Chapter 3

Tyhume, Pondoland, Farms, East London, 1931–1932

‘The need to record what would be lost for ever’

Monica and Jessie spent much of October and November 1930 on a Cook’s guided tour of France, Switzerland and Italy. David joined them at Genoa before the family embarked for South Africa on 14 November. Monica did not write to Godfrey, and then in a lively but not intimate way, until they were off the coast of Somalia. At Port Sudan, she had ‘hung over the hold and tried to Anthropologise’. The human diversity she witnessed left her ‘with less respect than ever for theories on racial characteristics’. The dockers’ work songs fascinated her, ‘but I heard complaints all round, of the African, who “can’t do a thing quietly.”’ To her mother’s relief she avoided quarrels with fellow passengers about ‘politics and native policy’.1

Back in South Africa but missing England, Monica wrote to Godfrey, ‘it’s uncomfortable loving two countries’. She walked in the mountains, enjoyed the dramatic summer thunderstorms, slept on the stoep, and found domesticity ‘a dreadful effort!’ Up until mid-January Monica studied isiXhosa and read everything she could on African history and ethnology. Though her anthropological reading was wide, her theoretical exposure was limited, and her practical training, apart from Hodson’s advice to focus on direct observation, was minimal. She had, however, had a rigorous training in history, especially by ‘that superb teacher’ Gwladys Jones. Study of the enclosures and other aspects of English agrarian history helped her to think about land issues in the Ciskei. Her training also generated an aversion to what she called ‘grand language’, and therefore a commitment to writing ‘as plainly and simply as possible’. Though she was a largely self-taught ethnographer, the advice she had received and her own empirical bent made her conclude that the most difficult and vital part of fieldwork was having ‘intelligent, and intelligible, questions … every question has to be concrete; that is a trial, but it purges one’s own mind of vague generalities, and “isms”’.2

Monica had just turned twenty-three when she started her fieldwork in February 1931. Transferring to anthropology at Cambridge, she had said that she wanted ‘to study Bantu social customs’. Much later, she said that she was ‘conscious of the need to record what would be lost for ever’. This approach might have been nostalgically antiquarian, but in her hands it was consistent with an interest in and acceptance of social change. Looking back, she reflected on how her experience had determined her approach:

Having been to school at Lovedale, I had no doubts about African abilities (then questioned in South Africa) or that there were two views of frontier history, or that African society was not static, and no static analysis of ‘tribal society’ would suffice. I had, after all, mixed daily with people moving from tribalism to a new sort of society, and [was] wholly dissatisfied with the place assigned to them in South Africa.3

Analytically she was still unsophisticated, later acknowledging that it took her ‘some time to realise that what one observed depended on assumptions’. There was little South African anthropology to which Monica could refer. A body of missionary ethnography existed but the only substantial monograph was Junod’s study of the Tsonga. Radcliffe-Brown had published ‘The mother’s brother in South Africa’ but otherwise worked little on specifically South African material. Much of Hoernlé and Eiselen’s work, and most of Schapera’s, was still to appear. When she did her Tyhume Valley and Pondoland fieldwork, Monica had as yet no exposure to Malinowski’s seminars, and Godfrey only worked with Malinowski from late 1932. During the next two years, her approach was thus closely observant but lacking an overt theoretical framework apart from a sceptical acknowledgement of the imprecise concept of ‘culture contact’. Her research resulted in a book that she later regarded as ‘very much a ’prentice job’ but which, standing largely outside contemporary anthropological thinking, has great originality, immediacy, freshness and charm. It is rightly seen as an ethnographic classic.4

The local and even domestic context of Monica’s fieldwork is crucial. After three months in the village of Auckland (e-Hala), close to home, she moved to Pondoland, through which her father had travelled in 1894. Monica was ‘familiar with stories of that period’, and had mission as well as government contacts. At a time when Europeans were unpopular, with local inhabitants’ cattle being seized for poll tax and African farmers in desperate economic straits, Monica was fortunate, for the fact that she came ‘from Lovedale, where the Pondo chiefs were educated, has helped a lot’. Her parents, she wrote, had taught her ‘to love and honour the Bantu’. Vivid youthful experiences also helped Monica understand African community life, the centrality of cattle and their significance for gender relations, for instance, as well as the obligations of women to one another. She remembered her mother and herself being lectured by the family cook, a woman, on the impropriety of Monica learning, as an eleven-year-old girl, to milk her father’s cows. About to leave for university in England, she heard the maids asking loudly and disapprovingly who would be there to stay with her mother, ‘and keep her company, when [Monica] was gone?’ Some white farmers and Ciskei and Transkei traders were ready to assist her with her research. So were certain mission-educated Africans, many of whom had ties to Lovedale and knew her father, and had known Monica as a child. She spoke isiXhosa, though haltingly. This was partly ‘insider’ research, carried out from within a familiar culture.5

Monica could not have embarked on her research without the 1931 Anthony Wilkin Studentship. By the end of that year it was clear that she would be ‘leaving a job in the middle if [she] chucked research’ at that point. She requested financial support from the International Institute for African Languages and Culture (IIALC), later the International African Institute (IAI), which had embarked on a programme of research into culture contact using Rockefeller Foundation funds. Hodson at Cambridge and Joseph Oldham, recently appointed administrative director in charge of the IIALC’s research, strongly supported her request. David Hunter was acquainted with Oldham, and Monica’s cousin Lena Hunter had been his secretary. Winifred Hoernlé, who taught social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, was a valuable advocate and intermediary. Monica’s application was ‘favourably considered’ by the IIALC Executive Council with a sum of ‘not more than £200’ envisaged, and on 16 November 1931, Monica wired her parents that she had been granted the money.6

Apart from the institutional support she received, Monica felt grateful for the spiritual support of her mother’s prayers, through which she believed she ‘survived’ in Pondoland ‘when perhaps there was danger a couple of times’. Looking forward in mid-January to her forthcoming fieldwork, she said she intended to live in a village, befriending women, ‘watching, and conversing’ and trying to find out how they were reacting to ‘European civilization’. Perhaps referring to relationships forged during fieldwork, she wrote to Godfrey that, increasingly, ‘the only times one “lives” in the New Testament sense’ is when the ‘relationship with God, or one’s neighbour is intensely felt’.7

Monica was fully aware of challenges to her spirituality. Her friendship with Eddie Roux brought her in close contact with communist thinking, though she related more to the ideas of Olaf Kullmann, a Norwegian ex-naval officer who by 1931 had become a Christian socialist and pacifist, later to die in a concentration camp for his peace activism in occupied Norway. Monica’s scepticism about the communist left may have been reinforced by a letter she received from the normally assured Roux. He described the condemnation he had suffered at the hands of the dominant faction in the South African Communist Party for his ‘rather bad “right” deviations’; this was followed by a recantation, and a reluctant move, on party orders, from Cape Town to Johannesburg; he was obliged to explain the shift in policy in the party newspaper Umsebenzi, which he edited and largely wrote, in accordance with current orthodoxy.8

‘Intombi Ka Hunter’

From 17 February to 30 April 1931, Monica lived at a store owned by A. Argyle in Auckland in the Tyhume Valley. Auckland was the largest of the three military villages established there by the British in the 1840s in their efforts to contain the Xhosa. During what came to be known as the Eighth Frontier War, on 24 December 1850 Sir Harry Smith sent a large force to drive Chief Sandile from the Amathole Mountains. The British were ambushed in the Boma Pass and the following day, Christmas day, Xhosa fighters attacked the villages, killing many British men but sparing women, children and missionaries. The Xhosa were ultimately defeated, and Mfengu allies of the British settled in the vicinity, adding to the political, economic and ethnic complexities in the area. Auckland was therefore far from an untouched ‘traditional’ community. Here, Monica investigated the lives of women, the original focus of her work. She constructed 151 family trees of the Xhosa, Mfengu and coloured people of the valley, and recorded details concerning education, housing, cooking, dress, land utilisation, cattle and other issues. She made detailed sketches of women’s dress, baskets and other aspects of material culture, as well as sketch maps of villages. She made notes on religion, mourning, status and wealth, attempting to organise the material in terms of ‘signs of growing individualism’ and ‘culture contact’, a concept with which she became increasingly dissatisfied, however. Although she never used this material subsequently, and ‘became convinced that it was impossible to study contact without a detailed first hand knowledge of tribal custom’ in a more remote area, the actual fieldwork methods that she developed in relatively accessible Auckland would later prove useful in Pondoland.9

Monica spent many weekends with her parents at Hogsback, riding on horseback up the newly constructed mountain road or being fetched by her father or friends in a car. David Hunter paid at least some of her accommodation costs. The Auckland area can be seen from Hunterstoun, on the cliff-edge overlooking the valley, and this symbolised Monica’s position at the time, autonomous but watched over, investigating research themes and methods within easy reach of family support.10

This period of Monica’s life is described in the only letter she seems to have written to Godfrey from Auckland. Argyle, she wrote to him in March, was ‘on good terms with the people’, and his wife spoke fluent isiXhosa. Storekeepers’ contacts and customer networks were crucial to her research, and this was the first of several stores where she stayed during her fieldwork. In words later echoed in her introduction to Reaction to Conquest, she told Godfrey that she spent her days

… paying calls in villages, and sitting on a mealie sack in the little tin shop, watching a child come in for 6d tea, an old woman for tobacco, and a man for patent medicine. It’s a strategic post … for I catch odd scraps of conversation from the verandah … and as customers come in, mine host gives the local gossip concerning them.

Monica took solitary walks, conversing with people she met along the way; but in ‘strenuous but profitable’ calls on households, she was accompanied by ‘the native girl teacher’ Hettie, ‘my sponsor, manager, and interpreter’. Together, the two women would approach a kraal, hail the family, request that the dogs be restrained, and then advance to the huts where they squatted among the livestock and naked children.

Then comes the polite question, ‘where do you come from’, and the answer ‘from home’. ‘What have you come for’. ‘To see you’. After further palaver the whereabouts of home, and my identity as ‘intombi Ka Hunter’ (Hunter’s daughter) is explained. Then an oration from Hetty announcing that I have come to ask questions, but that these have nothing to do with the poll tax or other evil things; further that I was ‘at school’ in England, and the people there were curious to know how the women in S.A. lived.

