Monica returned to England with a mass of research material from the Eastern Cape. She had a doctoral thesis to write and, after a separation of two years and three months, was about to meet up with her passionate suitor again. Godfrey met her on 9 January 1933 when she disembarked in Southampton. But Monica was still uncertain about her feelings for him, and to her mother she disclosed: ‘Apart from Godfrey, I’m enormously happy being back.’ Though she told Godfrey she hated herself for her indecision and that her ‘foolishness’ was not his fault, some of his letters had made her wary. But by the end of January he had overcome her reservations and they became engaged. ‘No more muddle,’ Monica declared: ‘I’m quite sure because everything seems clear and right when I’m praying in chapel.’ Henceforth, anthropology and the affective would be inextricably entangled.1
‘Come back to me from your gloomy place’
Godfrey’s condition might today be diagnosed as clinical depression. The psychoanalysis he underwent in 1932 is an indicator, though the precise nature of the depression is uncertain. Aware of his mental health problem, he and Monica referred to his ‘Eeyorish’ episodes, and the ‘Gloomy Place’, recalling A.A. Milne’s stories. Though generally managing the situation, they had to live through Godfrey’s episodes that manifested as a deep sense of worthlessness, guilt, self-loathing and insecurity.
Though Godfrey claimed he had been ‘a bit of a coward about [his] job’ and felt uneasy trying to match Monica’s obvious achievements, he ably managed not only his academic life but also his future career plans. At the LSE he was at the intellectual centre of British social anthropology at the time, but his ‘hobgobs’, as they both referred to his depressive episodes, had not disappeared. The struggle with these demons is a constant theme in their letters, leading to a ‘tempestuous’ engagement and unremitting emotional tension. A bewildered Godfrey asked how he could have allowed ‘the blues ever to come near’, given Monica’s power to ‘drive them away’. He continually reassured her: ‘the hobgobs are quiet now thanks dear’; ‘You needn’t worry about my hobgobs, they aren’t real and I love you.’2
On 9 June 1933 Godfrey wrote to Monica, reviewing their relationship. In his final year at Oxford, in 1930, he had looked for a satisfying job ‘which would take me after you’. This explained his abortive educational studies and job applications. But he realised he preferred ‘a job that involved more thinking’, and hence his decision to talk to Joseph Oldham about alternatives. At that point, Christmas 1931, he broke down and was under psychiatric care for a year, ceasing treatment soon after Monica arrived back in England in January 1933. In the midst of this crisis he obtained a grant from the IIALC and the promise of support from the Rockefeller Foundation. He said this made him feel he could ‘with decency’ write to her proposing marriage. In a torrent of insecurity and dependence he wrote that he found it difficult to admit to Monica that he was an anthropological novice, and that he could not yet offer her ‘full companionship in work’, or the certainty and security of a job. More importantly, he had only recently begun to take the subject seriously. He asked Monica to accept him for what he was: ‘I have lived so far largely inside myself, in imagination, and nothing but loving you has ever taken me outside. I’ve not really attacked the real world yet … I’ve to go my own pace, and to know that you are content and yet waiting for a slowcoach.’ He had not yet even ‘given’ himself to Malinowski as a pupil. He had shown off intellectually when he should have admitted that he relied on Monica, and that he had taken up anthropology because of her: ‘I’m not certain of getting through but I believe I can if I lean on you hard … if I lose you I’m done for.’ On the back of the envelope, Monica succinctly wrote: ‘trying to lean on me not going to get him out of the muddle’.3
Though Monica expressed optimism – ‘I think we have defeated the Hobgoblins’ – it is evident that she wilted under the weight of his reliance on her. ‘Come back to me from your gloomy place,’ she pleaded, ‘I can’t bear it when you are there. And forgive me for not understanding better.’ She frequently reminded him that ‘life is fun’ and exhorted him not to be ‘eyorish’. She admitted: ‘You still confuse me, such a turmoil of emotion, I don’t know where I am. … I feel like a naughty child sometimes, contrary and capricious. I don’t want to be that.’ She tried to assuage his feelings of inadequacy and to cajole him into abandoning his excessive introspection, urging him to take refuge in God and the beauty of creation, and not to ‘forget to turn around and look at the devils if they come again’. But though Monica tried to be supportive, she resisted his over-cautious marriage plans, manoeuvring him into suggesting that it was possible for them to get married on the strength of the anticipated IIALC fellowship rather than waiting for a formal job far in the future. Nor was she passive when Godfrey seemed to overstep the mark, replying sharply when he complained she was not writing to him often enough. Soon after, however, she wrote: ‘you do know that I love you terribly? – Often it must seem as if I did not, but I do.’ Monica undoubtedly developed mechanisms to defend herself against this emotional barrage, and Godfrey’s plea that she should trust him not just with her mind but with her feelings too may indicate its emotional cost.4
‘Brass hats are fun’
In spite of tensions, all the rituals of a middle-class engagement began. Godfrey wrote to Jessie Hunter as ‘Mother’. Monica answered numerous letters of congratulation. She visited her future parents-in-law in their Purley home ‘bursting with books and medici [sic] prints’ and found it ‘too devastating’ that Mrs Wilson managed her household without maids, and was relieved that the Wilsons did not make her feel ‘on apro’. She was becoming alienated from the narrower kind of Presbyterianism, but Godfrey, an Anglican, suggested they ‘stick to [their] own churches, just for the moment’, until they knew themselves and each other ‘a bit better’. Her Cambridge circle, including her supervisor, Hodson, approved of her marrying into John Dover Wilson’s family. Joseph Oldham sent congratulations. He had the ‘highest regard’ for Godfrey, he said, and invited the couple for an overnight stay at his home. Malinowski sent ‘a charming letter of congratulation’, invited them both to a ‘soirée of pupils’ at his home after the next weekly seminar, and seems to have immediately suggested that the couple should carry out joint fieldwork. Monica did not go to the soirée, though she did attend the seminar. Godfrey was disappointed: ‘There was quite a feeling in Town that you were due on Thursday,’ he wrote.5
