork in the context of a web of social networks that he had established in the township even before he began working there as a researcher in November 1960. Mafeje enrolled for a BSc degree at UCT in 1957. African students were in a tiny minority, numbering fewer than twenty out of a student population of some five thousand throughout his student years.38 He recalled how ‘as a biology student in the late 1950s at UCT I had been taught the same [racist attitudes] by my white professors who nonetheless regarded me as the “other”.’39 He came to social anthropology as a failing BSc candidate rather than as a star student confidently equipped with a BSc as some scholars have claimed.40 His student record reveals that he passed only three of the twelve BSc courses for which he enrolled,41 suggesting that his switch to a BA and social anthropology in 1959 was from necessity rather than choice. He lived in Athlone in the late 1950s and moved to District Six in 1960, but he had extensive contact with Langa during this period. He would have heard stories about the township as a child. His father Bennett had lived there and taught at Langa High School for some five years during the mid-late 1930s, having first got to know Cape Town during his years of work as chauffeur to a wealthy suburban family.42 His mother had also lived in Langa when she worked as a schoolteacher in Cape Town, and it is most likely that Langa was where his parents had married in 1934. 37 38

39 40 41 42

WC, K7, [A. R. W. Crosse-Upcott] ‘Social Harmony and Discord in an Urban Location’, typescript. African students would remain under 1 per cent of the total student population until the 1980s. See Kate Honikman, ‘Processes and Problems: First-Year Students at a South African University’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1982), Table 3.1, 51. Archie Mafeje, ‘Africanity: A Commentary by Way of Conclusion’ republished in Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue, 15. See Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’, 30; Fred T. Hendricks, ‘Editorial: A Brief Tribute to Archie Mafeje’, African Sociological Review, 11, 1 (2007), 1–3. UCT, University Archive, student record of Archie Mafeje (1957–1964), transcript, 1. Bennett had the unusual experience of having accompanied this family to Egypt and Australia.

264

Inside African Anthropology

When Mafeje entered Langa as a paid research assistant on 16 November 1960, having completed his second and final undergraduate year of social anthropology at UCT, he still had ‘an aunt and an uncle who have been in town since the early forties and all their children are with them’.43 He described them in his fieldnotes as ‘decent people’, a term that he and Monica used to identify the town-based ‘respectable middle class’ in their published book.44 His strongest networks were with this educated middle class. When Monica asked him to present his own categories of social groups, an issue she had already shown a keen interest in during her much earlier fieldwork in East London (see Chapter 3) and rank them in order of importance, he rated ‘education’ as the most important rank and index of difference after ‘colour’. For each informant he carefully recorded (at Monica’s request) the level of education of his interviewee along with their age, sex and social group, and the date of interview. His notes show that in the early weeks and months he worked mainly with well-educated informants, many of whom he knew from Healdtown Missionary College, Fort Hare University or UCT. Thus, for example, it was an educational rather than a political connection that put him in touch with Philip Kgosana, the young Pan African Congress (PAC) member who later achieved fame for his leadership of the Langa March of March 1960. In March 1959 Archie, then in his second year, took Kgosana through the rituals of registration. I had never been to Cape Town before. I had about two pounds from friends. [When I first arrived] I went to a hotel at District Six. In that little hotel I found a man who is now a professor today, Professor Archie Mafeje . . . Archie took me to the campus. There were very, very few Africans on the campus. There were something like sixteen or so [Africans] on the whole campus. We went through the routines [of registration] in Jameson Hall, the whole procedure, what it means to start with university studies and so on.45

The networks of school and politics overlapped in other cases, notably with that of his best friend from school years Archie Nkonyeni, who was doing B.Com. at UCT and lived in Langa. They met on weekends as members of the Society for Young Africa, the youth and student branch of the Non-European Unity Movement. Nkonyeni was the secretary. Many of their meetings were held at the home of I. B. Tabata and Jane Gool

43 44 45

WC, K3, Interviews and Notes by Archie Mafeje, Folder 3, Field report, 67, 94, 192. Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa, 26. Philip Kgosana interviewed by Howard Phillips, Cape Town, 3 May 1994. Thanks to Howard Phillips for making this interview available. The university records put the number of African students at 18 in 1958.

‘Speaking from Inside’

265

Figure 8.3. Archie Mafeje (right) in Adderley Street, Cape Town with fellow UCT student and anti-apartheid political activist Welsh Makanda, August 1961. Three months later he began his fieldwork in Langa.46

Woodstock.47 There is little doubt that these political connections were important in the volatile context in which he entered the field.48 His connections with Xhosa migrants from the Eastern Cape were equally important. It is easy to forget, given the emphasis of the Langa book on urban ‘associations’, that no fewer than 75 per cent of the

46 47

48

Margaret Green, private collection. Reproduced with permission from Margaret Green. Telephonic interview with Archie Nkonyeni by Andrew Bank, 4 December 2008 (unless otherwise stated, all interviews to the end of the chapter are by Andrew Bank). On biographical writing about Tabata see Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/Biography and History in South Africa’. The politically volatility of the period of Archie’s fieldwork has been well documented in the wider literature on the history of political protest against apartheid, beginning with Tom Lodge’s meticulous reconstruction of the events of the Langa March of 1960 (Tom Lodge, ‘The Cape Town Troubles, March–April 1960’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 4, 2 (April 1978), 216–239) reproduced in much the same form in Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), Chapter 9; on the radicalism and anti-white discourse in PAC speeches of the time, see Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: UCLA Press, 1978), Chapter 7.

266

Inside African Anthropology

population of Langa were Xhosa-speaking migrant labourers from the Eastern Cape – like Mafeje himself. One of the six extended case studies of ‘home-boys’ living in the hostels, recorded in his fieldnotes and reproduced almost verbatim in the published text, features migrants from Engcobo whom he had known from his teenage years. Archie’s fellow student and housemate from 1958 through to 1960, the late Fikile Bam, recalled that (after moving together from a house in Crawford to one in District Six) they used to visit these ‘Engcobo boys’ in Langa in order to collect sticks, sjamboks and blankets so that they could disguise themselves when walking in the streets of District Six at night. ‘Instead of attacking us, the [District Six] “skollies” would greet us with shouts of “Hello, Engcobo boys.”’49 Bam confirmed that they had established social networks in Langa as early as 1958. ‘We were visiting Langa for all sorts of things. I would tend to go and watch football. He was interested in rugby, because Fort Hare was a rugby place.’ A taxi driver named Mac Mayekiso was Archie’s man on the inside. He [Mac] acted as a kind of conductor. This was one of the things he was doing in Langa and Nyanga. He knew about shebeens and concerts. Archie would test his theories about Langa on Mac. He would come home and say to me, ‘You know Mac is wise now, because he spends time with Archie.’50

‘Archie is wise’ was Mafeje’s motto, according to Margaret Green, one of his close friends at UCT.51 Another fellow student, Deirdre Levinson, recalls Mafeje sitting in the front row of the lecture halls with an ‘admiring white girl on either side’.52 Whether or not this was a factor in his success at eliciting interviews from female informants in Langa, his notes reveal a great sense of openness and ease in his discussion with female interviewees, those colourfully described in the text of the book as amagodukakazi, ootstotsikazi, itopikazi, uMackazi and women of the middle-class ooscuse-me group.53 This is in stark contrast with the bluff former cadet Robin Crosse-Upcott, who was unable to record a single interview with a female informant, something he attributed to taboos about sex and the colour bar.54 Women feature in his fieldnotes only as a presence on the margins, either making or (more frequently) not making him tea when he was visiting their husbands. 49

50 51 52 53 54

Telephonic interview with Fikile Bam, 9 July 2010. For a more general account of Bam’s early years at UCT, see K. S. Broun, Black Lawyers, White Courts: The Soul of South African Law (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000), 65–66. Telephonic interview with Fikile Bam, 9 July 2010. Interview with Margaret Green, Plumstead, Cape Town, 21 June 2010. Deirdre Levinson, ‘Speaking of Archie’ in Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue, 54–55. See Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa, Chapters 2 and 4. WC, K2.4, Other Interviews, Interview by Crosse-Upcott with Mr Mshumpela.

‘Speaking from Inside’

267

Mafeje also had a good knowledge of township life in Johannesburg, a by-product of his female friendship circles there. In 1957 he reestablished romantic ties with his girlfriend from Healdtown, Nomfundo Noruwana, now a nurse-in-training at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg. He would visit her during university vacations, usually travelling up by train with Fikile Bam, whose eldest sister was a matron at Baragwanath. One of us (Vuyiswa Swana) was training there as a nurse at the time and her elder brother made a point of introducing her to the Johannesburg theatre and Wits University campus during his vacation visits. Archie Mafeje married Nomfundo Noruwana in Kwazakhele township in Port Elizabeth in 1961 and their son Xolani was born in April 1962.55 His wider knowledge of township life had a significant bearing on the Langa book, which makes numerous comparative observations about the styles of township youth. As he explained in one of his first letters to Monica, ‘I am finding quite a number of interesting points about Johannesburg in connection with the work I have been doing, so that even if my business [visiting his girlfriend] is finished, I might hang on here as long as that won’t inconvenience you.’56 Re-Reading the Langa Field Report of Archie Mafeje, 16 November 1960 to March 1962 The complexities of the authorship are most apparent when analysing Mafeje’s Langa field report. In the archive we encounter his report divided across seven folders, which was the way Monica used his material in writing up the seven main chapters of their book. The first of the numbered pages dates to 16 November 1960 (rather than November 1961, as Monica mistakenly claimed). While his records in the first month may be read as fieldnotes in the sense of writings recorded on site while conducting interviews, most of the pages that follow are better described as a field report, written in the more detached mode of the overview constructed in retrospect.57 In Clifford’s terms, this is ‘description’ rather than ‘inscription’ or ‘transcription’.58 We have no record of jottings or rougher notes that might have preceded the report, if indeed he produced such notes. By now Monica had accepted full responsibility for writing the final report. She had spent some of her research leave between January and 55 56

57 58

Telephonic interview with Nomfundo Mafeje, 15 June 2010. WC, K1.2, Correspondence with Archie Mafeje re research, 1960–1961, Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 26 Jan. 1961, Cape Town. For references to Johannesburg townships that derive in part from Mafeje’s personal knowledge, see Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 21–22, 26, 33–34, 74, 79, 145–146, 170, 174. WC, K3, Interviews and Notes by Archie Mafeje, 7 folders especially Folders 1–3. James Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 47–70.

268

Inside African Anthropology

June 1959 wading through Crosse-Upcott’s fieldnotes and drafted a rough paper entitled ‘Some Features of African Urbanization in the Western Cape’, which was limited to a discussion of Churches and clubs, the two topics on which Crosse-Upcott had collected data.59 She now began to develop an interest, not evident in the planning phases of the project, in how the people of Langa categorised themselves and one another. This would be one of the most interesting chapters in the book (Chapter 2: Categories of People). Monica provided Mafeje with a list headed ‘Criteria of identification’. How do you identify people? A. Yourself. B. 10 friends, 5 men, 5 women. C. Older men and women. D. Educated and uneducated differences? E. Town and country differences (i.e. by townsmen and countrymen) F. Situational differences? e.g. Street in Langa. Bus. UCT. Dance. Church.60

Mafeje’s fieldnotes begin as a reply to these instructions, recording his own way of categorising people and then those of ten of his friends in Langa. He divided the township’s population into the three primary groups that are set out in the book’s second chapter: ‘I Uneducated migrant labourers; II Self-educated and semi-urbanised; III Completely urbanized.’ The ‘completely urbanized’ were subdivided into the ‘tsotsitype’ and the ‘respectable and educated group’ with which he clearly associated himself.61 He went into detail about the defining features of each of these social groups. What is most striking is the sense of immediacy about these observations. They colourfully capture the texture of styles and identities on the street. For some reviewers of the Langa book, this was one of the study’s main achievements.62 These are not syntheses of information from questionnaires, but observations of people’s expressions of identity in everyday life. He reported in detail on dress and style, as one might expect from someone who took great interest in his personal appearance.63 He reported on how people walked and talked. In the case of the semi-urbanised Xhosa, for example, he commented on their ‘distinct exhibitionism’. They are ‘inclined to speak English often in public places e.g. in the street, buses and in any 59

60

61 62

63

WC, K1.1, Correspondence re: Research into African Communities in the Western Cape, 1950–1962, Monica Wilson/National Council of Scientific Research, 10 September 1959. The letter accompanied a draft progress report. There is, unfortunately, no copy of this first draft in WC. WC, K4, Notes Made by Monica Wilson, ‘Correspondence and Questions about Langa Research’. Her next list of questions was on ‘Home boys’ followed by a series on ‘Kinship’. The book chapters followed these themes. WC, K3, Folder 1, 1. See Aidan Southall, ‘Review of Langa’, The American Journal of Sociology, 70, 4 (Jan. 1965), 510–11. Southall’s incisive review is one of the few commentaries that (in our view) captures the true spirit of the book. Discussion with Vuyiswa Swana, 29 May 2010; telephonic interview with Nomfundo Mafeje, 6 June 2010.

‘Speaking from Inside’

269

other big gathering; style of dress flashy and gorgeous . . . Their Xhosa [is] very much influenced by English, Afrikaans and other slang words.’64 In describing himself in his fieldnotes, Archie devoted a full paragraph to his ability to pick up a sense of dialect from the spoken word. ‘I can readily classify people according to their accent e.g. I can tell whether one was Xhosa speaking, Sotho, Zulu, Rhodesian, Portuguese East African, South West African even if one was speaking English to me.’ He claimed to be able to distinguish easily ‘Pondos from Bhacas, Bhacas from Hlubis, Transkeians from Ciskeians’ on the basis of the different Xhosa dialects.65 His field report bears this out. His sense of insider identity went beyond his knowledge of language and dialect. In a lengthy unpublished critique of Philip Mayer’s Townsmen or Tribesmen written during the course of his fieldwork,66 Mafeje made explicit mention of his status as an insider with deeper background knowledge of ‘African’ beliefs.67 He noted in response to one of the entries on Mayer’s questionnaire: ‘Do you believe in the ancestor-cult or Christianity?’ The question . . . is altogether unsuited to give the field-worker even the vaguest clue to the problem. Speaking from the inside, I want to state categorically that most of the Africans, if not all, who still do believe in the existence of benevolent supreme beings . . . do [also] believe, whether vaguely or strongly, in ancestral spirits [our emphasis].68

His uncertainty (see the deletion in his note above) over whether to write ‘speaking from the inside’ or ‘speaking from inside’ is interesting. It seems to suggests a sense of dual identity as insider: both as cultural insider who could speak ‘from inside’ and as insider in the spatial or physical sense of speaking from ‘the inside’ of a place like Langa. In his early days in the field, Mafeje followed Wilson’s instructions, interviewing ‘10 friends, 5 men, 5 women’. He chose his peers. All these interviewees were between the ages of 18 and 30, and in the case of his male informants relatively well educated. In writing up the case studies, and those of the older men and women he interviewed in late November of 1960, he incorporated extensive verbatim testimony in Xhosa which he 64 65 66

67 68

WC, K3, Folder 1, 1. Ibid., 3. At one point in the commentary he makes reference to his field reports, again though in the spirit of dialogue which characterised their work: ‘Please check this point [his case for a correlation between specific types of migrant employment and respective lengths of work record] on the case histories I handed in’ (WC, J13.3, Papers and Articles by Archie Mafeje, A. Mafeje, ‘General Remarks: Townsmen or Tribesmen – P. Mayer’, 45). He was in fact a Thembu. WC, J13.3, Papers and Articles by Archie Mafeje, A. Mafeje, ‘General Remarks: Townsmen or Tribesmen – P. Mayer’, 51.

270

Inside African Anthropology

usually translated for Monica’s benefit even though she had a good knowledge of Xhosa. This suggests that he felt some of the nuances needed to be explained by the insider ethnographer. He also flaunted his newly acquired anthropological vocabulary with liberal sprinklings of technical terms, from ‘functional group’ to ‘sexual taboo’ or ‘clan exogamy’.69 They met in her UCT office fortnightly to discuss his latest findings. When Monica was in Hogsback during vacations, they corresponded by letter. The letters he wrote during his early weeks and months in the field bubble over with a sense of enthusiasm and his passion for fieldwork. After his first few weeks he wrote that ‘I simply love Social Anthropology and I have no doubt that it is the sort of study I would like to do for a whole life-time.’ He later claimed: ‘During the first week I started working in Langa I don’t remember any day on which I left Langa before 12 midnight.’ Monica was delighted with the quality of his field data. In January 1961 he wrote to her that ‘it was really a pleasure collecting that material . . . I gained the invaluable experience of going to the field myself and seeing what is there. I really learnt in this short space of time much more than books could ever have taught me. It was very kind of you, thanks so much for everything.’70 These letters reveal that their relationship was always warm, but during the course of the project became close. In recollecting their relationship with Monica during the 1960s and early 1970s, her white former students (or junior colleagues) tend to remember her with great respect, but always with a sense of formality and distance.71 With Mafeje things were different. I attribute that partly to his outgoing personality and confidence, but largely to the Langa project itself and their shared engagement in knowledge production. In his letters he would usually ask about her health and sometimes asked if she was feeling lonely at Hogsback with the Christmas crowd gone. It is difficult to imagine any of her white students breezily signing off, ‘With fondest regards, Goodbye, Yours sincerely, Archie.’72 He also wrote openly at one point regarding his anxiety about how she viewed him and his work, reflecting that he was unsure whether it was appropriate to address one’s professor in such a direct and personal way. Monica, on her side, developed great respect for him as a person, reporting in references that she had great trust in him and commenting on his bravery at the time of his arrest and imprisonment in

69 70

71

72

WC, K3, Folder 3, Field report, 67, 94, 192. WC, K1.2 Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 28 Nov. 1960, Cape Town; ibid., Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 22 July 1961, Eastern Pondoland; ibid., Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 15 Jan. 1961, Cape Town. See especially Heike Becker and Emile Boonzaier, eds, ‘“Remembering Monica”: Monica Wilson’s Students Appreciate Their Teacher’ in Anthropology Southern Africa Programme and Abstract Book (Cape Town: University of the Western Cape, 2008), 75–87. See also Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’, 33; and Chapter 10 in this volume. WC, K1.2, Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 20 Jan. 1962, Cape Town.

‘Speaking from Inside’

271

August 1963. She visited him in prison at Roeland Street and assisted in organising a lawyer for his defence. He also established close friendships with her sons Francis and Tim, and was a regular visitor at their house in Rondebosch.73 From 1966 onwards, as a doctoral student in Cambridge, he began to address Monica as ‘Aunt Monica’ and referred to himself at one point as ‘one of your neglected sons’.74 In a later letter to Monica, his father Bennett commented, ‘You take Archie as one of your sons.’75 This sense of warmth, even kinship, was at the very heart of the creative relationship that produced Langa. During the six to eight months that followed, Mafeje addressed detailed sets of questions that Monica set for him under the subheadings that would form the chapters of their book. His field report runs to nearly 530 pages – at around 75 words a page, some 40,000 words in length. While the significance of Archie’s information on ‘home-boys’ and the ‘arbitration of disputes’ has been recognised,76 and to some degree the material that he collected on ‘categories of people’,77 the importance of his ethnography of an emerging urban culture of leisure in the township has yet to be appreciated.78 The subsections on ‘Sports Clubs’ and ‘Music and Dance Clubs’ in the Langa book are drawn almost exclusively from Mafeje’s lively field report based on his participant observation of many concerts and his close contacts with band members and sportsmen. These contrast sharply with Crosse-Upcott’s dry summaries of the minutes of club meetings.79 In collecting this material Archie went well beyond Monica’s brief. He had long been passionately interested in township music. In his high school years he would bring gramophone records back home during summer vacations and order his younger siblings to clear the furniture from their lounge so that he could orchestrate a performance of the tango or the jive on this makeshift stage. The lack of a family radio in these years made the sound of these records all the more magical.80 73 74 75

76 77 78

79

80

Ibid., Monica Wilson reference, 2 Aug. 1965, Cape Town. Ibid., Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 5 June 1967, Cambridge. WC, uncat. corr., Correspondence with Archie Mafeje, 1960–1979 (includes some corr. with family members), Bennett Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 23 Feb. 1971, Ugie, Eastern Cape. See, for example, Powdermaker, ‘Review of Langa’, 1199; Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’, 31. See especially Southall, ‘Review of Langa’, 510–11. For a later revisionist history of popular culture in Langa, see Rashidi M. Molapo, ‘Sports, Festivals and Popular Politics: Aspects of the Social and Popular Culture in Langa Township, 1945–1970’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994). He did also collect material on music in two interviews with Mr Matshiqi, chair of the Western Province Musicians’ Association. (WC, K2.3 Crosse-Upcott: Interviews with Clubs, Interviews with Mr Matshiqi, 30 Sept. 1955 and 25 Oct. 1955). During his decades in exile he would regularly urge family members to send him ‘good township music’. He was also passionate about classical music, as one of his UCT friends and tutorial students recalls. Rene Hirschon, ‘Archie Mafeje’, Mafeje Panel

272

Inside African Anthropology

Monica did not make enough of Archie’s ethnography of township music. Consider, for example, the passionate tone in this description of the music played by the Cordettes and the Disciples, two of the young bands whose music he knew well and whose members were close friends. They are really jazz and kwela maniacs. They blow until every teenager ‘rocks’ his head off. They are the favourites of the ikhaba [one of Langa’s social groups]. They are referred to as ‘intwana zihot maan’ – really hot youngsters.’81

Of Langa’s most solidly established band, the Merry Macs, Mafeje reported that ‘the quality of their music is relatively good and they cover quite a range in music. They have some ball-room, jazz, calypso and samba numbers.’ He quoted from his interviews with these older musicians. ‘No these small boys are tiring. They play hot numbers throughout the night and that makes one completely exhausted the following day.’82 Monica’s account of the ‘musical and dance clubs’ only conveys in muted terms the energetic sections of Mafeje’s field report on what retrospectively has been termed ‘the Cape jazz boom’83 or the ‘golden age of Cape jazz’ in these years before many of the leading musicians were forced into exile.84 Sport was another aspect of cultural life in Langa that is more fully dealt with in Mafeje’s report than in the published text. Here too there is a case to be made for the influence of personal background and interests on cultural knowledge production in the field. Mafeje had played rugby at school. Nkonyeni recalls that his friend was the first team hooker at Nqabara. Ganief Hendricks remembers their guest playing football in the street outside their house.85 His field report gives detailed accounts of his participant observation on the sidelines at football and rugby matches, and suggests a close knowledge of these sports as well as of the township teams who played them. Again there is an argument to be made for Monica having not made enough of this insider ethnography of the culture of leisure in Langa. His 50 pages on football clubs, for example, were pared down to just five in the final text.86

81 82 83

84

85 86

Discussion, Anthropology Southern Africa Conference, East London, 10 Sept. 2010 (Baluku, Video). WC, K3, Folder 3, Field report, 382. Ibid., 380–381. For an evocative account based on 20 interviews with the jazz old-timers, see C. Miller, ‘“Julle Kan Ma New York Toe Gaan, Ek Bly in die Manenberg”: An Oral History of Jazz in Cape Town from the Mid-1950s to the Mid-1970s’ in S. Field, R. Meyer and F. Swanson, eds, Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2007), 133–149. Monica Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 126–130. Miller qualifies this view by making a persuasive case for the vibrancy of the underground jazz scene of the mid-late 1960s and 1970s in Cape Town. See Miller, ‘Julle Kan Ma New York Toe Gaan’. Interview with Ganief Hendricks, 12 June 2010, Cape Town. WC, K3, Folder 3, Field report, 301–50; Monica Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 120–125.

‘Speaking from Inside’

273

One last point about his insider ethnography relates to overheard speech. Mafeje’s report is filled with a sense of dialogue and conversation. This is conveyed in a series of ten vignettes of overheard conversations presented in the book. Monica had identified the value of reporting on overheard conversations in the list of ‘General Instructions’ about fieldwork she had issued at the outset. Other points related to the need for informant confidentiality and the importance of collecting case studies.87 Mafeje’s success at collecting this kind of data relates to his insider status in both the cultural and the spatial sense. He was a cultural insider who could understand the nuances of conversations, selecting to record the interactions that seemed to him revealing of particular township identities and cultural forms. He was also an insider in the spatial sense of being a well-connected young man, mobile enough to move through various public spaces from the bus to the street to the community hall. The Writing of Langa: from Draft Manuscript to Published Text Monica’s main contribution was drawing together, under enormous pressure, the fieldwork and other materials that made up the Langa book. Her letters speak of an internationally recognised scholar overburdened by professional responsibilities at UCT. In September 1959 she wrote of having to put her work on the Langa project on hold again, as she was now teaching six courses. These included Social Anthropology I with 81 registered students (including Mafeje). The first-year intake had increased to over a hundred by 1961 and remained at a high level through the 1960s.88 There was a staffing crisis in the School of African Life and Languages of which she was the head. The archaeologist A. J. H. Goodwin fell ill in July 1959 and died in December that year. Jack Simons was detained from 25 April to 21 May 1960 under the new emergency regulations and was under increasing pressure from the security police, leading eventually to his being forced into exile in 1964. Her co-leader on the ‘African communities in the Western Cape’ project, the economist Sheila van der Horst, had a serious operation in March 1960. As a result her study of African workers in Cape Town was published after rather than before Langa as Monica had hoped.89 To top it all, she was constantly being ‘harried’ by the National Council of Scientific Research (NCSR) 87 88 89

WC, K4, Monica Wilson, ‘General Instructions’, Nov. 1960. WC, J1, Social Anthropology Department, Administration. Sheila T. van der Horst, African Workers in Town: A Study of Labour in Cape Town (Cape Town, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). They wanted to follow the sequence of the ‘Xhosa in Town’ project led by Philip Mayer, where the quantitative overview published by the sociologist Desmond Reader came out before the more qualitative anthropological study.