The next question was generally, ‘Why do the people in England want to know how we live?’ Here, Monica wryly acknowledged, ‘we get stuck. The difference between scientific interest, and impertinent curiosity is dreadfully subtle!’ Questions about the family, lobola (dowry), land, cattle and other things, she acknowledged, ‘are impertinent’. Most people answered readily and even humorously, inviting her to eat with them, and questioning her in turn. She was, she wrote, enjoying the work and was ‘hugely interested’ in it, but the necessity to maintain respectability was a strain. She had already been reproved for the shortness of her skirts, with no respite from women’s disapproval at ‘painfully proper’ Lovedale. Monica arranged to go in May to Pondoland, which she hoped would be less ‘suffocating’. Her aim was first to compare Pondoland conditions with those in the Tyhume Valley, and then with those in the African section of a European town. Thereafter, her plans for 1932 were ‘nebulous in the extreme’ and she was not even sure if Cambridge would want her to convert her research into a thesis.11

‘Out all day watching, or sitting in the store listening and scribbling’

Monica’s plans may have been nebulous, but she had strong institutional backing, if little intellectual support, from Hodson in Cambridge; and in May, between fieldwork at Auckland and Ntibane in Pondoland, Monica visited Johannesburg for a week and met Winifred Hoernlé, who for the next two years provided the academic support she had found lacking at Cambridge. Monica sent her field notes, and also collected pots and other artefacts for her, and Hoernlé responded with various questions and a certain amount of scepticism. Monica was able to defend, for example, data she had collected on inkomo yakulungu, tail hair from cows worn by a person who is ill, ‘which she obviously thought untrue’. Hoernlé’s questioning had the effect of reinforcing Monica’s commitment to rigorous fieldwork: ‘That is the advantage of having her to inspect my notes. One is apt to forget what will appear unlikely to those at H.Q. and neglect to collect accounts of cases – the only thing that will convince them.’ At times, Hoernlé annoyed Monica; for instance, she failed to return field notes which might have been required to support Monica’s application to the IIALC for a second year in the field. More fundamentally, however, she suspected that Hoernlé regarded her attempts to use the idea of contact as ‘futile and amateurish’, and that she was trying to push her in the direction of ‘tribal studies’, which probably meant timeless ethnographic description. This was not what the IIALC or Monica had in mind: she felt that ‘contact studies are much the most important though much the most difficult to make’, a principle to which she held fast. It was, nevertheless, a difficult notion to grapple with, and she diverged from it constantly, spending ‘much time finding out about things that have no possible relation to contact, just to pretend that I am working hard’. Monica was aware that the concept of contact might lead to the ossification of tribal and racial distinctions. But it might also open the door to the idea that customs evolve over time, which chimed with her historical training.12

‘Contact’ was an inescapable reality in South Africa. As part of the Transkei, Pondoland, a typical native reserve, was nevertheless integrally connected to the rest of South Africa, providing cheap labour for mines, farms, households and industry. At Ntibane, it seemed to Monica that she was living in Abrahamic times. But she was aware that the appearance was deceptive: though the ethnography of the time largely ignored the activities of missionaries, labour recruiters and administrators, Ntibane was a mere sixty kilometres from the rail head, and the modern state and economy were palpably present. Monica’s work commenced with, though it was not dominated by, the idea of culture contact, and she attempted a more concrete view, including the effects of labour migration on African society. Her eventual study, Reaction to Conquest, reflects a threefold division: Pondoland proper, Africans in the city of East London, and African workers on farms. Though this approach may seem ungainly today, Monica was nevertheless a pioneer. Steeped in English agrarian history, she had a clear grasp, unique at the time, of social change in rural African societies.13

Though more remote than Auckland, Ntibane was more comfortable as a fieldwork base, thanks to the ‘charming’ Dreyer family, with whom Monica stayed. She paid £5 a month for board and lodging, with laundry and use of a horse included. Mary Dreyer was the daughter of Dr William Anderson Soga, head of Miller Mission Station at Elliotdale, south-west of Ntibane, and his Scottish wife. William was a son of Tiyo Soga, pioneer Xhosa minister and translator of The Pilgrim’s Progress, who had also married a Scottish woman. William Soga died in 1916, and he was succeeded at Elliotdale by his brother, Rev. John Henderson Soga, a Presbyterian minister in the same church as David Hunter and a writer on Xhosa life and culture. Monica was thus in an environment linked to Lovedale and her family, ‘the sort of house where there are Corot prints on the walls, and boxes of biscuits in your bedroom in case you feel hungry at night’. Mary Dreyer managed the store while also making braided Pondo skirts. Monica often helped out in the shop and even managed it some Saturdays when the Dreyers went to the coast; she did so willingly, since Mary Dreyer gave her ‘so much of her time’. Mary’s four surviving letters to Monica are lively, affectionate and full of local gossip and accounts of weather and cattle, in one case answering some ethnographic questions. Though in March 1934 Mary suggested that if Monica returned for further fieldwork she should come as a guest, with none of her ‘financial arrangements’, the letters have a hint of formality, a sense of social distance. Mary addresses Monica as ‘Dear’ or ‘My dear Miss Hunter’, and signs off as ‘Mary A.S. Dreyer’, the initials clearly a tribute to her father, Anderson Soga. Though intimately involved with the local community, Mary refers to them as ‘the natives’. She seems to have identified with an idealised England: she thought that her carefully cultivated lawn could never rival ‘the stately and velvety lawns of England’.14

The trading store and the adjacent family dwelling were on a larger scale than the ‘little tin shop’ at Auckland, and apart from being an accomplished homemaker, Mary Dreyer was a capable businesswoman fluent in isiXhosa. The household was large and its members informative. In her first few days, Monica joined the circle around the fire where the Dreyer son, Ivan, was having his weekly bath. He translated ‘many delightful stories’ for Monica, some probably from eleven-year-old Gretta, a maid in the afternoons and a schoolgirl in the mornings. On one occasion Monica and Ivan made toffee: ‘he so badly wanted some, and we did not burn it!’ The household used the services of a second childminder, as well as a male cook, a debt collector, a small boy who accompanied Ivan on his way to school, and others. As the relaxed scene around the fire suggests, employment shaded into personal obligation and fidelity. The Dreyer household also welcomed other members of the Soga family. On 28 November, the scholar John Henderson Soga visited his niece’s store and Monica and he ‘talked shop all afternoon and watched a race meeting in front of the store!’15

With Mary Dreyer’s help, Monica was immediately thrust into the activities of the area. She often worked nine or ten hours, ‘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.’ Her life, she wrote to her mother, was peaceful but ‘astoundingly busy’. As at Auckland, the store was a vital hub of information. One Saturday in June it was full of customers and Monica had ‘an exciting morning hearing about sacrifices and the cutting up of a beast’. That afternoon she went to visit some households with Mary. Finding herself at the initiation ceremony of a traditional healer, Monica was unable to bear the fetid air of the crowded huts and instead watched from outside while chatting. People discussed whether she was ebomvu (red, i.e. coloured) like Mary, or umhlope (white), eventually opting for the latter. Monica was still finding her feet, and she made social gaffes. At one ceremony she declined beer, and etiquette demanded that her companions should also get none. Like them, Monica was more than a little annoyed: ‘I was fuming.’ Her Lovedale background had by no means equipped her for a full understanding of village life, and each day things took ‘a lot of sorting out’. She described her shock at seeing members of the congregation take offerings up to the altar and make a loud announcement as they did so. And then, in a buoyant mood, she broke off: ‘I hear my weekly hot bath arriving so good night!’16

In spite of occasional missteps, Monica worked with sensitivity. Her mother read in the East London Daily Dispatch that a young white woman in the Transkei had ‘roused the jealousy of the squaws’. She need not worry, Monica replied: she was ‘not being indiscrete [sic]’ and never intruded where she might not be wanted. She had been welcomed everywhere and had ‘friends all over the country’. Out alone, people saw her as someone ‘to be very carefully looked after and handed on from curator to curator’ even if they might ‘regard me as slightly insane’. She described a typical walk through the countryside, accompanied by one person after another she met along the way, among them a Christian woman, a youth sent to walk with her ‘so that the dogs would not trouble’ her, a girl herding cattle, and a ‘red’ woman on her way to drink beer with friends; all the while Monica talked and learnt, surrounded by magnificent countryside. To a local observer like her cousin Desmond Hobart Houghton, back from Oxford and at the time teaching at Lovedale, Monica was

… an amazing person and has been doing great things, knocking about in the wilds of the native territories and attending all sorts of barbarian festivities. People here have never heard of that sort of thing and look upon Monica as a bit of a freak to be interested in such things. It is really very plucky of her to have stuck to her work the way she has.

Monica wrote to Godfrey that she had been to an intonjane, a girls’ initiation ceremony. Being a woman, she was allowed to visit the secluded initiates. She described the dancing, the feast and her difficulty in consuming, as was expected of her, quantities of partially cooked, freshly slaughtered beef. She reflected on the ‘magnificent day’ as she and her ‘small attendant stumbled home across veldt paths, in the starlight’. Back at the store, Monica probed people for information about marriage and sacrifices: ‘it’s all very complicated, and enormously fascinating’. She pre-empted Godfrey’s question:

I hear you murmur, ‘but what about culture contact?’ Well you see I’ve got so interested in the Pondo, hardly touched by civilization, that I’ve managed to evolve a theory that it is necessary to study life under old conditions, before looking at the new. Besides it’s so much easier to study the static, than … kalediscopic [sic] changes.

Foreshadowing a major theme of Reaction to Conquest, Monica added: ‘of course culture here is not static – boys go to the mines, and women wear beads and braid, and call their most noxious brand of beer drink (there are many grades of them) “i-tea meeting” – but it’s static compared to Auckland’.17

By the end of 1931, Monica had abandoned her original idea of studying women. She suspected that ritual, an abiding preoccupation, was crucial to the study: ‘It seems futile sometimes to spend days learning what bits of meat a woman may eat, and when a stranger may share the sacrificial leg, but it’s only by getting the details of ritual that one can grasp their idea of God. I suspect ritual came before theology.’ She told her mother that she spent much time writing up data, so that she could correlate her evidence. She was, moreover, ‘troubled by lack of bright ideas on “contact”’, though ‘as long as one is busy soaking in the atmosphere and collecting data on the life as it is lived, one is doing something. All the same,’ she said, tongue-in-cheek, ‘I feel I ought to be inventing some theories. They would really be easier to invent if one sat in an arm chair at home, for then one would not be troubled by contradictory evidence.’ While there is nothing unusual in the failure to discern patterns in the growing mass of data and impressions, Monica’s empiricism and respect for evidence are clear, as is her reluctance, or possibly inability, to default to a theoretical mode. True to her historical training and personal inclinations, Monica looked for exceptions and things that did not fit, and she was slow to generalise. She was a world away from the pattern-making, closer to philosophy than ethnography, which Claude Lévi-Strauss brilliantly conjured up from the haphazard Brazilian fieldwork he was undertaking at roughly the same time. Monica was, nevertheless, clear that mere description without analysis was of little use, a criticism she directed at P.A.W. Cook’s recent study of the Bomvana people who lived to the south of the Pondo.18

It would be misleading to imply that Monica had an intellectual project that she advanced with calm self-confidence. She told Godfrey she was ‘terribly frightened’: she knew she could ‘grub along and collect facts fairly efficiently’, but when she obtained a second year of IIALC funding she still felt she had no constructive ideas about ‘contact’ and dreaded being paid for two years’ work and then ‘dish[ing] up a lot of platitudes’. She admitted that she was even frightened of Godfrey: he had been thinking hard, while she had no one to argue with and lacked access to relevant books. She felt she was becoming increasingly superficial. However, the dangers of ‘slackness and feverish activity’, the ‘suffering’ even, were balanced by the beauty of the area which she thought brought ‘an awareness of God’.19