While most of Monica’s undergraduate friends at Girton had dispersed, her circle included Elizabeth Wilson, who had returned as a postgraduate, Muriel Bradbrook (‘Brad’), later Mistress of Girton, as well as Danish literary scholar and educationist Greta Hjort, and also Gwladys Jones. She was now part of a wider intellectual environment than during her undergraduate years, and Godfrey had much to do with this. Monica was well read and fairly well informed about music, but she had not been fully aware of John Dover Wilson’s eminence and, at least initially, felt at a cultural disadvantage with Godfrey, his family and their broader circle. In late 1934 Monica read Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, and wrote to Godfrey that when he was reading it she ‘was probably transplanting trees with my father, or fitting a collar to a doll’s frock – both highly educational activities! It is incredible how little I have read, but I’m getting fun out of classics now’. With Godfrey’s guidance she tackled Robert Browning, D.H. Lawrence and Robert Bridges, the beginnings of what she called her ‘literary education’. The religious and love poetry of Bridges was particularly important to her and Godfrey. Three weeks into their engagement, Godfrey brought his sister Audrey to Cambridge. Monica, in awe of the English intelligentsia but sardonically aware of their eccentricities, regarded her as ‘rather the “academic woman”, and casual about dress, but given to going for walking tours by herself, and very brilliant’. The three attended Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, which was presented in the original Greek. Such a self-consciously highbrow environment might well have alienated Monica, but she had no doubt of Godfrey’s sensitivity and honesty and knew he was no poseur. Her mother would like him very much, she said: ‘He’s very humble, and almost frightens me sometimes by caring so intensely about things. I should not have liked a thick skinned person who did not feel things keenly.’ Monica expressed an abiding fear: ‘I would be bored by anyone with whom I had to live permanently but somehow I don’t think I shall be by him.’6
The Wilsons, including Godfrey’s ‘brusque’ mother, Dorothy, appealed to Monica. Crucially, she wrote, ‘they all laugh’. She and Godfrey had ‘a mutual compact each to prevent the other from growing too earnest and solemn. Lovedale would hardly recognise me being skittish.’ Monica had a decided drollness and she observed her future in-laws with dry humour. Staying with them in September, she described to her mother evenings spent listening to Bach and Beethoven: ‘[A]t least Prof. Wilson and G and I do. Mrs Wilson knits furiously. I defend myself with the Shetland cardigan.’ She remarked also: ‘[Dorothy Wilson] surprisingly approves of my liking for dress, and disapproves of people collecting books.’7
Monica and Godfrey must have seemed a golden couple. Their engagement pictures appeared in society magazines such as Tatler and Sphere. They were invited for country house weekends and visited the elderly Alfred Haddon, who ‘dance[d] excitedly in front of a map of New Guinea, and urge[d] fiercely, “Now just see how much nicer it is than your precious Africa”’. Similarly, Godfrey visited the anthropologist of the Gold Coast, Robert Rattray, and was transported in imagination to ‘the Ashanti hinterland’. Since Monica had joined Malinowski’s seminar only a few months after Godfrey, the couple’s friendships, for example with Raymond Firth, Margaret Read and other distinguished or budding anthropologists, were often made jointly. Fleeing Louis Leakey’s self-promotion – he offered ‘supporters’ lifts to London where he was to deliver a paper – Monica wrote: ‘I have not time for such diversions.’ She did however relish Leakey’s mordant back-biting of ‘LSE stars’. She describes having coffee with medieval historian Eileen Power and Margery Perham, historian of Africa and commentator on colonial affairs, and being introduced by Perham to prominent people, including anti-colonial writer Leonard Barnes. Monica wrote to her mother: ‘Of course I’m not a snob, but brass hats are fun.’ She revelled, in short, in ‘the fun of belonging’. Godfrey opened new paths for Monica, but it worked both ways, and he was anxious to get to know her friends and relations and her home in South Africa. During their first holiday as an engaged couple, ten days in Scotland, they were based at Monica’s uncle and aunt’s house in Edinburgh. It was ‘too good for comment’, Godfrey said, though Monica had had to press him hard to take a break from work. Leisure would have no point, she said, ‘when we’re old and grumpy’.8
‘The master is a wriggler’
When the couple became engaged, to Godfrey’s chagrin, Monica refused Malinowski’s invitation to his home, because, as she explained to her mother, she needed to return to Cambridge to work and she had no ‘party frock’. Still, she was somewhat in awe of the LSE seminar and its ‘shabby, intellectual, and alarmingly intelligent’ atmosphere, with its ‘Jews, and Slavs, and Negros, and Dutchmen, and queer mixtures’. The English component consisted of a couple of colonial administrators and missionaries, as well as David Lorimer, retired colonel and linguist. As Monica reported, Malinowski would appeal sardonically to Lorimer ‘as the “epitomy of English common sense” when the discussion [got] too high fallutin’ [sic] and philosophical’.9
Malinowski’s Thursday seminars were crucial on the personal as well as professional level in the first year of Monica and Godfrey’s engagement. Generally, Monica would get a cheap four-shilling return ticket from Cambridge in the morning, and attend the seminar as a ‘guest’. The seminars often continued all day and, informally, into the evening, and she would return that night. She seldom stayed over in London. The seminars were intense and competitive: Godfrey was in his element, with Monica finding herself in a very different environment from that of Cambridge anthropology under Hodson. ‘Cambridge ideas of work differ from those of the L.S.E., and are much sounder,’ Monica wrote, wryly perhaps. The seminars were demanding: ‘The snag about Thursdays,’ Monica said, was that she and Godfrey had little time together. Yet, as she wrote to her mother, ‘Malinowski was worth it and one meets most of the people who matter in the anthrop world.’ During this time Godfrey often visited Monica at Cambridge on Sundays, sometimes staying overnight with his grandfather.10
Monica seems to have felt an outsider at the seminars, light-heartedly but anxiously remarking that she might have ‘alienated Malinowski for life!’ He appeared to avoid being pinned down on the meaning of culture contact, the concept that underpinned her Pondo work: ‘The master is a wriggler about c.c. What’s the excuse this time?’ she asked Godfrey. Not until June 1936, when Monica and Godfrey were nearing the end of their six-month period in England between fieldwork tours, did they get Malinowski to focus on social change: ‘he always sticks to nice “simple primitive communities”’, Monica wrote. There were other sceptical voices, such as that of Meyer Fortes, who pointed out that, far from being a recent phenomenon, culture contact had been occurring in such places as the West African interior for a thousand years. Thus perceived, the phenomenon disappeared into broader processes of historical change, with no obvious beginning or end. Monica remarked: ‘cultural contact is an historical process, and to me it seems that the analytic method alone is not adequate for studying it’.11
Monica had given an undertaking to the IIALC to devote her time solely to writing up her thesis. Uneasily aware of this obligation, she nevertheless acceded to Hodson’s suggestion that she should attend a weekly lecture by Driberg (‘very weak’ on culture contact, she said later), and also have a weekly meeting with him, assisting with Hodson’s supervision of women anthropology undergraduates in Cambridge. These supervisions consisted of ‘lunch and gossip, and a little anthrop’, and after Malinowski, Monica found them ‘a relaxation’. She also took part in Gwladys Jones’s discussion group, puzzling for example over T.S. Eliot, whom she thought ‘beautiful, and a mystic’.12