274

Inside African Anthropology

for her final report. She complained that ‘the University of Cambridge, the International African Institute, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York all left me to work at my own pace and trusted that the material would be written up in due course, as it has been’.90 As we have seen, Monica and Mafeje had to start almost from scratch when he began his fieldwork in November 1960. Crosse-Upcott’s material was only really of use for the analysis of Churches, which would make up no more than ten pages of the 190-page published text.91 She was able to produce a final report by June 1962 that Oxford University Press thought worthy of publication. How was she able to do so? The quality of Archie’s field materials was the decisive factor, of course. Within a fortnight she had come to realise that Mafeje was ‘one of the best fieldworkers I have ever struck, irrespective of colour’. After he had been in the field for three months she wrote from the Hogsback with enthusiasm. ‘Mafeje’s material is magnificent and I feel that the report will now really be worth publishing, so I shall apply [to UCT] for a publication grant when I send in the complete report.’92 They met frequently after her return to Cape Town. She kept records of these meetings which confirm that the research process was an ongoing conversation between them. Her lists of questions reveal a growing curiosity and knowledge on her part of social and cultural life in Langa, about which she wanted ever more information. The following list is typical. Questions arising while writing up: 1. Is there rigid control by the administration of the numbers in a room in the Barracks? Zones? Flats? Or do the groups occupying have some latitude in deciding how many men can be packed in? 2. Are there women brewing beer for sale in Langa? If so what [social] category do they fall into? 3. Can a widow or unmarried mother get or keep a house? Must houses always be in a man’s name? 4. What do amatopikazi [older traditional women] do? Housewives only? Some domestic servants? 5. At a guess what would you say are the proportion in Langa who are amagoduka, ibari, ikhaba? 90

91

92

WC, K1.1, Correspondence re: Research into African Communities in the Western Cape, 1950–1962, Monica Wilson/UCT Principal, 6 October 1959, Rondebosch, Cape Town; Monica Wilson/W. H. Hutt, 2 June 1960, Rondebosch, Cape Town. Monica Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 91–102. Even here Archie gathered additional material in the last phase of his research in January to March 1962, though it is clear from his notes that he had little interest in Churches. His parents were staunch Methodists but his friends recall that he had already stopped going to church in his days at Healdtown. WC, K1.1, Monica Wilson/Mr Hibbard, 28 Nov. 1960, Rondebosch, Cape Town; Monica Wilson/Sheila van der Horst, 3 Feb. 1961, Rondebosch, Cape Town.

‘Speaking from Inside’

275

Sometimes these questions related to nuances of speech and dialect, as when she enquired whether ‘clicks are elided in town’.93 In order to speed up the writing process, she chose to follow the broad template she had used in writing up the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey (KRS), vol. 3: Social Structure. An introductory chapter provided background history and commentary on method, the second tackled the themes of social groups and organisational structures (KRS Chapter 2: Village Organization; and Langa Chapters 2 and 3: Categories of People and Home-Boys). Both books then feature chapters on kinship networks, with marital relations as a significant theme (KRS Chapter 3: Kinship; Langa Chapter 4: Kinsmen). The four subsections in KRS Chapter 5 (A. Church, B. School, C. Recreational Associations and D. Gift Clubs) are echoed in Langa Chapter 5 (Churches, Schools and Traditional Rites) and Chapter 6 (Clubs). Even the final main chapter of Langa, ‘Chapter 8: Arbitration of Disputes’, has its precedent in the last main one of the KRS volume: ‘Chapter 6: Expression of Conflict’.94 Another strategy she used to speed up the writing of a book produced under great pressure was to enlist the support of colleagues. In June 1962 she sent her NCRS final report to Audrey Richards, Desmond Hobart Houghton, Jack Simons, A. C. Jordan, Dan Kunene and of course Archie Mafeje. Richards described the report as ‘first rate’ but recommended that Monica ‘consider the English reader a bit’, given that the book would also be published outside South Africa. This might explain the surprising number of comparative references to English urban history at a time when African urban anthropology was a much more dynamic field. She took up Richards’s suggestion that the introduction should provide background for the general reader rather than for the specialist and that the writing style be economical and accessible. In keeping with this, Richards recommended that Monica cut back on vernacular terms in the text.95 Mafeje’s typed comments are most relevant for the case we are making for reading Langa as an example of ‘the co-production of scientific knowledge’ in team research work. The book expressed a shared vision, despite Mafeje’s later claims about his discomfort with some of Monica’s assumptions. This is not surprising, seeing how strongly the text drew on his own data, arguments and writing in the field report. He 93 94 95

WC, K4, Archie Mafeje, Monica Wilson’s record of meetings, n.d. [late 1961 or early 1962]. Monica Wilson, Selma Kaplan, Theresa Maki and Edith M. Walton, Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, vol. 3: Social Structure (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1952). WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson’s Correspondence with Audrey Richards, Audrey Richards/ Monica Wilson, 12 June 1962, Cambridge; ibid., Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 13 June 1962, Cambridge.

276

Inside African Anthropology

made extensive comments on grammatical errors in the draft, which were probably received in a light spirit since Monica encouraged him to study English Special as an extra subject and had insisted that his written English needed urgent work in his undergraduate years. Mafeje even described the chapter on Churches as ‘beatifully [sic] written, and the facts in it are amazingly accurate and well expressed’, a somewhat ironic judgement in the light of his severe later critique of the Christian liberal underpinnings of the Langa study. He made some suggestions about ‘political facts’ that needed closer attention. Here Monica jotted ‘v.g’ [very good] point’ in the margins, but his general message was that he enthusiastically endorsed the arguments of the draft manuscript. Other than the few points I have raised, I am satisfied with the exposition of facts in this work. I am also in full agreement with the more fundamental ideas expressed i.e. at no time did I find myself forced to compromise my ideas. I am particularly pleased about this because I look at this study as a purely scientific work which has nothing to do with what the white or black nationalist feels. It grieves me to think that under the present [political] conditions, there are certain truths which cannot be stated.96

John Sharp has asked why, given Mafeje’s Non-European Unity Movement background and affiliation, he was not more critical of the underlying liberal framework of Langa. Sharp suggests that it was only after he had matured as an intellectual that his politics and his scholarship came into alignment, in particular in his later critical essays about the discipline of social anthropology. Our own view is that the politics of his knowledge was rather more complex and ambiguous than scholars, including Mafeje himself, have tended to suggest in their retrospective readings. Although he was an active member of the Society for Young Africa who, according to Fikile Bam, was known for his ability to quote Lenin chapter and verse, he had also gone to mission schools and imbibed certain of these values, as the memories of friends like Archie Nkonyeni indicate. In fact, Nkonyeni explicitly claims that in his Langa study years Mafeje was ‘not the radical he would later become’. He also recalls a certain distrust of his friend among some of the members of the Society for Young Africa, who saw Mafeje as too closely allied with liberals like Monica Wilson.97 On the other hand, white women friends at UCT clearly recall him as an outspoken critic of liberal ideology from his early years on campus.98 Whatever the exact nature of his political views at the time of his 96 97 98

WC, K1.4, Comments on TSS [Archie Mafeje], ‘Comments on the Manuscript’, n.d. [c. May 1962]. Telephonic interview with Archie Nkonyeni, 4 December 2008. Interview with Margaret Green, Cape Town, 21 June 2010; Hirschon, ‘Archie Mafeje’. Hirschon was tutored by Archie Mafeje in social anthropology in 1962 and attributes her later career path as a social anthropologist in large part to his inspiring classes at UCT.

‘Speaking from Inside’

277

fieldwork, his writings about Langa suggest that he was more sympathetic then to the educated elite than to the more radical proletarian youth with whom he later claimed to have identified most closely.99 The contrast in the book between the ‘decent’ middle class and the ‘rough’ and ‘violent’ urban youth directly echoes Mafeje’s field report. Monica posted the reworked text of Langa to the NCRS and to Oxford University Press.100 The book’s Acknowledgements were added in March 1963. Three months later Audrey Richards reported excitedly that she had a copy on her desk. Conclusion: Authorship and Insider Ethnography Who authored Langa: A Study in Social Groups? We have argued for moving away from thinking about the book’s production in exclusive terms as the work of Monica Wilson, as contemporary reviewers liked to see it, or of Archie Mafeje, as some recent posthumous reappraisals have suggested. While the project had a long and rather troubled history, going back to Jack Simons’s work in Langa in 1937 or at least to Monica’s grant proposals of 1953–4, the book was really the product of an intense period of creative engagement between Monica and Archie over twenty months between November 1960 and June 1962. Our case for co-production has been based in large part on a close rereading of Mafeje’s fieldwork report. Mafeje wrote the report by hand during his months of fieldwork in Langa, the questions he sought to answer being often very specific ones set by Monica. He did sometimes go beyond her brief, especially in documenting the culture of leisure in Langa. His writing was the product of his training as a social anthropology undergraduate in 1959 and 1960, and her guiding instructions in meetings, but also obviously drew on his own astute observations and interviews with men and women in Langa. Monica did draw together the materials under enormous pressure, but to suggest that she ‘wrote’ the book on the basis of his fieldwork and other materials would also be too simplistic, given the extent of her reliance on his very words in the field report. We see particularly close connections between field report and published text in the book chapters on categories of people, home-boys, clubs and arbitration in disputes. Monica did contextualise, synthesise, edit and simplify to make their ideas accessible to the general reader as well as the specialist. Here we saw how Volume 3 of the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey served as a template. The personal relationship between Monica and Mafeje was essential to this process of ‘co-production’. We have noted that Mafeje had a way 99 100

Archie Mafeje, ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’, 178–184. WC, K1.1, Monica Wilson/UCT Accountant, 27 June 1962.

278

Inside African Anthropology

of relating to Wilson that was unusual among his fellow students, one that was open and direct from the outset. There was always a sense of respect and reciprocity: the sense on her side of a willingness to listen and learn from a student and on his of a respect for a female professor who was industrious, productive and curious about his cultural background and politically committed to the democratic struggle in South Africa. Despite their differences in political affiliation, they were able to connect at a more general level. We also need to be cautious about projecting too confident and assertive an intellectual identity for Archie Mafeje back into these early years. While he developed very quickly both as a writer and fieldworker, his early correspondence with Monica suggests a deep underlying anxiety and need for affirmation, and he came to anthropology as a struggling student. This was not yet a relationship between intellectual equals, although by the late 1960s it was becoming one as they sent each other articles and book chapters for critique and commentary. The other central theme has been our analysis of Archie as insider ethnographer with a case for the importance of personal interests and background in shaping his ethnographic ‘style’. Here we found it useful to contrast the fieldwork styles and networks of Archie and CrosseUpcott, who had little formal training as an anthropologist and brought a military and colonial mentality to Langa as a field-site. Above all, he spoke no Xhosa and thus never got ‘inside’ the place in either the social or spatial sense, despite recording about a hundred visits to Langa. His only effective intermediary was a man widely seen as a collaborator, Mr Matshiqi, which only added to the already deep-seated suspicions of residents about the white outsider and his underlying political motives. Mafeje was an insider in a cultural sense, but also socially and spatially through his established networks that allowed for mobility inside the township. We have argued that these networks predated his formal employment as a fieldworker on the Langa project, dating back to his early years when he lived in Athlone with Fikile Bam. The taxi driver Mac Mayekiso was an important intermediary. He also had a long-standing and ongoing family link with Langa, but here it is important to note his dual identities as a young migrant born in a remote ‘Red’ village of Thembuland who all the same had acquired a ‘School’ identity during his years at Nqabara, Healdtown and then at Fort Hare and UCT. This close knowledge of both Red and School allowed for an unusually clear reconstruction of the social lives of both the middle-class elite and the working-class migrants in Langa. In most cases he usually began by working through his friends. His strength as a fieldworker was arguably this ability to straddle the ideologies of different social groups. It is this sense of insider knowledge, evident in the details within chapters and case studies rather than in the articulation of any general

‘Speaking from Inside’

279

theory, that is the book’s greatest strength. Langa is not a classic work of urban anthropology like the Mayers’ Townsmen or Tribesman with its more in-depth ethnography of Red values and rituals, and its clearer theoretical contribution within the emerging field of African urban anthropology. Given its peculiar history, the Langa project could scarcely have been a work with the same kind of ethnographic depth. Yet it is still a highly significant and often undervalued contribution to urban studies in South Africa. In the end it was quite remarkable that Archie Mafeje and Monica Wilson were able to create an internationally respectable publication under conditions of severe political constraint. It was a work that did successfully convey a sense of Langa’s ‘intense vitality’ – and in the book’s concluding words, demonstrated that ‘something new is growing in towns’.101

101

Monica Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 189.

Part 4

Legacy

Figure P.4. Traces in the landscape: the trading store in Ntibane, Western Pondoland, then and now. This store owned by Frederick and Mary Dreyer (n´ee Soga) was where Monica Hunter effectively began her career as a fieldworker. As we have seen, she recalled that she began her Pondoland fieldwork by engaging in conversations in and around the shop with Pondo women, like those shown in the foreground. She lived in a cottage behind the shop which also still stands today. Along with the ruins of the Wilsons’ ‘principal headquarters’ at Isumba in the Rungwe District (see Figure 4.4), these are the only remaining traces of her presence in the landscapes of Pondoland and Bunyakyusa. Her legacy is rather associated with her writings and her teaching. Photographers: Monica Hunter, 1931 WC, uncat., from negative in a brown cardboard box containing the Wilsons’ fieldwork photographs and Rui Assubuji, June 2007.

9

‘Part of One Whole’: Anthropology and History in the Work of Monica Wilson Se´an Morrow and Christopher Saunders

Though Monica Hunter Wilson is rightly remembered as a leading anthropologist, her academic work was deeply concerned with change over time. This perspective does not emerge from, say, the festschrift published in her honour.1 She saw anthropology as a way of approaching and uncovering the history of African societies. In this orientation, apparent early in her career, she was unlike any other major contemporary anthropologist of the British school. In developing a sense that African societies had a history that could be written, she was in the forefront of developments for her time, particularly in South Africa, where she worked. She was ahead of most scholars in pointing South African historians towards the importance of the history of the majority of the population. We will show, using in particular her still mostly unsorted papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Department at the University of Cape Town (UCT), that, though she remained professionally first and foremost an anthropologist, it would be incorrect to see her as one who now and then dabbled in history. She saw herself above all as an anthropologist concerned with ‘how it becomes – that is with an analysis of process’ over time.2 From a historiographical perspective Monica has been associated above all with her joint editorship of, and contributions to, the Oxford History of South Africa. The standard narrative is that this was the culmination of the work of a school of liberal historians, superseded almost as soon as published by the work of a new generation of Marxist or Marxistinfluenced scholars. This ignores the long-standing historical dimension to Monica’s work; underplays her role in moving anthropology in a historical direction; and neglects the interdisciplinary and comparative nature of her work. She kept abreast of the latest archaeological findings, 1 2

Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa. Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975). Monica Wilson, ‘Changes in Social Structure in Southern Africa: The Relevance of Kinship Studies to the Historian’ in Leonard Thompson, ed., African Societies in Southern Africa (London: Longman, 1969), 71.

283

284

Inside African Anthropology

followed contemporary British, French and other social history, and read widely in fiction and poetry. As she wrote to her ex-student Archie Mafeje, recently appointed head of sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam, ‘an interdisciplinary approach is very difficult, but it is obvious that rigid divisions in subjects are as stultifying as group areas. I think my colleagues here get pretty cross at the way I stray into what they regard as their preserves (history, “sociology” etc.) but that cannot be helped. Students say that they are not taught, in other departments, to connect the different disciplines. How can one learn without doing that?’3 Monica and History Monica grew up with a strong sense of the history of the Eastern Cape. Among her fellow pupils at Lovedale was Janet Maqoma, a descendant of Chief Maqoma, who had defied British colonial conquest.4 She knew her father had travelled in Pondoland, where she was to do her research in the 1930s, before its annexation in 1894.5 Her early anthropological work was not, as was so much ethnography of the time, the work of a metropolitan intellectual observing the exotic ‘other’, for she researched the lives of people similar to those with whom she had been at school at Lovedale, with whom she had prayed, and who had been her neighbours at Hogsback. As an undergraduate at Girton College, Cambridge, she studied history before changing to anthropology. In notes in the last year of her life for a chapter solicited by George Stocking for a book on anthropological fieldwork, she referred to the inspiration of a ‘superb teacher’, the historian Mary Gwladys Jones.6 Jones, she said, had encouraged her always to think about change, and to relate the history of open fields and enclosures in England to the Ciskei, and of labour tenants on South African farms to medieval English villeins.7 But when she looked at the history syllabus for the senior years, she realised that she ‘would get nothing on the African side and it seemed clear that I must read Social Anthropology’.8 She

3 4 5

6 7 8

WC, uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Archie Mafeje, 25 March 1970, Rondebosch, Cape Town. Thanks to Andrew Bank for drawing our attention to this reference. WC, Monica Wilson interview: ‘childhood’. See Timothy J. Stapleton, Maqoma: Xhosa Resistance to Colonial Advance, 1798–1873 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1994). WC, uncat. corr., Notes for ‘Reflections on Fieldwork’, solicited by George Stocking for History of Anthropology 1: Fieldwork in Historical Perspective, but not completed, n.d. but clearly the outline of the piece referred to ibid., George W. Stocking/Monica Wilson, 15 March 1982, Chicago, and in Monica’s positive reply to Stocking on 6 April 1982, Hogsback. See Chapter 1 in this volume. For Jones see references in Maxine Berg’s biography of Eileen Power, A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). WC, Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.

‘Part of One Whole’

285

later recalled that the Cambridge anthropologists Alfred Haddon and Jack Driberg had been ‘light weight’. It was only when she did fieldwork in Pondoland that she came to know the importance of ‘observation’ and understood that it was always set within ‘preconceived categories of thought’. This stayed with her, becoming more fully realised when she worked in Bunyakyusa.9 Far from being converted from history to anthropology, she came to believe that the anthropological approach was the only possible way of attempting to write the history of African societies. It was only two decades later that new developments in African historiography were to show that African societies could be treated in the same ways as others, through using a variety of techniques including archival research and the analysis of oral testimony and tradition. In 1944–5 she told her students at the South African Native College at Fort Hare that the anthropology they were studying with her was comparable to the English history she had studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate.10 She was critical of mainstream historians of her day – she mentioned G. M. Trevelyan of Cambridge, who described his English Social History as ‘history with the politics left out’, and the French historian Charles Seignobos – for failing to treat change over time, the stuff of history as she saw it, sufficiently seriously. Instead, they treated history as a chronicle, meant to be ‘more or less entertaining’. ‘They do in fact make connections,’ she told her Fort Hare students, ‘but they expressly deny the possibility of systematic and certain connections. To accept that position is to abandon the possibility of understanding how society works.’11 In the context of South African historiography W. M. Macmillan was a pioneer in breaking with the work of George McCall Theal and George Cory, but was dismissive of what he took to be the static and conservative vision of contemporary anthropologists, by implication the would-be preservers of outdated customs. Macmillan did not know any African language and his histories were heavily based on the missionary archive. He did not analyse the nature or histories of African societies, and part of his animus against anthropologists may have stemmed from the fact that some of them at least did attempt to do this. In notes Monica made on his Cape Colour Question she wrote that he was good on events affecting indigenous people, but that there was ‘[n]othing on [the] structure of 9

10 11

WC, uncat. corr., Notes for ‘Reflections on Fieldwork’, see n. 5 above. However, in these scribbled notes, especially as she refers in them to the ‘influence of Haddon’, she probably meant her supervisor T. C. Hodson rather than the eminent Haddon, who in any case retired from Cambridge before Monica arrived. WC, J5, Monica Wilson Lecture Notes, including, as here, some from Fort Hare, dated 1945. WC, Occasional Papers, Social Change (uncat.), notes for lecture on ‘Social Change’, n.d. [but Fort Hare period].

286

Inside African Anthropology

Hottentot communities’.12 While she was critical of those who, unlike the best French historians, neglected changing social structure and merely provided ‘a succession of events’,13 she remained aware of the difference between her approach and that of historians she respected: she told one of them that she weighed the importance of the archive ‘rather differently’ and she contrasted the ‘approach of the historian accustomed to dealing with records which are accessible and the anthropologist used to having only his [sic] own record of events and correspondence as his source’.14 In the 1930s she thought that anthropology was the only way in which African societies could be understood, and she came close to saying that such understanding was a type of history. In her Pondoland work she tried to explore the available documentary sources, but found them deeply frustrating. The Cape Blue Books she consulted on the annexation of Pondoland contained all too little history, and what there was she found tendentious: ‘Of course Blue Books and Theal are suspect. Neither mention that Rhodes took along a canon [sic] and mowed down a mealy [sic] field to encourage the Pondo in their desire to be annexed!’15 Though the bulk of Reaction to Conquest, her great work, was cast in the synchronic functionalist mould then fashionable, where appropriate sources were available, she adopted a historical approach, as in parts of the innovative chapter on ‘Bantu on European farms’.16 Much later she was to note that, though ‘it does seem old fashioned, nowadays’, historians and others who had previously thought of the book as irrelevant to their interests no longer did so: ‘The early anthropologists provide a sort of quarry, like early travellers.’17 Monica was not a member of the broadly functionalist group in Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous seminars at the London School of Economics 12

13 14 15 16

17

WC, uncat. material, Lectures, Third Theological Staff Institute, 1965, Notes and Drafts, handwritten notes on Macmillan’s Cape Colour Question; note also, ‘Some knowledge of an African (Bantu) language is a necessary tool for a historian studying “Native Policy” in South Africa’ (WC, uncat. corr., Schreuder, Monica Wilson/Dr Christian Pouyez, 3 April 1973, Rondebosch, Cape Town). For a different emphasis on Macmillan and anthropology see Hugh Macmillan, ‘“Paralysed conservatives”: W. M. Macmillan, the Social Scientists, and “the Common Society”, 1923–48’ in Hugh Macmillan and Shula Marks, eds, Africa and Empire: W. M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic (Aldershot: Temple Smith, 1989), 72–90. WC, uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Martin West, 17 Nov. 1980, Hogsback. Ibid., De Kiewiet, Monica Wilson/De Kiewiet, 26 Nov. 1973, n.p.; ibid., Thompson, Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson, 26 Nov. 1973, n.p. WC, B1, Monica Hunter/Godfrey Wilson, 22 Feb. [1934], Union Castle ship, Cape Town. Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press for International African Institute, 1936), esp. pp. 544–574. WC, uncat. corr., David Philip, Monica Wilson/David Philip, 31 Dec. 1978, Hogsback; ibid., Monica Wilson/J. E. Duncan (Juta & Co.), 17 Feb. 1979, n.p.

‘Part of One Whole’

287

in the 1920s and 1930s. Her connection with the seminars was marginal and was through Malinowski’s star student, her fianc´e Godfrey Wilson. Coming from a Cambridge tradition, she did not share the dismissive approach to history that tended to characterise Malinowski and his circle.18 This is not to say that she was uninfluenced by her London experiences, from which in any case it is impossible to separate her close intellectual and emotional interaction with Godfrey, but she was, as another of Malinowski’s students, Audrey Richards, was later to say, ‘outside the spell under which we were bound’.19 Malinowski appreciated Monica’s intellect, was unusually accommodating towards women students,20 and, with his apparent need for discipleship, would have liked to have included her in his circle of devotees. He wrote, in one of his histrionic handwritten addenda to a typed letter to Godfrey, that he was reading Reaction to Conquest and ‘am full of genuine enthusiasm. This is by far the best book on Contact yet on the scientific market – and apart from it, an excellent piece of really scientific anthro’ = sociology’.21 When he reported that Malinowski had said: ‘“She is a natural functionalist, she has a mind,”’ Godfrey added that Malinowski ‘certainly has a flair for making his compliments in the form of boomerangs.’22 In the hothouse in which Malinowski was the most brilliant bloom, detachment from his functionalist faith often led to personal dislike, and there are hints that Malinowski did not greatly care for Monica’s work, or perhaps Monica herself. He criticised her for being ‘verbose’, which upset her,23 and she wrote to Godfrey, ‘[h]e . . . think[s] it such a pity that you’re marrying me’.24 Malinowski’s functionalism was, if not anti-, at least non-historical, and clearly diverged from her historical orientation. He was difficult to pin down on the subject of change. As Monica noted, ‘he always sticks to nice “simple primitive communities”’.25 He tended to be dismissive of history, believing it generally ‘conjectural’, a malleable creation of the present, of interest and value only as a pedigree for contemporary societies. Monica, retrospectively, said she was not a ‘natural functionalist’ and in 1973 told her students about Malinowski’s ‘silly book on change’, probably 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

See Chapter 1 in this volume. WC, B6.14, Correspondence with Audrey Richards, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 26 March 1974, Elmdon. Audrey Richards was soliciting Monica’s impressions of the seminars for a planned biography of Malinowski by his daughter, Helena Burke. Helena Wayne (Malinowska), ‘Bronislaw Malinowski: The Influence of Various Women on His Life and Works’, American Ethnologist, 12, 3 (1985), 529–540. WC, B4.4, Bronislaw Malinowski/Godfrey Wilson, 1 Dec. 1936, London. WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Hunter, 24 Oct. 1933, London. Ibid., Godfrey Wilson/Monica Hunter, 10 Sept. 1933, London. WC, B1, Monica Hunter/Godfrey Wilson, 23 Dec. [1934], Hogsback. WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 4 April [1936], London.

288

Inside African Anthropology

referring to a posthumous collection of his writings.26 She stressed that she and Godfrey were interested in social change rather than the culture contact that was Malinowski’s shibboleth. They chose the title of their 1945 book, The Analysis of Social Change, to emphasise diachronic change rather than synchronic contact.27 That book was written in a condensed style that probably owed more to Godfrey than Monica. As Audrey Richards, their close friend and a sympathetic reader, said in her review: ‘Definition follows definition with a speed that leaves the reader breathless. Hypotheses are outlined with the elegance of a geometric theorem and with similar dogmatism . . . there are sufficient stimulating suggestions to make the basis of a dozen articles or even books, but in their present condensed form they fail to convince.’ It seemed to her ‘a brilliant if perhaps a premature book’.28 Lucy Mair saw their treatment of social change as predominantly cultural, but believed it was the first anthropological work to use this concept in its title.29 Written in very difficult wartime circumstances, in ‘Northern Rhodesia, South Africa, Middle East’, it bears the stamp of the personal and intellectual tensions that Monica and Godfrey underwent while writing. Though widely respected as an attempt to grapple with the obdurate theme of the enlargement of scale and its effects, ‘the great book’, as Godfrey called it, never had the impact the authors expected.30 Nevertheless, Monica was to perceive a direct line between it and the Oxford History. To her, as she wrote to J. E. Goldthorpe, the sociologist of East Africa, the attempt to write the history of the peoples of South Africa was ‘an application of the general theme of our “Analysis”: the change from isolation to wider interaction’. When she employed a young UCT historian in 1965 as researcher for the first volume of the Oxford History she gave him a

26

27 28

29

30

WC, J5, UCT lecture notes, Social Anthropology II, 1973; Phyllis M. Kaberry, ed., The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945). WC, A2.15, Anthropology in South Africa, recorded for Jom [recte Jim] Fox, Behavioral Studies Center, April 1972. Audrey Richards, ‘Social Change in Central Africa’, Review of The Analysis of Social Change’, Spectator, 15 February 1946. Audrey Richards, older than Monica and Godfrey, had always been sceptical of the analytical ambitions of The Analysis. A reading of Monica and Godfrey’s correspondence and other writings suggests that, typically, Monica identified factual inconsistencies in, and made measured qualifications of, Godfrey’s theoretical insights. In this, Audrey was perhaps closer to Monica than Godfrey. Lucy Mair, ‘Malinowski and the Study of Social Change’ in Raymond Firth, ed., Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Malinowski (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 232. Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change, vii; WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 12 April 1943, A.P.O. [Army Post Office] Durban; Se´an Morrow, ‘“This is from the Firm”: The Anthropological Partnership of Monica and Godfrey Wilson’, paper presented at Monica Hunter Wilson Centenary Conference, 24–26 June 2008, Hogsback.