While Godfrey studied for his final examinations, he planned how he could get a job that would bring him near to Monica, now back in South Africa with no guarantee that she would return to England. He failed to get a job at Michaelhouse, a private school in the province of Natal. Kenneth Hobart Houghton, Monica’s uncle by marriage and a school inspector, wrote that government teachers needed to be fluent in Afrikaans as well as English, and that a teaching diploma was essential for African schools. Godfrey concluded that his prestigious Oxford degree left him ‘completely unprepared for real life’. And while Monica thought it was ‘incredibly exciting’ that Godfrey was thinking of coming to South Africa, she confirmed that he was unlikely to get a teaching job without a diploma.20

In early September she wrote to congratulate Godfrey on his first-class degree, about which Desmond had told her. Of herself she said, ‘it is, of course, abominably lonely’, but she liked her work so much that she was ‘raising heaven and earth to get a second year in the present job’. To discuss culture contact without a grasp of ‘what was’ seemed ridiculous, and she had plans for a monograph on the Pondo, ‘to back a thesis on culture contact’. Monica was thus talking to ‘the old and conservative’ members of the community, and attending and observing various ceremonies. She had accompanied an African minister, on horseback, as he collected church offerings in kind, sleeping in a village along the way and also at a trading store: ‘our little Pondo ponies scrambled up and down precipices like goats, and still had breath to gallop on the ridges’. She went on to apologise for the ‘scrap and undiluted shop’, signing somewhat perfunctorily: ‘Monica’.21

Her letters to Godfrey were nevertheless becoming more intellectually and emotionally responsive, perhaps partly because of her need for ‘something beyond shop and gossip’ at Ntibane. She told him she was wrestling with the elision of Christianity and capitalism on the one hand, and communism and atheism on the other. She thought ‘economic individualism’ was growing in Pondoland, but it was still not dominant. People might undertake a week-long journey without food or money and be sure that they would always be fed. They were shocked at what they perceived as the ruthless economic individualism of white people. But Monica was not romantic about village society, and in terms she employed throughout her life, she noted: ‘under the old conditions the society was static and advance either in economic or intellectual spheres negligible’.22

Though shy, Monica approached academics and administrators with apparent confidence. She corresponded with ‘stout allies’ Isaac Schapera and Winifred Hoernlé, and also with Audrey Richards, later a close friend. In late June 1932 she went to Johannesburg and Pretoria ‘to meet the existing South African Anthropologists and put forth [her] claims’. She sent samples of plants used for ceremonial or medicinal purposes to C.E.B. Bremekamp, professor of botany at the University of Pretoria, and to J.M. Watt, professor of pharmacology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Watt in particular was fascinated by this plant material that originated from an area little studied at the time. Monica also corresponded with University of the Witwatersrand musicologist Percival Kirby, and sent him traditional musical instruments, as she sent clay pots to Winifred Hoernlé. She corresponded with Fr Bernard Huss, proponent of cooperative societies, at Mariannhill Mission. While at the hotel at Ngqeleni, she talked to officials like the cattle-dip inspector. Permitted to consult files and registers about the numbers of local polygamists, stock sales and the like, she was undaunted by the apparent confusion: ‘fuddled but I hope some useful tables may emerge from the jumble’. She liked the village, but strangers were stared at, especially one like herself about whom certain undisclosed ‘queer stories’ had circulated.23

Monica also took photographs, which she first mentioned in October 1931, explaining the large chemist’s bills for photographic materials. She was, she wrote, inclined to be over-eager, thereby spoiling the pictures, and the many failures made her feel ‘very incompetent and extravagant’, though she was more successful with photographs she had taken of a ‘smelling out’ of a witch, and of pot-making. Much later, Monica said her photography had assisted her work, with people hoping she would take a picture of them. She also took cine films, though apart from a list of the scenes she had filmed, none appear to have survived. A film shown by the Eton- and Cambridge-educated handyman and mechanic at Holy Cross Mission made her aware of the potential of the medium. She filmed, for instance, a beer-drink near Ntontela. It ended in a fight, but she had left by then: ‘bad luck, for I wanted a picture of a scrap’. In November, she showed her films at the home of friends in Grahamstown. She thought them ‘very savage (and very beautiful in bits)’. The following year, she gave at least two screenings to friends at Girton, who were fascinated by the content of the films.24

As at Auckland, Monica enjoyed the advantage of unstinting family support. Her school inspector uncle, Kenneth Hobart Houghton, sent her details about the numbers and qualifications of African teachers in his area, Fort Beaufort, and hoped to meet her and assist with transport when next he visited the Transkei. Two visits by her parents to Ntibane were called off because of the weather and the state of the roads, but in early September they spent a few days with her, probably in Umtata, though Jessie spent at least a day with her daughter at Ntibane.25

For the villagers themselves, ‘savage life’ was not boring, Monica wrote, and the notion that it was constituted nothing more than a projection of the anthropologist without diversions, ‘who gets bored to tears’. Monica took occasional breaks from her work, and through the network of traders she became friendly with Miss Viljoen, governess of the Picken children at a nearby store, at Qokama. Miss Viljoen went walking with her, ‘pupils in tow’, though, Monica added, it was unfortunate that she was ‘terrified of natives’. The striking manner in which elements in South African society interwove meant that Monica could take part in typical white South African activities while investigating apparently pristine African societies. On 26 September, she spent the day with the Dreyers and Miss Viljoen and her charges at the Dreyers’ cottage, or ‘camp’, on the beach at Lwandile, ‘which they cherish as we cherish Hogsback’. Monica was on a good horse, and rode the twenty kilometres or so to the coast, arriving in time for breakfast. She swam and explored while the boys fished, and then rode back to Ntibane in the moonlight. Mary Dreyer was delighted that she had visited the cottage, though Monica had reservations: ‘privately one day was plenty for me!’ Yet a week later, she abandoned work and joined a lorryload of Ngqueleni people going to the coast, including the assistant magistrate, a policeman and his wife, and an ex-musician from Riga who had fought in the White armies in the Russian civil war and now kept a store in the village. They played beach games: ‘It is good to stop being staid sometimes,’ Monica wrote. Mostly, though, she spent her leisure time reading. The following year, at Mbotyi, she abandoned Homer and the Old Testament because they were ‘solid “shop”’ and instead she read George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë.26

That November, Monica attended a race meeting at Ntibane. The moving spirits of the meeting were Chief Konjwayo’s uncle, ‘a “sporting dog”, exactly parallel to the English sporting peer’, and the coloured owner of the neighbouring store. The meeting was ‘a queer mixture of African and European’, with ululation and English-style betting. Mary Dreyer’s in-laws arrived during the event, insisting that Monica stay by herself in a room, even though the household was crowded. Mary had spent the week preparing for the critical gaze of two house-proud sisters-in-law. The men slept on hay bales in the shop and the women in young Ivan Dreyer’s room. Monica claimed to have ‘behaved beautifully’, remarking with a hint of condescension, ‘it was funny’. For her, the issue of class was not theoretical, derived from Marxist or other texts: it was a lived reality, with South African and English points of reference.27

In spite or perhaps because of her keen sense of social gradation, Monica was not, as perhaps were some anthropologists of her day, seduced by rank and status, and never felt at ease with chiefs and chiefly protocol. She spent the last week of her 1931 fieldwork at Rainy, a Presbyterian mission station twenty kilometres north of Umtata near the Great Place of Victor Poto Ndamase, the Western Pondo paramount chief. She collected useful material on legal matters, remarking ruefully, ‘I am not cut out for royal visits.’ The chief’s secretary, Tennyson Makiwane, an Mfengu man who had known Monica at Lovedale and had also studied at Fort Hare, seemed to consider her still a small girl, ‘awkward in a society where status depends largely on age’. To the chief’s amusement, she got into an argument with Makiwane as to whether or not Pondos believed women to have ancestral spirits: ‘They do, only chief and councillor were too deraciné to know it, and thought I was a feminist – dreadful thought!’ At the time, Monica was reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and used this term despite the fact that she rejected Woolf’s ‘quite too Victorian … militant feminism’. Yet she was highly conscious of gender-based condescension, in whatever racial group, and contrasted the straightforward approach of the Lusikisiki magistrate she interviewed on 23 October 1932 with that of the Ngqeleni clerks who saw her as ‘a bright young thing, who thinks she’s investigating the natives – what a joke!’28

In remote Pondoland, Monica maintained her interest in clothes, her own as well as those of local women. She ordered material for three dresses from Liberty’s, the London store specialising in good-quality fabrics. She suggested that her mother alter a skirt she wished to pass on to her, though if she remained certain that she did not want it, Monica declared: ‘I shall be charmed.’29

‘It’s pleasant to be domesticated and non-academic for a bit’

Approaching the end of her time at Ntibane, Monica arranged accommodation in East London. By the end of November she would have gleaned much useful information, and though there were ‘lots of lions in next year’s path’, things were likely to be easier, and, she declared: ‘I do like the work.’ On 8 December 1931, Monica arrived back at Lovedale and the next day the family packed for the Christmas holiday at Hogsback.30

For the first month of the holiday, Monica ‘baked, and made frocks, and talked to … Mother, and was sociable’. She visited her cousins at Innisfree, rode, walked, climbed, searched out seedlings with her father, attended a Young Peoples’ Prayer Circle rally at Cathcart, and read. ‘It’s pleasant to be domesticated and non-academic for a bit,’ she wrote. Her reading, however, included ‘bolshevik literature’ from Eddie Roux which, together with Godfrey’s letters, made her feel that ‘one must get one’s attitude towards communism clear’. She was puzzled by what she perceived as its atheism, and repelled by this and its apparent readiness to use physical force. She wryly noted her tendency to earnest-mindedness, connected to a lack of a sense of humour, her ‘besetting sin … a particular failing of Protestantism’.31

With the holiday over, Monica focused on writing up her notes, ‘a longer job than [she] had expected’. Later, she remembered this as a period of unremitting labour: ‘I really worked jolly hard at writing it, getting it into order.’ Yet Monica admitted to being ‘frightened as usual’; the year’s work had not reconciled her to the necessity of ‘asking impertinent questions’. Pondoland had been like a fairytale, where nothing was surprising: ‘I got to take queer things for granted, and question the taken for granted.’32

‘A tired and over-excited mind’

Godfrey was undergoing a crisis. Monica noted that he had given no news of himself in his letter of 7 September, written on his way back to England after two months at Alfred Zimmern’s Geneva School of International Studies. He was returning to teach for three weeks in an elementary school, part of the education diploma course for which he had enrolled. Monica’s reply crossed a letter from Godfrey dated 8 December. He was experiencing a breakdown, and was under the psychiatric care of Dr Leonard Browne, of the Tavistock Clinic. The comments on Monica’s work – ‘fascinatingly interesting’; ‘jolly important’ – were agonisingly trite and ‘obvious’, as he himself admitted. His distress at his ‘humiliating’ breakdown is evident. He was, he said, suffering from ‘a tired and over-excited mind which refused to work and a consequent imprisonment of consciousness with its owner’s small but obstinate greediness, pride and general ineffectiveness’. In the midst of this, Godfrey taught Latin two days a week in a secondary school, ‘a grim and barrack-like building’ where no one seemed to believe that Latin could be ‘made interesting’ and where the matriculation examination ‘hangs over the curriculum like a cloud’. He realised that, to teach, one had to ‘throw oneself into it and be absorbed’, admitting, ‘somehow I can’t do that, it’s not my craft’.33