In the meantime, Godfrey plunged into Malinowski’s group, and was soon one of its most prominent members. Right from the start, Godfrey viewed anthropology as the study of change: he wrote to Malinowski in January 1933, urging that more use should be made of the colonial administrators in the class, since most of the students would be going to ‘areas in a transitional stage, no longer self-contained and integrated systems, but full of changes and tensions between old and new, and the administration at work is part of our picture’. In September 1933 Malinowski asked Godfrey to summarise the previous year’s lectures and discussions for the new students, a task he completed on 19 October. His survey of Malinowskian functionalism incorporated the following: the notion of an empirical science of culture, and its methodological implications; the focus on a cross-section of social institutions at a particular point in time; the assumption of the comparability of all societies; and the necessity of describing any aspect of a society in relation to the entire social structure, despite methodological problems entailed in this. Moreover, while organisational categories are necessary, empirical reality must not be forced to conform to these; instead, any such categories should be ‘searchlights playing over the rough surface of fact’. History and anthropology were not rivals, but distinct disciplines. Social life, unlike history, could be directly observed: ‘we are interested in the past just in so far as it lives in the present, not for itself … Institutions are in flux for the historian – but we study them in the present.’ He wrote this up as a paper, which Monica judged ‘dashed good’. Godfrey’s survey pointed to issues that he and Monica later took up in The Analysis of Social Change, when they grappled with rapidly evolving, larger-scale societies, and raised questions about the relationship between history and anthropology which were not fully addressed by the functionalism of the time.13
Malinowski’s seminars were self-consciously innovative. Functionalism was an avowedly scientific approach to social analysis, but with its larger-than-life proponent and its inner circle of ‘Mandarins’, as Malinowski himself referred to them, it attracted fervent commitment. Godfrey described a supper with Frederick Nadel, Hilda Beemer (later Kuper) and Meyer Fortes, all of whom fiercely debated whether ‘to be or not to be functionalists’, with Sonia Fortes interjecting wearily at intervals from a sofa nearby, ‘for God’s sake stop talking about Malinowski’. Godfrey and Günter Wagner were instructed to give seminar presentations in the presence of a group of visiting IIALC grandees: Westermann, Lugard, Labouret and Vischer. Malinowski, swashbuckling as always, told Godfrey: ‘all the bl- b- are turning up; you two must do a tour de force, doesn’t matter how unintelligible you are, they’ll none of them understand, and I’ll back you up’. Describing Malinowski’s presentation to the Royal Anthropological Institute on ‘The Language of Swearing and Magic’, Godfrey captured his brilliance and showmanship: he made ‘all his showing off integrate with a perfectly serious argument. [Missionary-anthropologist] E.W. Smith was in the chair so he talked about Blasphemy, with examples, addressing his remarks to the Chair all the time, then about English bad-language in general, then demonstrated Trobriand Magic by acting the part of the Magician and reciting Trobr spells (in Trobriand) for 6 mins on end, crawled on the floor and speaking into a “Times”. It was all almost very silly, but never quite, for he developed his theory of language very well as he went along’. Already a disciple, though a rather wry one, Godfrey had supper with Malinowski, writing to Monica that he was ‘shown the Holy of Holies of the Functionalist Temple – the original field-notes in MSS’.14
Doubtful of the value of the seminar’s duelling, Monica referred to the ‘poisonous atmosphere’ of the LSE, of which, Godfrey admitted, he was a ‘natural inhabitant’. She was sceptical about excessive devotion to any one theory, functionalism included. In late 1933 she told Godfrey that she was reading little theory, though in preparation for their work in buNyakyusa she was carefully studying a paper by the missionary Mackenzie on snakes. She was, she said, ‘more respectful for facts [sic], however higgletypigglety, than you!’ Rereading Malinowski’s Crime and Custom in Savage Society, she thought he was ‘talking through his hat’. There may have been differences of emphasis between the two at this point, but Godfrey supported Monica, defending her, for example, against Malinowski’s accusation of verbosity. ‘I forbid you to feel “inferior” to B.M.,’ Godfrey said, ‘he is over and you are just beginning.’ Monica later said that she had never taken to the ‘grand language’ of the Malinowski seminar, and that her instinct, reinforced by her Cambridge historical training, was to state things plainly and simply. With Godfrey’s help she mastered the content, ‘frequently no more than I had already grasped’, that lay behind the grandiose style of the seminar. So, Monica’s fulsome acknowledgement of Malinowski in Reaction to Conquest was strategic rather than heartfelt: ‘it’s important that he should be made to purr gently’, she wrote to Godfrey. Indeed, she believed that Malinowski thought it ‘such a pity’ that Godfrey was marrying her, and she wondered how his affection for Godfrey had survived her presence in his life. And yet despite Monica’s qualms, Malinowski wished to include her among his adherents: ‘Bronio is very anxious that you should have a supper off him,’ Godfrey wrote. Malinowski had told him that Monica was ‘a natural functionalist, she has a mind’. Godfrey remarked: ‘He certainly has a flair for making his compliments in the form of boomerangs.’15
‘Sorry about the worm turning’
With the support of her parents, Monica had lived a remarkably liberated and adventurous life, though at times circumventing what even they considered permissible. But she now began to encounter ‘explosions’ from her family, even from her mother, based on what they saw as appropriate behaviour for women. Her family said that she should not work too hard at her profession, she told Godfrey; it would only be ‘fair’ to him if she accepted a wife’s allowance from the IIALC as opposed to a full grant, or worked on a voluntary basis, freeing her to work at her own pace and on her own terms. She agreed that husband and children should be the central concern for married women, but the possibility of being awarded the IIALC fellowship was overwhelmingly seductive: ‘I want it!’ she wrote. She and Godfrey had both fought hard to secure a fellowship for Monica with no provisos, politely resisting Joseph Oldham’s parsimonious attempt ‘to treat [them] like missionaries minus the security of mission employment’.16
Already, working and publishing on the Pondo people, Monica worried about the opinions of family and friends concerning her work on a society with a moral code so different to that of Scottish Presbyterianism. But professional commitment and ambition trumped these concerns. Planning further anthropological work with Godfrey in an area even more remote and unfamiliar than Pondoland, Monica now met resistance, even from immediate family. She wrote to her mother that she was ‘sorry about the worm turning’, but that she intended to continue with fieldwork once married: ‘one can’t only housekeep while wandering around with a husband in the field’. This conviction, together with her formal qualifications, meant that Monica avoided the fate of a talented woman such as Edith Turner. Married to an eminent anthropologist, Turner contributed enormously to her husband’s work, though it was many years before she herself achieved academic recognition. Similarly, Monica’s friend Elizabeth Wilson, the brightest of their group at Girton, did no more academic or paid work after her marriage to Christopher Graham.