‘Part of One Whole’

289

copy of The Analysis of Social Change as a guide to her thinking on the project.31 Monica and Murdock Monica’s views on history before she embarked on the Oxford History in the 1960s were put with particular clarity in 1952 in her correspondence with the American anthropologist George Murdock. An article he published in the American Anthropologist started with a critique of African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, to which Monica had contributed. Murdock criticised what he took to be contemporary British anthropology’s lack of interest in history and how cultures change over time.32 She replied that she wanted to rebut the charge that ‘we’ ignore history. It was true of Malinowski, she said, and, for reasons of space, of African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, but not of a number of Malinowski’s pupils such as Evans-Pritchard. She continued: ‘A number of us who were bred in history schools feel very strongly that facts are not intelligible in the contemporary moment alone and fought a long battle with Malinowski and others on it. We thought we had won.’ She hoped Murdock would look at her Good Company and tell her whether it ‘gives you the history you want or not’.33 In reply Murdock acknowledged the use of documentary sources and oral traditions by such as Evans-Pritchard, but taxed the British, using Gluckman’s work on the Lozi as a particularly egregious example, with ignoring ‘cultural distributions, which we Americans have developed some skill in interpreting’.34 Replying further, Monica in effect dismissed cultural distribution as speculative and premature, without a sufficient empirical basis: ‘In short, I think that the returns from distributional 31

32

33

34

WC, uncat. material, Analysis of Social Change: Business, Monica Wilson/J. E. Goldthorpe, 10 Feb. 1968, [Rondebosch, Cape Town]. The historian was the second author of this chapter. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1950); George Peter Murdock, ‘British Social Anthropology’, American Anthropologist, 53, 4 (1951), 465–473. WC, uncat. corr., George Murdock, Monica Wilson/G. P. Murdock, 13 Feb. 1952, Rondebosch, Cape Town. Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute) had appeared the previous year. Ibid., G. P. Murdock/Monica Wilson, 20 Feb. 1952, New Haven, CT. Murdock was crucial in developing the ‘Standard Cross-Cultural Sample . . . a cumulative and collaborative data-base of coded variables on maximally diverse and ethnographically bestdescribed societies used by scholars in the social sciences’, the context of his ‘cultural distributions’. See ‘Standard Cross-Cultural Sample’ by Murdock’s collaborator Douglas R. White in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2007, 2nd edition, http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/pub/IntEncyStdCross-CulturalSample.pdf (accessed 18 July 2009).

290

Inside African Anthropology

studies at this stage are small, in most African areas, compared with the returns from detailed fieldwork and analysis of the interrelation between different aspects of the same culture.’35 Murdock replied that it would be sterile to wait for thirty years to do the sort of study she recommended, and that field research and comparative and distributional exercises should go together. With a sideswipe on distributional grounds at Monica’s Nyakyusa age-villages, he concluded that the skilfully constructed ‘“still pictures”’ of the British anthropologists were often ‘as “speculative” as the wildest flights of the Kulturkreis diffusionists, and can be demonstrated to be false by sound distributional technique’.36 In an undated, emollient, draft letter, Monica acknowledged she had been mistaken in suggesting that empirical study must precede, rather than go hand in hand, with analysis, though she remained sceptical that available material would yet make such analysis possible: ‘About the need for historical depth in anthropological studies I have no doubt whatsoever; our only difference turns on whether it is possible with the sort of material we have.’ Could he, she asked mischievously, carry out a distributional study on some part of southern Africa himself, to show how to achieve historical depth with available materials?37 This correspondence should be seen in relation to the developing African historiography of its day. As it proceeded, Monica shifted ground slightly. She now acknowledged, if not the cogency of his generalisations, his attempt to make them, and, by implication, the limitations of intensely organised, time-specific, ethnographies. She was clear, however, that historical deductions based on insufficient evidence were not history at all. In other words, she re-emphasised her belief, which went back to her Cambridge days, that in contemporary conditions ethnography was the only possible mode for writing the history of African societies. This did not mean, as she later said, that she was a na¨ıve empiricist. She dismissed the advice she said she had received at Cambridge before her Pondoland fieldwork to ‘go without any preconceived ideas’ as ‘nonsense’. She was adamant that observation is ‘shaped by previous experience’.38 Though Murdock claimed to be researching historically, his broad-brush interpretations seemed to her at variance with the emphasis on detailed 35 36

37 38

WC, uncat. corr., George Murdock, Monica Wilson/G. P. Murdock, 9 April 1952, Rondebosch, Cape Town. Ibid., G. P. Murdock/Monica Wilson, 18 April 1952, New Haven, CT. Murdock refers to the diffusion of supposed cultural complexes, a concept particularly discredited by its association with National Socialist ideas of Aryan expansion. Ibid., Monica Wilson/G. P. Murdock, n.p., n.d. [but responding to G. P. Murdock’s letter of 18 April 1952]. WC, Talks and Addresses, Box 2 (partly cat.), draft and typescript notes for ‘The Application of Scientific Method in the Social Field’, address to [UCT] Science Society, May 1963. Here Monica also refers extensively to E. H. Carr’s recent What is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961).

‘Part of One Whole’

291

evidence and the eye for exceptions and inconsistencies intrinsic to historical research. This correspondence shows her approach as distinctly historically oriented. In the 1950s African history was about to come of age. Historians like Jan Vansina would soon provide the methodology and comparative framework required to write histories of African societies. This revolution in the discipline, which began in tropical Africa and was directly related to decolonisation, took some time to infiltrate the white-ruled south, where apartheid seemed to be tightening its grip. As one who kept up with the latest literature in her own and related fields, Monica realised that the old Eurocentric approaches to the study of the African past had finally been jettisoned and that new approaches were beginning to produce scholarly histories of African societies for the first time. It was at this point that she herself moved onto a more overtly historical track, one, she believed, she had never really left in the first place. Monica’s Return to History Most weekday mornings Monica took tea with colleagues in the African Studies tearoom in the UCT Arts Building. Perhaps her closest colleague was Jack Simons, a historical sociologist whose doctorate at the London School of Economics had been supervised by Malinowski. Simons had done fieldwork in the township of Langa in the 1940s, and in the 1950s was beginning to prepare, with his activist wife Ray Alexander, the study published in 1969 as Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850 to 1950.39 In the late 1950s she increasingly interacted with a historian colleague, Leonard Thompson, who had become as aware as she, through time in London and then being invited to Ghana soon after its independence, of the new currents in African historiography. Thompson began to say, as he would often in later years, that South African history needed to be decolonised.40 To Monica, as to Thompson, showing that African societies were as worthy of study as white-ruled ones, and writing the country’s history with the black majority always in mind, was a project strongly opposed to apartheid. Apartheid policies threatened destruction of much that she held dear, from Lovedale to UCT’s academic freedom. Early in 1959, when some 39

40

H. J. and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969). In her book on Langa, Monica acknowledged her debt to Simons for material, but there is no evidence that she had access to his fieldnotes from the 1940s (Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa. A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1, note 3). The second author of this chapter heard him say this many times in the 1960s. The Wilson–Thompson collaboration was close because the History Department was then in the Arts Building.

292

Inside African Anthropology

universities were trying to oppose the imposition of apartheid on them, South Africa’s minister of External Affairs repeated the myth that ‘[t]he Bantu began to move from the North across the Limpopo just . . . when Van Riebeeck landed in Table Bay’.41 The implication was that South Africa’s whites had settled an empty land and had as much claim to it as anyone else. Explicitly to refute this myth, Monica wrote a paper for African Studies on the early history of the Transkei and Ciskei. This drew upon records, collected and published by the historian Theal many years before, of those shipwrecked along the south-eastern coast of South Africa. These demonstrated that Bantu speakers had lived there from at least the sixteenth century.42 Then in the early 1960s she and Thompson decided to edit a major new collaborative history of South Africa, with ‘interaction’ as its major theme. The imperial historian John Galbraith, a friend of Thompson’s who taught at the University of California, was initially to have been a third editor, but he soon dropped out of the project. Detailed planning of what became the two-volume Oxford History of South Africa began in California in 1963–4. Thompson had moved to the University of California, Los Angeles; Monica was on sabbatical at Stanford. That her name was to come before his as editor of both volumes indicated that, though not a historian, she was the main driver of this historical project. In choosing contributors, Thompson did not simply favour historians and Monica anthropologists: Thompson was keen to have the anthropologist Hilda Kuper as a contributor, and Monica considered UCT historian Eric Axelson until Thompson firmly rejected this possibility: ‘if in any doubt at all, read his published work,’ he told her.43 At one point Monica said she feared that ‘there is really a cleavage between us as to priorities: you, a historian, think the chronology should be dominant: I, an anthropologist, must work from observation to deductions’.44 While historians were often to say that her chapters did not have a sufficient sense of chronology, she remained critical of historians for their ‘and then and then’ approach, as she put it in 1980.45 41 42

43 44 45

Die Burger, 1 April 1959. See Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Monica Wilson, ‘The Early History of the Transkei and Ciskei’, African Studies, 18, 5 (1959), 167–179. She also contributed ‘Myths of Precedence’ to Allie Dubb, ed., Myth in Modern Africa (Lusaka: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1960). Leonard Thompson did not acknowledge her work in his Political Mythology of Apartheid, where his stress was on Afrikaner political mythology, an area that Monica did not deal with directly. WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 16 July 1964, London. Ibid., Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson, 29 Nov. 1965, n.p. Ibid., Martin West, Monica Wilson/Martin West, 17 Nov. 1980, Hogsback; she referred to the chapters by Lye in William F. Lye and Colin Murray, Transformations on the Highveld: The Tswana and Southern Sotho (Cape Town: David Philip, 1980). Given her remark, it is surprising that she thought of asking her colleague Axelson to contribute: much of his writing verged on antiquarianism in its concern for ‘what’ and its failure to ask ‘why’.

‘Part of One Whole’

293

Figure 9.1. Monica Wilson with Leonard and Betty Thompson. Monica’s handwritten caption on the back of the print reads: ‘Lake Arrowhead, 1963 UCLA.’46

The two editors were at one, however, in emphasising the black majority throughout the History. This was implicit, for example, in their decision to have separate chapters for Natal and the Highveld, rather than the standard approach of following ‘the Vooktrekkers around the country in one chapter’. Monica accepted without demur when Thompson rejected her suggestion of separate chapters on the creation of the nineteenth-century African kingdoms. That, he argued, ‘is only a portion of the . . . historical experience of the people of Natal and the High Veld in this period’.47 ‘How deeply glad I am that you and I have been in such complete harmony on all the basic issues related to our work,’ Thompson wrote to her as the second volume was about to appear.48 For the first volume, published in 1969 and the only one to appear subsequently in paperback,49 she co-wrote an introduction and contributed four chapters: on hunters and herders, the Nguni, the Sotho and 46 47 48 49

WC, N2 Photographs of Monica Wilson in groups. WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 2 April 1964, Los Angeles; ibid., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 12 May 1964, Los Angeles. Ibid., Thompson, Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 11 May [1971], New Haven, CT. It was republished as Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds, A History of South Africa to 1870 (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1982).

294

Inside African Anthropology

the Cape’s eastern frontier. Only in the last of these did whites enter the story in any significant way. She was keen to know what her most talented African student, Archie Mafeje, thought of her work and sent him the draft chapters as they were completed. He had been her collaborator in the Langa township project and while she was working on the Oxford History he was at Cambridge. By this time a close bond had developed between them, and Monica regarded him virtually as a son. They addressed each other frankly. She asked him if he thought that her draft chapter on the Eastern frontier had, as an earlier critic had said, ‘left out the whites’.50 In this as in her other chapters, she drew upon her anthropological knowledge and wide reading of the primary sources. Though some historians dismissed her chapters as ‘not proper history’, because they did not have enough chronological underpinning, they remain of great value today. The editors’ theme was ‘the interaction between people of diverse origins, languages, technologies, ideologies, and social systems, meeting on South African soil’,51 or ‘cooperation and conflict’.52 The problem was to assemble a team capable of dealing with it adequately. Thompson thought J. S. Marais of the University of the Witwatersrand the only ‘objective scholar’ of the Dutch period, ‘an astonishing and, for us, an unfortunate fact’. When he could not undertake the chapter on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cape Colony, Thompson suggested that he himself and John Galbraith, then still on the editorial team, might have to write it. That chapter was crucial ‘because it is the first one which has as the central theme the interaction between white settler and other peoples in South Africa. Therefore we feel it is of the greatest importance [that] the chapter be written by a person who is known to be thoroughly sympathetic to the objectives of the editors.’53 This was a central issue throughout the shaping of the book. Eventually the editors gathered a team that satisfied them. Some potential contributors were approached but declined (Keith Hancock, Hilda Kuper, Ellen Hellmann, Sheila van der Horst, Eric Stokes, C. W. de Kiewiet), some became ill and withdrew (J. S. Marais, Leo Marquard), some were considered, but were deemed unsuitable or were not available (Eric Axelson, Godfrey le May, F. A. van Jaarsveld, Isaac Schapera, Marcus Arkin, Jack Simons, Philip Mayer, Noel Garson,

50 51 52 53

WC, uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Archie Mafeje, 11 May 1966. Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds, The Oxford History of South Africa, vol 1: South Africa to 1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), v. For example, WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 2 April 1964, Los Angeles. WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 9 Jan. 1964, Los Angeles. Finally the chapter was written by the young May Katzen of UCT. Her career as a South African historian was cut short by her having to leave Cape Town for England after she had been detained for anti-apartheid activities.

‘Part of One Whole’

295

Jeffrey Butler), some produced work that the editors thought inadequate (Ralph Horwitz, Peter Carstens).54 Clement Goodfellow, who was to have written on the late nineteenth century, had to flee South Africa because of his involvement in the African Resistance Movement and in Lesotho took his own life. For the chapter on farming in Volume 2, various scholars were considered before the editors settled on Monica’s son Francis, then completing a doctorate at Cambridge. Given their later critical reviews of the Oxford History, it is ironic that Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, ‘both first-class people with the right approach’, were considered for the Highveld chapter in the first volume.55 Monica thought that Marks would do a good job on the farming chapter in the second volume despite having no specific rural experience. She would need to spend some time actually visiting farms before writing, Monica said,56 but ultimately she seems not to have been invited to write it.57 The significance of the Oxford History in the liberation politics of the time should be emphasised, for the attacks on it by academic Marxists may obscure this. It was, and was meant to be, an intervention against the historical distortions of apartheid. Powerful figures like General van den Bergh, the head of the Bureau of State Security, understood this, saying that Volume 1 ‘confirms the Communists’ view of history’.58 Monica told the publisher, when insisting on complete accuracy in one of the settlement maps, ‘it is an explosive document’.59 To the censors, the first volume appeared to have no contemporary relevance, and it was available to political prisoners on Robben Island. Neville Alexander, who was studying for a University of South Africa honours degree in history while imprisoned, obtained a copy, which went from hand to hand. ‘It opened up people’s minds,’ Alexander says. ‘I remember even somebody like Nelson [Mandela] was absolutely fascinated by the fact that it was these sources that we didn’t even know about, and the book had a major

54 55

56 57

58

59

References to the various authors suggested are scattered through the uncatalogued correspondence between Monica and Leonard Thompson in WC. WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 2 April 1964, Los Angeles. See Shula Marks, ‘African and Afrikaner History’, Journal of African History, 11, 3 (1970), 435–447; Anthony Atmore and Nancy Westlake, ‘A Liberal Dilemma: A Critique of the Oxford History of South Africa’, Race, 14, 2 (1972), 107–136. Both Marks and Atmore had been students of Thompson at UCT and had gone on to London University. WC, uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson, 31 Aug. 1964, n.p. On the project in general see Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1988), Chapter 15. WC, uncat. material, Files on Various Subjects Bo–Bu, B.O.S.S., translation of report of speech by Van den Bergh in Die Transvaler, 6 April 1972. Van den Bergh went on, ‘[i]s not this sort of propaganda consciously aimed at disturbing race relations in the crudest manner?’ WC, uncat. corr., Oxford History: Corr., Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson/Clarendon Press, Monica Wilson/Peter Sutcliffe, 21 Nov. [1970], Girton College, Cambridge.

296

Inside African Anthropology

influence on the way people saw their history – there’s no doubt about it.’60 This was Monica’s hope and intention. She told Audrey Richards, using veiled language in case her mail was opened, that she had received ‘a special message from . . . dusky people about the Oxford History which had provided a new blik for those enclosed’.61 When she went to Lusaka, Zambia in July 1968 for a conference organised by Thompson on African societies in southern Africa, she found herself addressing a gathering mainly of historians. She drew their attention to the significance of studies of change in economic and social structures. Commenting self-deprecatingly that she was not ‘a well-brought-up historian who holds fast to chronology and frowns on comparisons that stray out of time’,62 she launched into a wide-ranging discussion of how the social structure of African societies had continually changed. Having recently written of the history of the Nguni and Sotho people in the Oxford History, she was able to draw out threads of comparison, both between them and with central African societies. She cited Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost as an example of how historians were now finding ‘changes in family structure a fit subject for study’.63 In notes for another paper, she emphasised the other side of the disciplinary relationship, noting anthropology’s struggle to develop a ‘model that moves’, combining time and space: ‘Anthropologist reaching out for help from historian, to make a more realistic model. Some historians welcome co-op [sic].’64 From her chapter on the Sotho in the first volume of the Oxford History, she drew out a set of ‘problems for research in Tswana history’ that was published in Botswana. She ended that article by saying that ‘[t]he pursuit of history in a country like Botswana has all the excitement of a treasure hunt and the relevance of a study that provides a people with greater understanding of themselves and their roots.’65 In 1967 a new radiocarbon date of 400 A.D. for iron working in Swaziland provided further proof of Bantu speakers moving south centuries before whites arrived anywhere near the area.66 This greatly excited her, and she worked news of it into the 1970 Dart Memorial Lecture on ‘The Thousand Years before Van Riebeeck’ that she delivered at the University

60 61

62 63 64

65 66

Neville Alexander interviewed by Se´an Morrow, Cape Town, 3 March 2008. Archives and Rare Books Division, London School of Economics (LSE), Audrey Richards Papers (Richards), 16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 25 Aug. 1975, Hogsback. ‘Blik’ is Afrikaans for an insight or view. It is unclear precisely who these ‘dusky people’ were. Monica Wilson, ‘Changes in Social Structure’, 71. Ibid., 78 and note 31; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965). WC, uncat. material, Occasional Papers: Talks and Addresses, 1967–69; ibid., Occasional Papers 1967–68, notes for talk on ‘The Role of the Anthropologist in the Twentieth Century’, n.d. Monica Wilson, ‘Problems for Research in Tswana History’, Botswana Notes and News, 3 (1971), 73. Ibid., Monica Wilson/‘Dear Neglected Son’ [Archie Mafeje], 15 June 1967, Hogsback.

‘Part of One Whole’

297

of the Witwatersrand.67 This was a bold survey of what was known about South Africa before the Dutch arrived. The following year the second volume of the Oxford History, another tour de force, appeared, to which she contributed a chapter on the history of peasant communities. She feared the banning of the whole work in South Africa, and was determined to see it read in South Africa. Wishing to display the mentality of the government, she insisted that Oxford University Press bring out a South African edition of the second volume, in which the chapter by Leo Kuper on African nationalism was replaced by 53 blank pages. This was done on the assumption that the book would be banned if the chapter remained, because it quoted banned sources. In the event, it was not banned, and the incident caused a major fallout, with Kuper accusing her of censorship. It was a most unfortunate way for a great historical project to end.68 The attacks on the volumes by the Marxists must also have wounded her, but she never responded directly to them. Had she done so, she would probably have said that they were missing the point, but she recognised that history writing is an ongoing process in which no one has the last word. Her interest was South Africa’s early history, not debates about capital and its relationship to racism. She would have been dismissive of the relatively recent assessment by Ben Magubane, an eminent sociologist with a strong interest in anthropology, that the Oxford History was ‘the ultimate word of liberalism’s irrelevant wisdom’, which ‘exemplifies wishful thinking and the limits of bourgeois thought’ and ‘was unable to go beyond the limits imposed by its interest in the status quo’. He went on to make the bizarre claim that ‘[t]he intellectual inertia or indifference to historical reality exhibited by Wilson can be explained by Freudian theory as resulting from an individual’s wish to hide what is shameful, fearful and socially unacceptable. The dispossession of the Africans and its consequences are extremely unpleasant to contemplate and equally unpleasant to explain.’69 As she moved towards retirement from UCT in 1973, Monica delivered the third Dugmore Memorial Lecture in Grahamstown, in

67 68

69

Published as Monica Wilson, The Thousand Years Before Van Riebeeck (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press for the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa, 1970). Leo Kuper accused her of ‘cowardice’ and published his correspondence about the chapter in an appendix to his Race, Class and Power: Ideology and Revolutionary Change in Plural Societies (Gloucester: Gerald Duckworth, 1974), 289–314. Some years later the two were reconciled, with Kuper regretting the break in their ‘long friendship’ (WC, uncat. corr., Thompson, P. H. Sutcliffe/Leonard Thompson, 9 Feb. 1973, Oxford); ibid., Kuper, Kuper/Monica Wilson, 2 June 1978, Los Angeles. Thompson called Kuper ‘irritating’ (ibid., Thompson, Thompson/Secretary, Clarendon Press, 15 March 1973, New Haven, CT). Bernard Magubane, ‘Whose Memory, Whose History’ in Hendrik E. Stolten, ed., History Making and Present Day Politics (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2007), 261, 264. For Monica’s interest in psychohistory and the work of Erik Erikson see note 96 below.

298

Inside African Anthropology

which she spoke of the key role of the interpreter on the frontier.70 The following year she participated in a conference at Rhodes University on the history of the Transkei and Ciskei, and wrote a chapter for the published volume that resulted. In this she pointed to areas for further research, drawing attention especially to the need for black writers to offer new interpretations of the past, an issue with which the historical profession still grapples.71 In 1976 at the opening of the Missionary Museum in King William’s Town she spoke of the role of missionaries on the frontier as agents of conquest and servants of God.72 She summed up much of her thinking about South African history in her Alfred and Winifred Hoernl´e Memorial Lecture in 1975. This began with a long section on ‘History and Myth’ before discussing the stifling of truth and the discovery of new truth. She went on to point to South African realities and ended with a plea for free speech.73

‘I’ve Always Seen Anthropology and History as Part of One Whole’ While this chapter emphasises Monica’s overtly historical work, we now look briefly from the perspective of her historical interests at the studies on which, with the earlier Reaction to Conquest, her specifically anthropological and ethnographic reputation rests. Between the early 1950s and late 1970s she published four major monographs based on her and her husband’s fieldwork in the 1930s, and her 1956 return visit, among the Nyakyusa and Ngonde of modern Tanzania and Malawi. In these she increasingly stressed the historical dimension, especially in For Men and Elders, published in 1979.74 Aspects of her approach were challenged, particularly by anthropologists Simon Charsley and Michael McKenny and by Marcia Wright, a historian who taught at Columbia University.75

70 71

72

73 74 75

Monica Wilson, The Interpreters (Grahamstown: 1820 Settlers National Monument Foundation, 1972). See the Introduction to this volume for a fuller discussion. Christopher Saunders and Rodney Derricourt, eds, Beyond the Cape Frontier: Studies in the History of the Transkei and Ciskei (Cape Town: Longman, 1974). Her chapter was ‘Some Fields for Research’. South African Outlook, March 1976. This was in effect a response to the polemic by N. Majeke (Dora Taylor) of the Unity Movement on The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest, (n.p. [Johannesburg]: Society of Young Africa, 1952). Monica Wilson, . . . ‘So Truth Be in the Field’ . . . (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1975). Monica Wilson, For Men and Elders. Simon R. Charsley, The Princes of Nyakyusa (Nairobi: East African Publishing, 1969); Michael G. McKenny, ‘The Social Structure of the Nyakyusa: A Re-evaluation’, Africa, 43, 2 (1973), 91–107; Letters from Dr S. R. Charsley and Professor Michael McKenny, Africa, 44, 4 (1974), 422–424. For Marcia Wright’s critique see below. See also Chapter 4 in this volume.

‘Part of One Whole’

299

Wright’s German Missions in Tanganyika appeared in 1971.76 A meticulous study based on mission archives, it made relatively little use of the Wilsons’ work, merely referring to Monica’s Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor as ‘of great value . . . [n]otwithstanding certain [unspecified] misconstructions of history’.77 She subsequently attacked the Wilsons’ work directly,78 accusing them of projecting the situation in the 1930s into a past in reality marked by conflict, change and constant reinterpretation. Specifically, they misinterpreted the relationship of religious and chiefly authority. She alleged that Godfrey had stretched the evidence to fit a Frazerian ‘divine kings’ theory.79 Replying ‘with reluctance’ to her critics, Monica defended detailed ethnographic observation. ‘What periods of time (if any)’, she asked, ‘have the three critics spent in Bu-Nyakyusa?’ She also defended her and Godfrey’s work against Charsley’s charge that it was ‘timeless’. They had dealt, for example, with Christianity and change, and with diversity, ‘the cross-section of social change’. While ‘it is true that except in the Constitution of Ngonde [by Godfrey Wilson], the flow of time has not been the main focus of attention’, her forthcoming For Men and Elders would combine discussion of ‘the flow of time with analysis of the complex relationships of generations, and of men and women’.80 When it appeared, she wrote to an old friend: ‘I await brickbats from the anthropologists who dislike one discussing history, and historians who disapprove of anthropology.’81 The brickbats hurt: she wrote that ‘a vicious and prompt review of For Men and Elders by Marcia Wright . . . sank it with most historians’, and that positive reviews by Aidan Southall and Jan Vansina came too late to redeem its historical reputation.82 Wright claimed, misreading Monica’s ethnography and her political and social attitudes, that ‘[a]nxiety about the consequences of radical change permeates and perhaps motivates the book. Diversity then emerges as part of a counter-ideology, liberal towards traditional values and hostile to the new socialism.’ More cogently, though with exaggeration, Wright stated that a book such as

76 77 78

79 80

81 82

Marcia Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika 1891–1941: Lutherans and Moravians in the Southern Highlands (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Ibid., 24; Monica Wilson, The Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor (Cape Town: School of African Studies, UCT, 1958). Marcia Wright, ‘Nyakyusa Cults and Politics in the Later Nineteenth Century’ in Terence O. Ranger and Isaria Kimambo, eds, The Historical Study of African Religion (London: Heinemann, 1971), 153–170. Ibid., 156. Letter from Dr Monica Wilson, Africa, 45, 2 (1975), 199–205. Monica refers to Godfrey Wilson, ‘The Constitution of Ngonde’, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, 3 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 (1939)). WC, uncat. corr., Desmond Clark, Monica Wilson/Clark, 6 March 1978, Hogsback. WC, uncat. corr., George Park, Monica Wilson/George Park, 22 June 1982, Hogsback.