Godfrey was soon to choose the craft of anthropology. On 26 January 1932, he wrote Monica a frenetic, mannered letter, blending the imaginative, the intellectual and the practical. Monica had arranged for a collection of the poetry of Robert Bridges to be sent to Godfrey, and this led to a fanciful dialogue between knight-errant Bridges (‘Joyous Faith’) and the novelist Mary Webb (‘Pity’). The writing is fluent but sentimental, completely lacking his usual ironic restraint. He asked Monica to understand that he had been instructed to rest and that an earlier letter ‘was written by an invalid and [she should] throw it away’, which she did not do. In this same overwrought letter, he told Monica that Joseph Oldham and Sir Walter Buchanan-Riddell, principal of Hertford College until 1930 and chair of the Commonwealth Fund which financed British students at United States universities, had supported his application to study with Lowie or Radcliffe-Brown, followed by six months in Germany ‘learning Savage Grammar’. As in subsequent episodes in the 1930s, Godfrey was able to operate professionally in the midst of severe mental stress. But at this stage his relationship with Monica was still dogged by distance, with the need to ask, ‘what happens to you now after Pondo?’34

Monica wrote back sympathetically, asking if Godfrey’s illness really was the result of overwork, or, considering the grim global situation, whether it might not have been caused by ‘thoughts that go outside the garden gate’. Regarding his study plans, she felt that Radcliffe-Brown would be more stimulating than Lowie, but warned him that anthropology was in its infancy, that most theoretical books were poor, and most monographs ‘just a jumble of facts’. But she went on to say: ‘it is more fun making roads than repairing them … [and] field work is exciting’. Godfrey’s outlook was, by contrast, gloomy: her letter was ‘Christmas in the middle of a very grim winter’, at a time when he was ‘completely in pieces’, and he wondered whether he would ever recover.35

While Monica was walking around the dusty streets of the African location in East London, Godfrey, recovering, as he hoped, from his breakdown, was listening to Bach and Brahms and wandering around the National Gallery looking at the paintings of Turner, Constable, Claude, Hogarth and El Greco. In his letters, he continued to elaborate on the imagined personae of Robert Bridges and Mary Webb, adding some acute personal observations in the process. You must swear, he said to Monica, ‘that you will never flatter me but always laugh at me, and I will do the same by you. Laugh at my bombast, and rhetoric and solemn dreams – so will you indeed be a comforter. And I will laugh at your fears.’ She replied with reflections on beauty, creativity and suffering, but also with lively descriptions of her work, adding that the ‘ache in beauty’ stems not merely from its ephemeral nature, but, for women, ‘has a lot to do with being virgin and hunger to be possessed’. Though she signed, formally, ‘Yours truly, Monica’, letters between herself and Godfrey were becoming more frequent, more intimate, more like love-letters. She was, however, direct and practical: ‘You have not answered half my questions. May I not even know how you are?’36

‘They look at me rather as at a traveller from Mars, when they hear I have been there’

Monica’s focus on social change, specifically with regard to farm labour and urbanisation, was the most original, though not the most detailed, aspect of her study. Much anthropology of the time hinted at regret at the passing of seemingly untouched indigenous societies or, its obverse, a desire to insulate such societies from modern influences. Monica knew that change, with all its potential for destruction, was inevitable. She searched it out, and on finding evidence of change she scrutinised it. Though these themes appeared in relatively short sections at the end of her book, they were not an afterthought: in 1932, she spent substantial periods in the African locations of East London and Grahamstown, and also on commercial farms, thereby ignoring the advice of significant figures such as Diedrich Westermann of the IIALC to confine her research to East London and Pondoland. It was only towards the end of the year that she went to parts of Pondoland where she had not previously worked.37

On 16 February 1932, Monica drove with her parents to East London, where she stayed in lodgings in Belgravia, a quiet middle-class area. On one occasion she shared a table with two men who seemed to be commercial travellers, ‘only they don’t travel, and I derive much inward amusement’. Her father had written in advance to doctors, location administrators and community leaders such as Dr Walter Rubusana and Rev. G.G. Ndzotyana, and Monica was able to start work immediately. She met the three African nurses who worked at the Child Welfare Bureau in the location, all of whom had studied at Lovedale, and arranged to accompany them on their rounds. This was her passport to house visits, her basic urban research method. She enjoyed many illuminating conversations with Dr Rubusana, a prominent elder and political figure, and asked him to enquire about a Xhosa interpreter. He managed to find a former court interpreter and location headman who was an excellent guide and source of information. Monica employed the man she generally referred to as her ‘interpreter’, or ‘bodyguard’, four mornings per week at £2 per month. He would introduce her to potential informants in a formal manner: ‘he sings an isibongo [praise song] about intombi Ka Hunter wase Dikeni, as we enter, and people are remarkably cordial’. He also helped Monica in gathering material about dreams (to which there is only passing reference in her published work): ‘are you an igqira [traditional healer] that you are asking people’s dreams?’ she was asked in one household. Monica was struck by the relationship between illness and witchcraft, and she became aware that even a figure as educated and sophisticated as the Christian minister Rubusana had consulted an igqira when he suspected that an enemy had made him ill. Dreams proved helpful in indicating people’s concerns and preoccupations: ‘the location is simply steeped in the belief that most illness is caused by “supernatural means” – church goers and all’. Monica was also interested in psychology, even thinking that it might be ‘the most fruitful side of Anthrop’, and read psychoanalytical work intensively ‘to see if some interesting witchcraft evidence will work out in Freudian lines’. Godfrey, who was at the time undergoing psychoanalysis with Leonard Browne in London, would surely have read her letters with a personal as well as a professional interest.38

Monica encountered numerous well-disposed Lovedale graduates, and visited many families with Mrs Rubusana. She met Charles Lloyd, the brusque and authoritarian location superintendent, who mellowed when he saw ‘Girton’ on Monica’s card. She was to attend a meeting of the Joint Council with its secretary, H.C. Peacock, whose daughters invited her to tennis. In short, she had a valuable network of contacts and a congenial social milieu which included people like East London medical officer of health and amateur archaeologist Percy Laidler with whom she could discuss issues relating to her own concerns. Laidler took her to the West Bank location, where he introduced her to location officials.39

Monica improvised her methodology as she worked. Her ‘House Hold Questionnaire’ was more a series of guiding themes, including ‘Permenant Questions’ [sic], many crossed out, amended and added to, comprising not a body of rigorously comparable data, but rather multiple explorations of different households as she encountered them. She seems to have surveyed 226 households, though it is sometimes difficult to determine from the records where one household ends and another begins. She found it hard to formulate questions that would elicit the sort of information she wanted, ‘and most natives when answering seem to say yes and no at the same time – qualifying a statement till it means nothing. However I am collecting “impressions” which I hope may be translatable into words some day.’ She went on to give one vivid ‘impression’ from her household visits:

One moment you are in a civilized house – linoleum floors, frilly pillows, photos, artificial flowers, and the lady of the house just going out to tennis, the next mud floor, no furniture, babies in beads, and red blankets appearing beneath other clothes. But in the first you may get an account of death by witchcraft, and in the second a discussion on unemployment, so the two are not apart.40

House-to-house visits were not ideal, but seemed the only possible way to work, she wrote. The nuclear family was taking the place of wider groups of relatives, and religious observance was declining while belief in and the practice of witchcraft flourished, yet peoples’ decency and good nature survived the ‘virulent economic individualism’ that was obliterating the concept of working for the group. The constant official struggle against brewing meant investigators were suspect, but Monica’s Lovedale background was a help to her. Dr Rubusana arranged for her to meet Clements Kadalie, organiser of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU). He was ill on her first visit, but she met his secretary, ‘elderly, and toothless but an old Lovedalian’. On the afternoon of 28 February, Monica attended an IICU meeting and was introduced by Kadalie ‘as a non political person to be helped and not hindered’. She later said: ‘I could not have got anywhere without his support.’ Monica was prepared to take risks: ‘The police are out to get Kadalie (quite a mild Trades Unionist) as they did Roux, but one must make contacts’. She felt awkward when asked to make an impromptu speech: ‘Meeting people of a different culture, being the only one of your kind among them, and being stared at, is still sometimes a nightmare. You feel such a rabbit.’ But she felt completely safe, and was greeted cheerfully wherever she went. She had seen so much illegal beer brewed that nobody could imagine she was a police informer, and she was so well accepted that, in one house, her interpreter was even offered a drink in her presence. Yet Monica was aware that she herself was being closely observed by the authorities. Occasionally, she found herself in a middle-class household where she could truly relax. Miss Makaya, educated at Healdtown school and about to go to Lovedale as a nurse, was being visited by a group of teachers and a nurse when Monica arrived. It was a ‘jolly party’, Monica wrote, and she clearly felt at home.41

From her letters to Godfrey, it seems that Monica’s perspective on East London was rather different to that of her mother. East London had moments of stimulation when, for instance, she and her mother went to a concert performance by the Italian soprano Amelita Galli-Curci. But Monica thought most of the white community, particularly the women, were philistines, utterly ignorant of African life, claiming to ‘know the native from A to Z’ but stymied if asked a single specific question. Women who talked about anything besides the weather and neighbours were considered highbrow, and Monica lamented: ‘it’s grim, and I work to forget that I’m abominably lonely’. When pressed, wives of officials could agree that ‘someone ought to do something’ about conditions in the location. However, ‘they look at me rather as at a traveller from Mars, when they hear I have been there’. Such attitudes depressed Monica, but when they were used to thwart her, she was enraged. Location Superintendent Charles Lloyd kept postponing her requests for an interview: ‘He smiled at a bright young thing pretending to be working, and asking ridiculous questions, and invited me to tea with his daughter. That sort of treatment makes me furious.’42

Monica left East London sooner than she had intended, at the end of March, having completed her work there in less than six weeks. By 6 April she was in Umtata (now Mthatha), the Transkei capital. She heard committee reports and attended sessions of the Bunga, the Transkeian assembly, which met under the eye of white officials; it had limited autonomy, with certain areas of responsibility. She had access to the highest levels, even at a time when officials were preoccupied. She stayed at the Imperial, the best hotel in town, and was welcomed warmly, by William Thomson Welsh, chair of the General Council and chief magistrate, who was effectively governor of the Transkeian Territories, and also by Frank Brownlee, magistrate, author and collector of oral histories, with whom she subsequently corresponded about Pondo life. Welsh invited her to tea at his residence. She accepted, ‘fearsome’ though it seemed. The wife of Colonel Taylor, chief of police in Umtata, was an acquaintance, and Monica spent an evening with the Taylors ‘getting indaba from the Colonel’ about Wellington Buthelezi’s millenarian movement and other organisations the police were observing. Monica clearly made an impression, although she demurely ascribed it to the ‘dashing hat’ she had bought in East London, ‘which extracts all the pamphlets I want, even from harassed officials’.43