Monica told her mother that, although she would spend at least six months at home in 1934 converting her thesis into a book, she would not apply for a job at Fort Hare, where she probably imagined she would be trapped in the web of family and church. Despite family opposition, Godfrey supported Monica: Aunt Mary, in Edinburgh, had ‘hoped to enlist Godfrey in disapproving of Pondoland’, but he responded that it was ‘quite the right and proper thing to do, seeing [Monica] was an anthropologist’. Gently but firmly, Monica explained to her family that she wanted the full grant and would not accept lower-status voluntary work; she conceded that if she got the fellowship and found she could not manage, she would revert to a wife’s allowance, though she clearly saw no prospect of this. In a separate enclosed letter addressed to her mother, Monica said that despite not knowing ‘what Daddy would think about the morals of it’, she and Godfrey had investigated birth control, and would delay having children until such time as their fieldwork was completed. She would certainly not do a paid job when expecting a child, and probably not after it was born: ‘this is the real answer to the argument about the fellowship’. Her mother persisted, and Monica’s tone sharpened. Pig-headed though her mother might think her, Monica insisted: ‘when there is a fire inside it must escape somehow’. She reminded her mother: ‘you like dashing about, and can’t bear housekeeping all day, and no more shall I’.17
Confident and uninhibited by narrow convention, Monica continued on her chosen path. She spoke at a vacation course in Edinburgh for missionaries and mission candidates, noting that she was the daughter and granddaughter of missionaries, ‘convinced of the irreplaceable value of mission work’, but critical of its denominationalism and ‘unChristian and unScientific’ resistance to anthropological investigation and understanding. She gave a paper on Christian marriage to dignitaries at Edinburgh House, the London headquarters of the Conference of Missionary Societies in Great Britain and Ireland. In addition, she attended meetings such as one in 1933 where the political trials in Stalin’s Moscow were discussed; addressed by Pat Sloan, a communist, the meeting was disrupted by fascists with ‘heckling and missiles’, which Monica derided as ‘so silly’.18
On 28 December 1933 Monica was interviewed by the Council of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, later the Josephine Butler Society. The secretary of the association was trying to encourage it to ‘agitate for legislation to protect the down trodden African women who are bought and sold as wives’. Monica told Godfrey that she was ‘peppered’ during the encounter with hostile questions from people who seemed determined to perceive the oppression of women without nuance or reference to context. She had recently published an article noting that village women in Pondoland were ‘in no way servile’, and that ukulobola, the transfer of cattle from the family of the groom to the bride’s family, was a guarantee of women’s status and security. It is likely that the reception of such findings confirmed Monica’s scepticism regarding aspects of contemporary feminism. She herself objected strenuously ‘to being treated as a mere woman!’ and was annoyed by women’s pretence of helplessness. In February 1934, climbing from the tender onto the ship off Port Elizabeth in a howling south-easter ‘was rather a picnic’: Monica ‘enjoyed the excitement’, declaring, ‘Women do look silly when they are frightened. It was quite safe really.’19
‘I have no methods but of course might invent some’
In 1933 Monica was often ‘Eyorish about work’, ‘groaning’ over the ancestor cult, claiming she had insufficient data to write about the administration of Pondoland, thinking longingly how much nicer it would be to play tennis. She juggled work and being with her parents during their visit to Britain in July and August: she and Godfrey planned to spend time with them in Scotland, and when they visited Cambridge she would work in the mornings and ‘be sociable in the afternoons’. But for all this she made steady progress, and in spite of strains was supported emotionally and intellectually by Godfrey, who was finding it difficult to plan his own thesis. He looked at some of her notes, showed them to Meyer Fortes, and then wrote to Monica: ‘I had no idea how exceedingly thorough you’ve been, and I’d not realized before how good it’s going to be … It is, as they say, “the goods”.’ Immersed in LSE functionalism, he drew attention to Monica’s tendency to treat her material ‘from the point of view of a historic process of change, in which the primary thing is the original culture, rather than from the point of view of the present situation to which two different traditions contribute factors of equal weight’. He cited the example of the magistrate, who – like missions and schools – was not ‘an external modifying factor’ to the chief: instead, ‘the two sides are both integral to the present situation’. Monica made certain concessions, though it took her a long time, she said, to steel herself for the change. Still, by October she was ‘reconstructing the thesis, putting “what was” in Pondoland along with what is’; in other words, she was ‘describing what is’, while the ‘“what was” chunks’ were merely ‘interpretations to explain the present’. But she was not yet on firm ground: ‘I still have qualms, but think it’s the right method.’ Godfrey wrote back, implying that Monica based her argument on a supposedly archetypal culture, in tune with the ‘tribal studies’ of the time, while her thesis, with its sections on urbanisation and life on commercial farms, was moving away from this paradigm. Indeed, Monica was already criticising her mentor Winifred Hoernlé for this ‘tribal studies’ approach, and she was modifying her own views in this respect.20
Monica never diverged from her belief in the importance of history; indeed, in a lecture she gave at the time she referred to her work as ‘contemporary history’. And Godfrey did not confine himself to an overarching theoretical position, which might have been blind to the details of Monica’s meticulous exposition of Pondo life. He made suggestions on the logic and structure of her argument, to which Monica paid careful but not slavish attention. Later, she acknowledged to Godfrey that she was unwilling to jettison the detail because she ‘hoped the interpretation might come some day’. Feeling, in part because of Godfrey’s influence, that she was now more capable of interpretation, and largely sticking to her methodology, Monica felt that the answers ‘must be sought in Pondoland – thro’ more material’.21
By now, Monica was publishing scholarly articles as well as more popular pieces, such as her chapter on the woman she calls Nosente in Ten Africans, essays edited by Margery Perham. She told Godfrey that she was finding it difficult to write a chapter of the required length on the intriguing story. Fearing that the account would be ‘largely invention’ by the time it reached Perham, Monica later lamented: ‘I did not do my piece well! Some things don’t come off.’ Though copies of the newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu might give ‘an air of learning in a savage language’, Monica generally resisted invitations, even one from Diedrich Westermann, to publish in areas such as linguistics where she did not feel competent. Where she did feel proficient, though, her observations were trenchant. Cavalier not only about functionalism but most other theoretical positions too, she often adopted a tone of faux naïveté as a defence against practitioners’ enthusiasms. She used the notion of culture contact, for instance, as a mere post factum gloss on her descriptive material, rather than as an organising principle. She gathered data first and asked theoretical questions later. For example, she wanted to give a picture of the East London location, even though it was mostly unrelated to her Pondoland study: ‘I hope for the best in theory later.’ She found a conversation on culture contact with Godfrey’s fellow student Sjoerd Hofstra useful, because she needed to develop some ideas before giving a paper in London. Contemplating an invitation to speak on how she had studied culture contact she said: ‘I have no methods but of course might invent some.’ So she did, writing a poised and persuasive report on ‘Methods of field work’ to the IIALC, as well as an article for the leading anthropological journal, Africa, where she dismissed the ‘fashionable label’ of ‘culture contact’, writing that discussions of its meaning were futile since there was no agreement as to what the term denoted. Though Monica herself was an empiricist, there was far more scepticism about theory at the LSE than might be supposed. On 12 December there was an uproarious party for LSE anthropology students and staff at a Soho Chinese restaurant, organised and presided over by Godfrey, to mark the departure for West Africa of Meyer and Sonia Fortes, Nadel and Hofstra. After dinner there was a skit on them doing fieldwork, which Monica clearly enjoyed: ‘they were represented being very foolish and theoretical and those of us who have suffered from their long words and abstractions laughed enormously’.22
At about 180 000 words, Monica’s thesis was lengthy, though with no word limit to anthropology theses, Hodson was ‘quite unperturbed’. Monica asked the typist to correct her spelling, though errors did slip through with respect to words and phrases in isiMpondo and isiXhosa, as certain critics later pointed out. On 4 December 1933 Monica submitted the thesis, worrying that it was ‘bad in patches’ and that it would need substantial revision for publication when she returned to South Africa. She forewarned her mother, always anxious about her daughter’s strenuous work habits, that she might be ‘fossiking [sic] about with records in Umtata and East London, and perhaps just looking at Pondoland in the middle of the year’.23
Monica’s examiners passed her thesis with enthusiasm. Edwin Smith noted the originality of her treatment and her ‘humanness which enables her to get close to the people whom she is studying’, judging it as ‘of quite unusual value’. Frederic Bartlett, professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge, said he had never read a doctoral dissertation that had interested him so much and that her work should be published. Observing Monica’s reluctance to generalise in terms of the theories of the day, he noted what he saw as a shortcoming: while the results of culture contact were her main theme, she did not draw general conclusions, and ‘could have done much more … in the way of stating the exact conditions which determine the changes of culture’.24
While Monica drew from her copious material, Godfrey, lacking the field sources that he would later prove adept at gathering and interpreting, was floundering in theory and secondary sources. In June he was beginning to have ‘glimmers’ about a study of ‘the development of the sentiments which maintain the obligations of political subjection – à la Malinowski on Kinship’ which ‘in the absence of any suitable material … will be short’. It is hard to ignore the lack of conviction. Consolingly, he told Monica not to be too anxious about her writing, and went on to outline his own problems: ‘I’m finding it ever so much easier to plan theses than to write them, ideas turn out to be vague and facts have an existence of their own quite independently of the ideas and pig-headedly won’t fit.’ In September he wrote to Jessie Hunter, telling her that his thesis was going badly, though Monica’s was ‘extraordinarily good’. He presented a paper on law, and hoped to ‘touch it up’ for publication, somewhat compensating for the lack of even a partially complete thesis. While it seems never to have been published, his interest in law is apparent in his later work on the Nyakyusa. Academic issues were of central importance, as they were for Monica, but Godfrey was also deeply interested in the politics of the day, in particular the left. Though he used Marxist concepts in his later work, he was not persuaded by communism as a political and social system, seeing it instead as an inverted form of religion. Having been harangued by Alexander Wicksteed, a British writer on and resident of the Soviet Union, Godfrey remarked dryly that ‘it would be an excellent country to belong to if one didn’t care about eating or philosophical meditation on subjects remote from real life, as apparently none of them do’.25
Monica was pleased to be awarded the William Wyse fellowship, which would enable her to convert her thesis into a book the following year. She battled prejudice, and believed that Trinity College, which controlled the grant, ‘does not like women – specially engaged ones who should be making their trousseaux!’ In her application she noted that although she worked mainly among women it was impossible to discuss them apart from the overall social structure. She said she needed further time in the field to investigate movements such as the one that had led to the cattle killing of 1857, and the contemporary Israelites and followers of Wellington, as well as ‘Magic and Culture Contact’. She emphasised that a study of magic was of ‘practical use’ to the development of African education, as well as being ‘one of the most fruitful approaches to an understanding of the native mind’. Being awarded the grant was certainly ‘one in the eye for the men!’, but humiliating special conditions were attached: rather than the usual three years, it was for one year only, and marriage was forbidden for the duration. Gwladys Jones, one of her referees, had had ‘to answer lots of questions about my morals!’ Monica completed her book within the year, and married Godfrey in February 1935. Had the terms of the grant permitted it, it is possible that they would have married in 1934 when Godfrey visited South Africa en route to Tanganyika.26
While occupied with their respective work in 1933, Monica and Godfrey also looked ahead to their joint fieldwork. At first they had no idea of where they might go. On 20 May 1933 the students funded by the IIALC met with the organisation’s council at Lord Lugard’s home in the Surrey countryside. There, Monica and Godfrey had long conversations with Joseph Oldham, hoping to convince him that they should not be assigned to West Africa. Margery Perham in particular had hoped they would work in Nigeria after the Iboland women’s riots of 1929. But Monica was adamant: ‘Hai Kona, I’m fighting it like a cat.’ Lord Lugard’s fond recollections of the ‘north-enders’, his allies in the 1888–89 fight against Lake Nyasa slave-traders, may also have helped tip the balance in favour of the Nyakyusa.27
Oldham encouraged Monica to embark on a comparative study of mission policies; she could work on this in South Africa and then continue the study in East Africa after she got married. Though Godfrey and Monica disagreed with him at times, Oldham provided crucial behind-the-scenes support for them both. Indeed, Godfrey subsequently acknowledged to Malinowski that Oldham had ‘engineered’ his training with him. Oldham had characterised Godfrey as a ‘good pukka Englishman’ compared to most of Malinowski’s cosmopolitan students. Oldham enquired about opportunities for Godfrey in the colonial service after his fieldwork, and even sounded out Philip Mitchell, secretary for native affairs in the Tanganyika administration. Jobs were indeed on the young couple’s minds, and they were interested to hear that anthropology might soon be taught at Rhodes and Fort Hare.28