300

Inside African Anthropology

For Men and Elders that ‘rejects’ documentary evidence ‘is seriously handicapped’. The book was ‘disappointing’ in spite of some ‘highly suggestive materials’.83 The doyen of contemporary African historians, Jan Vansina, by contrast, called it ‘an extraordinary book . . . a “longitudinal” study of an African society . . . the social history of a rural community in the colonial and postcolonial age.’ He noted that broad statements were supported with validating cases, which ‘historians welcome with glee’. He commented that, though Monica was an anthropologist and functionalist, ‘the Wilsons never were “pure” functionalists. They were fascinated by social change, almost right from the onset.’ He considered Monica’s account of change ‘remarkably clear’, and praised her eschewing of unsupported generalisation and her focus on the specific: ‘Her work beautifully shows how a generalization such as “dependency” is just that: a big generalization that attempts to explain situations on a world-wide scale, or at least a continental one . . . the local society is not just a dune to be moulded by the dependency winds.’ He concluded: ‘this is an important book . . . [it] carries a message to historians, especially social historians. It also is grist to the mill of economic historians in that it shows the coincidence of so much social change with economic change.’84 In advance of her historical colleagues Monica foreshadowed what would later be called ‘contemporary history’. Writing to Audrey Richards, her close friend, about For Men and Elders, she said she was convinced that analysis of diversity was the key to understanding change. ‘My historian friends’, she said, ‘look shocked when I say “diversity is change in the contemporary moment” – they can’t conceive of a contemporary moment of change, which I think is arthritic!’ She said she was returning to their 1930s approach where both worked in areas that were changing profoundly.85 Richards got the point, saying that the second chapter, ‘A Model that Moves’, should be ‘read by every student of change’. Monica’s long and arduous work on the Oxford History, she thought, had given this book ‘a perspective that no other anthropologist has achieved’.86 83 84

85 86

Marcia Wright, ‘Change in Southern Tanzania’, Review of Monica Wilson’s For Men and Elders, Journal of African History, 20, 2 (1979), 300–301. Jan Vansina, ‘Review of Monica Wilson, For Men and Elders’, African Economic History, 8 (1979), 267–269. James G. Ellison, ‘Transforming Obligations, Performing Identity: Making the Nyakyusa in a Colonial Context’, D.Phil. thesis (University of Florida, 1999) considers the controversies over Nyakyusa history. WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 21 Feb. 1974, Hogsback. Ibid., Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 30 March 1978, Cambridge. Monica’s emphasis on the complexities of change and on the absolute need for knowledge of particular circumstances is summarised – typically, in relation to a specific historical context – in her ‘Zig-Zag Change’, Africa, 46, 4 (1976), 399–409.

‘Part of One Whole’

301

Monica’s approach to history is apparent in relation to what she saw as contemporary anthropology’s loss of direction. Clarity of aim, she wrote to Richards in 1982, ‘is dismally absent’ and the discipline ‘is in a fog and a bog’.87 She wrote to Leonard Thompson in 1982 that she had become increasingly historical. She was excited by contemporary French historians ‘using so much of what I would call anthropology’, and by John Roberts’s Penguin History of the World,88 with its ‘magnificent’ sweep. Of Roberts she wrote to Muriel Bradbrook, ‘I’ve always seen anthropology and history as part of one whole and it’s good to read a historian who does so and has really digested all the admirable work done in France.’89 She thought John Iliffe outstanding amongst contemporary historians of Africa writing in English and his A Modern History of Tanganyika ‘the best history of any part of Africa I have read’.90 He grasped what small-scale societies were like, what change in transport implied, and the importance of solid evidence. Also, she added, ‘he can write’.91 She criticised much South African historiography for failing to grapple with small-scale societies or use anthropological insights. When historians read no anthropology early, ‘it seems almost as if they had missed learning to speak during the babbling stage’.92 Her criticisms were of historians, not of history as a discipline. She quoted approvingly R. H. Tawney’s alleged remark that historians need ‘not more documents but stronger boots’, and told her students in 1973 that though historians had provided rich comparative material, with exceptions they had tended to do so about limited fields within a limited range of societies.93 The reception of the Oxford History made clear the division between the ‘liberal’ history, emphasising ‘interaction’, of Monica and her coauthors, and the ‘neo-Marxist’ history of many of their critics. She did not find contemporary French Marxist ideas on small-scale societies helpful to her historical analysis of gender and generational relations in Bunyakyusa. Marxism seemed to her ‘an ephemeral terminology’, and characterising husbands and wives as members of different and competing classes completely unhelpful.94 Her commitment to empiricism, and deep knowledge of the eastern Cape frontier in the nineteenth century, 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94

LSE/Richards/16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 30 Sept. 1981, Hogsback. WC, uncat. corr., Oxford History Reprint, Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson, 23 Jan. 1982, Hogsback. See J. M. Roberts, Pelican History of the World (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, [1976] 1980). WC, uncat. corr., Muriel Bradbrook, Monica Wilson/‘Brad’, 11 Feb. 1982, Hogsback. WC, uncat. corr., Elizabeth Colson, Monica Wilson/Elizabeth Colson, 27 April 1981, Hogsback. LSE/Richards/16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 28 Nov. 1979, Hogsback. WC, uncat. corr., Martin West, Monica Wilson/Martin West, 15 July 1976 [Hogsback]. WC, J5, UCT Lecture Notes, Social Anthropology I, 1973. WC, uncat. corr., Jeff Guy, Monica Wilson/Jeff Guy, July 1979, Hogsback.

302

Inside African Anthropology

was shown in her essay on the Xhosa proph`et figure Mhlakaza. Published in French, it unfortunately found few readers in southern Africa.95 Finally, Monica’s broad understanding of history should be noted. For example, the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s attempt to combine evolutionary thought and religion, emphasising the historicity of the Christian revelation, resonated with her sense of a world where God was incarnate in and revealed through humanity’s struggle towards understanding and self-consciousness.96 She closely followed Erik Erikson’s use of psychoanalysis in historical studies.97 In the late 1950s, reflecting on the emergence of language and human society, and taking an evolutionary-historical perspective that few historians of the time would have contemplated, she spent much time watching baboon behaviour at Cape Point with Kenneth Hall, Professor of Psychology at UCT, and his students.98 She was acutely aware, as has been seen, of the importance of archaeology in understanding the African past. The Z. K. Matthews Biography: A Memoir of an ‘Interpreter’ Monica’s final book-length study was her edited biography and memoir of Z. K. Matthews. She had worked with him at Fort Hare and he shared her view of the importance of history.99 Her old friend Frieda Matthews had found the unevenness of the papers left by her husband, one of the most prominent black intellectuals of his day, difficult to 95 96

97

98

99

Monica Wilson, ‘Mhlakaza proph`ete d’une apocalypse en Afrique australe’ in C. Julien, Les Africains (Paris: Editions Jeune Afrique, 1977), 207–209. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1959; Le phenom`ene humaine first published Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1955); WC, Talks and Addresses, Box 2 (partly cat.), ‘The Growth of Self-Consciousness in Man and Society’, paper by Monica Wilson opening Arts and Sciences Festival at Rhodes University, September 1962. See also ibid., Monica Wilson, ‘Cleavage and Coherence in Southern Africa’, paper to conference for anthropologists, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York, 13 March 1964. Monica was instrumental in bringing Erikson to UCT to deliver the Ninth T. B. Davie Memorial Lecture in 1968. See Erik H. Erikson Insight and Freedom (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1968). His psychohistorical studies include Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958). The extent of her ethnographic fieldwork with baboons is clear from the reports and correspondence in WC, uncat. material, Monica Wilson Own Research: Animal Sociology. She advised her students to read classic works on animal behaviour such as David Lack, The Life of the Robin (London: H. F. and G. Witherby, 1943) and F. Fraser Darling, A Herd of Red Deer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937). Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews: Southern Africa 1901 to 1968 (London: Rex Collings, 1981); J. W. Raum, ‘Zacharia Keodirelang Matthews as a “Social Anthropologist”’ in L. Kropackek and P. Skalnik, eds, Africa 2000: Forty Years of African Studies in Prague (n.p.: Set Out, 2001), esp. 191. Matthews published a history of the Tshidi Barolong. For more on Matthews and Fort Hare see Chapter 6 in this volume.

‘Part of One Whole’

303

deal with. With family backing, she approached Monica with the idea of her contributing ‘the Introductory Biographical sketch Zac’s Memoirs require’. ‘My answer . . . dear Frieda is Yes!’ she said.100 As she wrote to Desmond Clark, ‘if black asks that sort of thing of white nowadays in this country one does not refuse!’101 The project quickly escalated into a much more substantial task than Frieda had envisaged.102 Freedom for my People is a hybrid, both an edited version of material left by Matthews and an account by Monica of areas and periods where his memoirs were inadequate. These areas, oddly, considering how central each was to his life, were Matthews’s political activities and his academic career at Fort Hare. Monica was aware that she was not well qualified to write about Matthews as a political leader, but she was asked by the family to carry out the assignment and realised that the book was required politically and could not be postponed.103 Some of the inadequacies, such as the treatment of the Treason Trial, can be put down to Frieda Matthews only coming across relevant letters after the book had been published.104 Monica believed the importance of the biography was that it showed ‘what it was like to grow up black in Kimberley, and at school in Lovedale and on to Fort Hare’.105 There were personal as well as political reasons for taking on the task.106 She wrote to David Philip, noting the limitations of the material with which she would have to work, but saying that she had agreed to undertake the project out of love for both Z. K. and Frieda and close family ties. (Her mother was a friend of my mother’s; Godfrey was friendly with Z. K. and chose him for Tim’s godfather; I worked on Z. K. [sic] staff – a lecturer in his department – at Fort Hare, and the friendship continued until his death; I still visit Frieda and she me when distance permits).107

Monica might have added that David Hunter, Monica’s father, was a mission colleague and friend of Frieda’s father John Knox Bokwe, ‘both 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107

WC, uncat. corr., Frieda Matthews, Monica Wilson/Frieda Matthews, 7 June 1976, Hogsback. Ibid., Desmond Clark, Monica Wilson/Desmond Clark, 6 March 1978, Hogsback. Ibid., Frieda Matthews, Frieda Matthews/Monica Wilson, 24 May 1976, Gaborone; ibid., Frieda Matthews/Monica Wilson, 26 June 1976, Gaborone. Ibid., Monica Wilson/Frieda Matthews, 7 June 1976, Hogsback. WC, uncat. files, Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/David Philip, 15 March 1982 [Hogsback]. WC, uncat. corr., Elizabeth Colson, Monica Wilson/Elizabeth Colson, 27 April 1981, Hogsback. When David Philip was dilatory about publishing the South African edition, she taxed him with risking the topicality of the book. WC, uncat. corr., David Philip, Monica Wilson/David Philip, 14 March 1980, Hogsback. Ibid., Monica Wilson/David Philip, 2 Dec. 1976, Hogsback.

304

Inside African Anthropology

Presbyterians through and through’, as Francis Wilson says, while she and Frieda were school-friends at Lovedale, and remained close.108 The Hunter-Wilsons and Bokwe-Matthewses were part of the religious and educational elite centred on Lovedale and Fort Hare. This goes far towards explaining Monica’s sense of the importance of an inclusive southern African history, her complete lack of racism, and her insistence on intellectual quality whenever there was educational opportunity. Monica set about the research and writing promptly and efficiently. She insisted that material of which there was no copy must be brought to her by trustworthy individuals in person. She sent detailed requests for information to Frieda. She arranged publishing contracts with Rex Collings in London and David Philip in Cape Town. She wrote to numerous individuals who had interacted with Matthews, and visited the World Council of Churches in Geneva, stopping off on the way in Nairobi, where he had worked for a time. Here she stayed with the powerful and, by many, feared Kenyan attorney-general Charles Njonjo, an ex-Fort Hare student of hers, who arranged a visa for Monica, a facility not normally granted to white South Africans.109 Monica was willing to provide loopholes to those in power who might not want to ban the book, like signing the preface from Cambridge rather than from within the country, but she wrote to the South African publisher David Philip: ‘I have considered my own position and have decided to stand by what I have written. There are certain advantages in being over 70 and no longer responsible for any one!’110 David Philip thought that the book might well be banned, and he was prepared if necessary to publish with blank pages, as with the second volume of the Oxford History. Monica, it turned out correctly, was more sanguine. She did not believe it would be banned. If it was, she said, it would ‘seep into the Republic’.111 Freedom for my People is probably as good a study of Z. K. Matthews as was possible at that time and in those circumstances. Though preceded

108 109

110 111

Francis Wilson interviewed by Se´an Morrow, Cape Town, 7 March 2008. WC, uncat. corr., Correspondence re Z. K.’s Biography, Charles Njonjo, Monica Wilson/Charles Njonjo, 15 Feb. 1978, Hogsback; replying from Nairobi on 23 Feb., Njonjo says he is ‘delighted . . . that you are editing our dear teacher’s autobiography’. Burgess Carr, who shortly before this time had been ousted as general secretary of the Nairobi-based All Africa Council of Churches, commented to Francis Wilson that Njonjo ‘may have gone to Fort Hare, but none of the Africans who were there with him would recognize him anymore’ (WC, uncat. corr., photocopy of Burgess Carr/Francis Wilson, 12 June 1978, Harvard University Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass). WC, uncat. corr., Correspondence with David Philip re Z. K. Biography, Monica Wilson/David Philip, 6 Feb. 1978, Hogsback. Ibid., Monica Wilson/David Philip, 20 July 1978; ibid., David Philip/Monica Wilson, 27 July 1978, Cape Town.

‘Part of One Whole’

305

by some scholarly and popular biographies of ‘traditional’ leaders,112 and autobiographies and biographies of modern, educated black South Africans,113 it was an innovative record of a major African nationalist leader. Monica managed to create a coherent narrative out of disparate documents by Matthews and chapters by herself, sometimes on areas with which she was not deeply familiar, such as the internal history of the African nationalism of Matthews’s day. As with much of Monica’s work, particularly her overtly historical studies, she wrote with a political as well as scholarly purpose, which in this case was to bring to the fore an African academic and statesman, ‘a man for reconciliation’, in the words of an earlier article on him. To her he represented the potentially liberal and tolerant South Africa under devastating attack in her time.114 She initially suggested the title of the book be the words of Patrick Henry in 1765, ‘If this be treason’.115 ‘For a title to be “provocative”’, Monica wrote to the publisher, ‘is perhaps useful’.116 But Helen Joseph had used that title, so it became Freedom for My People.117 Conclusion To the end Monica thought and wrote historically, following a path she had been on since the beginning of her career. The reading she did in the early 1980s indicates that she was moving towards social and environmental history and anthropology of a distinctly modern kind: ‘I’m thinking’, she wrote to Audrey Richards, ‘about a book concerning this range of mountains [the Amatolas] – the trees, and people, and

112

113

114

115

116 117

The former includes Leonard Thompson, Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho 1786–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); the latter, Peter Becker, Path of Blood (London: Longmans, Green, 1962). See, for example, Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom (London: Faber and Faber, 1954); Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London: Faber and Faber, 1959); Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963). In a different mode is anthropologist Hilda Kuper’s Sobhuza II: Ngwenyama and King of Swaziland (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1978). Monica Wilson, ‘Z.K. Matthews: A Man for Reconciliation’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press; Braamfontein: Spro-Cas, 1972), 557–559, first published in South African Outlook, July 1968. WC, uncat. corr., Frieda Matthews, Monica Wilson/Frieda Matthews, 2 Aug. 1978, n.p. The rhetorical power of the full quotation is clear: ‘“Caesar had his Brutus – Charles the First, his Cromwell – and George the Third – (‘Treason’, cried the Speaker) . . . may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it”’ (ibid., uncat. files, Z.K. Matthews Biography, transcript of Freedom for My People, ‘final’ (but some corrections), July 1978. Ibid., unsorted corr., Corr. with David Philip re Z. K. Biography, Monica Wilson/David Philip, 3 Aug. 1978, Hogsback. Helen Joseph, If This Be Treason (London: Andr´e Deutsch, 1963).

306

Inside African Anthropology

water supplies. A “flyer” in the form of an article for Veld and Flora has gone off and I want to do the book.’118 Ecology would be the focus, she said, ‘but history [is] necessary to explain ecological change, and choices open’.119 This scholarly direction was related to the politics of the time, in particular the formation of the Ciskei bantustan and the attempt to incorporate the Hogsback into it. Monica positioned herself in the narrow space between most of her white neighbours’ rejection of anything to do with black rule, and her concerns about the corruption, authoritarianism and neglect of the natural environment that she feared, correctly, would characterise ‘independent’ Ciskei. She became honorary vice-president of the Friends of the Ciskei, a liberal group working for welfare, health and small industries in the area.120 Another spur for this projected work was undoubtedly the anthropological study of the Essex village of Elmden inspired by Audrey Richards. As Audrey lived in Elmden, so did Monica in Hogsback.121 Throughout her life Monica Wilson had a strong sense of the importance of history. She would have liked to open a dialogue between anthropologists and historians, and did what she could to promote one, as French academics had already done. She was critical of much historical writing for not asking the relevant questions, and when the opportunity arose she turned to writing history herself. In so doing, she retained her anthropological perspective and did not always write as a historian would, but she showed imagination and originality that made her a pioneer in historical scholarship in South Africa. While Thompson, her collaborator on the Oxford History, remained primarily a political historian, she embraced the idea of interdisciplinary work in opening up the study of the South African past, and especially its pre-colonial past. In particular, 118

119 120 121

LSE/Richards/16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 15 Feb. 1982, Hogsback; ‘The Late Monica Wilson’ and ‘The Re-Establishment of Yellowwood Forest’, Veld and Flora, 68, 4 (1982), 111–112. For the African environment partly as a subject of historical study, see J. Ford, The Role of Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). However, a study such as Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History (London: James Currey) was not published until 1996. Monica’s environmentalism is clear from an inquiry from Bishop Hugh Montefiore about the theology of man and nature: see WC, uncat. corr., Hugh Montefiore/Monica Wilson, 20 Oct., 1973, London; ibid., Monica Wilson/Hugh Montefiore, n.d. [but Nov. 1973], n.p. Ibid., uncat. material, Files on Various Subjects, E–G, Emathole, Notes on the History of Hogsback and the Amathola Mountains, ‘Notes for study of Hogsback’. Ibid., Affiliations: Minutes of Meeting Friends of the Ciskei Association, 4 Nov. 1979, Kenilworth. Marilyn Strathern, Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in NorthWest Essex in the Nineteen-Sixties, Foreword by Audrey Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Monica may also have been influenced by the fact that W. K. Hancock, the Australian historian of Smuts, had in retirement written Discovering Monaro: A Study of Man’s Impact on His Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

‘Part of One Whole’

307

her interest in new advances in archaeology enabled her to grasp South African history over the centuries in ways no historian of the time did, while she understood the importance of environmental factors in shaping historical change. Unlike any historian of her time, she saw South Africa as part of the wider southern and even central African regions, for her own work in Central Africa gave her a perspective on South Africa different from that of any other scholar working in the country. She played a major role in opening up the history of African societies in southern Africa, and she challenged historians to take forward her own pioneering work. Historians who reviewed the Oxford History, whether from the left or the right, failed to appreciate the significance of what she had done. Now that we can to some extent stand back from the febrile atmosphere of her time, her significant place in southern African historiography can be more clearly appreciated.

10

Gleanings and Leavings: Encounters in Hindsight Pamela Reynolds gleanings and leavings in the combs of a fieldworker’s archive Seamus Heaney, ‘The Backward Look’1

Part One An Adequate Reading In her 1972 paper ‘The Interpreters’, Monica Wilson talks of the fundamental role that interpreters play on the frontiers between peoples.2 She said, ‘I use interpreter for the man between whose primary function is communication, and secondary function negotiation.’ His concern is ‘to mediate ideas, law, custom, symbolism’ and, in her opinion, anthropologists and missionaries are interpreters. A real interpreter, she held, listens as well as talks, is a man of integrity who is personally trusted, and who can be loyal to his own group and be an intermediary.3 This chapter first considers one type of interpreter, field assistants, and how just acknowledgment should be given to their contributions to fieldwork. The matter is very difficult and troublesome and I write in a tone that I hope is not querulous but inquisitive. The second section is a reminiscence. My intention is to encourage those writing in hindsight about Monica Hunter Wilson to do so with due consideration of our inheritance from her. The challenge is to ascertain how we can achieve an adequate reading of the products of her labour, of her mode of production, and of the intellectual milieu in which she wrote. 1 2 3

Extract from Seamus Heaney, ‘The Backward Look’, 1975 in Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). I am grateful to Colleen Crawford Cousins and Thomas Cousins for the contribution of ideas that I have incorporated into the chapter, and for having edited it. Monica Wilson, The Interpreters (Grahamstown: The 1820 Settlers National Monument Foundation, Third Dugmore Memorial Lecture), 18, 23; Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008 (1936), 4th edition), 22–23. See the Introduction of this volume for further discussion of the concept.

308

Gleanings and Leavings

309

In an interrogation of the production of knowledge, Pierre Bourdieu, speaking in his own defence against his critics, invites us to consider the logic of the international circulation of ideas. He worries that texts circulate without their contexts, that they are unaccompanied by the social space in which they have been produced, that is, in the ‘space of scientific possibilities in which they constructed themselves’. He feels that readers often apply to texts categories of perception and interpretation from a field of production subject to different traditions. In consequence their perceptions and interpretations ‘have every chance of being more or less inadequate’.4 In effect Bourdieu warns us that, in critiquing texts, we must remember the context, social space and the production of knowledge plus the era and traditions of the writers and their readers. Bourdieu believes that the circulation of texts can generate through the accumulation of misunderstandings a cultural phenomenon that he calls ‘a collective artefact’. One such is postmodernism. He fears distortion in ‘scientific exchanges’, and suggests that the distortions be countered by reflexivity. He accuses his critics of making a false synchrony of his ideas and of fragmenting his body of work and, in the process, ignoring his mode of intellectual production in research and writing. He calls for ‘an adequate reading tied to the very movement of the research’ and for attention to be paid to ‘the epistemological and social conditions of the intellectual project’, and he calls for readers to apply a ‘socio-genetic’ point of view towards ‘any creation of the mind’. To avoid misunderstanding, we could try to reposition ourselves in the intellectual tradition in order to see the move from common sense to the construction of an idea (or form of analysis) that links the theoretical and the empirical: that is, to see what is original. In offering a sort of ‘intellectual autobiography’, Bourdieu tries to act as an informant on social conditions of the formation of his thought, thus encouraging a ‘self socio-analysis’. He says that the appearance of radical critique may disguise intellectual conformity, even conservatism. He is wary of ‘the infantile disorders’ of social science yet he is respectful of ‘the dispositions that define the sociological eye’.5 In discussing our inheritance from Monica Hunter Wilson, we should ask if we can achieve an adequate reading; avoid producing a collective artefact; pay full regard to her mode of intellectual production; and position ourselves in both the intellectual tradition of the 1930s and the second decade of the twenty-first century. 4

5

Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual Works’ in Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma and Moiske Postone, eds, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 263. Bourdieu, ‘Concluding Remarks’, 263–264.

310

Inside African Anthropology

To add another qualifier to our interrogation of the production of knowledge, Michel Foucault says that the Delphic Oracle was so enigmatic and obscure ‘that one could not understand it without knowing what sort of question one was asking’.6 Similarly, in anthropology one sets out to learn what questions to ask. In weighing Monica Hunter Wilson’s body of work, we ask what questions she put before herself, and what sort of questions we are asking in retrospect. Foucault examines the early Greek notion of parrhesia (truth telling) with regard to finding out what the truth of a life is. He quotes Plato, who has Socrates say: ‘For I think that whoever is to test a soul sufficiently about correctness of life or the lack of it needs three things . . . knowledge, kind regard, and frankness.’7 On Fieldwork Let us begin by acknowledging the vulnerability of the anthropologist in the field. Some of my graduate students at Johns Hopkins University assure me that anthropologists are often dubious persons. They cannot rely, as can those who work in laboratories, on a protocol in undertaking fieldwork. Doing ethnography can be heartbreaking, and it is edgy. The unspoken negotiations that it entails are seldom recognised. The graduates say that having to formulate their work into categories – the collection of data, the analysis of material, the writing of a monograph – reduces it, for each process is intricately entangled in untranslatable terms. Many anthropologists find relations in the field fascinating, challenging and very demanding. Everyday scenes in research on some topics and with some people call for subtle or direct negotiations. To enter the field is to expose oneself. Fieldwork is a fiction, a romance, and no defence ought to be put up for it, one of them said. We cannot really know about the character of relations without knowing the tenor and conventions of the time, said another, who then used Malinowski’s diaries as an example,8 pleading, ‘Write the guy a pass’ – yet, he added, the diaries complicated the remote scene of ‘the field’ and give it a new dimension. On Working with an Assistant There are often four phases that bleed into one another as an ethnography is made: training and theoretical preparation; fieldwork; analysis; and writing. If the ethnographer requires an assistant at all, it is often 6 7 8

Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001), 103. Ibid., 98, note 61. Bronislaw M. Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, trans. N. Guterman (London: Routledge, 1967).

Gleanings and Leavings

311

only for the second phase. Once an assistant is appointed for fieldwork, a triangulation of relationships between the anthropologist, the assistant(s), and the informant(s) occurs in the field. In critiques of anthropological endeavour, the focus is usually on the relationship between the anthropologist and the assistant and not on the other two ties, those of assistant/informant and informant/anthropologist. Perhaps it will help us to gauge the nature of this complex if we examine these other ties as carefully. Let us remember that the relationship between anthropologist and assistant may develop into something other, may become something in itself, with mysterious qualities that are more than the sum of the parts, like the new relationship that can grow between an analyst and an analysand, or patient. Sigmund Freud said that analytic work involves two different people, each with a different task.9 The analysand is ‘supposed to be induced to remember something he has experienced and suppressed’, while the analyst’s task is a work of construction and reconstruction that corresponds extensively to that of the archaeologist. Freud said, ‘Interpretation depends simply and solely on reconstruction, which can therefore quite often claim at best only a certain degree of probability.’ This represents only preparatory work, and the analysand’s agreement with the interpretation is only valuable if it is followed by indirect confirmations. An individual construction is no more than a supposition to be ‘investigated, confirmed, or rejected’.10 The analogy cannot be pushed too far but for our purposes I suggest that the relationship between anthropologist and assistant in the field is not easily translatable: each makes different contributions and these are hard to measure. One more similarity is striking. Just as Freud sought confirmation for his interpretations through agreement and investigation, so did Monica. The bedrock of Monica’s extraordinarily reliable method was, beside the accumulation of minute details, the careful check she made of the verity of everything she found out. The question remains: how ought the contribution of an assistant to be acknowledged? It could happen that an interpreter is much cleverer than the anthropologist; has greater originality in analysis; knows much more; is a very competent writer; has a position in a community that allows for interviews of greater depth and importance; and whose contribution to the compilation of a monograph equals, if it does not surpass, that of the anthropologist. Let us grant that possibility. I shall reflect on my experiences in working with and without assistants. My ethnographic research has involved five studies in southern Africa, each of between 18 months and five years, and another less intense one 9 10

Sigmund Freud, ‘Constructions in Analysis’ in A. Phillips, ed., Sigmund Freud: Wild Analysis (London: Penguin, 2002 (1937)), 212. Ibid., 213, 219.