Monica had, and was seen to have, the support of authority. Much later, she remembered that occasionally people were suspicious of her, even muttering that she might be a member of the CID. But she was generally treated as ‘quite an amusing guest, and one who added status to an occasion’. Her Western Pondoland research now complete, in Umtata she made contacts for Eastern Pondoland. The magistrate for the area introduced her to chiefs and councillors, telling them that they would be responsible for her safety when she visited in July, which was ‘an embarrassing but useful preparation for the next job’. Later, on her visit to the regent near Lusikisiki, she was escorted by an African policeman who anxiously murmured hints on court etiquette. Locally, she was helped by those who either occupied or aspired to positions of authority. In return, she was sometimes asked to provide assistance. For example, the teacher in the school nearest to Mbotyi, ‘a stout ally’, told a diviner that Monica was ‘the special child of [the regent] Mswakeli … and of the Magistrate, and anyone who hindered [her], or refused information would be eaten up entirely’. Monica said she could not help laughing at this – ‘I cannot support the role of a dignified limb of authority’ – yet the introduction undoubtedly made a big impression on the diviner. In return for his help, the teacher asked Monica to talk to a group of girls about why they should attend his struggling school.44

‘The conditions they have to hide’

Using her father’s ‘large and ancient Buick’, Monica went on to visit white-owned farms west of the Ciskei, in the Adelaide, Bedford and Grahamstown areas. One farmer who sympathised with her research warned in advance that his fellows were suspicious of anyone investigating labour conditions on their property. ‘It is not surprising,’ Monica commented, ‘considering the conditions they have to hide.’ She dreaded the expected rebuffs, though she claimed, unconvincingly, that she was ‘fast becoming a brazen hussy’. Invoking her nickname, she later admitted to Godfrey that she had in fact felt like ‘rather a lonely and frightened rabbit, too small for my skin’.45

Her uncle Kenneth provided Monica with introductions. She stayed at first at Midgeley’s Hotel in Adelaide, but quickly made her own connections, including the stock inspector and the veterinary surgeon who introduced her to the farmers of the Bedford area. Thereafter she visited one farm after the other, and was often invited to stay. She also knew some farm daughters from her schooldays in Port Elizabeth. As usual, though, she felt herself an uneasy outsider, embarrassed about intruding into domestic lives. As in the past, she overcame this in the interests of her work. It was important for Monica to ingratiate herself with farmers, given the tight control that they exercised over workers who invariably lived on their farms. She made up a foursome at bridge, trumping only where she felt it politic to do so. She ate vast meals: ‘I feel I am getting fat already! But oh Mummy we are back to meat three times a day. It’s desperate.’ Monica acknowledged that the farms to which she was given access were those whose labour conditions were generally better than average. Many farmers belonged to the local English- or Scottish-descended elite – Pringles, Moffatts, Bennetts and others – but some, like the De Klerks and Van Niekerks, were Afrikaners. Her hosts would have found their guest unsettling had they fully realised what she was observing. She rejected the widespread notion that agricultural or domestic work on farms increased the skills of African workers. Though certain families had lived on farms for three generations, Monica believed that skills were often higher in the Ciskei or Transkei among people who had never been under the direct control of white farmers.46

Very often, it was the white women of the farm who assisted Monica in finding out about the lives of the workers. At the Welshes’ farm, ‘the show of the district’ staffed entirely by ‘school’ people, a daughter who happened to be home showed Monica around and gave her much information, as did a Miss Bennet of Post Retief. Wages were standard, at 10/- per month for a man, with food rations and usually grazing rights and certain other benefits. However, extras like medical attention, meat and clothes varied greatly, ‘also the manner of the baas varies, and that counts for a lot’. Upland farms differed from valley to valley. In one, conditions were good and there was not a great deal of drinking or sheep-stealing, a fact that Monica ascribed to a long-standing Christian presence. All farmers, however, were rigidly opposed to independent African churches, with one telling her that farmers did not want anyone who ‘might upset the servants’.47

Paradoxes confronted Monica continually. Her days were spent in the huts of impoverished farm labourers, and her evenings in comfortable farmhouses, an experience that made her more sympathetic to both labourers and farmers. But Monica had no illusions about conditions on even the best farms, some of which did not permit schools to operate on their property, allegedly to reduce the chance of unrest. On one farm, it was customary ‘to give someone a thick ear just to assert authority’. She categorised farms as being ‘good as reserves’, ‘messy’, ‘really raw’ and ‘bad raw’. She was invited to give two lectures at Rhodes University College in Grahamstown. While staying with Mrs Milne, wife of the chair of the Grahamstown Joint Council, who had ‘the nicest pictures’ Monica had seen since her trip to Italy, Monica investigated life in the location. On 31 May, she saw an igqira purge patients of insects and poison by means of a dung plaster, as he claimed, and that same evening she attended the Rhodes Ball with her cousin Desmond and his wife Betty.48

‘I want to begin wooing you a little, don’t forbid it’

Meanwhile, Godfrey’s letters became ever more insistent and dramatic. Responding to these communications was made no easier by the jarring juxtaposition of moods and contexts as letters crossed one another or were delayed. On 11 May, Godfrey sent Monica ‘A Song of Apples’, the first of many poems he wrote for her:

The apples that I gave you,

My Mirabel, were green,

July and codlin apples

That only sun had seen;

Ashamed (yet I’d none other)

I plucked them for my Queen.

‘Those are not eating apples’ –

You never spoke so true! –

But you saw me flinch and redden,

So you took one up and threw

It playfully, ball-fashion,

Till hilarious we grew.

Too soon the game was over

And you took your maiden way

Bravely smiling, left your playmate,

And I could not bid you stay;

But I looked up at my fruit-tree

And I cursed the balmy day.

The Heavens heard me cursing

And sent a bitter wind,

Snow-sifting and satiric,

And it froze my fluid mind

Into form, and substance gave it;

And frost bit the apples’ rind.

Yet still these frosted apples

Are not vintaged to your taste,

They need hot sun to warm them –

And my sun is shy and chaste;

Could I but see you smiling

With my arm about your waist!

Godfrey told Monica that he had come back from ‘Eeyore’s gloomy place’ and that he loved her and was ‘going to make you love me’. Gathering references from Monica’s letters and conversations too, it seems, Godfrey said he desired her beauty:

That is why I am coming to Africa, because you couldn’t, try however hard you might, give it except in Africa; it is all tangled up with Xosa and Pondo babies, and Scotch missionary work, with stories of Livingstone and Arab slave traders, of Chaka and Moshesh, with Roy Campbell’s satires, Wayfarers, Dutch Predikants, sugar plantations, and with pity for frightened Coloured prostitutes and puzzled White statesmen – and that’s how I want it, tangled up with all these things.

‘I am going to begin by learning anthropology,’ he said, and though the Chicago scholarship was now unlikely, with ‘valiant ally’ Joe Oldham’s help, Godfrey seemed confident he might yet study anthropology in Britain. The day after writing this, Godfrey proposed again to Monica. He repeated his explanation for wishing to learn anthropology and come to Africa, presumptuously instructing her: ‘you must begin to learn wifely patience’. Anthropology, he said, involved thinking about society and putting flesh on the abstractions of Oxford philosophy. His history tutor had told him to avoid Plato and to read ‘Aristotle and facts’ instead, and Godfrey remarked: ‘Now, “Aristotle and facts” is just the middle name of anthropology.’ Listening to the dawn chorus at five on a May morning, he said: ‘Men are asleep and only God can hear us’, and then asked Monica whether he might sing to her. This is followed by some of his own verse and a peroration: ‘will you, Monica Hunter become Mrs. Wilson and sew on my buttons, will you wait for me to come, and consent to live on 2½d a year with me when I can come?’ He continued: ‘before God, Monica, don’t let me carry you away against your will with passion and rhetoric. If you do not love me that is just a fact which we can not help and which we must accept. I fear God more than I love you. To violate you with my passion would be Hell, for clouds of lies would hide His face from us.’ Yet he acknowledged: ‘you are 7,000 miles away in space and I want you and I am trying to wound you and make you feel the same ache as I do about that 7,000 miles’. A typically histrionic letter, it is nevertheless leavened with humour and self-deprecation.49

In Monica’s reply, she said that Godfrey’s letter ‘half frightens’ her. He was changing his life because of her and, though she loved no one else and did not regard his love ‘heedlessly’, she could not say that she loved him as he loved her, nor could she say she ever would, ‘for I don’t know’. Visiting him at Oxford, she had wanted him to stop caring for her, but she herself felt a need: ‘I couldn’t do without your friendship, and your letters, and now I feel I have been unfair to you.’ His idealisation made her uncomfortable. She was not as good a woman as he thought, and she confessed: ‘there are intervals when I am completely pagan, and I cannot pray’.

With a characteristic note of realism, Monica advised Godfrey ‘concerning loaves and fishes’, that Malinowski would be the most interesting anthropologist to work with, apart from Radcliffe-Brown, who, perhaps unbeknown to her, had accepted an appointment in Chicago, which she referred to as ‘a barbarous place’. She herself might conceivably be in England in 1933, since ‘Mrs. Hoërnlé [sic] is burbling about trying for a PhD, and Hodson about applying for a Rockefeller’. In closing, slightly misquoting Irish writer George William Russell (AE), to whose poetry she had introduced Godfrey in Geneva, she wrote:

I thought, beloved, to have brought to you

A gift of quietness and ease and peace,

Cooling your brow as with the mystic dew

Dropping from twilight trees.

And she ends, with a new urgency: ‘I am hungry to see you. Moché.’50

After his letters of 11 and 12 May, Godfrey wrote four which were apparently even more extravagant, and which he deeply regretted sending. Writing by airmail to head them off, he asked Monica to burn them unopened. He had had a nervous breakdown, he wrote, and, though he meant what he had said in the first two letters, and awaited her answer anxiously, in the last four, ‘under great stress, I flung together a sort of rubbish heap of misunderstood bits of myself, all clothed in the most exalted language, under the impression that I was heroically making love to you’. He was now much better but would wait anxiously for her assurance that she had ‘not read [his] rubbish heap’.51

Monica promised to burn the letters. She was ‘terribly distressed’ at his state, especially as she felt responsible for it, and so was unable to answer his letter properly. ‘I don’t understand anything, and it is all dark,’ she wrote. There was only one certainty: ‘I have got a job that I am meant to do, and it is to be finished.’ Ten days later, she assured Godfrey that three of his letters were ‘ashes, unread’, and that she would burn the next when it arrived. Still taking for granted that, for a woman, marriage and a career were mutually exclusive, she explained that her refusal of him was not because she was ascetic or career-minded. She loved her work, ‘and it would mean a lot to give it up’. And though she detested housekeeping, she assured Godfrey that ‘all that is beside the point. If I loved you there would be no choice.’