After spending Christmas 1933 at the Wilsons, Monica joined them for a stay with Godfrey’s aunt Winifred Wilson, headmistress of Winceby School for Girls, Bexhill-on-Sea. Monica’s PhD was passed in late January, and she then sailed for South Africa, due to arrive at East London on 27 February. For more than three weeks she endured ‘the slums’ with ‘very third class looking persons’, some of whom were intrusive and crude, and others quite ‘civilized’. Happily, she said, ‘the bath average’ was ‘reasonably high’. She enjoyed shipboard entertainment, dancing with German Jewish refugees, and participating in various games, though she tended not to mix with the younger people: ‘I am regarded as somewhat standoffish, but it can’t be helped.’ When cabin portholes were closed because of high seas, Monica slept up on the deck, with no mattress, to avoid the suffocating atmosphere below. While some passengers thought she was ‘trying to get herself talked about’, Monica, unconcerned, merely remarked that she was ‘not too soft in spite of the year in England’. When the ship docked at Lobito in Angola, a missionary took her on a tour of the location, which she found very like that of East London. They were joined by a number of fellow passengers, some from first class, though the wife of Conrad Opper, an educational administrator in Northern Rhodesia, showed no interest, complained continually, and rankled Monica by treating her ‘very much as a third class acquaintance’.29
‘It is the very first of its kind’
Monica’s task in 1934 was to do supplementary research and transform her thesis into a book. She had also promised her parents that she would spend an extended period of time with them before she got married. In the meantime, Godfrey’s plan was to travel to their appointed research area in Tanganyika in August, spending a few weeks in South Africa en route. Then in February 1935 he would return to South Africa, they would get married, and travel together to Tanganyika. Though critical of much in South Africa, Monica loved the country and hoped that Godfrey would appreciate and share her devotion, embracing the rains, droughts, mealies, ‘the sort of thing that really concerns us’. She observed: ‘The towns are shabby and sleepy, but it’s a grand country.’30
For the next year at Lovedale and Hogsback, Monica’s life was quiet, ordered and predictable, involving not only work but also tennis, gardening, interactions with relatives and friends, visits from African teachers and acquaintances, and driving her parents around, ‘the penalty of living in a small and friendly community’. She lectured at Rhodes University College in Grahamstown, and spoke on ‘Magic’ to Fort Hare students, most of whom would have had first-hand experiences, and who ‘agreed or disagreed or laughed so much that it was quite difficult to make oneself heard sometimes’. She attended the opening of Beda Hall, the Anglican student hostel at Fort Hare, and was impressed by the splendid vestments and high church ceremony. She also enjoyed intercollege sports days. By now, Monica was a sought-after local celebrity.31
During the voyage to South Africa, Monica had already begun to read official reports on Pondoland as historical background to her research. She regarded them as suspect; they failed to mention that ‘Rhodes took along a canon [sic] and mowed down a mealy field to encourage the Pondo in their desire to be annexed!’ No sooner was she home than her mother complained that her daughter was ‘beginning to look pale and thin again with her constant study’, though Monica declared that she never exceeded and ‘frequently scamped’ seven hours per day. She interacted with scholars like the linguist W.G. Bennie, and also with government officials, now as often the one consulted, as the one consulting. She wrote for information to ministers, bishops and officers of the Transkei General Council. Members of the Eastern Cape black intelligentsia provided her with information that was far less garbled and less partial than what she received from newspapers concerning, for instance, Wellington Buthelezi’s millenarian movement. She combed the files of the East London Daily Dispatch for information on the 1930 IICU strike, and asked her cousin Desmond Hobart Houghton to send her a record of the trial of union leader Clements Kadalie. She regretted not being able to attend the installation of the paramount chief in Pondoland East, and tried to keep abreast of broader issues, too. She asked Godfrey to send her a copy of philosopher John Macmurray’s recently published Freedom in the Modern World, for his analysis of communism: with the possible exception of Fort Hare psychology lecturer Bernard Notcutt, there was, she said, nobody with whom she could discuss such issues.32
Winifred Hoernlé’s careful reading of, and continued esteem for, Monica’s work is clear. On 8 August she suggested that, because so little had been written about change in African societies, Monica’s pioneering research should be published in its entirety: ‘it is the very first of its kind’, she wrote. Ideally, it should also include a study of migrants on the mines, though that was beyond a single scholar’s capabilities. She thought Monica had not ‘quite found [her] bearings between Malinowski’s functionalism and the use of historical data’, though, like Monica, she had taxed Malinowski with leaving anthropologists ‘in the lurch … over the whole problem of culture change’. To this Malinowski merely responded that, though cultures had always been studied ‘as if they were stable’, it was now up to his students to tackle the issue. Arguing that change was impossible to ignore in South Africa, Winifred Hoernlé contended that ‘recorded history can be used as data just as can observed changes’. Finally, in the spirit of the ‘practical anthropology’ much discussed at the time, and given her own concern with contemporary social issues, she queried the future of the village system, as well as traditional courts and leadership.33
Monica seemed at times to despair of her work: she got herself into ‘thickets of verbosity’, the section on farms was thin, while the work as a whole was ‘horribly dull and solid and much too long’. Adopting a bantering tone, Godfrey encouraged her: ‘everyone who reads your stuff thinks it incredibly good, why the moans about its badness: you don’t believe it yourself’. At other times she was more enthusiastic: the chapter on beef and beer parties was bawdy and readable: ‘I shan’t let my family see it until it’s safely in print,’ she added. She had an excellent local typist and her parents helped read the proofs. To her surprise, Isaac Schapera offered her a job moonlighting as a market analyst, advising a tea company how to increase sales. ‘Very paying, if combined with a fellowship’, Monica wrote, but because she was too busy she turned it down. On 29 November, she sent off the completed manuscript. ‘I’m a lady at last,’ she said, pleased at the prospect of leisure. Finally, risking Jan Smuts’s dubious views on native policy, she asked Joseph Oldham to intercede with him to write the preface. Coming from him, the request would be more favourably received than from her or her friends in South Africa, as ‘Lovedale is not a good address from which to ask favours of Smuts!’34
Audrey Richards was asked to read the manuscript. She thought it excellent, and though not strong theoretically, of real significance, breaking new ground and ‘likely to become a standard work’. The section on Africans in town was not as good as the rest, but it was the first study of its kind and as such should be published in its entirety. Diedrich Westermann praised the manuscript but suggested that Monica shorten it. She responded bluntly that unless the institute agreed to publish the full study she would take it elsewhere.35
‘This patch of hell’