312

Inside African Anthropology

in the USA. In three, I had an assistant. The first was from the area and a pleasure to be with, amenable, kind to the children with whom we were working but not otherwise contributing significantly to the study. In the second case, I brought an assistant from the city to the countryside. It did not work well because the rural people were not interested in working with a man from the city. I hired a local called Satan for a while but he rather lived up to his name. For the third study, I had the good fortune to work with and to live in the domain of a wonderful man whose contribution was invaluable. He was acknowledged in the academic book and his name is on the cover of Lwaano Lwanyika: Tonga Book of the Earth, the book written with Colleen Crawford Cousins for and with the Tonga people of Omay, in the Zambezi Valley in Zimbabwe.11 There is no doubt that an assistant can be crucial to an anthropologist’s endeavour, and a deep collaboration can be established. One lives, in certain places, under their protection. An assistant can, among many things, make possible the collecting of many kinds of data; actively facilitate access to leaders, forums and other groups; repair blunders; act as a guide through etiquette and the rules of exchange; and shape the anthropologist’s ideas. In two studies in South Africa, I conducted fieldwork for extended periods directly with informants who were not paid. In a book recently be published on one of the studies, the 14 men with whom I worked read the manuscript and critique it. Their names are on the cover of the book along with mine.12 This is not unproblematic. Four of the men have died since our project ended and so they cannot sanction what I write about them. Some have altered the views they formerly expressed about the past and their paths have diverged. In collaborating closely I have had to handle particular difficulties in writing about actions and experiences that are not positive and that could even rebound to the men’s disadvantage. In the study in the United States, I worked under the aegis of a large medical team. Two colleagues and I completed a small qualitative project involving young women in four cities who had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. One colleague and I interviewed women in New Orleans over a period of about nine months. The women, who were all AfricanAmerican, were recruited by a clinic where they received treatment and they were paid for their interviews. Some of them were very ill. We had no assistants except a graduate student hired to conduct specific analyses based on the data. From that study two questions arise: what marks the difference in how we acknowledge assistants or graduate students? And what is the difference when we acknowledge assistants or informants? 11 12

Pamela Reynolds and Colleen Crawford Cousins, Lwaano Lwanyika: Tonga Book of the Earth (Harare: Baobab, 1991). Pamela Reynolds, War in Worcester, Youth and the Apartheid State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

Gleanings and Leavings

313

My experience with assistants varied but was never difficult. Only in one study could the assistant be called a collaborator. How ought I to have acknowledged him? The design in that ethnography utilised a range of methods that had not been used before in those combinations or for the study of the subject under examination. Some of the methods were devised in the field in response to situations that presented questions to be answered. And the analysis called for a different range of skills and for the ability to search for patterns in the data that could not have been predicted. Collaboration in the design and the analysis was not feasible. I began one study with a student as my assistant and, quite soon, she became a Ph.D. scholar and then we worked alongside each other. How should we have acknowledged the information we exchanged and drew on in the compilation of two separate monographs? Sometimes I have hired people and have paid them for specific pieces of work but have found few of their research products fruitful. In fact the small projects mostly just provided one way to offer financial support. What are the criteria for greater acknowledgment than the usual proffered at the beginning of publications? Criteria of indigeneity, of belonging, of degree of education; value of remuneration; or an estimation of the quality of the contribution? Who is to judge my motivation? Who to weigh our contributions, on what evidence? Is the issue only to be raised in relation to works granted the status of classics, works that will last down time? Ought protocols to be formulated to ensure justice? Just acknowledgment implies a measure of the joint exploration and the weighting of contributions made to the four stages in the production of a monograph. There are many more facets we could explore, the character of the anthropologist, for one. Some say I am like Monica and if that is so, it is only in having craggy looks as we age, and in being shy, socially awkward, reticent, formal for most of our social interactions. If the description holds for either of us, how can it be said to have affected, or affect, our relationships in the field? Helen Vendler, writing about Seamus Heaney’s book of poems Fieldwork (1979), says he composed them while living in Ireland in anthropological mode (‘from the convinced will of the companioned self ’), and turned his gaze to ‘the ordinary ways life is lived, and became able as a fieldworker to sketch psychological and cultural transactions’.13 My query here is how far anthropologists’ characters influence their ways of seeing and interpreting, and the extent to which assistants may contribute to the sketch of psychological and cultural transactions. What could constitute the evidence? Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that someone’s state of mind might be estimated on the basis of

13

Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 72–74.

314

Inside African Anthropology

‘evidence’. ‘But evidence here includes “imponderable evidence”’ – and this includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone.14 Anthropologists have for a long time been accused of colonialism. The charge rests largely on relationships in the field and the stealing of knowledge. It is a very real issue. Is the implication that, given racial dominance, anthropology ought not to have been undertaken like that? How then should it have been pursued? Would joint authorship qualify as justice? It is difficult to gauge, and hard to know who should decide, on what terms anthropologists may cross frontiers such as race, class, age or gender. Perhaps the accusation relies on the nature of the product. It seems often to be made about estimates of the relationship an anthropologist has with their assistant. Is my work (supposing it worthy of close examination) to be scrutinised for colonial bias only in respect of its ethnography – in which assistants were used? Certainly, it is much harder to scrutinise the relationship between anthropologist and informant. In any case, the nature of the relationship between anthropologists and assistants surely reaches beyond colonialism. It is multiplied across time and space and political dispensations. It is current. Monica’s work was unusual for its time in being multi-sited and multi-layered. Her determination to attend to detail led her to make an extraordinary contribution to knowledge. Her analysis is subtle and wise, her evidence dependable and scrupulous. She was intrepid. She may not have known the worth of her ethnographic text and so would have shied away from attaching another’s name to it. In judging her motivation we may do well to recall ‘the fundamental obscurity of lives not our own’.15 Her work may not escape the criticisms levelled against our anthropological ancestors, for example, the impression they often gave of having been omniscient; of having perpetuated a sense that their informants lived in an ethnographic present; or of having delivered synthetic descriptions. My intention here is not to make judgements but to invite close inspection of the criteria we use in making them. Nor am I suggesting that we foreclose the investigation into relationships between anthropologist and assistant for it is one that can be imbued with anxiety. Rather than naming it and tying the label on to this or that anthropologist, it may be better to stay open to the nature of the anxiety. It is a strange relationship: it contains nervousness with regard to power, meaning and history (particularly in the account of inequality and differences in language). It is an intense relationship and yet it is one that ends, at least in the form that it takes around a specific project. The anthropologist has a greater investment in it although the assistant may also benefit 14 15

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963 [1953], 228. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 85.

Gleanings and Leavings

315

from the opportunities it provides (access to work with local government or NGOs, for example, or the acquisition of new skills). These interests are not often articulated, I suspect, and nor are the tensions that may build over time. As the end of the project approaches a withdrawal may occur. The issue at the heart of it all is a mystery, for this is a tie unlike any other. It is bounded, yet monetary exchange does not determine its form or rid the relationship of intricate reverberations. Anxiety need not preclude or dominate its quality, mutuality or enjoyment. Anthropology has changed. Few now design projects that resemble the classic, all-encompassing form of old. Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (1936) is recognised as a classic and in 2008 it was reissued by the International Africa Institute in their series ‘Classics in Anthropology’.16 In discussing what guidelines to offer the writers of introductions to individual volumes in the series, Murray Last (in a personal communication) suggested that a classic has three parallel ‘lives’. The first is the book itself – its ideas and arguments, the innovations it set in motion, the way it reflected current concerns, and so on. The second ‘life’ is that of the author – who she was, her subsequent career, and references to what else she wrote. The third ‘life’ is that of the people who were studied both in real life and in the more fictive life of anthropology or film. I would suggest that Monica’s writing on the Pondo is a vital part of the historical record of the Eastern Cape, an area from which many leaders – including the most famous one – of the fight to install democracy in South Africa have come. This region has a very complicated history and has become a place of terrible poverty. An older elite has used the book as a reliable resource in the description of the past. Perhaps current critiques of Monica reveal the nervousness of the postcolonial period. Questions can be raised as to how South Africans recognise a canon in anthropology, how they claim a founding knowledge and hence can value a continuing tradition in the discipline. Part Two Remembering Monica Monica was a formidable figure. On the dot of eight in the morning she would glide into the lecture hall of the Old Arts Building at the University of Cape Town with her black gown flapping ominously. Her stern demeanour silenced us all, even the newspaper readers at the back. As a first-year student I was mesmerised by her absorption in her subject. I watched her mouth – she spoke more from one side of it than the other 16

Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest.

316

Inside African Anthropology

Figure 10.1. Monica Wilson at Hunterstoun in the years of her retirement.17

as she formed her well-crafted sentences – and I was fascinated by the clarity and confidence of her exposition. There was no obvious attempt to entertain and little interaction with us. She presented her political views, imbued as they were in her topic, without prevarication or apology. Her scientifically objective account of race was formative in my understanding of the world for it revealed the rickety structures on which ideologies are so often founded. Her 1965 talk in Jameson Hall in defence of Jack Simons was just as impressive.18 One did not, in those days, speak to professors, or at least I did not, and it was only as a friend of her son Francis and daughter-in-law Lindy that I came to know her in the late 1960s and stay with her in Hunterstoun, her home in the Hogsback. In 1979, having been away from Africa for 11 years, in the United States, India and Britain, I returned as a Cambridge graduate student to do fieldwork with children in Crossroads, then a beleaguered informal settlement, and Monica generously agreed

17 18

WC, N1 Photographs of Monica Wilson. For details about this speech on Simons and academic freedom see Francis Wilson, ‘An Appreciation’, 20.

Gleanings and Leavings

317

to be my supervisor despite having retired. Twice I stayed with her in Hunterstoun and we overcame our mutual shyness to enjoy long walks and hours of talk, mostly about books. I recall, in particular, the pleasure of Sunday evenings when she would make omelettes for us and we would eat them and drink wine beside the fire as we talked. Monica was the first woman to impress me with her stature and her deep, unquestioned involvement in the pursuit of knowledge for itself and for her recognition of the potential power inherent in it. It was startling for me to meet someone so convinced of the value of studying people’s everyday lives; of granting the importance of their history, albeit not one of kings and castles and crusades; of tracing the force in ideas like those to do with witchcraft; and of documenting the devastation being wrought by the imposition of different ways of being – different economic, political, social and moral ideas accompanied by the irresistible force of foreign finance, arms, ideologies and the will to dominate. My initial research on children in southern Africa built on her ethnography of the Pondo. All my work has been influenced by the value she placed on the forms of life that people design for themselves and the depth of meaning that lies in what people say, how they move, their use of space, their cognizance of time, and the way their interactions are shaped by ethical considerations. I have taken from her the courage to work wherever one chooses and to get there by any means – at the age of 23 she rode across Pondoland on horseback. I have taken from her the will to pursue academic interests even at dinner tables and the cognizance of the rigour necessary in fieldwork, for everything impinges on the core subject of one’s interest. Monica is famous for the emphasis she placed on the massing of minute details and the search for the pattern in things. Let me give one example: with Monica in mind, I knew that to study the labour of a child on a field in the Zambezi Valley I would necessarily have to discover the field’s history, ownership, size, quality of soil, level of destruction by elephants, distance from water, effects of fertiliser, the amount of labour it demands across the seasons, and the number of baskets of millet it yields. The accumulation of detail can, now, lead to accusations of being old-fashioned; the riposte is to ask how sound the analysis can be without it. One thing I can confirm is that she was a tough supervisor. While conducting fieldwork for my dissertation in the Crossroads informal settlement,19 I invited Monica and the mothers of the children with whom I was working to a party in my room at the back of a shack. We 19

Pamela Reynolds, ‘Children of Crossroads: An Ethnographic Study of Cognition among Seven-year-old Xhosa Children in an Urban Environment’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1983), later amended and published as Childhood in Crossroads: Cognition and Society in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).

318

Inside African Anthropology

had a grand time and afterwards I asked Monica, ‘How will I know that I have enough data to leave the field?’ She drew herself up and said with firm Oxbridge enunciation, ‘When there are no further contradictions in your material.’ There was no timidity in what she set out to do: ‘My object is firstly to describe life as it is in Pondoland today.’ Nor was she timid as, in the years between 1931 and 1933, she rode her horse across the famous ‘crowd of little hills’ when doing fieldwork among the Pondo.20 What spirit, what confidence, what mastery to write in one’s twenties an ethnography of a people. (Yet she told me of her sense of inadequacy as she grew older.) Her ambition was to reach beyond description to analysis. She joined in with as many activities and discussions as possible in order to describe things as they were in the 1930s and as they were recalled as having been; and to place the ideal beside the practice. She would describe a custom or an institution as she saw it working and as it was described by ‘the ancients’, and then discuss modifications. She gave special attention to the effect of contact with other groups and how this influenced social cohesion and the sanctions that regulate society. She took pride in checking every piece of information or description. One inquiry led to another and another, until patterns formed and she could weave them into a monograph. Monica integrated a wealth of material in her book. In talking about her time in the field she said that her work on the Pondo was fine but that her work on the farms and the towns was not a success; it had been too brief, too light. She added that it is hard to study in cities. I was asked to write about Monica’s effect on my work. What amuses me right now is that she would never have passed the scrutiny of present funders or the inspection of the current thought-police who man the barricades of ethics boards. They might say: ‘Your object is to describe the life of the Pondo? You need a clear and well-defined research question, derived from and justified in the context of a particular body of anthropological theory.’ ‘You want to analyse change? Your research design must be developed to provide robust answers to research questions. You must give evidence of the feasibility of the study and its potential contribution to anthropological theory.’ ‘Every interlocutor, even a five-year old, must sign a consent form.’

These responses come from recent rejection letters I have received. It is the vital importance of evidence that Monica taught me to keep in mind always. On what basis can one claim to know something? Monica’s method was to crosshatch: she engraved with an intersecting series of 20

Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 15.

Gleanings and Leavings

319

Figure 10.2. Monica Wilson on a hike during her retirement, with the Hogsback in the background. She died peacefully on 26 October 1982 after a long battle with cancer.21

lines that covered and checked the terrain. Mine is more to draw with a compass: with a child or a youth at the centre I attempt to ‘go round; hem in; grasp mentally; accomplish’22 to cover the experiences that radiate from the centre and that are drawn in to affect it. Beyond her method, though, what stays with me always is her unapologetic fascination with anthropology and the indubitable foundation of her work in an understanding of the political injustice and devastation done to the people in South Africa.

21 22

WC, N1 Photographs of Monica Wilson. Reproduced with permission from Francis and Tim Wilson. Definition of ‘compass’ in D. Thomson, ed., Concise Oxford English Dictionary of Current English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 9th edition).

Bibliography

Archival Sources BC 880 MONICA AND GODFREY WILSON PAPERS [WILSON COLLECTION, WC], UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN LIBRARIES, MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT A. Catalogued materials As listed in Lesley Hart BC880 Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers: An Index compiled by Lesley Hart (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Libraries, 1999) [Wilson Collection] http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/index.php?html=/mss/newaids/BC880.HTM&mss collid=261 A Personal Papers A1 Godfrey Wilson A1.5 Diary, 1934–1935 A1.11 Budget of field expenses A1.14 Papers re Godfrey Wilson’s Death, 1944 A2 Monica Wilson A2.2 Pocket diaries, 1927–1930, 1935, 1947–1973, 1979–1980 A2.4 Address Book A2.5 School history book, 1925 A2.6 School reports, 1919–1924 A2.7 Certificate: Synod’s Examination in Religious Knowledge, 1919 A2.8 Presbyterian minister’s statement of Monica Wilson’s fitness to join congregation, 1926 A2.9 School and university accounts A2.10 Wedding invitation to Monica and Godfrey’s wedding, 1935 A2.12 Prescription for spectacles, 1938 A2.13 Funeral service for Monica Wilson, 1982 A2.14 Family tree A2.15 Notes: Anthropology in South Africa, recorded for Jom [sic] Fox, Behavioral Sciences Centre, April 1972 A2.16 Reports on overseas visits and special leave A2.17 Notes on anthropological work A2.22 Customs forms: r requesting permission to export Corona typewriter, 6.12.1932 321

322

Bibliography

r requesting permission to export HMV portable gramophone and records, 2.3.1935 B Correspondence B1 Letters from Monica Wilson to Godfrey Wilson, 15.02.1934–1944 B2 Letters from Godfrey Wilson to Monica Wilson, 30.06.1930–14.05.1944 B4 Letters from Godrey Wilson (mostly personal and with fellow anthropologists) B4.4 GW to and from Bronislaw Malinowski, MSS & TSS, 22.11.1934– 11.11.1938 B4.6 To and from Dr J H Oldham, TSS, 17.01.1936–22.06.1939 (both personal and in his position as Administrative Director of the African Institute) B4.7 To and from Audrey Richards, MSS & TSS, 27.03.1931–07.07.1941 B4.10 Correspondence with others in chronological order, MS & TSS, 1935– 1943 B4.11 Correspondence with and re: Rhodes Livingstone Institute, 14.10.1938– (Includes letter from Bruno Malinowski and letters from Max Gluckman) B4.12 Correspondence re: application to Rhodes University for Chair in Sociology, 23.12.1941–25.10.1941 B4.13 Correspondence (of GW and MW) with Makerere College, Uganda, 23.12.1943–12.10.1944 B4.14 Correspondence with the Rockefeller Foundation, 06.06.1934– 24.02.1938 B5 MW: Family correspondence B5.1 Letters MW to her father (David Hunter), 24.08.1918–19.04.1944 and letters from DAH to MW, 31.10.1937–25.03.1949 B5.2 From MW to her mother (Jessie Hunter), 01.11.1931, 1947–1948 B5.6 Correspondence with Prof & Mrs John Dover Wilson, 18.10.1936– 21.07.1946 B6 [MW] Correspondence with others B6.4 To and from Bice Crighton[sic]-Miller, 12.01.1973–25.04.1978 B6.5 To and from E E Evans-Pritchard, MSS & TSS, 04.06.1946–09.07.1946 B6.6 From Max Gluckman, TSS, 15.08.1942–15.01.1947 B6.13 To and from A R Radcliffe-Brown, 10.08.1946–1952 B6.14 To and from Audrey Richards, 28.08.1940–15.02.1982 B6.15 From E R Roux, 05.11.1928–05.12.1931 B6.16 From Isaac Schapera, MSS, 26.07.1938–01.11.1976 B6.20 Miscellaneous single letters B12 Correspondence with Botswana Society about lecture, 1969. Includes letter from Frieda Matthews and MW’s reply B13 Correspondence with Rhodes University re: Honorary degree, 1969–1970 C Godfrey Wilson: Writings and Talks C1 Malinowski seminars: notes on/papers prepared for Seminar paper read at the London School of Economics, 19.10.1933 Ten elements of social life: a suggested guide in the field. TSS. [Paper prepared for Bruno Malinowski seminar, 17.06.1936] The nature of an institution. MSS C4 Writings on religion (Includes material on the Nyakyusa).

Bibliography

323

D Nyakyusa Research D1 Godfrey Wilson’s notebooks D1.1 GW’s notebooks 1–79 (no. 12 missing) Index (incomplete) D1.2 John Mwaikombo [sic] notebooks J1-J20 D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo notebooks L1-L7 D1.4 T Mwanjin notebook D2 Folders of Age-villages The headings are those used by MW in labelling the folders D3 Folders on Communal Rituals D4 Missions/Christian influences D5 Kinship/Family D6 Other topics D6.2 Songs and folktales. Copied by MW, GW and clerk D6.3 Tradition Notes by clerk L D6.4 Race relations MW’s notes D6.5 Earning money MW’s notes Also notes by one of clerks D6.7 The Lupa 100 point questionnaire/survey form on the Lupa, compiled by GW Answers to some of the questions D7 Ngonde Research D8 MW’s and GW’s writing on the Nyakyusa D8.4 MS of GW’s book on Nyakyusa society D10 Letters to GW, mostly in Nyakyusa, 1933–39 Including from John Brown Mwaikombo [sic], Timothy Mwanjisi, W Ambilikile Mwaisemba and T L Mwaisumo D11 Correspondence with the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures including reports from the field, 1935–1939 D12 Photographs

E Broken Hill Research F The Analysis of Social Change F1 Notes and drafts, MSS and TSS F2 Letters of congratulations, 1945–1949, including from A R Radcliffe-Brown and Alfred Zimmern F3 Reviews

G Monica Wilson: Student Notes and Essays G1 Student essays, 1930, with comments by T C Hodson G2 Notes by MW, probably made while a student (2 folders)

324

Bibliography H Eastern Cape Research

H1 Reaction to Conquest H1.1 Early drafts, notes. Request slips for British Library Reading Room. H1.2 Letters received after publication, 1936–1938 H1.3 Reviews H2 Research in Auckland, Victoria East District H2.1 Sketches of clothing ornamentation, tobacco bags, basketwork, etc. Family trees H2.2 Fieldnotes, draft, TSS H2.3 Notes, in Xhosa [by assistant?] H4 Keiskama [sic] Hoek Rural Survey J University of Cape Town J1 Social Anthropology Department: administration J2 Social Anthropology Department: students J3 Examinations Correspondence with external examiners, copies of exam papers, 1953– 1970 J4 Reading lists and course programmes, 1953–1973 J5 Lecture notes [Includes some lectures she would have been given at the University of Fort Hare and Rhodes University] J6 Open Universities J6.1, Papers concerning Academic Freedom Committee and Open Universities, 1956–1966 J13 Other J13.3 Mafeje, Archie: The Role of the bard in a contemporary African community (offprint from Journal of African Languages, 6, 3 (1967). MSS notes by Archie Mafeje on Townsmen or Tribesmen by P Mayer K Langa K1 Correspondence K1.1 Correspondence re: Research into African Communities in the Western Cape, 1950–1962 K1.2 Correspondence with Archie Mafeje re research, 1960–1961 K1.4 Comments on TSS by D Hobart-Houghton and Francis Wilson K2 Interviews K2.1 Interviews (conducted by Dr Crosse-Upcott) with churches, 1955–1956 K2.2 Interviews with sports clubs (conducted by Dr Crosse-Upcott), 1955– 1956 K2.3 Interviews with clubs (mainly music) (conducted by Dr Crosse-Upcott), 1955–1956 K2.4 Other Interviews, including re Township affairs, tribal chiefs (conducted by Dr Crosse-Upcott), 1955–1956 K2.5 Notes made by Dr Crosse-Upcott and memos from MW to C-U K3 Interviews and notes by Archie Mafeje (7 folders) Includes notes to and from MW

Bibliography

325

K4 Notes made by Monica Wilson (4 folders) Notes made by Monica Wilson, with questions to ask researchers, including notes re churches, clubs and societies, demographic profiles K6 TSS of chapters or articles on Africans in Cape Town K7 Social harmony and discord in an urban location TSS K8 Langa Early drafts L Monica Wilson’s Writings and Talks L2 Lectures L2.1 Apologia: special lecture to UCT students about personal faith and anthropology L2.2 Lecture on ritual and symbolism to the Kolbe Society, 1956. N Photographs N1 Photographs of Monica Wilson N2 Photographs of Monica Wilson in groups N3 Photographs of Godfrey Wilson N4 Photographs of GW and MW and family N7 Unidentified photographs

David and Jessie Hunter Papers [Hunter Collection (HP)] AA PERSONAL AA1 Diaries AA1.1 Pocket diaries, 1890–1893, 1895, 1898–1948 AA1.4 Travel diaries Norway 1871 Cruise of the yacht ‘Osprey’, 1889 Victoria Falls 1904 AA2 Accounts of travels AA6 Notebook containing notes of thoughts on spiritual matters AA8 School certificates from Glasgow Academy, 1878–1880 AA10 Agreement of employment of David Hunter in Croggon & Co Ltd, London, 1886 AA11 Copy of minutes relating to the ordination to the eldership of Mr David Alexander Hunter 1895 AA22 Newspaper cuttings of the announcement of the marriage of Monica and Godfrey Wilson, 1935, and of the birth of Francis Wilson, 1939 AA24 Religious tracts: notes for sermons by DAH etc. BB Correspondence BB2 Letters from David Hunter to Jessie Hunter, 1900–1930 BB3 Letters from Jessie Hunter to David Hunter 1900–1940 & some undated

326

Bibliography

BB4 David Hunter: letters of introduction, 1881; 1885; 1893 BB5 Letters from James Stewart to David Hunter, 1893–1902 BB6 David Hunter’s correspondence, 1887–1947 DD Lovedale and Missionary Work DD1 David Hunter’s writing of Lovedale and mission work DD1.1 Report on tour of mission stations in South Africa, TSS, 10.10.1895 DD1.2 Report on a day’s activities at Lovedale, TSS DD1.3 Two rounds of the clock at Lovedale, offprint DD1.4 Recollections of a meeting of the Lovedale Literary Society DD1.7 The Story of the Lovedale Hospital, MSS DD1.8 The Mission field: the story of Lovedale II, TSS DD3 United Free Church of Scotland DD4 Education and teaching of crafts DD6 South African Outlook EE Photographs EE2–EE3 Family photograph albums EE6 Photographs of David and Jessie Hunter and children EE7 Photographs sent by Monica Wilson (Hunter) to her parents, mostly of university in England (annotated by Monica) EE8 Photographs of Monica and family EE11 Photographs of Lovedale and Alice EE12 Photographs of African scenes EE14 Packets of assorted photographs, mostly unidentified B. Uncatalogued materials CD: Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson, Hogsback, Eastern Cape, ‘Childhood’, 10 Jan. 1979 ‘Pondoland’, July 1979 ‘Bunyakyusa’, 4 Jan. 1982 CD: ‘Archie Mafeje Panel Discussion’: Anthropology Southern Africa Conference, East London, 10 September 2010, Stanley Baluku video recording uncat. corr., John Dover Wilson uncat. corr., Correspondence re Z.K. Matthews Biography uncat. corr., Isaac Schapera uncat. corr., Gaositwe Chiepe uncat. corr., L. Mqotsi uncat. corr., Max Gluckman uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje uncat. corr., J.D. Rheinallt Jones uncat. corr., Solomon Skosana uncat. corr., Colin Murray uncat. corr., Fort Hare Council uncat. corr., Frieda Matthews uncat. corr., Aelred Stubbs

Bibliography

327

uncat. corr., Federal Theological Seminary uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi uncat. corr., Archie Mafeje, 1960–1979 (includes some corr. with family members) uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Archie Mafeje uncat. corr., Robin Crosse-Upcott uncat. corr., Notes for ‘Reflections on Fieldwork’ uncat. corr., Schreuder uncat. corr., Martin West uncat. corr., David Philip uncat. corr., David Philip re Z.K. Biography uncat. corr., George Murdock uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson uncat. corr., Oxford History: Corr uncat. corr., Desmond Clark uncat. corr., George Park uncat. corr., Oxford History Reprint uncat. corr., Muriel Bradbrook uncat. corr., Elizabeth Colson uncat. corr., Jeff Guy uncat. corr., Hugh Montefiore uncat. material, Lectures, Third Theological Staff Institute, 1965 uncat. material, Analysis of Social Change: Business uncat. material, Files on Various Subjects Bo–Bu uncat. material, Occasional Papers: Talks and Addresses, 1967–69 Additions, Information Files (partly cat.), Migrant Labour Files on Various Subjects, L–N (partly cat.), Migrant Labour Occasional Papers, Social Change (uncat.) Other Archival Collections: United Kingdom London, Archives and Rare Books Division, London School of Economics Audrey Richards Papers Girton College Archive, Cambridge Memories of Muriel Bradbrook on tape (with a transcript), compiled during the 1980s as part of the series entitled ‘Strong-minded Dons’ Other Archival Collections: United States Department of Special Collections, UCLA Library The Papers of Hilda Kuper (1911–1992) Other Archival Collections: South Africa AU8HOE Winifred Hoernl´e Papers (Witwatersrand University, University Archive) A1419 Ellen Hellmann Papers (Witwatersrand University, William Cullen Papers) The Jack and Eileen Krige Papers (Killie Campbell Library, Durban) 1/NQL, vol. 50, file 2/3/2(11)

328

Bibliography

Death Notice of Mary Soga, MOOC 6/9/16812, 1950, 503/50 (Cape Archives Depot, Cape Town) University of Fort Hare Staff Files University of Fort Hare Student Files (University of Fort Hare, Alice)

Interviews Andrew Bank Interview with Dumisani Mbube, Ntibane, 14 March 2007 (with Leslie J. Bank). Telephonic interview with Archie Nkonyeni, Cape Town/East London, 4 December 2008. Interview with Lesley Hart, Cape Town, 21 January 2010. Telephonic interview with Nomfundo Mafeje, Cape Town/Cofimvaba, 6 June 2010. Interview with Ganief Hendricks, Cape Town, 12 June 2010. Telephonic interview with Nomfundo Mafeje, Cape Town/Cofimvaba, 15 June 2010. Interview with Margaret Green, Cape Town, 21 June 2010. Telephonic interview with Fikile Bam, Cape Town/Johannesburg, 9 July 2010. Leslie J. Bank Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 15 September 2008. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 28 September 2008. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 October 2008. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 4 November 2008. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 26 January 2009. ´ Morrow Sean Telephonic interview with Professor Elizabeth Colson, 19 November 2006. Interview with Joe Matthews, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 20 November 2006. Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006. Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 June 2007. Interview with John and Jean Comaroff, Cape Town, 4 September 2007. Interview with Neville Alexander, Cape Town, 3 March 2008. Interview with Francis Wilson, Cape Town, 7 March 2008. Interview with Professor Joanne Tyler, Hogsback, 16 August 2008.