Monica did not permit this personal turmoil to distract her from her work. She spent hours talking to farmworkers in their huts. She rode ‘miles over a grass track, [with] impatient horses, and a sweep of blue hills, half-dressed in snow’. She also visited Grahamstown, and though Godfrey’s letters made her ‘fearful, and very sad, and very happy’, Monica did not pretend to a devastation that she did not feel: ‘for the rest, I am busy – and happy’, she wrote.52

Ill though he was, Godfrey continued to work towards a career in anthropology. In mid-May, he went to see Malinowski and soon had an unofficial promise from him and Oldham of a Rockefeller or IIALC doctoral grant later that year, followed by two years of fieldwork, probably in East Africa. This was confirmed some weeks later, with an annual grant of £250 for two years, and a Rockefeller fellowship for two years of fieldwork in Africa from September or October 1934, subject to satisfactory academic performance. These were the ‘loaves and fishes’.53

While Godfrey clearly pursued anthropology because of Monica, he was reluctant to admit to this and instead wrote: ‘it’s not that I love you and therefore want to take up Anthrop, but on the contrary partly because your subject is Anthrop that I need you’. Her claim not to be the ‘good woman’ Monica assumed he thought her was irrelevant: ‘“Goodness” is one of the facades which it is so sweet to abandon to someone one trusts utterly.’ Her refusal did not deter him: ‘I want to begin wooing you a little, don’t forbid it,’ he persisted. He might not see her for two years, ‘but it is for ever, Monica, and I can wait’. He was doing anthropology because he ‘wanted unspeakably to find a common aim’. He knew that with his tendency to theorise on insufficient evidence he could never make a first-class anthropologist by himself, and he needed a practical, scientific person like Monica ‘to cross out half anything [he] wrote and rewrite it’. ‘Awful cheek’ though it might sound, he was determined that she should have a career: ‘for if we were only to play together and not work together we should burn each other out before we were middle-aged, as so many couples do’. She should not worry about his nervous breakdown. He had been having treatment and had been told that it was due to childhood experiences, and he assured her: ‘it’s all fading away quite happily now that I’ve had a look at it’. Puncturing his inflated rhetoric, Monica reminded Godfrey that she was ‘a very plain and ordinary young woman, in mind and body’; uncomfortably for them both, he would ‘fall from the stars with a dreadful bump’ when he really got to know her.54

There was little likelihood that they would see each other unless Monica was able to return to Cambridge after the completion of her fieldwork. To receive an extension of her IIALC grant for the next eighteen months, Monica would need the recommendation of the South African Inter-University Committee for African Studies (IUCAS), and would have to write up her study as a PhD. To comply with these requirements, she would have to be in residence at a university, which, initially, would not necessarily be Cambridge. Apparently misreading the ‘hart’ of Psalm 42, she told Godfrey that her ‘heart panteth after the water brooks of Cambridge’ and its proximity to the London School of Economics. But it would be ‘much more efficient’ to be attached to a South African university close to her research area. She assured Godfrey that she cared for him, but did not intend to commit herself by post: ‘I want to see you first. You understand?’ Yet, while Monica refused to allow Godfrey’s devotion to disrupt her study, she was edging closer to him. ‘I can’t talk on paper old man,’ she said, adding that though she detested herself for not being sure about her love for him, it was ‘intolerable’ for them both not to be able to see each other.55

Though Winifred Hoernlé felt confident that the application would succeed, Monica anxiously awaited a response. She regretted her excessively tentative letter to the IIALC, the effects of which Hoernlé tried to counteract. On 10 September, Monica wrote that it was still uncertain whether ‘Cambridge may be wangled’ with Mrs Hoernlé’s assistance. When, eventually, the IUCAS recommended to the IIALC that it support the writing-up of Monica’s study, the year at Cambridge seemed certain. Feeling ‘very much relieved’, Monica wrote to her mother, ‘Will you and Daddy permit that if the scholarships go through?’ Of course, she had already applied to Cambridge for admission as a doctoral student, requesting that her two years of fieldwork, which she had undertaken without formal academic affiliation, be credited to her studies. Monica was finally admitted as a research student under the supervision of Hodson, who had written strongly in her support.56

In the margin of a letter written on 26 October, requesting information about sacrifices and thanking Monica for snuff spoons and pots, Winifred Hoernlé wrote that she had just heard from London that Monica’s application for funding had been approved. This was confirmed by a telegram from the IIALC. And so, just two months before leaving for England, Monica was assured of the means of writing up her study, and of seeing Godfrey again. Soon, she wrote, ‘these bottled up letters can stop’.57

During her visit to Johannesburg in late June 1932, Monica met up with Eddie Roux, whose ‘information about Russia, and adventures as communist agitator, and prisoner’ she found ‘interesting’. She accompanied him to the Johannesburg Marxist Study Group dance, ‘a grand tonic after the proprieties of Pondoland and Lovedale’. She wrote to Godfrey, asking: ‘You don’t mind me wandering round with wooly haired [sic] people like Roux do you?’ Doubtless Godfrey gritted his teeth. Indeed, he may not have been fully reassured when Monica continued: ‘I think I care a bit, only don’t make me promise yet, for I might get frightened, and restless, if I knew that I was bound, and you were not there to kiss me, and still me.’ Nevertheless, she was delighted to hear that Godfrey was ‘being rash and doing Anthrop’, and she told him: ‘I hate people who play for safety.’ Shortly afterwards, Godfrey wrote that the LSE had accepted him. Monica hoped that anthropology would live up to his expectations: ‘I fear the books will seem puerile after “Greats”, but Malinowski should be fun.’58

Monica spent the rest of July at Lovedale and her beloved Hogsback. ‘I want to show you the Hogsback very badly,’ she wrote to Godfrey; she assured him that he ‘would belong’. The air was keen, like ‘skating weather in Cambridge’, the peaks ‘white, and a queer blue’, and the veld burnt pink. ‘Have you ever lived close enough to earth and farm as to feel that the weather is an important thing in life?’ she asked him. But at Lovedale visitors distracted her continually. Accused by her mother of becoming ‘high brow, and stand offish’ she agreed to play bridge with the locals; she survived one such bridge evening, ‘apart from frequently forgetting what trumps were, and almost falling asleep twice’. Whenever she could, she wrestled with her farm material, admitting that she ‘did cook occasionally’ when her statistics looked ‘irrational’.59

‘Michael shows resource in blarneying, and I profit much from listening’

Monica now began work in various rural centres in Pondoland East, moving about ‘to discover what things were peculiarly local, and what were general within the tribe’. On 27 July, she set off for Jack and Sally Barber’s trading store at Mbotyi in Lusikisiki District on the coast, with a letter of introduction from David Rheinallt Jones to ‘Magistrates and Native Commissioners’. Monica remarked, ‘I must be in Pondoland before all the beer is finished and the “season” is over.’ On the way, she again spent an evening in Umtata with Colonel Taylor, who kept her informed about ‘native “movements”’. She was amused that he thought her ‘nice and respectable, not a bit the sort of person who would know any Communists!’ Travelling in a crammed bus, Monica went to Lusikisiki where she interviewed the magistrate and borrowed official reports. Homesick and ‘trying not to feel frightened’, she waited to see the regent of Eastern Pondoland at the Great Place: ‘I abominate these state visits to chiefs,’ she wrote. She particularly loathed court etiquette, as when she ‘was about to commit the enormity of crossing the iKundla to where the councillors were, instead of waiting for someone to come and inquire [her] business’. But she was at least not patronised as she had been at the court of the Western Pondoland paramount; remembering to wear a long frock, she ‘survived’ a four-hour discussion on custom with the councillors.60

The Barbers lived in a remote area with scattered homesteads. Sally Barnes was an American nurse whom Jack had met while recuperating from war wounds. According to Monica, she arrived in 1931 with cases of evening clothes, expecting to find servants and an elegant colonial life. Instead, ‘she found a shack on the beach, a store that does practically no business’ with the nearest small administrative centre fifteen miles away through a roadless forest. She knew nothing about housekeeping, was terrified of the local people, and remained unconvinced by Monica’s assurances that though Mbotyi might be a backwater, ‘the country was really quite civilised’. The unfortunate woman had awoken one night dreaming she was in New York ‘listening to a concert by the Philadelphia orchestra!’ Though Monica comforted Sally, she herself was under strain, writing that to minimise loneliness, ‘in spite of a failing heart occasionally’, she immersed herself in visits to kraals. She was not frightened for her security, though she did admit: ‘it still embarrasses me to go to peoples [sic] homes, and ask impertinent questions, when you are not quite sure that you are wanted’.61

Michael Geza, Monica’s ‘henchman’ or ‘clerk’ as she often called him, who was also her ‘guide, philosopher and friend’, now appears. He had ‘very good English, nice manners, and [was] resourceful’, she told her mother. At Ntibane in 1931, she had generally gone around alone, but here in Eastern Pondoland the magistrate ‘forbade’ her to do so. Monica and Michael called on the elderly local headman, who was intrigued by Monica’s relationship with the Barbers. She resented being called the ‘little wife’, though she was possibly also categorised as Sally Barber’s sister. Monica attended beer-drinks with Michael, and for a sixpenny basket of beer the party agreed to dance for them, with Monica taking photographs. They had long discussions about the details of sacrifices, witchcraft and kinship obligations: ‘Michael shows resource in blarneying, and I profit much from listening.’ Despite Mbotyi’s isolation, as at Ntibane customs were far from uniform and the dispersed settlement patterns added further to the difficulty of gaining an overall picture. After providing such details, she rather bizarrely apologised to Godfrey for her ‘dreadfully prosaic letters’.62

Michael, whose ‘business [it was] to make appointments with suitable persons’, helped Monica to probe ‘half red, half Christian’ homes. She was amazed ‘to converse with intelligent, well educated people, and find them complete believers in magic’. She recorded that a teacher who conceded that typhus was carried by lice then asked: ‘Who sent the louse?’ – a phrase that became a byword in anthropological literature. Though Monica confessed bafflement at obligations due to kin and chiefs, she was fascinated by the origins of the dignity and ‘awfulness’ of chiefs and by the isitunzi (shadow) which they alone were believed to cast as a consequence of their occult powers. These were themes to which Monica returned throughout her life. She was keenly aware of her linguistic disadvantage: ‘I thank heaven for the little Kaffir [isiXhosa] I know but it is as well that I have an interpreter.’ Michael wrote up witchcraft cases, and explained words relating to witchcraft and medicine that could not be found in any dictionary, and whose meaning eluded even Mary Dreyer. Later, Michael again played an important role in easing Monica into local society at Ntontela. They attended a coming-out ceremony where the doctor and the initiates were all women; it threw an interesting light on the position of women, ‘for as a well known doctor a woman can order about everyone and dictate to any man’. Monica ‘had a gay old time greeting acquaintances, and shaking hands with everyone’, and soon there was ‘such a different feeling from when [they] began’. She and Michael were welcomed at a kraal whose owner had leprosy. Initially, she was suspected of hunting out and reporting lepers, especially when she questioned people about their opinion on the disease. Michael soon intervened, telling her that ‘such questions would not do here, and he was right’. He was, she said, ‘a standbye [sic], and a great comfort, taking a real interest in the work, and suggesting new lines of inquiry, on his own’. Monica’s notes show that Michael was indeed a subtle and invaluable source, both in his own Pondo lifestyle, and in how he reported and represented Pondo culture to Monica. He wrote accounts of legal cases and other meetings, and recorded izibongo (praise poems) and other material, often translating them into lively English. His translation of Izibongozika Bakleni begins:

The vast Pondo country

Big man of Marubeni

Fearful man that cannot be stared at,

A pole that stood on land and prevented the thunder.63

‘I want a flinty job that will make me sweat before yielding its secrets’

In preparation for his anthropological studies, Godfrey read widely, impressing both Oldham and Malinowski. As Monica said, the promise of two years’ training financed by the IIALC, followed by a further two years’ support by the Rockefeller Foundation for fieldwork, was ‘unusual’. Malinowski told him he would be part of ‘an advanced crowd’ the following year, ‘but (sotto voce, pianissimo)’, Godfrey disclosed: ‘I’ve not yet even read “The Golden Bough”. What fun it will be.’ He intended to submit a doctoral thesis, though whether this was to be based on secondary material or on fieldwork results, apparently remained unresolved. LSE management was irritated by ‘Malinowski’s constant production of people like myself who want to read a Ph.D. in two years “with no background whatsoever”’, and the authorities enquired about the promised qualifying examination and preparatory ‘courses and seminars’. But Malinowski, who ran his celebrated seminar like a medieval scholar with a school of adherents, scornfully ignored these pleas. It was agreed that, subject to passing a qualifying examination set by Malinowski in June 1933, Godfrey’s current year would count towards his PhD registration.64

As Godfrey edged his way into anthropology, he insistently requested details concerning Monica’s thesis and her areas of specialisation: ‘you probably assume that I know a lot more in detail what you are up to than I do’; ‘I wish you … would tell me the “terms of reference” which are orientating your research’. But in the midst of her fieldwork, Monica did not know, in the clear, systematic way he demanded, what her central theme was to be. She tended to respond with descriptions of her fieldwork, revealing a dimension which she had only divulged previously to her mother, ‘that being an anthropologist is not easy’, and that life would have been far less demanding had she done medicine instead. Fieldwork involved physical discomfort, isolation, loneliness and fruitless days, with

… no blessed routine to fall back on, and each day you have got to invent something to do – some excuse to go to a kraal – concrete questions to ask, and not the general abstractions that never seem to be answered. And you can never get away from the job … and often it does not seem to be worth the candle … all the time there is a feeling of a wall between you and the people you are studying – failures in language, and sympathy, and a consciousness that you will never understand … You are entirely on your own … success or failure lies entirely in your own hands, and often I loose [sic] courage and wish it were not so … And then you wonder how much use these catalogues of custom will be after all. The amount of universal truth, the contribution to the theory of society, to be extracted from a fat monograph, seems so infinitesimal. You may catalogue customs, and remain far from the life.65

Moving to bedbug-infested lodgings in Doughty Street to start his anthropological studies at the LSE, Godfrey answered Monica tartly. He knew anthropology was difficult: ‘you didn’t think I wanted an easy job did you?’ Apart from trying to understand social life, he wanted ‘a flinty job’ that would make him ‘sweat before yielding its secrets’. While Monica grappled with the seemingly incoherent detail of her material, Godfrey tackled anthropological theory. With his theoretical bent, he had been gripped by Durkheim’s Règles de la Methode Sociologique. Though it was exciting to be in ‘at the beginning of a new subject’, he was amazed by the ‘utter formlessness’ of anthropological theory ‘with all logical gaps filled up with a sort of soft putty made of “social forces”, “structure” and “organic relationships”’. With this in mind, he asked Monica: ‘Does theory seem very far away to you, or do you take bags of it … when you ask questions, or is your mind so full of it that … the right and most illuminating questions rise spontaneously to your lips?’ He already saw contemporary anthropology as insular in a disciplinary sense, and was glad to be going to the LSE, ‘for there Anthrop takes its proper place as just one branch of Sociology, and I shall be surrounded by people whose main interest is in Town and Regional Surveys in England, or in Economics’. No anthropological text he had read had referred to Le Play’s Les Ouvriers Européens, the very first study based on scientific fieldwork, published in 1855, which began with a section on a ‘primitive’ community in the Ural Mountains, ‘all of which I expect you know, but the people who write the books don’t seem to’. Yet Monica had never heard of Le Play, and though Godfrey may have been preening, he added that Monica’s letters would prevent him becoming ‘too damned academic’. He wanted her to write to him about ‘the individual people themselves, teach me to love them … as well as respect and be interested in “the material of science”’. More characteristically, perhaps, he continued: ‘better not assume that I understand much about our subject yet … Greats confers no special grasp of the principles of social life, I happen to know.’66

Neatly expressing her scepticism, Monica conceded that, while theoretical systems played an essential role, one ‘must be prepared to scrap the theories every twenty four hours’. Since leaving university she was ‘discarding “views” fast’, including those concerning the allegedly harmful effects of women trying to do two jobs at once. Intellectually, she was living from hand to mouth, amassing facts without a framework: ‘write me some of your “theory”’, she asked of him. Godfrey did play an important role in obliging Monica to think carefully about her purposes and to avoid data-collection for its own sake. In a less gloomy mood, she wrote that while scholar-missionary Henri Junod’s The Life of a South African Tribe was ‘a masterpiece – my pattern for what a background on tribal conditions should be’, the discipline had since moved on and new questions had emerged. Nonetheless, she felt that there was a tension at the heart of anthropology: specialisation as in the natural sciences was impossible.67

Monica shifted her focus from the impact of culture contact on women because her initial fieldwork at Auckland had convinced her that ‘it was silly to discuss woman apart from man’, and so she told Cambridge that, before considering ‘contact’, she needed to study ‘tribal conditions’. Her organising concept, and the original title of her study, was Janus, a reference to the two-faced god who looked to the past and also to the future. Part one was to deal with Pondo ‘Tribal Life’, and part two with the mixed African communities of farms, urban areas and Pondoland itself, which she recognised was changing even as she coaxed from it the customs and beliefs of apparently less mutable times. She suspected that Diedrich Westermann of the IIALC was ‘horrified by the spreadiness’, but that ‘Joe’, i.e. Joseph Oldham, ‘either from laziness, or kindness, manages not to forward Westermann’s letters, (eg [sic] one forbidding work on farms) until the job is finished’, which meant that she herself was ‘not unduly hampered’. It was impossible to isolate particular phenomena when attacking a new field, she said, and the ‘spreadiness’ was her attempt to deal with change, while holding on to tightly focused, detailed, ethnographic description. ‘Everywhere the emancipation of youth confronts you,’ she wrote, and even in a seemingly remote area like Mbotyi things were ‘changing fast’. For example, there was far more beer available than before, a fact ascribed to an increase in cultivated land after the advent of ploughs: more grain meant more beer for social gatherings. Language, too, was changing. There were ‘contact words’, coinages such as umphotokazi, a female photographer, rare until Monica appeared on the scene, and various modifications of existing words in isiMpondo.68

Monica left Mbotyi at the beginning of September 1932, happy to vacate Jack Barber’s ‘dreadfully expensive’ grass-roofed, insect-ridden holiday hut, but sorry because she would no longer be able to swim in the lagoon. As a parting kindness she taught Sally Barber how to bake a cake, using a recipe Jessie Hunter had sent. She hoped this had ‘obliterated the label of blue stocking’ attached since Monica’s arrival, and that it might arm Sally against the condescension of vacationing housewives: ‘Women can be so poisonous to one another under a becoming cloak of womanly domesticities.’69

Monica’s next base was A. Smith’s trading store at Ntontela, on a ridge above the Umzimvubu River gorge, more than 900 metres above sea-level, with expansive views of the sea on one side and the ‘white wall of the Drakensberg’ on the other. Soon after her arrival, Smith produced some horses to visit the local chief and they ‘galloped into the iKundla of the “Great Place” with a proper flourish’. The councillors at first looked horrified, but an explanation as to why Monica was in the area, backed up with a letter from the magistrate, seemed to mollify them.

Smith’s store was hospitable, and enabled Monica to observe the lives of the frontier whites. Reflecting on her experiences since early 1931, she wrote to Godfrey: ‘I think I have learnt as much from the people with whom I have stayed in the last eighteen months as in the Anthropologizing itself.’ The behaviour of the white people seemed ‘almost more strange than that of the natives’ since they were sufficiently similar to herself for her to notice even small differences. Seventy-year-old Goss, owner of a nearby store, who had once been an elephant hunter, told her yarns about the various ‘Kaffir wars’ in which he had fought. He arrived at Smith’s store in the company of two white drifters who had been doing odd jobs for him: ‘All are housed and fed as a matter of course.’ Monica noted the absolute lack of social distinction, among whites, at least, in these remote areas. Smith had delivered meat in the East London location for his brother who was a butcher: ‘That is a job in just the same way as anthropologizing,’ Monica told Godfrey, describing how she and Smith compared notes about the location. The two drifters sat down to meals with everybody else, ‘an excellent state of affairs, but of course dependent on the unsurmountable barrier between black and white. The tramps cannot go to the kitchen for they are white, even though the kitchen people may be considerably cleaner than they!’ The rough democracy of the store contrasted with St Andrew’s Anglican Mission which Monica visited on the way up from Mbotyi. The priest was ‘the complete Oxford man – lean, with a drawly voice, an excellent musician, and completely oblivious to appearances’. He and his wife were refreshing company ‘after philistines in strong doses. Not that I don’t like philistines, I do, but you want to visit home sometimes.’ For the first time, Monica ended this letter to Godfrey ‘With love’.70

Monica also spent time at Holy Cross Mission, talking to Archdeacon Walter Leary, the son of a Transkei trader. She described ‘looking at contact’ and enjoying ‘civilized people, and food, and a hot bath’, as well as the beauty of the gardens and the austere ecclesiastical architecture, telling Godfrey: ‘the sun can be incredibly beautiful glinting on the deal floor of a stark little room’. She encountered the historian W.D. Cingo, who clarified certain cultural issues for her. On the feast of the Holy Cross on 14 September, she commented: ‘there were rather more banners and processions than I, as a solid Presbyterian, personally appreciate’. Monica also attended mass and a kind of medieval mystery play dealing with ‘the lives of the saints’, all in keeping with the high church Anglicanism transplanted to rural Africa. Some villagers walked for two days to participate in the festival, and an ox was slaughtered to feed the pilgrims. Back at Ntontela, Monica contracted flu, and together with Mrs Smith she went to Port St John’s to recover. Mrs Smith’s relatives who arrived from East London were not ‘civilized, though very worthy’. One, ‘a violent Salvation Armyite’, caused Monica to fear that she might ‘giggle at the wrong place some day soon’.71