Behind Monica’s apparently tranquil life in Lovedale and Hogsback lay the reality of her long-distance relationship with Godfrey, which was no easier than when both of them were in England. Though Godfrey continued to suffer from depressive episodes, he did not withdraw from social interaction. He hiked with friends in Berkshire and neighbouring counties, and went to the theatre with his father, where he was much impressed by Seán O’Casey’s symbolist Within the Gates, a copy of which he sent to Monica. He sympathised with the travails of his communist classmate and Monica’s eventual colleague and friend Jack Simons, whom he consistently referred to as ‘Symonds’, implying a less than familiar relationship. Simons was expelled from the LSE for selling a student paper in which it was implied that a staff member, John Coatman, was a police spy.36
Later on, happy and fulfilled in his marriage, Godfrey referred to their ‘gift of virginity to each other’. But this sexual restraint came with costs. As soon as Monica left England Godfrey said it was better that they were apart, not just because of the importunate demands of ‘brother body’, but because he needed the opportunity to mature. He criticised himself, not only for the pride that had caused ‘all the trouble’ between them, but also for his childishness and his unwillingness to admit that he was not as strong or successful as Monica. He admitted he was afraid, of getting married, of doing a real job, and of meeting her family. Monica wrote that while it might ‘in a way’ be easier apart, she missed him very badly, and gently dismissed his fears of failure, reminding him that this was a universal experience. To Monica’s exuberant declaration that she wanted ‘to live adventurously and not begin in a snug little suburb with a fat and firm job’, Godfrey replied that he was pleased at the prospect of adventure. Disconcertingly, however, he gave as his reason: ‘not because I have any deep craving for adventure myself, but because I want you and you’d burst in a suburb’. Taken aback at the implication of this, she replied: ‘I should hate to feel that you were in a nasty hot spot in Tanganyika only because I dislike suburbs.’ Also, she was bewildered by his remark about pride: ‘I hate not understanding exactly what you mean,’ she wrote, asking whether being engaged was the problem, or whether he felt aggrieved that she had ‘an unfair start in anthrop’.37
Godfrey’s letters of early 1934 seem to anticipate the bombshell of 17 April: ‘I’m writing to break off our engagement and to ask your pardon.’ He confessed that he was ‘conscious of failure’ and of relying selfishly on Monica, and that he felt too proud and ashamed to continue on these degrading terms. Above all, he felt ashamed of having asked her to trust him on the basis of their common Christianity, and then himself not having had ‘faith enough to get out of Doubting Castle’.38
Almost immediately, Godfrey pulled back from this ‘dreadful letter’, as he called it. He had written ‘in a fit of depression’ and hoped Monica would forgive him and allow him to try again. At the very least, this letter may have cleared the air, revealing a side of him of which she should be aware. Still, he was dismayed to realise that, seemingly, he ‘could only learn by hurting’ Monica. He now saw that the idea that life is either perfect or disastrous is foolish, and that it ‘goes by steps, not leaps’. He then declared: ‘I promise I won’t let eyore beat me again … I know now where he leads me, away from you, and I do not want to repeat this experience, and never will.’39
Monica was enormously distressed by these letters. On 10 May she wrote that if Godfrey really desired marriage she was willing, but it would ‘be much better to finish now than to get into another muddle’. She understood his feelings of dependency but felt he must break free of them, for he overestimated her strength. The point was not to be unafraid, but to act as if he were: she had told him before she left England that he ‘had been living on my gayety [sic] and … seemed to have none of your own most of the time’. She was optimistic: ‘I do believe that we can pull off a marriage together, or at least have a damn good shot at it’, but Godfrey would need the same kind of faith and strength. Confused by his mood, Monica found it ‘hard to understand why [he] should not feel self reliant and free and joyful’ when he had a job he enjoyed and was ‘very good at’. Most bewildering, perhaps, was the fact he felt this way when he was engaged to ‘someone whom you say you love’. She asked whether he had seen his psychiatrist recently, or whether he felt that the physical side of love was wrong, reassuring him: ‘it isn’t you know’. She knew he loved her more completely than she loved him, but that was no reason for not getting married. He should send a cable, with the one word ‘yes’ to proceed with the marriage, otherwise ‘no’. In a letter blotched in places, probably by tears, Monica wrote: ‘My Darling I so want you to come and kiss my tears away and put your arms round me to stop this awful shivering.’40
Monica was battered emotionally, and in spite of Godfrey’s assurances, she expressed her misgivings: ‘Not being sure whether we were going to get married or not has rather knocked me sideways … the one thing I’m frightened of is your being eyorish, and not believing in yourself. That I know I cannot stand up to. And I can’t stand another patch like this one. Otherwise I’m game.’ With Godfrey due to leave for Tanganyika via South Africa in a month’s time, Monica was still unsure whether he would leave England at all, go straight to Tanganyika, or come via South Africa as planned.41
‘Yes,’ Godfrey cabled on 26 May. ‘I know now that all is well,’ Monica replied. If Eeyore was really fading away, even ‘this patch of hell’ would have been worthwhile. Godfrey would not pretend that Eeyore had completely disappeared, though he did promise, naively perhaps, not to inflict him on her again.42
‘Like history but slightly different’
On 6 June 1934 Godfrey was formally appointed a research fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, initially for a year, at £300 per annum. He sailed for South Africa on 22 June. The Arundel Castle buzzed with debate, with its passengers including Fort Hare lecturers and educational administrators, as well as Victor Murray and Bryant Mumford, prominent educationists. Many were travelling to the New Education Fellowship conference on ‘Educational Adaptations in a Changing Society’. What amounted to an extended informal seminar on education and social change in colonial Africa took shape during the voyage. Mumford emphasised cultural continuity while Murray argued that cultural forms were secondary and that discontinuity was inevitable and often beneficial. Acutely, Godfrey commented that this debate would ‘continue all [his] life probably in just about that form’. He disembarked at Cape Town on 9 July and immediately left for Alice by train. Together with Monica, he then drove through the Transkei and Natal, visiting her Pondoland research area on the way. On 14 July they arrived at Durban, and the next day they took the train to Johannesburg.43
The couple were on their way to attend the conference in Johannesburg, where Monica had been invited to give a paper. Observing that ‘there’s nothing like trading in the general interest in the occult’, Monica had decided to avoid theoretical issues, and rather speak on magic. Sessions were held in Cape Town and then in Johannesburg, attracting educationists and anthropologists from many parts of the world, including Malinowski, ‘the lion in chief’ as Monica aptly said. During the conference, Monica stayed with Winifred Hoernlé.44