General Titles Adesina, Jimmy A., ‘Against Alterity – The Pursuit of Endogeneity: Breaking Bread with Archie Mafeje’ in A. Olukoshi and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin, Special Issue: ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007), 3 and 4 (2008), 21–29. African Peoples’ Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA), APDUSA Views, 4 (April 1989) (Special Issue: Tribute to Leo Sihlali, 1915–89). Anon., ‘The Late Monica Wilson’, Veld and Flora, 68, 4 (1982), 111. Anon., ‘The Re-establishment of Yellowwood Forest’, Veld and Flora, 68, 4 (1982), 112.

Bibliography

329

Assubuji, Rui C. de N., ‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography: Monica Hunter Wilson’s Photographs in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa, 1931–1938’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010). Atmore, Anthony and Nancy Westlake, ‘A Liberal Dilemma: A Critique of the Oxford History of South Africa’, Race, 14, 2 (1972), 107–136. Baines, Gary, A History of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 1903–1953 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2002). Bank, Andrew, Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek– Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006). Bank, Andrew, ‘The “Intimate Politics” of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and Her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–1932’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34, 3 (2008), 557–574. Bank, Andrew, The Life, Work and Legacy of Monica Hunter Wilson (1908–1982) (East London: University of Fort Hare, FHISER Research Series No. 9, 2008). Bank, Andrew, ‘The Making of a Woman Anthropologist: Monica Hunter at Girton College, Cambridge, 1927–30’, African Studies, 68, 1 (April 2009), 29–56. Bank, Andrew, Archie Mafeje: The Life and Work of an African Anthropologist (1936–2007) (East London: Fort Hare University Press, 2010). Bank, Andrew, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson (1908–1982)’ in Robert Gordon, Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons, eds, Fifty Key Anthropologists (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 255–260. Bank, Leslie J., Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City (London: Pluto Press, 2011). Barber, Karin, ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). Becker, Heike and Emile Boonzaier, eds, ‘“Remembering Monica”: Monica Wilson’s Students Appreciate Their Teacher’ in Anthropology Southern Africa Programme and Abstract Book (Cape Town: University of the Western Cape, 2008), 75–87. Beinart, William, The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982). Beinart, William, ‘Speaking for Themselves’ in Andrew D. Spiegel and Patrick A. McAllister, eds, Tradition and Transition in Southern Africa: Festschrift for Philip and Iona Mayer (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1991), 11–38. Beinart, William and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and the Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987). Berg, Maxine, A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Biko, Steve, I Write What I Like, ed. Fr. Aelred Stubbs, C.R. (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1987 [1978]). Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual Works’ in Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma and Moishe Postone, eds, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 263–275. Boyd, Valerie, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (London: Virago, 2003).

330

Bibliography

Bradford, Helen, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987). Brokensha, David, ‘Monica Wilson 1908–1982: An Appreciation’, Africa, 53, 3 (1983), 83–87. Brokensha, David, ‘Monica Wilson (1908–1982) and Social Change’, Anthropology Southern Africa, 29, 1 & 2 (2006), 1–7. Broun, Kenneth S., Black Lawyers, White Courts: The Soul of South African Law (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000). Brown, Richard, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule: Godfrey Wilson and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute’ in Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), 173–197. Brown, Richard, ‘Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist: Max Gluckman in Northern Rhodesia’, Journal of African History, 20, 4 (1979), 227– 232. Brown, Sterling A., Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, eds, Negro Caravan (New York: Dryden, 1941). Burchell, David E., ‘The Emergence and Growth of Student Militancy at the University College of Fort Hare in the 1940s and 1950s’, Journal of the University of Durban-Westville, 3 (1986), 149–167. Cambridge University, Cambridge University Examination Papers: Michaelmas Term 1929 to Easter Term 1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). Camerini, Jane R., ‘Wallace in the Field’, Osiris, 11 (1996), 44–65. Carr, Edward H., What is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961). Carstens, Peter, ‘Introduction’ in Carstens, Peter, Gerald Klinghardt and Martin West, eds, Trails in the Thirstland: The Anthropological Field Diaries of Winifred Hoernl´e (Cape Town: University of Cape Town African Studies Centre, 1987). Carstens, Peter, Gerald Klinghardt and Martin West, eds, Trails in the Thirstland: The Anthropological Field Diaries of Winifred Hoernl´e (Cape Town: University of Cape Town African Studies Centre, 1987). Carton, Ben, ‘Fount of Culture: Legacies of the “James Stuart Archive” in South African Historiography’, History in Africa, 30 (2003), 87–106. Charsley, Simon R., The Princes of Nyakyusa (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969). Charsley, Simon R., ‘Letter’, Africa, 44, 4 (1974), 422–423. Clifford, James, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’ in Roger Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 47–70. Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Comaroff, Jean, ‘Monica Wilson and the Practice of “Deep Ethnography”: Roundtable on South African Women Anthropologists and Ethnography’ (unpublished paper presented at the Anthropology Southern Africa Conference, University of the Western Cape, September 2008). Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (1997).

Bibliography

331

Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff, eds, Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Post-Colonial Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Comaroff, John L., Jean Comaroff and Deborah James, eds, Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007). Cooppan, Somarsundarum, Godfrey M. Pitje and Richard E. van der Ross, Four Essays on Education (Wynberg: Teachers’ Educational and Professional Association, 1959). Crosse-Upcott, A. Robin W., ‘Social Structure of the ki-Ngindo-Speaking Peoples’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1956). Currey, Ronald F., Rhodes University 1904–1970: A Chronicle (Grahamstown: Rhodes University, 1970). De Boeck, Filip, ‘The Divine Seed: Children, Gift and Witchcraft in the Democratic Republic of Congo’ in Filip De Boeck and Alcinda Honwana, eds, Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Post-Colonial Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 61–75. de Chardin, P. Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1959 [1955]). de Kock, Leon, Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996). Delius, Peter, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983). Delius, Peter, A Lion amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996). Delius, Peter and Clive Glaser, ‘Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Perspective’ in Peter Delius and Liz Walker, African Studies Special Issue: AIDS in Context, 61, 1 (2002), 27–54. Delius, Peter and Clive Glaser, ‘The Myths of Polygamy: A History of ExtraMarital and Multi-Partnership Sex in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, 50 (2004), 84–114. ¨ Delius, Peter and Kirsten Ruther, ‘J. A. Winter: Visionary or Mercenary? A Missionary Life in Colonial Context’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 2 (2010), 303–324. Deslandes, Paul R., Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the British Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). de Wet, Chris, Moving Together, Drifting Apart: Betterment Planning and Villagisation in a South African Homeland (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995). Dover Wilson, John, Milestones on the Dover Road (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Driberg, Jack Herbert, The East African Problem (London: Williams and Norgate, 1930). Driberg, Jack Herbert, At Home with the Savage (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1932). Driberg, Jack Herbert, The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923).

332

Bibliography

Dubow, Saul, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995). Dubow, Saul and Alan Jeeves, eds, South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005). du Toit, Marijke, ‘The General View and Beyond: From Slum-Yard to Township in Ellen Hellmann’s Photographs of Women and the African Familial in the 1930s’ in Patricia Hayes, ed., Gender and History: Special Issue Gender and Visuality, 17, 3 (2005), 593–626. Edgar, Robert R., An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche (Athens, OH and Johannesburg: Ohio University Press and Wits University Press, 1992). Ellison, James G., ‘Bilingual Assistants and “Tribal” Bodies in Colonial Tanganyika’ (unpublished paper presented at the African Studies Association meeting, Chicago, 25 October 1998), http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/∼ellison/bodies. html. Ellison, James G., ‘Transforming Obligations, Performing Identity: Making the Nyakyusa in a Colonial Context’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Florida, 1999). Ellison, James G., ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: Anthropology and Social Justice’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African Institute, Classics in African Anthropology Series, 2009), 27–45. Elton Mills, M. E. and Monica Wilson, Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, Vol. 4: Land Tenure (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1952). Engelke, Matthew, ‘The Endless Conversation: Fieldwork, Writing and the Marriage of Victor and Edith Turner’ in Richard Handler, ed., Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 6–49. Erikson, Erik H., Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958). Erikson, Erik H., Insight and Freedom (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1968). Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., The Nuer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). Fabian, Johannes, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000). Fallers, Lloyd, ‘The Predicament of the Modern African Chief: An Instance from Uganda’, American Anthropologist, 57, 2 (1955), 290–305. Fardon, Richard, Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography (London: Routledge, 1999). Fegan, Edith S., ‘A Near-Eastern Tour’, The Girton Review, 92 (1933), 18– 24. Ferguson, James, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999). Field, Sean, ‘Sites of Memory in Langa’ in Sean Field, Renate Meyer and Felicity Swanson, eds, Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2007), 21–37. Ford, John, The Role of Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971).

Bibliography

333

Fortes, Meyer, ‘Isaac Schapera: An Appreciation’ in Meyer Fortes and Sheila Patterson, eds, Studies in African Anthropology: Essays Presented to Professor Schapera (London, New York and San Francisco, CA: Academic, 1975), 1–6. Fortes, Meyer and Sheila Patterson, eds, Studies in African Anthropology: Essays Presented to Professor Schapera (London, New York and San Francisco, CA: Academic, 1975). Foucault, Michel, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001). Freeman, Gwendolen, Alma Mater: Memoirs of Girton College 1926–1929 (Cambridge: Pevensey Press, 1990). Freud, Sigmund, ‘Constructions in Analysis’ in Adam Phillips, ed., Sigmund Freud: Wild Analysis (London: Penguin, 2002), 212–222. Gacs, Ute, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre and Ruth Weinberg, Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). Gaitskell, Deborah, ‘Introduction’, Journal of Southern African Studies: Special Issue: Women in Southern Africa, 10, 1 (1983), 1–13. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Geertz, Clifford, ‘The Javanese Kijaji: The Changing Role of a Cultural Broker’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2, 2 (1960), 228–249. Gerhart, Gail M. and Thomas Karis, eds, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1964, vol. 4: Political Profiles, 1882–1964 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1977). Gerhart, Gail M., Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: UCLA Press, 1978). Geschiere, Peter, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-Colonial Africa (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 1997). Gewald, Jan-Bart, ‘Researching and Writing in the Twilight of an Imagined Conquest: Anthropology in Northern Rhodesia, 1930–1960’, History and Anthropology, 18, 4 (2007), 459–487. Gillespie, Kelly, ‘“Containing the Wandering Native”: Racial Jurisdiction and the Liberal Politics of Prison Reform in 1940s South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37, 3 (2011), 499–515. Glaser, Clive, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000). Gluckman, Max, ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Zululand’, Bantu Studies, 14 (1940), 1–30; 147–174. Gluckman, Max, ‘Some Processes of Social Change Illustrated from Zululand’, African Studies [formerly Bantu Studies], 1 (1942), 243–260. Gluckman, Max, ‘Introductory Note’ in E. Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard (Cape Town and Livingstone: Oxford University Press and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1948: RLI Papers No. 13). Gluckman, Max, ‘Anthropology and Apartheid: The Work of South African Anthropologists’ in Meyer Fortes and Sheila Patterson, eds, Studies in African Anthropology: Essays Presented to Professor Schapera (London, New York and San Francisco, CA: Academic, 1975), 21–40. Gluckman, Max, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London: Cohen and West, 1963). Gluckman, Max, J. Clyde Mitchell and John A. Barnes, ‘The Village Headman in British Central Africa’, Africa, 19, 2 (1949), 89–106.

334

Bibliography

Golde, Peggy, ed., Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences (Chicago, IL: Aldine Press, 1970). Gordon, Robert, ‘Apartheid’s Anthropologists: The Genealogy of Afrikaner Anthropology’, American Ethnologist, 15, 3 (1988), 535–552. Gordon, Robert, ‘Early Anthropology in South Africa’, African Studies, 49, 1 (1990), 15–48. Guy, Jeff, ‘Class, Imperialism and Literary Criticism: William Ngidi, John Colenso and Matthew Arnold’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 23, 2 (1997), 219–241. Hamilton, Carolyn, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998). Hamilton, Carolyn, ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’, History in Africa, 38 (2011), 319–342. Hamilton, Carolyn, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Roger Salek, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002). Hammond-Tooke, W. David, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africas’s Anthropologists, 1920–1990 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, [1997] 2001, 2nd edition). Hammond-Tooke, W. David, ‘Six Native Churches: A Preliminary Survey of Religion in an Urban Location’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1948). Hancock, William K., Discovering Monaro: A Study of Man’s Impact on His Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Handler, Richard, ed., Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Harries, Patrick, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007). Harries, Patrick, ‘Field Sciences in Scientific Fields: Entomology, Botany and the Early Ethnographic Monograph in the Work of H. A. Junod’ in Saul Dubow, ed., Science and Society in Southern Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 11–41. Hart, Lesley, BC880 The Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers: An Index compiled by Lesley Hart (Cape Town: UCT Libraries, 1999). Hartmann, Wolframm, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes, eds, The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town: Cape Town University Press; Windhoek, Namibia: Out of Africa; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998). Hellmann, Ellen, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slumyard (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, Rhodes-Livingstone Institute Papers, No. 13, 1948). Hendricks, Fred T., ‘Editorial: A Brief Tribute to Archie Mafeje’, African Sociological Review, 11, 1 (2007), 1–3. Hendricks, Fred T., ‘The Mafeje Affair: UCT, Apartheid and the Question of Academic Freedom’, African Studies, 67, 3 (2008), 432–452. Hodson, Thomas Callan, The Primitive Cultures of India (London: The Royal Asiatic Society, 1922). Hoernl´e, Agnes Winifred, ‘Review of Reaction to Conquest’, Africa, 10, 1 (1937), 121–126. Hofmeyr, Isabel, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Bibliography

335

Honikman, Kate, ‘Processes and Problems: First-Year Students at a South African University’ (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1982). Howarth, Jane, ‘Women’ in Brian Harrison, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. 8: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994), 345–376. Hunter, Monica, ‘Results of Culture Contact on the Pondo and Xosa Family’, South African Journal of Science, 29 (1932), 681–686. Hunter, Monica, ‘The Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Status of Pondo Women’, Africa, 7, 3 (1933), 259–276. Hunter, Monica, ‘In Pondoland’, The Girton Review, 92 (Easter Term 1933), 27–29. Hunter, Monica, ‘Review of Valenge Women by E. Dora Earthy’, Africa, 7, 1 (1934), 110–112. Hunter, Monica, ‘Methods of Study of Culture Contact’, Africa, 7, 3 (1934), 335–350. Hunter, Monica, ‘The Effects of Contact with Europeans upon a South-Eastern Bantu Group’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1934). Hunter, Monica, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1936; Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1961, 2nd edition; Cape Town: David Philip in associations with Rex Collings, London, 1979, 3rd edition; Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African Institute, 2009: Classics in African Anthropology Series, 4th edition). Hunter, Monica, ‘An African Christian Morality’, Africa, 10, 3 (1937), 265– 291. Hyslop, Jonathan, The Classroom Struggle: Policy and Resistance in South Africa, 1940–1990 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1999). Jacobs, Nancy J., ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48, 3 (2006), 564–603. Jacobs, Nancy J., ‘Servants to Science: African Assistants in Twentieth-Century Ornithology’ (unpublished seminar paper, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, May 2006). Jones, Hugh M., ‘Review of Langa, The Second Generation and African Workers in Town’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 5, 1 (1967), 157–158. Joseph, Helen, If This Be Treason (London: Andr´e Deutsch, 1963). Junod, Henri Alexandre, The Life of a South African Tribe (Neuchatel: A. Freres, 1912–13), 2 vols. Kaberry, Phyllis M., ed., The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945). Kallaway, Peter, ‘Welfare and Education in British Colonial Africa and South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s’, Paedogogica Historica, 41, 3 (2005), 337– 356. Kallaway, Peter, ‘Conference Litmus: The Development of a Conference and Policy Culture in the Interwar Period with Special Reference to the New Education Fellowship and British Colonial Education in Southern Africa’ in Kim Tolley, ed., Transformations in Schooling: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 123–149. Kallaway, Peter, ‘Education, Health and Social Welfare in the Late Colonial Context: The International Missionary Council and Educational Transition

336

Bibliography

in the Interwar Years with Specific Reference to Colonial Africa’, History of Education, 38, 2 (2009), 217–246. Kallaway, Peter, ‘Science Policy: Anthropology and Education in British Colonial Africa during the Inter-War Years’, Paedogogica Historica [forthcoming]. Kerr, Alexander, Fort Hare, 1915–48: The Evolution of an African College (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1968). Khumalo, V., ‘Ekhukhanyeni Letter-Writers: A Historical Inquiry into Epistolary Network(s) and Political Imagination in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa’ in Karin Barber, ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 113– 142. Kjekshus, Helge, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History (London: James Currey, 1996). Krige, Eileen Jensen and Jack Krige, The Realm of a Rain-Queen: A Study of the Pattern of Lovedu Society (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1943). Kros, Cynthia, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). Kuklick, Henrika, ed., A New History of Anthropology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Kuklick, Henrika, ‘Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology’, Isis, 102, 1 (2011), 1–33. Kuper, Adam, Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School, 1922–1972 (London: Routledge, 1973). Kuper, Hilda, Sobhuza II: Ngwenyama and King of Swaziland (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1978). Kuper, Leo, Race, Class and Power: Ideology and Revolutionary Change in Plural Societies (Gloucester: Gerald Duckworth, 1974). Lamphere, Louise, ‘Unofficial Histories: A Vision of Anthropology from the Margins’, American Anthropologist, 106, 1 (2004), 126–139. Lancaster, Chet and Kenneth P. Vickery, eds, The Tonga-Speaking Peoples of Zambia and Zimbabwe (Lanham, MD: University Press of America). Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965). Lawrance, Benjamin N., Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts, eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Leach, Edmund, ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 13 (1984), 1–22. Lekgoathi, Sekibakiba Peter, ‘“Colonial” Experts, Local Interlocutors, Informants and the Making of an Archive of the “Transvaal Ndebele”, 1930–1989’, Journal of African History, 50, 1 (2009), 61–80. Lekgoathi, Sekibakiba Peter, ‘Sophonia Poonyane and the Researches of Isaac Schapera in Colonial Botswana’ (unpublished paper presented at the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom Biennial Conference, University of Oxford, September 2010). Levin, Ruth, Marriage in Langa Native Location (Cape Town: University of Cape Town School of African Studies, 1947). Levine, Roger S., A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010).

Bibliography

337

Lodge, Tom, ‘The Cape Town Troubles, March–April 1960’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 4, 2 (April 1978), 216–239. Lodge, Tom, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983). Lutkehaus, Nancy C., ‘“She Was So Cambridge”: Camilla Wedgwood and the History of Women in British Social Anthropology’, American Ethnologist, 13, 4 (1986), 776–798. Lutkehaus, Nancy C., Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008). Lye, William F. and Colin Murray, Transformations on the Highveld: The Tswana and Southern Sotho (Cape Town: David Philip, 1980). Mackenzie, David R., The Spirit-Ridden Konde: A Record of the Interesting but Steadily Vanishing Customs & Ideas Gathered during Twenty-Four Years’ Residence among These Shy Inhabitants of the Lake Nyasa Region, from Witch Doctors, Diviners, Hunters, Fishers & Every Native Source (London: Seeley, 1925). Macmillan, Hugh, ‘“Paralysed Conservatives”: W. M. Macmillan, the Social Scientists, and “the Common Society”, 1923–48’ in Hugh Macmillan and Shula Marks, eds, Africa and Empire: W. M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic (Aldershot: Temple Smith, 1989), 72–90. Macmillan, Hugh, ‘Return to the Malungwana Drift: Max Gluckman, the Zulu Nation and the Common Society’, African Affairs, 94, 374 (1995), 39–65. Macmillan, Hugh, ‘From Race to Ethnic Identity: South Central Africa, Social Anthropology and the Shadow of the Holocaust’ in Megan Vaughan and Patrick Harries, eds, Social Dynamics Special Issue: Essays in Commemoration of Leroy Vail, 26, 2 (2000), 87–115. Macmillan, Hugh, ‘From “Rational Divines” to the Northern Rhodesian Mines: Christianity, Political Economy and Social Anthropology in Southern Africa’ (unpublished paper presented at the Monica Hunter Centenary Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June 2008), 1–3. Macmillan, William M., ‘Review’, International Affairs, 16, 2 (1937), 314–315. Macmillan, William M., The Cape Colour Question: A Historical Survey (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927). Mafeje, Archie, ‘A Chief Visits Town’, Journal of Local Administration Overseas, 2, 2 (1963), 248–263. Mafeje, Archie, ‘Leadership and Change: A Study of Two South African Peasant Communities’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1963). Mafeje, Archie, ‘Africanity: A Commentary by Way of Conclusion’, CODESRIA Bulletin, 3 & 4 (2001), 15–16. Mafeje, Archie, ‘A Commentary on Anthropology and Africa’, CODESRIA Bulletin, 3 & 4 (2001), 15–21. Mafeje, Archie, ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’ in Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 164–184. Mager, Anne, Gender and Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945–59 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999). Magubane, Bernard, ‘Whose Memory, Whose History’ in Hans Erik Stolten, ed., History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2007), 251–279. Magubane, Bernard, Bernard Magubane: My Life and Times (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010).

338

Bibliography

Mair, Lucy, Native Policies in Africa (London: Routledge, 1936). Mair, Lucy, ‘Malinowski and the Study of Social Change’ in Raymond Firth, ed., Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Malinowski (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 229–244. Majeke, Nosipho (Dora Taylor), The Rˆole of the Missionaries in Conquest (Cape Town: Society of Young Africa, 1952). Malapo, Rashidi M., ‘Sports, Festivals and Popular Politics: Aspects of the Social and Popular Culture in Langa Township, 1945–1970’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994). Malherbe, Vertrees C., Krotoa or Eva: A Woman Between (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, 1991). Malinowski, Bronislaw M., ‘Dreams and Deeds’ in B. Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 30–55. Malinowski, Bronislaw M., ‘Native Education and Culture Contact’, International Review of Missions, 25 (1936), 480–515. Malinowski, Bronislaw M., ‘Introductory Essay: The Anthropology of Changing African Cultures’ in Bronislaw M. Malinowski, ed., Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). Malinowski, Bronislaw M., A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, trans. N. Guterman (London: Routledge, 1967). Marks, Shula, ‘African and Afrikaner History’, Journal of African History, 11, 3 (1970), 435–447. Massey, Daniel, Under Protest: The Rise of Student Resistance at the University of Fort Hare (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). Matthews, Frieda Bokwe, Remembrances (Bellville: Mayibuye, 1995). Maxwell, David, ‘The Soul of the Luba: W. F. P. Burton, Missionary Ethnography and Belgian Colonial Science’, History and Anthropology, 19, 4 (2008), 325– 351. Mayer, Philip with Iona Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of Urbanisation in a South African City (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, Xhosa in Town Series 1961). Mbembe, Achille, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’ in Carolyn Hamilton et al., eds, Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002). McCracken, John, Politics and Christianity in Malawi 1875–1940: The Impact of the Livingstonia Mission in the Northern Province (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). McKenny, Michael G., ‘The Social Structure of the Nyakyusa: A Re-evaluation’, Africa, 43, 1 (1973), 91–107. McKenny, Michael G., ‘Letter’, Africa, 44, 4 (1974), 423–424. McWilliams-Tullberg, Rita, Women at Cambridge: A Men’s University – Though of a Mixed Type (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), 1 n 42. Mead, Margaret, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). Mendelsohn, Richard and Milton Shain, The Jews of South Africa: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008). Miller, Colin, ‘“Julle Kan Ma New York Toe Gaan, Ek Bly in die Manenberg”: An Oral History of Jazz in Cape Town from the Mid-1950s to the Mid-1970s’ in Sean Field et al., eds, Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007), 133–149.