Godfrey continued to seduce Monica with a potent blend of passion and anthropology. He hid nothing from her, he said, and in return demanded ‘the secret places of [her] soul’. She was ‘so superbly self-possessed’ that Godfrey felt he dared not enquire, yet he confessed: ‘it maddens me to be outside’. He described his vision of the importance of anthropology in the same elevated style. He was convinced that service to Africa was paramount for her, and anthropology might influence white opinion and ‘those administrators and politicians who want to do the right thing but don’t know how’. He believed that individuals felt lost in contemporary societies. If, as anthropologists, he and Monica could ‘succeed in conveying the shape and satisfaction of social life in a simple, but complete, form it [would] really help the rest to pick out the essential points and forms in [their] own society, and so to feel part of it’. He wanted to break through her ‘self-possession’, which others often saw as reserve. ‘I don’t know you yet,’ he wrote, ‘not as you know me by this time. May I begin to hear you thinking aloud sometimes, hear you dreaming of Africa and whatever else you dream of? … you can tell me anything because I love you, because I want to live with you and think with you and work with you, and comfort you.’ But this life he longed for would not be one of insipid unanimity: ‘I expect we’ll have lots of intellectual scraps.’ He needed her to curb his tendency to focus on ‘general ideas’, for specific facts were also crucial. He therefore declared, ‘we’ve got to do both together, that’s the chief fun of social science’.72

Monica’s replies blended descriptions of fieldwork with hints of acquiescence in Godfrey’s wooing. She defended her methodology against his intellectualism, arguing that theories ‘seem academic, and divorced from reality in the field’, and that ‘most questions based on theory sound silly in isiXosa’. Yet she acknowledged that theories were useful, ‘floating about in our mind to force you to notice things’, leading to a focus on facts that fit the framework, though they might also block out important issues falling outside it. At other times, diffidence and even insecurity overcame her. With Godfrey’s LSE colleagues in mind, she implored: ‘please to remember I’ve not read Greats, and am now a country cousin’; at another time she said he would have to teach her from the beginning about music, pleading: ‘I don’t know anything.’ But Monica told him off too, sometimes bluntly: ‘I wish you would stop thinking you’ve hurt me, and blathering about patience. Yours is an entirely upside down view.’ Candidly she said: ‘I [had] nearly written you very rash letters sometimes, but then I thought I would rather wait until we saw each other. And I am in a dreadful hurry to see you Godfrey.’ A pencil draft remains of one such letter declaring her love for him.73

In her frequent moves in 1932, Monica made extensive use of her large network of trading and mission contacts. Archdeacon Leary recommended that she stay with Mr Mountjoy, the owner of Nkantisweni store, near Ludeke, in the far north of Pondoland. From there, she hoped to visit W.D. Cingo again at Mfundisweni, as well as the country of the Mzizi clan around Bizana. When heavy rain made it impossible to bring horses to Nkantisweni, Monica stayed overnight at Maqusheni at the store of the ‘fierce little Irishman’ Gallaher, arguing with him all evening about religion and native education. She called at the Redoubt Store, beyond Bizana, when she was in the Mzizi area. This was Michael Geza’s home district, where his ancestors had been doctors to the chiefs, and he arranged interviews with chiefs and elders. He also recorded ‘perfectly beautiful intsomi (folk tales) in Xosa, collected on wet days from the children with the help of a few sweets’, which Monica later translated. One remaining tale, narrated by a child of eleven years, is a vivid and unsentimental story of uninhibited ferocity.74

Monica’s own literary imagination was stimulated: by October 1934 she was ‘contemplating a novel’, while some time later she wrote an outline for ‘Black Pawns’, a story of Pondo migration over three generations, exploring cultural, religious and political change in literary form. She was still toying with the story in England in 1936, writing on the back of letters and receipts from a public house in Ashbury and a newsagent in Chiseldon, and returning to it in early 1937 at Hogsback while recovering from a bout of malaria contracted in Tanganyika. Godfrey wrote from the field that he was rereading Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned. He thought that ‘Black Pawns’ was to race what Mitchison’s iconoclastic novel was to social class, though Monica disputed this.75

She reassured her parents that Nkantisweni was ‘a highly civilized country, with telephones’. Even though ‘it sounds well to hear that the investigator has travelled all over Pondoland’, Monica was beginning to think that she might have collected more information simply by staying at Ntontela. Nonetheless, at Nkantisweni people were prepared to believe that her ‘real business [was] not to arrest the innocent’, and she made good progress with clan histories and genealogies that were ‘fascinating to disentangle’. She investigated the Wellington movement, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) and the Israelites, whose various messages, she said, were conflated in uneducated minds as ‘anti-European propaganda’. She also collected myths that had grown around the story of the hippopotamus nicknamed Huberta: until shot by white farmers in April 1931, the animal had, over a period of three years, wandered from northern Natal to the East London area through countryside where the species was no longer found. To white South Africans this was simply a bittersweet animal story, while Monica’s Pondo informants explained that the creature was on its way to meet and overcome a white hippopotamus, ‘the signal for a rising against the Europeans’. Monica wrote: ‘The people seem genial, and contented, but these stories must show in what way thought is tending.’76

‘Come and look at Hogsback some time: you won’t know me until you do’

As Monica’s fieldwork drew to a close in late 1932, Godfrey began his studies at the LSE. Given his eminent father and his own outstanding Oxford career, he was in many respects a privileged student. Even before starting his studies with Malinowski, he met Audrey Richards, one of the most prominent of the younger anthropologists who became a close friend, and had tea with A.C. Haddon, the influential anthropologist of an earlier generation, ‘who gave [Godfrey] his blessing’. He lunched with Joseph Oldham at the Athenaeum, describing it as a ‘jolly good lunch too’. Oldham told Godfrey that the most important question was the ‘theory of society’, that ‘Malinowski was the only possible teacher thereof’, and that Africa was the best place to begin such a study. Godfrey agreed, telling Monica, however, that Oldham ‘didn’t know that I was also thinking of your eyes’. At the LSE, Godfrey read Malinowski’s Coral Gardens of the Western Pacific in typescript and remarked: ‘I know a lot about yam growing after reading it, I can tell you.’ He was getting to know his talented and cosmopolitan fellow students, some of whom were already established scholars and many of whom went on to become leaders in their field, and he engaged socially with eminent Africanists such as Alice Werner, an expert on Bantu linguistics. He struck up an immediate friendship with South African anthropologist Meyer Fortes and his wife, and found Lucy Mair, who had just returned from fieldwork in Uganda, interesting, though she was ‘incoherent’ in Malinowski’s presence. He found the larger-than-life Malinowski ‘incalculable, to say the least of it’, to which Monica responded that she ‘dislike[d] explosive people’. Malinowski himself apparently regarded Godfrey as ‘a most promising student, in every respect pleasant to work with, correct as well as intelligent’. In complete contrast to this academic milieu, Godfrey spent Monday evenings helping out at a boys’ club in Bermondsey.77

Early in November, Monica, ‘just about [at] the end of [her] tether’, left Nkantisweni and Pondoland for home. She had had her fill of rhorhos (bugs) and ‘eating off tin’, though within days at Lovedale she found she already missed the music and the beauty and ‘the adventure of trying to live into another culture’. The journey home, via Kokstad and Umtata, took four days by horse, bombela (local bus) and train. The bombela to Kokstad was fearsome, driving at speed for twelve and a half hours on slippery roads, but she relieved her terror by chatting to the ‘large, sentimental’ Afrikaner conductor who thus successfully ended his four-month search for someone who could translate ‘omnia vincit amor’. Along the route, Monica stayed with Mrs Keeys, ‘a woman of parts’: the illiterate but highly capable Redoubt store-owner had for years been abandoned by her husband, eventually agreeing to take him back in return for control of the store. At Kokstad, Monica revelled in a good dinner, a fire and a bath ‘after the bread-butter-and-tea, cold linoleum palours [sic], and washings-in-basins, of Transkei stores’. After this, because the Keiskamma River had flooded both railway and road, Monica was forced to spend an extra night on the train.78

In her nearly two years of fieldwork, Monica had accumulated a large amount of material. Like all researchers leaving the field, perhaps, and with less justification than many, she said regretfully: ‘we have left undone those things that we ought to have done’. As they survive in the archive, her fieldwork records have been much worked over and rearranged, yet it is clear that her method of recording differed, for instance, from that of Godfrey later in buNyakyusa. He recorded most of his material methodically in seventy-nine identical hardbound notebooks. Monica’s material is a miscellany of manuscript and typescript, often but not always on loose-leaf A5 sheets. There are also many slips of paper, some with just a line or two of text. Much material was seemingly recorded hurriedly, on hotel notepaper, on the back of letters, and occasionally even, literally, on the back of an envelope. In her urban research, there are notes on passes, indicating rates of migration and work-destinations, written testimonies from Pondo and other informants, as well as records of bank accounts held by Africans, notes on civil and criminal cases, sports clubs, and suchlike. It was from this miscellaneous collection that Monica eventually created her fine and original study.79

She gave lectures at Rhodes and Fort Hare university colleges, and was also beginning to publish. While still engaged in fieldwork, she had an article appear in the South African Journal of Science, and was working on others in draft form. She eventually listed twenty separate papers, reviews and articles she had drafted up until 1934.80

Back at Lovedale, Monica luxuriated in the orderly comfort of home and garden, and in her parents’ company. She and her mother had ‘so many things to tell each other, and laugh about, which would not go on paper’. Officially, she was studying Lovedale records, though she claimed her time at Lovedale would ‘be a skimp fortnight’. But Monica’s account of working through the files of the South African Outlook; doing numerical calculations concerning students’ backgrounds; and conducting interviews with D.D.T. Jabavu about the African Farmers’ Association, with Dr Neil MacVicar about nurses, and with African teachers about ‘tribal days’, suggests she worked much harder than she implied. Monica also arranged for her father to ask former nurses at Victoria Hospital to write accounts of their work on the frequently tense interface between Western and indigenous healing, and she received fourteen responses. She attended a memorial service for Jane Waterston, who had founded the Lovedale Girls’ Institution, and subsequently battled male prejudice to train as a medical doctor. Monica described Dr Waterston as ‘a grand soul, with adorable white ringlets, and a caustic tongue’, and felt annoyed by the unctuous preacher whose eulogy transformed her ‘from a vivid, very human, saint, into a merely worthy person like himself’. She keenly anticipated the service led by the African-American missionary Max Yergan, ‘one of the biggest men in South Africa’. Warmly greeted by old Ntibane friends who were at Lovedale for the opening of a new Bible school, Monica also talked at length to the visiting members of the Merle Davis Commission, especially Cambridge economist Austin Robinson, whose interest in village industries paralleled that of David Hunter. Monica eagerly anticipated the family’s move to Hogsback at the end of November: ‘You must come and look at Hogsback some time Godfrey,’ she wrote, ‘you won’t know me until you do.’81

Godfrey’s tenacity had paid off. They would see each other soon, with Monica writing hopefully: ‘the barrage that makes it so hard to talk to you now, will come down’. She could no longer bear being away from him, and asked for his ‘patience with a foolish woman who does not even know her own mind’. Joseph Oldham had written to say that there was a group of able and unusual people receiving IIALC grants who she would undoubtedly find interesting to meet. ‘I have no doubt either,’ she wrote to Godfrey.82

On 16 December 1932, Monica embarked at East London for the voyage westwards to Cape Town. On arrival, she bought a ‘daffy yellow frock … it is such fun being extravagant after Pondoland’.83