As is typical, the conference was both an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and a stage for the stars of academe, with the chorus-line jostling for recognition. Godfrey, according to Monica, was ‘quite Malinowski’s white haired boy, and everyone is taking in the fact!’ Underlying the conference, as it did thinking in colonial education and social welfare generally, was the question that had exercised Murray and Mumford on the ship to South Africa. Though liberal historian William Macmillan was not present, his ideas could not be ignored. Contending that rapid social change was inevitable and desirable in Africa, Macmillan was highly critical of the anthropologists of the time, whom he saw as conservative and backward-looking, regarding small-scale, remote rural communities as the norm and thereby neglecting social change. While there was substance to this criticism, anthropology was in fact changing, particularly with Monica’s pioneering work. Reaction to Conquest was indeed among the first anthropological works not only to describe and analyse ‘traditional’ African life, but to examine the impact of colonial rule. For Monica, the notion of social change was central, as was clear from her earlier responses to Driberg, as well as the book she later co-authored with Godfrey. But she went further, positing that economic forces underlay these processes, with the influence of education and missions being relatively marginal. Precolonial societies were slow to change, and this was at the cost of progress. The immediate task was to build a stable society on the basis of the new forces. At the conference Victor Murray put forward a similar argument that Monica thought ‘extremely good’ and ‘a retort to the anthropologists’ criticisms of educationists and missionaries’, thus distancing herself from the more static aspects of her own discipline. While Monica had had a brief and unexplained clash with Macmillan at the LSE, with her historically influenced approach – anthropology was ‘like history but slightly different’ – she least merited his criticism of contemporary anthropologists.45
For Godfrey, the great Witwatersrand industrial and commercial centre was one of his first experiences of Africa, and he took advantage of his visit in ways that would leave him in no doubt regarding the scale and significance of the southern African transformation. As well as attending certain ‘unreal’ conference sessions where politics were out of bounds ‘and the answer to every problem was good-will and £.s.d.’, he met Monica’s communist friend Eddie Roux, and together with American Board missionary Ray Phillips visited African locations like Orlando.46
After Johannesburg, Monica finally had the opportunity to give Godfrey a proper experience of Lovedale and Hogsback before he left East London on 15 August for Dar es Salaam. He met Fort Hare staff and students, and was particularly impressed by Paul Mosaka and Ernest Mancoba, describing the latter as ‘astonishingly cultured and well-read and a very good artist’. He spent a weekend in Grahamstown with Monica’s cousin Desmond, his old Oxford friend. Leaving South Africa, Godfrey reflected that the existence of the friendly white community he had met there depended, jarringly, on the exploitation of black labour. Later, he said that the attraction of South Africa for him was almost entirely its African population, and not the whites, though with some exceptions. Further, while English-speaking South Africans were generally contemptuous of Afrikaners, he thought they used the allegedly more extreme racial views of their fellow countrymen to disguise their acquiescence in a situation from which they themselves benefited immensely. He sensed too that, liberal-minded though its staff considered themselves to be, there was ‘something wrong with Lovedale’. He found this difficult to pin down. Was it because there were ‘spiritual “haves” and “have-nots”’, he wondered.47
‘You really are grand at getting shown around’
Godfrey sailed for Dar es Salaam from East London. Disembarking at Durban, he visited an African location and the ‘weird and wonderful’ Roman Catholic Mariannhill Mission, ‘reeking of the 14th century’. At Lourenço Marques and Beira he persuaded officials of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association to conduct him around African areas, and while in Beira he enjoyed a culturally incongruous tea with the ‘talkative and affectionate’ guesthouse owner, Mrs Goldberg, from Shanklin in the Isle of Wight. Godfrey’s intense curiosity and capacity to observe is clear. There is no sign of the self-absorption and insecurity that had plagued him for years and which made his relationship with Monica so fragile. ‘I feel more at peace than for a long time,’ he wrote en route to Tanganyika. She had previously claimed, ‘I find it very hard to be sentimental on paper’, but now she was overjoyed, with an ardent tone emerging: ‘my sweet heart I love you – absurdly … We’ve had a marvellous month together and we’ll have a lot more like them’; ‘my darling I miss you so badly. I don’t feel that I am really here. A lot of me is with you … But sweetheart though I miss you so I’m terribly happy – just terribly happy.’ She can barely contain her delight at Godfrey’s reaction to the life opening up to them, and her pride in his capability and charm in unfamiliar contexts, in being ‘shown around’ for instance, so crucial for an anthropologist: ‘You really are grand at getting shown around. I was so afraid you were too modest for an anthropologist but if it’s a question of “learning a lot” you don’t care a hang and people are so pleased to take you. Splendid!’48
Monica adroitly managed wedding arrangements, asking Cheri Hobart Houghton to be her bridesmaid, and prodding Godfrey into asking Desmond to be his best man. Following Godfrey’s pleas not to ‘allow [her] people to have an elaborate wedding’, Monica discouraged her uncle Kenneth from donning a top hat and making a speech, and Cheri from the ‘absurd’ gift of conventional silverware. She suggested the ceremony take place in the new chapel being built at Hogsback, ‘a stone hut with thatched roof’, where there would be room for close family only. Godfrey’s response was vague, even wondering whether they might marry in Tanganyika, and it was only after vigorous pestering that Monica got him to commit to a date in South Africa: ‘I was only plaintiff [sic] because I want you so badly,’ she wrote. Godfrey booked to fly from Mbeya to Johannesburg, and from there to travel by rail to Cathcart, to arrive on 5 February 1935, their wedding date. They planned a three-week honeymoon where they would ‘read and talk and stroll about and laugh’. Monica told Godfrey, apologetically but firmly, that to avoid fear and – a favourite word – ‘muddle’, he must see to contraception, to which he agreed. She also told him that her father was arranging an ‘anti-nuptual [sic] contract’, without which, under South African law, a marriage is automatically in community of property. The contract ensured that Monica did not become a legal minor, and she and her father were also prudently safeguarding any assets she might have. In the meantime she worked hard on finishing her book, played tennis, gardened and entertained visitors like Hugh Ashton, a student of Malinowski who would specialise on the people of Basutoland. As Godfrey’s letters from buNyakyusa began to arrive, Monica commented that they were ‘so exciting’ while hers were ‘so dull’: ‘There just isn’t any indaba here,’ she complained about Lovedale. She negotiated firmly about her fellowship, asking Joseph Oldham to ensure that the IIALC did not reduce her grant on account of her marriage. Though she managed to get a camera and various travel and equipment allowances, Monica would only be paid a basic £20 per month, and £30 when she was working at a different place from Godfrey.49
The latter part of 1934 was a period of anticipation and achievement for both Monica and Godfrey. The typescript of Reaction to Conquest was dispatched to the publisher and several of Monica’s articles were appearing. Godfrey’s depression seemed to have been banished and it quickly became apparent that he was a highly capable and enthusiastic fieldworker. He would return to South Africa early the following year. They would then get married, go on honeymoon, and return together to their joint fieldwork in Tanganyika. The future was beguiling.