Bibliography

339

Mills, David, ‘How Not to Be a “Government House Pet”: Audrey Richards and the East African Institute for Social Research’ in Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills and Muftafa Babiker, eds, African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2006), 76–98. Modell, Judith Schachter, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). Mojapelo, Phineas M., ‘Profile: Dr Godfrey Mokgonane Pitje – A Vital Cog in the Liberation Struggle’, African Law Review, 1988, 4–8. Mokoena, Hlonipha, ‘An Assembly of Readers: Magema Fuze and his Ilanga lase Natal Readers’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35, 3 (2009), 595–608. Mokoena, Hlonipha, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual (Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2011). Morrow, Se´an, ‘“This Is from the Firm”: The Anthropological Partnership of Monica and Godfrey Wilson’ (unpublished paper presented at the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June 2008). Morrow Se´an and Khayalethu Gxabalashe, ‘The Records of the University of Fort Hare’, History in Africa, 27 (2000), 491–493. Mqotsi, Livingstone and Nimrod Mkele, ‘A Separatist Church: iBandla likaKrestu’, African Studies, 5, 2 (1946), 106–142. Mqotsi, Livingstone, ‘A Study of Ukuthwasa: Being a Syndrome Recognised by the Xhosa as a Qualification for Being Initiated as a Doctor’ (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1957). Mqotsi, Livingstone, House of Bondage (London: Karnak, 1991). Mqotsi, Livingstone, A Study of Ukuthwasa (East London: Iqula, 2007). Murdock, George Peter, ‘British Social Anthropology’, American Anthropologist, 53, 4 (1951), 465–473. Murray, A. Victor, The School in the Bush: A Critical Study of the Theory and Practice of Native Education in Africa (London: Longmans Green, 1929). Murray, Bruce K., Wits, the Early Years: A History of the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Its Precursors, 1896–1939 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1982). Murray, Colin, ‘“So Truth Be in the Field”: A Short Appreciation of Monica Wilson’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 1 (1983), 129–130. Ngqongqo, Songeza, ‘Mpilo Walter Benson Rubusana 1858–1910: The Making of the New African Elite in the Eastern Cape’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Fort Hare, 1996). Niehaus, Isak, ‘Adam Kuper: An Anthropologist’s Account’ in Deborah James, Evie Plaice and Christina Toren, eds, Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts (New York: Berghahn Press, 2010), 171–187. Niehaus, Isak, Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press for the International African Institute, 2013). Ntsebeza, Lungisile, ‘Obituary: Archie Mafeje’, New Agenda, 27 (2007), 48–49. Olukoshi, Adebayo and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, ‘Editorial’, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue: ‘Archie Mafeje (1935–2007): A Giant Has Moved On’, 3 and 4 (2008), 1–4. Osborn, Emily, ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History, 44, 1 (2003), 29–50. Parezo, Nancy J., ed., Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993).

340

Bibliography

Pauw, Berthold A., The Second Generation: A Study of the Family among Urbanised Bantu in East Londo (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, Xhosa in Town Series, 1963). Peel, J. D. Y., ‘Wilson [n´ee Hunter], Monica (1908–1982)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Peires, Jeffrey B., The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981). Peterson, Derek R., Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of the Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004). Pile, Steve, ‘Perpetual Returns: Vampires and the Ever Colonised City’ in Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Wei Wei Yeo, eds, Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (London: Routledge, 2003). Pitje, Godfrey M., ‘Traditional and Modern Systems of Male Education amongst the Pedi and Cognate Tribes’ (MA thesis, University of South Africa, 1948). Pitje, Godfrey M., ‘Traditional Systems of Male Education among Pedi and Cognate Tribes’, African Studies, Part 1: 9, 2 (1950), 53–76; Part 2: 9, 3 (1950), 105–124; Part 3: 9, 4 (1950), 194–201. Pitje, Godfrey M., ‘Sex Education among the Pedi’, International Journal of Sexology, 4 (1951), 212–216. Pitje, Godfrey M., ‘The Effect of Pass Laws on African Life’: Address to South African Institute of Race Relations Council (Cape Town: SAIRR, 1961). Pogrund, Benjamin, How Can Man Die Better: The Life of Robert Sobukwe (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2006 [1990]). Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991). Powdermaker, Hortense, Copper Town: Changing Africa: The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Powdermaker, Hortense, ‘Review of Langa’, American Anthropologist, 66, 5 (1964), 1199–1201. Powdermaker, Hortense, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966). Raban, Jonathan, Soft City (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974). Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. and Daryll Forde, eds, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1950). Raffles, Hugh, ‘Intimate Knowledge’, International Social Science Journal, 54, 3 (2002), 325–335. Ranger, Terence, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64 (Harare: Baobab, 1995). Ranger, Terence, ‘Scotland Yard in the Bush: Medicine Murders, Child Witches and the Construction of the Occult’, Africa, 77, 2 (2002), 272–283. Rassool, Ciraj Shahid, ‘The Individual, Auto/Biography and History in South Africa’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2004). Rassool, Ciraj Shahid, ‘Writing, Authorship and I. B. Tabata’s Biography: From Collective Leadership to Presidentialism’, Kronos: Southern African Histories (Special Issue: Making Histories), eds, Ciraj S. Rassool and Leslie Witz, 34 (2008), 190–215. Raum, Johannes W., ‘Zacharia Keodirelang Matthews as a “Social Anthropologist”’ in Africa 2000: Forty Years of African Studies in Prague, eds, L. Kropacek and Peter Skalnik (Prague: Set Out, 2001), 187–193.

Bibliography

341

Raum, Otto F., Chaga Childhood: A Description of Indigenous Education in an East African Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1940). Reader, Desmond H., The Black Man’s Portion: History, Demography and Living Conditions in the Native Locations of East London, Cape Province (Cape Town: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Xhosa in Town Series, 1961). Reader, Desmond H., ‘Review of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township’, African Studies, 22, 4 (1963), 190–191. Reynolds, Pamela, ‘Children of Crossroads: An Ethnographic Study of Cognition among Seven-year-old Xhosa Children in an Urban Environment’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1983). Reynolds, Pamela, Childhood in Crossroads: Cognition and Society in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). Reynolds, Pamela, ‘Adolescents and Individuality in a Zimbabwean Tongo Community’ in Chet Lancaster and Kenneth P. Vickery, eds, The Tonga-Speaking Peoples of Zambia and Zimbabwe: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Colson (Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, Toronto and Plymouth: University Press of America, 2007), 171–202. Reynolds, Pamela, War in Worcester, Youth and the Apartheid State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Reynolds, Pamela and Colleen C. Cousins, Lwaano Lwanyika: Tonga Book of the Earth (Harare: Baobob, 1991). Rich, Paul, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Richards, Audrey, ‘Social Change in Central Africa: Review of The Analysis of Social Change’, Spectator, 15 February 1946, 16. Richards, Audrey, ‘Monica Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 1–13. Roberts, J. M. Pelican History of the World (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, [1976] 1980). Robeson, Esmeralda G., African Journey (New York: John Day, 1945). Ross, Robert, ‘Hermanus Matroos, aka Ngxukumeshe: A Life on the Border’, in Andrew Bank and Leslie J. Bank eds, Kronos: Journal of Cape History (Special Issue: Eastern Cape), 30 (2004), 47–69. Roux, Eddie, Time Longer Than Rope (London: Rex Collings, 1948). Roux, Eddie and Win Roux, Rebel Pity: The Life of Eddie Roux (London: Rex Collings, 1970). Sanjek, Roger, ed., Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990). Sanjek, Roger, ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and Their Ethnographers’, Anthropology Today, 9, 2 (1993), 13–18. Saunders, Christopher, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Class and Race (Cape Town: David Philip, 1988). Saunders, Christopher and Robin Derricourt, eds, Beyond the Cape Frontier: Studies in the History of the Transkei and Ciskei (Cape Town: Longman, 1974). Schapera, Isaac, The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1930).

342

Bibliography

Schumaker, Lyn, ‘A Tent with a View: Colonial Officers, Anthropologists, and the Making of the Field in Northern Rhodesia, 1937–1960’, Osiris, 11 (1996), 237–258. Schumaker, Lyn, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001). Schumaker, Lyn, ‘The Director as Significant Other: Max Gluckman and Team Research at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute’ in Richard Handler, ed., Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 91–130. Schumaker, Lyn, ‘Women in the Field in the Twentieth Century: Revolution, Involution, Devolution?’ in Henrika Kuklick, ed., A New History of Anthropology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 277–293. Shanafelt, Rosalyn, ‘How Charles Darwin Got Emotional Expression out of South Africa (and the People Who Helped Him)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 4 (2003), 815–842. Sharp, John, ‘Mafeje and Langa: The Start of an Intellectual’s Journey’ in Adebayo Olukoshi and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue: ‘Archie Mafeje (1935–2007): A Giant Has Moved On’, 3 and 4 (2008), 31–36. Shepherd, Nick, ‘“When the Hand That Holds the Trowel Is Black”: Disciplinary Practices of Self-Representation and the Issue of “Native” Labour in Archaeology’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 3, 3 (2003), 334–352. Shepherd, Robert H. W., Lovedale, South Africa, 1824–1955 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1971). Simons, H. J. and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969). Skotnes, Pippa, ed., Claim to the Country (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007). Smith, Edwin W. and A. Murray Dale, The Ila-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia (London: Macmillan, 1920), 2 vols. Smith Janet and Beauregard Tromp, Hani: A Life Too Short (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2009). Smith, Robert J., ‘Hearing Voices, Joining the Chorus: Appropriating Someone Else’s Fieldnotes’ in Roger Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 356–370. Southall, Aidan, ‘Review of Langa.’ The American Journal of Sociology, 70, 4 (1965), 510–511. Stapleton, Timothy J., Maqoma: Xhosa Resistance to Colonial Advance, 1798–1873 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1994). Steinberg, Jonny, The Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey through a Great Epidemic (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008). Stocking, George W. Jnr, ed., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). Strathern, Marilyn, Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in North-West Essex in the Nineteen-Sixties, Foreword by Audrey Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Switzer, Les, Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1993). Thompson, Leonard, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

Bibliography

343

Thornton, Robert, ‘Narrative Ethnography in Africa, 1850–1920: The Creation and Capture of an Appropriate Domain for Anthropology’, Man, 18, 3 (1983), 502–520. Tilley, Helen, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). Tilley, Helen with Robert Gordan, eds, Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Turner, Victor W., The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1967). van der Horst, Sheila T., African Workers in Town: A Study of Labour in Cape Town (Cape Town, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Vansina, Jan, ‘Review: Monica Wilson’s For Men and Elders’, African Economic History , 8 (1979), 267–269. Vaughan, Megan, ‘Anthropologists and Others in South-West Tanganyika’ (unpublished paper presented at the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June 2008). Vaughan, Megan, ‘Mr Mdala Writes to the Governor: Negotiating Colonial Rule in Nyasaland’, History Workshop Journal, 60, 1 (2005), 171–189. Vendler, Helen, Seamus Heaney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Vicinus, Margaret, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985). Vincent, Kerry, ‘Literature as Laboratory: Hilda Kuper’s Factional Representations of Swaziland’, African Studies, 70, 1 (2011), 89–111. Wanless, Ann, ‘The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Fourie Collection of Khoisan Ethnologica’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2007). Wayne (Malinowska), Helena, ‘Bronislaw Malinowski: The Influence of Various Women on his Life and Works’, American Ethnologist, 12, 3 (1985), 529–540. Webb, Colin and John Wright, eds, The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples, vols. 1–6 (Pietermaritzburg: Natal University/University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 2001, 2012). Weintroub, Jill, ‘A Working Life: The Linguistic and Rock Art Research of Dorothea Frances Bleek (1873–1948)’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010). Welsh, A. S., Report of the East London Municipal Native Commission of Enquiry (Native Affairs Department, Pretoria: Government Printers, 1949). West, Martin E., ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: A Memoir’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 45, 2 (1984), 205–210. Whisson, Michael and Martin E. West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975). White, Douglas R., ‘Standard Cross-Cultural Sample’ in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2007, 2nd edition, http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/pub/ IntEncyStdCross-CulturalSample.pdf (accessed 18 July 2009). White, Luise, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). White, T. R. H., ‘Z. K. Matthews and the Formation of the ANC Youth League at the University of Fort Hare’, Kleio, 27 (1995), 124–144.

344

Bibliography

Wilkes, Arnett, ‘Tiyo Soga’ in W. J. de Kock, ed., Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 1 (Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1968), 758. Williams, Donovan, A History of the University College of Fort Hare, South Africa: The 1950s (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2001). Wilson, Francis, Labour in the South African Goldmines, 1911–1969 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Wilson, Francis, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: The Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African Institute, 2009: Classics in African Anthropology Series, 4th edition), 1–25. Wilson, Godfrey, ‘An African Morality’, Africa, 9, 1 (1936), 75–99. Wilson, Godfrey, ‘An Introduction to Nyakyusa Society’, Bantu Studies, 10, 3 (1936), 253–291. Wilson, Godfrey, ‘Nyakyusa Law: A Theoretical Introduction to the Study of Law in East Africa’, Man, 36 (1936), 50. Wilson, Godfrey, ‘Introduction to Nyakyusa Law’, Africa, 10, 1 (1937), 16–36. Wilson, Godfrey, ‘Nyakyusa Conventions of Burial’, Bantu Studies, 13, 1 (1939), 1–31. Wilson, Godfrey, ‘The Land Rights of Individuals among the Nyakyusa’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers No. 1, 1968 [1938]). Wilson, Godfrey, ‘The Constitution of Ngonde’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers No. 3., 1968 [1939]). Wilson, Godfrey, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia, Parts 1 and 2 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 [Livingstone: RLI Series, 1941 and 1942]). Wilson, Godfrey and Monica Hunter, ‘The Study of African Society’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers No. 2, 1968 [1939]). Wilson, Godfrey and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change: Based on Observations in Central Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954, 2nd edition). Wilson, Monica, ‘An African Christian Morality’, Africa, 10, 2 (1937), 265–292. Wilson, Monica, ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 79 (1949), 21–25. Wilson, Monica, ‘Nyakyusa Kinship’ in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 111–139. Wilson, Monica, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56, 4 (1951), 307–313. Wilson, Monica, Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1951; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, 2nd edition). Wilson, Monica, ‘Nyakyusa Ritual and Symbolism’, American Anthropologist, 56, 2 (1954), 228–241. Wilson, Monica, Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957; London: Oxford University Press, 1970, 2nd edition). Wilson, Monica, ‘Joking Relationships in Central Africa’, Man, 57, 141 (1957), 111–112.

Bibliography

345

Wilson, Monica, The Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor (Cape Town: School of African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1958). Wilson, Monica, Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959). Wilson, Monica, Divine Kings and the Breath of Men (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Wilson, Monica, ‘The Early History of the Transkei and Ciskei’, African Studies, 18, 5 (1959), 167–179. Wilson, Monica, ‘Myths of Precedence’ in Allie Dubb, ed., Myth in Modern Africa: The Fourteenth Conference Proceedings (Lusaka: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1960), 1–7. Wilson, Monica, ‘Traditional Art among the Nyakyusa’, South African Archaeological Bulletin, 19 (1964), 57–63. Wilson, Monica, ‘Changes in Social Structure in Southern Africa: The Relevance of Kinship Studies to the Historian’ in Leonard Thompson, ed., African Societies in Southern Africa (London: Longman, 1969). Wilson, Monica, The Thousand Years Before Van Riebeeck (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press for the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa, 1970). Wilson, Monica, Religion and the Transformation of Society: A Study of Social Change in Africa (The Scott Holland Lectures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Wilson, Monica, ‘Problems for Research in Tswana History’, Botswana Notes and News, 3 (1971), 70–73. Wilson, Monica, The Interpreters (The Third Dugmore Memorial Lecture. Grahamstown: 1820 Settlers National Monument Foundation, 1972). Wilson, Monica, ‘Z.K. Matthews: A Man for Reconciliation’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale, 1972 [1968]), 557–559. Wilson, Monica, ‘The Expansion of the Nyakyusa’, Journal of African History, 14, 3 (1973), 331–350. Wilson, Monica, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa, 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1973), 4–11. Wilson, Monica, ‘ . . . So Truth Be in the Field . . . ’ (The Alfred and Winifred Hoernl´e Memorial Lecture, Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1975). Wilson, Monica, ‘Letter’, Africa, 45, 2 (1975), 202–205. Wilson, Monica, ‘Zig-Zag Change’, Africa, 46, 4 (1976), 399–409. Wilson, Monica, ‘Missionaries: Conquerors or Servants of God?’ (Address at the official opening of the South African Missionary Museum, 30 Jan. 1976, King William’s Town: South African Missionary Museum, 1976). Wilson, Monica, ‘The First Three Years, 1938–41’, African Social Research, 24 (1977), 279–283. Wilson, Monica, For Men and Elders: Changes in the Relations of Generations and of Men and Women among the Nyakyusa-Ngonde People, 1875–1971 (London and New York: Africana Publishing Company for the International African Institute, 1977). Wilson, Monica, ‘Mhlakaza prophete d’une apocalypse en Afrique australe’ in C. Julien, ed., Les Africains (Paris: Editions Jeune Afrique, 1977), 207–209.

346

Bibliography

Wilson, Monica, ed., Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews: Southern Africa 1901 to 1968 (London: Rex Collings; Cape Town: David Philip, 1981). Wilson, Monica and Archie Mafeje, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (Cape Town, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). Wilson, Monica and Leonard Thompson, eds, The Oxford History of South Africa, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, 1971). Wilson, Monica and Leonard Thompson, eds, A History of South Africa to 1870 (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1982). Wilson, Monica, Selma Kaplan, Theresa Maki and Edith M.Walton, Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, vol. 3: Social Structure (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1952). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963 [1953]). Witz, Leslie, ‘The Making of an Animal Biography: Huberta’s Journey into South African Natural History, 1928–1932’, Kronos: A Journal of Cape History, 30 (2004). Wolf, Eric, ‘Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico’, American Anthropologist, 53, 6 (1956). Wright, Harrison M., The Burden of the Present: Liberal-Radical Controversy over Southern African History (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1977). Wright, John, ‘Ndukwana kaMbengwana as an Interlocutor on the History of the Zulu Kingdom, 1897–1903’, History in Africa, 38 (2011), 343–368. Wright, Marcia, German Missions in Tanganyika 1891–1941: Lutherans and Moravians in the Southern Highlands (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Wright, Marcia, ‘Nyakyusa Cults and Politics in the Later Nineteenth Century’ in Terence O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo, eds, The Historical Study of African Religion (London: Heinemann, 1971), 153–170. Wright, Marcia, ‘Change in Southern Tanzania. Review of Monica Wilson’s For Men and Elders’, Journal of African History, 20, 2 (1979), 300–301. Young, Michael W., Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004).

Index

African National Congress (ANC), 81, 97, 235, 250–1 ANC Youth League, 102–3, 123, 204, 208–9, 235, 238 Defiance Campaign, 123, 237 African research assistants, 14–17, 25, 67–9, 164–5, 308, 310–11 insider-outsider status, 6, 22–3, 165, 226–7 motivation, 69, 93–4, 226–7 see also names of individual research assistants, e.g. Mqotsi, Livingstone African Studies article by Mqotsi, 208, 224–5, 233 articles by Pitje, 210 review of Langa, 256 Africanizing Anthropology, 13–15 Alexander, Neville, 24, 295 Alidi, 145, 149–50, 169–70, 176, 178 All African Convention, 204, 226, 241 Anthony Wilkin Scholarship, 63, 70 anthropological theory, 1–2, 11–12, 25 colonialism, 6, 14, 67, 314 functionalism, 1–2, 6, 11–12, 61, 287 insider-outsider dichotomy, 6, 22–3, 165, 226–7 anthropology, 4, 10–17, 95–6, 139, 310 co-production of knowledge, 14, 23, 25, 68, 254–5 fieldwork styles, 14, 20, 23, 61, 67–8, 255 role of personal background, 12–13, 37, 255, 263, 271–2 fieldwriting, 12, 18, 95, 98–9, 108, 112, 118, 121, 157–8 male dominance, 7, 10, 12 ‘official history’ of (South Africa), 7, 10, 12 ‘unofficial history’ of (Southern and Central Africa), 12–17 women in, 10, 13, 60–1, 142 see also African research assistants; interpreters/research assistants

apartheid, 4, 12, 249, 291–2 Bantu Education, 224, 241 black academic advancement, 224–5, 227 Argyle, Mr and Mrs, 71 Auckland Village, 18, 70–2, 90, 93 Bam, Fikile, 5, 266–7, 276, 278 Bates, George Latimer, 16, 69 Beinart, William, 73, 80–1, 100–2 Bokwe, Frieda see Matthews, Frieda (n´ee Bokwe) Bokwe, John Knox, 7, 197, 303–4 Bokwe, Rosebery, 52–3 Bourdieu, Pierre, 25, 309 Bradbrook, Muriel, 4, 48, 301 Brutus, Denis, 206, 229 Bundy, Colin, 80–1, 100–2 Bunyakyusa, 6, 14, 95, 133–4, 140, 143–7, 154, 160–2, 172, 177–8, 285, 301 ‘age villages’, 136–7 case studies, 159 Godfrey as co-author, 1, 24, 130, 135–8, 156 Godfrey as co-worker, 14, 19–21, 31, 95, 129, 134, 143 different fieldwork styles, 20, 133, 138–40, 142–3, 147–8, 150–5, 188 different relations with informants, 132–3, 140, 142, 148 ‘gendered’ division of labour, 130, 134, 138, 148 Monica having malaria, 134, 144–5 Mwaisumo, as Godfrey’s research assistant, 131–2, 150–1, 165–6, 168–74, 181, 184, 187, 189 as Monica’s clerk, 14, 20–1, 142, 145–6, 148, 154–5, 165–6, 173–4, 177–81, 184, 187, 189 publications on, 1, 3, 19–21, 24, 30, 129, 133–6, 156, 174, 260

347

348

Index

Bunyakyusa (cont.) writing up and publishing both of their notes, 130–2, 138–9, 155–60 research assistants notes by, 159, 181–3 relationships with, 5, 38, 227, 260 women, 148–9 Burkitt, Miles Crawford, 63 Cambridge, 49, 51, 274 Monica on Indian men, 51–2 see also Girton College Cape African Teachers’ Association (CATA), 225, 241, 243 Charsley, Simon, 298–9 Chiepe, Gaositwe, 199, 203–6 Clark, Desmond and Mary, 194, 303 Clifford, James, 91, 95, 98 different forms of field-writing, 19, 98–9, 112, 118 significance of using a typewriter, 105, 158 Collegiate Girls’ High School, 27, 38, 45–6, 66 Colson, Elizabeth, 8, 13, 197 Comaroff, John and Jean, 5, 8, 120, 165, 202 Cory, George, 45, 285 Coryndon, Sir Robert Thorne, 59–60 Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), 241–2 Crosse-Upcott, A.R.W. (Robin), 23, 255–6, 260–3, 266, 268, 271, 274, 278 Cousins, Colleen Crawford, 312 David and Jessie Hunter Papers, 27, 30, 32 De Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, 302 Dent, Clifford, 204, 214 dreams, 19, 117–21, 182, 184 collected by Monica, 118–23, 125–6 Dreyer, Mary Agnes Buchanan (n´ee Soga), 73, 75–80, 89, 92–4 Dreyer, Theodore Frederick, 73, 75, 78–79 Driberg, Jack Herbert, 38, 59–62, 70, 139, 147, 285 East Bank, 18–19, 81–3, 90, 95, 97, 99–101, 106–10, 124, 227 desire for money, 110–11, 115, 125 gaps in material, 99–100, 108–10, 113–15, 118 interpreter, 100, 111, 126 and Kadalie, 18, 82, 90, 103 on ‘Kadalie’s Strike’, 81, 102, 106, 108 survival of magical beliefs, 119–20

urban social change, 98, 110–13, 115–17, 124–6 women, 115–16 youth, 117 East London, 100–1, 103, 110, 123 IICU active in, 81, 91, 98, 102 Eiselen, Werner, 12, 211, 241 Ellison, James, 173, 181–2 Erikson, Erik, 302 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 148, 201–2, 289 Fabian, Johannes, 149 Federal Theological Seminary (Fedsem), 221 Fort Hare Native College, 5, 52–3, 62, 193–5, 197–8, 203–4, 223, 225, 227, 230, 251, 264, 266, 285 ANC Youth League at, 204, 208–9, 235 Monica as lecturer, 5, 7, 21, 155–6, 158, 193, 195, 197–200, 203–4, 218–20, 227, 231–4, 284–5 as warden of Elukhanyisweni, 197–8, 204–5, 218–19, 222–3 giving evidence to Fagan Commission, 220, 223 maintaining links after leaving, 221–2 Foucault, Michel, 310 Freeman, Gwendolen, 48, 51 Freud, Sigmund, 119, 311 Galbraith, John, 292, 294 Gavin, Rev. William, 73 Geza, Michael, 84–9, 91–3, 179 Girton College, 4, 17, 25, 34, 38, 46, 65, 139 Monica as undergraduate, 4, 24, 34, 38, 46–50, 55–6, 64, 65, 71, 96 changing from history to social anthropology, 17, 38, 59, 62, 66, 284–5 and Driberg, 59–62 friendship with Roux, 54–9 friendship with Sadek, 38, 52–3 as doctoral student, 17, 38, 64, 76–7, 85, 91–3, 118 see also Labour Study Circle Gluckman, Max, 1–2, 4–5, 11–12, 120, 138, 194, 201–2, 289 as director of RLI, 212–13 correspondence with Monica, 213–14, 217, 219 Godlo, R.H., 82, 90, 101 Goldthorpe, J.E., 288 Green, Margaret, 266 Hall, Kenneth, 302

Index Hammond-Tooke, David, 10, 19–20, 130, 157, 259 Hani, Chris, 226, 251 Harries, Patrick, 8, 68 Hart, Lesley, 30 Healdtown, 144, 239–41, 246, 259, 264 healers, 235–7, 239, 245–8, 252 Heaney, Seamus, 308, 313 Hellmann, Ellen, 4, 13, 18, 96, 116–17, 124, 294 Hendricks, Ganief, 272 Hertzog, J.B.M., 44, 80, 88 Hodson, Thomas Callan, 62, 70–1, 88 influence on Monica, 17, 38, 62–4, 66, 71, 139, 147, 159 Hoernl´e, Winifred Tucker, 11, 13, 31, 34, 89 letters from Monica, 87, 178, 180 Honono, Nathaniel, 241, 243, 259 Houghton, Kenneth Hobart, 73, 87, 200 Howarth, Jane, 49 Hunter, Aylmer (brother), 41 Hunter, David (father), 39–40, 44, 65, 70–1, 77, 82–5, 88, 97–8, 200, 303–4 Monica correspondence with, 27, 32, 45–7, 55–7, 62, 140, 156, 158, 186 influence on, 27, 38–42, 47, 64–5, 105 networks, 42, 44–5, 82, 98, 103–4, 197, 304 Hunter, Jessie (n´ee McGregor), 39–41, 43, 46, 65, 77, 200 correspondence with Monica, 33, 78, 80 Hunter, Monica see Wilson, Monica (n´ee Hunter) Hunterstoun (Hogsback), 28, 41, 80, 200 conference, 6–7, 64, 225 Monica living in cottage in grounds, 198–9 retiring to, 25, 28, 306, 316–17 Iliffe, John, 301 Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU), 18, 80–1, 83, 90, 98, 101–3, 106 Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), 54, 56–7, 80–101 International African Institute (IAI), 141–2, 162, 178 interpreters/research assistants, 7–11, 14, 25, 308 acknowledgement of contributions, 16, 69, 91, 308, 311–13 Africans as, 14–17, 25, 67–9, 164–5, 226–7, 308, 310–11

349 in colonial administration, 15–16, 163, 187 insider-outsider status, 6, 22–3, 165, 226–7 motivation, 69, 93–4, 226–7 missionaries as, 8, 11, 298, 308 relationships with anthropologists, 311–15 see also names of individual interpreters, e.g. Pitje, Godfrey Jacobs, Nancy J., 16–17, 69, 90 Jeffreys, Mervyn, 209, 244–6 Jones, Mary Gwladys, 46, 50, 62, 284 Jordan, A.C., 2, 217, 241, 275 Junod, Henri Alexandre, 8, 44, 68, 89, 91 Kabiki, 145, 147, 149–50, 176, 186–7 Kadalie, Clements, 18, 80–2, 90, 93, 98, 101–3 Kasitile, 21, 132, 144, 147, 152, 173–4 Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, 31, 95, 203, 217, 260, 275 Kerr, Alexander, 195, 197, 201, 208, 218, 239 Kgosana, Philip, 264 Krige, Eileen, 4, 13, 18, 31, 211, 248 Krige, Jack, 4, 31, 211, 248 Kuper, Hilda, 4, 13, 31, 202, 209, 292, 294 Labour Study Circle, 17, 38, 55–7, 98 Lamphere, Louise, 12–13 Langa, 6, 23, 95, 125, 203, 262–3, 265–6, 272, 279 fieldwork by Crosse-Upcott, 256, 260, 262–3, 266, 268, 271, 274, 278 Hammond-Tooke, 259 Mafeje, 23–4, 95, 125, 226, 253–6, 258–9, 263–74, 277–8 Simons, 259–60, 277, 291 Last, Murray, 315 Laws, Hester, 62 Leach, Edmund, 37, 39, 65 Levine, Roger, 15, 163–4 Levinson, Deirdre, 266 Leys, Norman, 57 Libombo, Elias (Spoon), 68 Limba Separatist Church, 225, 228–9, 230–2, 247, 251–2 Lovedale Missionary Institution, 4, 7, 43, 52–3, 70–1 liberal Christian tradition, 4, 38, 47, 64, 116, 140, 142, 203 religious and social networks, 42, 82, 98, 103–4, 193 school, 4, 17, 24, 38, 43–5, 66, 77, 304

350

Index

Macmillan, Hugh, 39 Macmillan, W.M., 88, 197, 285–6 Mafeje, Archibald Boyce Monwabisi (Archie), 5, 37, 224, 226, 253, 257, 259, 263, 267 school career, 259–60, 272 as student at Fort Hare, 260–1 as student at UCT, 254, 258, 263–4, 266, 273, 276, 278 academic career, 244, 253 fieldwork in Langa, 23–4, 95, 125, 226, 253–6, 258–9, 264, 268–71, 274, 277 authorship of Langa, 226, 255, 257–8 influence of background, 271–2, 278 as insider, 254, 263–7, 269–70, 272–3, 278–9 report on, 268–73, 275, 277 style, 23–4, 271, 278 Monica correspondence with, 33, 255, 258, 267, 270, 278, 284 on, 257 relationship with, 6, 23–4, 37, 209, 226, 253–5, 258, 268, 270–1, 274–8, 294 as Non-European Unity Movement activist, 254, 259, 264, 276 obituaries, 253, 258 parents, 259, 263–4, 271 Mafeje, Bennett, 259, 263, 271 Magubane, Bernard (Ben), 224, 226, 251, 297 Mair, Lucy, 211–12, 288 Majombozi, Guston and Miriam, 228–9, 233 Major, Helen, 47 Maki, Theresa, 260 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2, 10–11, 39, 60–1, 66, 70, 88, 91, 119, 139, 147–9, 159, 287–9, 310 praise for Godfrey, 139–40 reaction to Reaction to Conquest, 88, 287 Mandela, Nelson, 24, 237, 295 Maqoma, Janet, 44, 284 Masinyane, Pauline, 204–5 Matthews, Frieda (n´ee Bokwe), 44, 197, 221–2, 302–4 Matthews, Joe, 197, 199, 218 Matthews, Zachariah Keodirelang (Z.K.), 28, 44, 195, 197, 199, 204, 206, 209, 217, 220–2 Monica working on his autobiography, 203, 222–3, 302–5 and Mqotsi, 236, 241–2 Mqotsi on, 207, 236, 238 Pitje on, 208

Mayer, Iona, 96, 98, 102–3, 110, 112, 125, 257, 279 Mayer, Philip, 12, 102–3, 110, 112, 125, 243, 257, 279, 294 and Mqotsi, 243–4 role of Jewish identity on work, 37 Townsmen or Tribesmen, 110, 269, 279 ‘Xhosa in Town’ trilogy, 95–6, 98, 112 Mayekiso, Mac, 266, 278 Mbembe, Achilles, 29 Mbilini, Peggy, 44 Mbube, Dumisani, 79 McGregor, Jessie see Hunter, Jessie (n´ee McGregor) Mdala, Kenneth, 15, 17, 163, 181, 185 Meikle, Mary Agnes see Soga, Mary Agnes (n´ee Meikle) Middledrift, 6 fieldwork by Burkitt, 63 fieldwork by Mqotsi, 22–3, 225, 227, 235–7, 239, 244–6, 248, 251–2 Mitchell, Clyde, 11–12, 213 Monica Wilson Centenary Conference (2008), 6–7, 64, 225 Mqotsi, Livingstone, 22, 206, 208, 224–6, 228–31, 235, 237–8, 241, 252 as pupil at Paterson Technical High School, 206, 208, 229–31 as student at Fort Hare, 206–7, 224–5, 230–5, 239 on staff of Healdtown Training School, 240–1 CSIR fiasco, 241–2 and position at Rhodes, 243–4, 249 as newspaper editor, 250, 252 banning and exile, 250–1 academic development, 225–6, 230–40, 244–51 article in African Studies, 208, 224–5 and CATA, 225, 241, 243 fieldwork, on Limba Separatist Church, 225, 232–3, 247, 252 in Middledrift, 22–3, 225, 227, 235–7, 239, 244–6, 248, 251–2 as mentor to Chris Hani, 226, 250–1 Monica correspondence with, 33, 226, 234–5, 240, 242–5 influence on, 227, 230, 246, 252 opinion of each other, 206–7, 209, 218, 225 relationship with, 6–7, 21–2, 206, 208, 225–7, 231–5, 241, 243, 246, 249–52 and Non-European Unity Movement, 208, 225–6, 229–30, 235, 241, 243, 250

Index obituaries, 226 Pemba as role model, 229–30 and Z.K. Matthews, 207, 236, 238, 241–2 Miller, Bice Creighton (Bis), 56–7 missionaries as interpreters, 8, 11, 298, 308 Mkele, Nimrod, 22, 208, 232–3, 260 Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers, 26–34, 70, 79 Moore, Sally Falk, 257–8 Murdock, George, 25 correspondence with Monica, 289–91 Mwaikambo, John Brown, 159, 166, 173, 176, 181, 186–7 Mwaipopo, Chief, 143, 145–6, 172 Mwaisabile, Mwambenja, 181 Mwaisumo, Leonard, 15, 20–1, 159, 165–6, 173, 176 as author of ‘native texts’, 181–5, 188 conversion to Christianity, 166–8, 180 Godfrey, as his research assistant, 131–2, 146, 150–1, 165–6, 168–74, 180–1, 184, 187 relationship with, 170, 174–5, 187–8 as informant, 173–5 as insider-outsider, 173, 183, 188 pursuit of literacy and multilingualism, 168–9, 176, 181 taking up appointment in appeal court of senior chiefs, 162, 165, 185–7 working with Monica, 142, 145–6, 148, 154–5, 165–6, 173–4, 177–81, 184, 187, 189 National Council of Scientific Research (NCSR), 260, 262, 273–4, 277 National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), 235 Native Laws Commission of Enquiry (Fagan Commission), 220, 223 New Brighton, 22, 228–30 fieldwork by Mqotsi, 225, 232–3, 247, 252 Njonjo, Charles, 222, 304 Nkonyeni, Archie, 259, 264, 272, 276 Non-European Unity Movement, 204, 208, 225–6, 229–30, 235, 241, 243, 250, 254, 259, 264, 276 Noruwana, Nomfundo, 267 Ntibane, 17, 73, 75–80, 98, 105, 112 Olivier, Lord, 55–6, 59 Osborn, Emily, 15–16 Peel, J.D.Y., 133 Pemba, George, 229–30

351 Philip, David, 303–4 Pile, Steve, 121 Pitje, Godfrey, 5, 208–10, 213–16, 226, 238, 260 as legal partner in Tambo and Mandela, 208, 214–15 his MA, 209–12 Monica correspondence with, 33, 214–16 opinion of Pitje, 208–9, 212–13 relationship with, 6, 21, 208–10, 212–14, 216 Pondoland, 5, 6, 14, 17–18, 64, 69, 95, 99, 124, 139–40, 148, 157, 285, 315 Eastern, 85–7, 91–2 Western, 17, 73, 75–80, 98, 105, 112 exploring documentary sources, 286 letters from, 61, 78 relationships with African research assistants, 5, 17, 38, 70, 227, 260 role of dreams, 19, 119 women, 61, 71, 75, 98, 112 see also East Bank; Ntibane Poonyane, Sophonia, 165 Poto, Victor, 42, 73 Powdermaker, Hortense, 256–7 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald, 2, 10, 31, 220 Radloff, Ellen, 199 Raum, Otto, 239, 243 Reader, Desmond, 256 Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), 67–8, 201, 213–14 Gluckman as director, 212–13 Godfrey as director, 130, 134–5, 193–4 Rhodes University College, 49, 201–2, 225, 227, 243–4, 249 Richards, Audrey, 13, 39, 60, 88, 201, 275, 277, 287–8, 306 correspondence with Godfrey, 33, 129, 141 Monica, 33, 155–7, 161, 201–3, 220, 296, 300–1, 305–6 Roberts, John, 301 Roux, Edward Rudolph (Eddie), 17, 33, 38, 54–9, 65–6, 197 Monica correspondence with, 33, 58, 197–8 influence on, 55–6, 59, 66 Royal Anthropological Institute, 219–20 Rubusana, Mrs, 18, 84, 90, 93, 98, 103–4, 106–8, 112, 115–16, 125 Rubusana, Walter Benson, 82, 90, 101–3 as Monica’s main facilitator in East Bank, 18, 83–4, 90, 93–4, 97, 103, 106, 116 Ruffel, Miss, 46

352

Index

Sadek, Munira, 38, 52–5, 65 Sanjek, Roger, 14, 17, 67, 95 Schapera, Isaac, 2, 4, 10–12, 61, 70, 88, 165, 198, 202, 211, 294 Schumaker, Lyn, 5, 13–14, 67–8, 92, 142 ‘the co-production of scientific knowledge’, 23, 62, 68, 254–5 Sharp, John, 12, 23, 254, 258, 276 Simons, Jack, 259–60, 262, 273, 275, 277, 291, 294, 316 fieldwork in Langa, 259–60, 277, 291 Smith, Robert, 160 Smuts, Jan, 2, 88 Soga, John Henderson, 77 Soga, Mary Agnes (n´ee Meikle), 75–6 Soga, Mary Agnes Buchanan see Dreyer, Mary Agnes Buchanan (n´ee Soga) Soga, Tiyo Burnside, 7, 75, 76 Soga, William Anderson, 75–6 South African Native College, Fort Hare see Fort Hare Native College Steinberg, Jonny, 2 Stewart, James, 39–40 Stubbs, Aelred, 221 Swana, Vuyiswa, 255, 267 Tambo, Oliver, 2, 208, 214–15, 237 Tawney, R.H., 301 Theal, George McCall, 45, 285, 292 Thompson, Leonard, 24, 291–6, 301, 306 Thornton, Robert, 29 Turner, Victor, 3, 5, 137 Tylor, Edward B., 119, 248–9 Tzatzoe, Jan, 7, 15, 163–4 University of Cape Town (UCT), 5 Mafeje Affair, 244, 253 Monica at, 5, 64–5, 217, 222, 226–7, 260–2, 273, 291, 315–16 urbanisation, 95, 100, 113, 117, 120 survival of belief in magic and witchcraft, 119–21 waning of tribal influences, 110–12 Xhosa responses to, 95–7 vampires and magic, 120–1 Van der Horst, Sheila, 257, 260, 273, 294 Van Warmelo, Nicholas, 12, 164–5 Vansina, Jan, 291, 299–300 Vaughan, Megan, 15–17, 143–5, 163, 172, 181, 185 Vendler, Helen, 313 Walker, Eric, 45–6 Wedgwood, Camilla, 60–1 Wells, Major and Mrs, 144, 150, 152, 171 West, Martin, 5, 65

White, Luise, 120–1 Wilson, Francis, 5, 29–30, 33, 64, 116, 157, 194–5, 197–9, 218–19, 271, 295, 304, 316 Chiepe looking after, 199, 205–6 and father’s death, 199–200 interview with Monica, 59, 70, 145, 147, 177 Monica as mother, 200, 206 Wilson, Godfrey, 39, 58, 139, 142–3, 148, 177, 194, 199–201, 287 correspondence with Audrey Richards, 33, 129, 141 depression, 134, 136, 139–40, 194 as director of the RLI, 130, 134–5, 193–4 fieldnotes, 150–3, 159 influence of background on work, 140–1, 152 linguistic skills, 140–1, 143, 150–2, 155, 170, 172, 179, 188 Monica as co-author, 1, 24, 130, 135–8, 156, 299 as co-worker at Bunyakyusa, 14, 19–21, 31, 95, 129, 134, 143, 160–1 correspondence with, 32, 140–1 Nyakyusa dictionary and grammar, 141, 144, 152, 177–8 relationship with informants, 148, 152, 174–5 in the South African Army, 135, 194 suicide, 3, 20, 130, 136, 155, 193–6, 199 as ‘an active presence’ after, 28–9, 157–8, 160–1, 199 Wilson, John Dover, 28, 140, 195–6, 222 Wilson, Mary Monica (n´ee Hunter), 1, 4–5, 18–19, 38, 49, 70, 116–17, 142, 194, 220, 313–17 childhood, 40–5 at Lovedale Missionary School, 4, 17, 24, 38, 43–4, 66, 304 at Collegiate School for Girls, 27, 38, 45–6, 66 at Girton College, 4, 17, 25, 34, 38, 46–50, 52–65, 70, 76–7, 85, 91–3, 96, 118, 139, 284–5 at Fort Hare, 5, 7, 21, 155–6, 158, 193, 195, 197–8, 200, 203–5, 218–20, 222–3, 227, 231–4, 284–5 at Rhodes, 49, 201–2, 221, 225, 234 at UCT, 5, 64–5, 217, 222, 226–7, 260–2, 273, 291, 315–16 curiosity, 25, 38, 70 father’s influence, 27, 39–42, 47, 64–5 fieldwork, 3, 61, 78, 87, 91, 94

Index checking verity of information, 311, 317 empirical method, 66, 70, 89, 95, 98, 311, 314, 317 implications of getting typewriter, 105–10, 118, 158–60 interest in dreams, 19, 118–23, 125–6 multi-sited approach, 17, 73, 144–5, 314 as observer rather than participant, 142, 158, 188, 285, 290 see also Auckland Village; Bunyakyusa; Langa; Ntibane; Pondoland fieldwriting, 99, 150–3 Cambridge way, 95–6, 147, 149, 152–3 contrasting urban life to rural customs, 97, 110, 114, 125 gaps in material, 19, 99–100, 108–10, 113–15, 118 friendships, 44, 197 global reputation, 2–4, 89, 198, 256, 258 and Godfrey, 58, 177 as co-author, 1, 24, 130, 135–8, 156, 299 as co-worker, 14, 19–21, 31, 95, 129, 134, 143, 160–1 marriage, 141–3 suicide, 3, 20, 130, 136, 155–6, 193–6, 199 as ‘an active presence’ after his death, 28–9, 130 changing from Hunter to Wilson as author, 156–7 coping after his death, 193, 195–200, 206 prioritising his work when writing up their notes, 130–2, 138–9, 155, 160 at Hogsback, 41, 198–9, 200, 221 retirement to, 25, 28, 306 and history of African societies uncovered through anthropology, 283, 290–1, 296 and anthropology as one, 298–302, 306 broad interdisciplinary understanding of, 302, 305–7 contribution to African, 3, 24, 203, 307 interest in, 27, 38, 44–6, 66, 284, 289–90, 294 opinion of contemporary historians, 301 Hodson’s influence, 17, 38, 62–4, 66, 71, 139, 147, 159 horse-riding, 41, 71, 79, 86, 317

353 importance of religion, 37–8, 43, 193 influence of missionary background and schooling, 4, 7, 17, 37–8, 52–3, 64–5, 70, 98, 116, 143 and interpreters/research assistants, 6–8, 14, 17–25, 37–8, 73, 75, 78–80, 82–7, 89, 91–4, 97–8, 103–4, 107, 142, 145–6, 148, 154–5, 165–6, 173–4, 177–81, 184, 187, 189, 208–9, 212–14, 216, 226–7, 230–5, 241, 243, 246, 249–55, 258, 260–1, 268, 270–1, 274–8 knowledge of Xhosa language and culture, 4, 18, 104 Lovedale ‘as a daughter of ’, 4, 7, 17, 24, 38, 47, 52–3, 64, 66, 70–1, 104, 116, 140, 142, 193, 203, 304 networks, 42, 82, 98, 103–4, 197, 304 and mother, 43, 46 as mother, 157, 194, 200, 206, 219 preservation of documents by, 26–7 on witchcraft, 249 publications, 2–3, 19–21, 24–5, 202, 298, 314 interdisciplinary and comparative nature, 283–6 stressing historical dimension, 298 articles ‘An African Christian Morality’, 156–7 ‘The Early History of the Transkei and Ciskei’, 292 ‘Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Status of Pondo Women’, 115 ‘In Pondoland’, 1 ‘Mhlakaza proph`ete d’une apocalypse en Afrique australe’, 301–2 ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, 219 ‘The Re-Establishment of Yellowwood Forest’, 306 ‘The Study of African Society’, 150 books African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (contribution only), 220, 289 The Analysis of Social Change, 1, 25, 31, 129, 135–8, 149, 157, 194–6, 212, 219, 288–9 Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa, 3, 19–21, 25, 133–4, 136–9, 152, 160–1, 174, 219 For Men and Elders, 25, 133–4, 136, 216, 219, 298, 300 Freedom for My People, 222–3, 302–5

354

Index

Wilson, Mary Monica (n´ee Hunter) (cont.) Good Company, 3, 19–21, 25, 133–4, 136, 138–9, 148, 156–61, 173–4, 183, 219, 289 Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, 275, 217 Langa, 28, 37–8, 95, 253–4, 264–5, 267, 271–3, 275–7 acknowledgements, 255–6, 258–9, 262, 277 authorship, 226, 255–9, 267, 277 as creative dialogue and co-production, 258, 275, 277 fieldwork by Mafeje, 23–4, 95, 125, 226, 253–6, 258–9, 264 Monica’s main contribution, 273–5 reviews, 256–7, 268 The Oxford History of South Africa, 24, 28, 203, 218, 283, 288–9, 292–7, 300–1, 304, 307 Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor, 299 Reaction to Conquest, 2, 25, 28, 57, 64, 66, 69, 89, 95, 124, 138–9, 144, 219, 286, 298, 315 acknowledgements, 64, 73, 83, 85, 91–2 doctoral thesis, 76, 85, 91–3 reviews, 2, 89, 287 role of African assistants, 73, 75, 78–80, 82–7, 91 Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa, 3, 19–21, 25, 133–4, 136–9, 159–61, 174, 219 lectures ‘So truth be in the Field’, 19 ‘The Thousand Years before Van Riebeeck’, 297–8 papers ‘The Interpreters’, 308 ‘Some Features of African Urbanization in the Western Cape’, 268

correspondence with Archie Mafeje, 33, 255, 258, 267, 270, 278, 284 Audrey Richards, 33, 155–7, 161, 203, 220, 296, 300–1, 305–6 David Philip, 303–4 Desmond Clark, 303 Eddie Roux, 33, 197–8 father, 27, 32, 45–7, 55–7, 62, 140, 156, 158, 186 Francis Wilson, 33 Frieda Matthews, 221 George Murdock, 25, 289–91 Godfrey Wilson, 32, 140–1 Godfrey Pitje, 33, 214–16 J.E. Goldthorpe, 288 Leonard Thompson, 301 Livingstone Mqotsi, 33, 226, 234–5, 240, 242–5 Mary Dreyer, 79 Max Gluckman, 217, 219 mother, 33, 78, 80 Muriel Bradbrook, 301 Winifred Hoernl´e, 87, 178, 180 letters from, Bunyakyusa, 140 Fort Hare, 204 Girton College, 38–9, 46–52, 55–7, 62, 65 Pondoland, 61, 78 Wilson, Timothy (Tim), 29–30, 34, 194, 197–9, 219, 271, 303 Chiepe looking after, 199, 205–6 Wilson Collection see Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers witchcraft and magic, 115, 180, 183, 187, 227, 236–7, 245–9 women and minorities, 10, 12–13, 61, 71, 75, 98, 112, 115–16, 148–9 as anthropologists, 10, 13, 60–1, 142 discrimination against in Cambridge, 49, 51 Wright, Marcia, 298–300

THE INTERNATIONAL AFRICAN LIBRARY General Editors j. d. y. peel, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London suzette heald, London School of Economics and Political Science deborah james, London School of Economics and Political Science

The International African Library is a major monograph series from the International African Institute and complements its quarterly periodical Africa, the premier journal in the field of African studies. Theoretically informed and culturally sensitive ethnographies and studies of social relations ‘on the ground’ have long been central to the Institute’s publications programme. The IAL includes works focused on development, especially on the linkages between the local and national levels of society; studies in the social and environmental sciences; and historical studies with social, cultural and interdisciplinary dimensions. TITLES IN THE SERIES 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25

ISAK NIEHAUS: Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa FRASER G. MCNEILL AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa KRIJN PETERS War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone INSA NOLTE Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo: the local politics of a Nigerian nationalist BEN JONES Beyond the State in Rural Uganda RAMON SARRO´ The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: iconoclasm done and undone CHARLES GORE Art, Performance and Ritual in Benin City FERDINAND DE JONG Masquerades of Modernity: power and secrecy in Casamance, Senegal KAI KRESSE Philosophising in Mombasa: knowledge, Islam and intellectual practice on the Swahili coast DAVID PRATTEN The Man-Leopard Murders: history and society in colonial Nigeria CAROLA LENTZ Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana BENJAMIN F. SOARES Islam and the Prayer Economy: history and authority in a Malian town COLIN MURRAY and PETER SANDERS Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: the anatomy of a moral crisis R. M. DILLEY Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices Among Haalpulaar’en in Senegal: between mosque and termite mound BELINDA BOZZOLI Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid ELISHA RENNE Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town ANTHONY SIMPSON ‘Half-London’ in Zambia: contested identities in a Catholic mission school HARRI ENGLUND From War to Peace on the Mozambique–Malawi Borderland T. C. MCCASKIE Asante Identities: history and modernity in an African village 1850–1950

24 JANET BUJRA Serving Class: masculinity and the feminisation of domestic service in Tanzania 23 CHRISTOPHER O. DAVID Death in Abeyance: illness and therapy among the Tabwa of Central Africa 22 DEBORAH JAMES Songs of the Women Migrants: performance and identity in South Africa 21 BIRGIT MEYER Translating the Devil: religion and modernity among the Ewe in Ghana 20 DAVID MAXWELL Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: a social history of the Hwesa people c. 1870s–1990s 19 A. FIONA D. MACKENZIE Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya, 1880–1952 18 JANE I. GUYER An African Niche Economy: farming to feed Ibadan, 1968–88 17 PHILIP BURNHAM The Politics of Cultural Difference in Northern Cameroon 16 GRAHAM FURNISS Poetry, Prose and Popular Culture in Hausa 15 C. BAWA YAMBA Permanent Pilgrims: the role of pilgrimage in the lives of West African Muslims in Sudan 14 TOM FORREST The Advance of African Capital: the growth of Nigerian private enterprise 13 MELISSA LEACH Rainforest Relations: gender and resource use among the Mende of Gola, Sierra Leone 12 ISAAC NCUBE MAZONDE Ranching and Enterprise in Eastern Botswana: a case study of black and white farmers 11 G. S. EADES Strangers and Traders: Yoruba migrants, markets and the state in northern Ghana 10 COLIN MURRAY Black Mountain: land, class and power in the eastern Orange Free State, 1880s to 1980s 9 RICHARD WERBNER Tears of the Dead: the social biography of an African family 8 RICHARD FARDON Between God, the Dead and the Wild: Chamba interpretations of religion and ritual 7 KARIN BARBER I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: oriki, women and the past in a Yoruba town 6 SUZETTE HEALD Controlling Anger: the sociology of Gisu violence 5 GUNTHER SCHLEE Identities on the Move: clanship and pastoralism in northern Kenya 4 JOHAN POTTIER Migrants No More: settlement and survival in Mambwe villages, Zambia 3 PAUL SPENCER The Maasai of Matapato: a study of rituals of rebellion 2 JANE I. GUYER (ed.) Feeding African Cities: essays in social history 1 SANDRA T. BARNES Patrons and Power: creating a political community in metropolitan Lagos