Godfrey arrived in Dar es Salaam on 28 August 1934. He was intoxicated by the sweltering, multicultural city. He paid courtesy calls on Chief Secretary Philip Mitchell and other government officials and examined documents in the Secretariat on his future research area. On 4 September he left by train for Dodoma and from there travelled by mail lorry to the district capital Tukuyu, his destination in northern buNyakyusa. This was the administrative centre for the area, built around the crenelated German fort, or Boma, on the lower slopes of the extinct Rungwe volcano. With the heightened perception of first encounters, Godfrey noted the ‘bright and ample clothes’ of the Hehe people around Iringa, and the ‘dirty and almost naked’ Safwa, the first ‘primitive-looking’ people he had encountered. ‘It is good to feel that I’m really starting on our job,’ he wrote to Monica; ‘I want you with me terribly badly, darling, but think what fun it will be showing you round.’1
‘I know now that I can do this job’
Monica and Godfrey were to study Nyakyusa society as a team, with Godfrey focusing on communities that held traditional beliefs, and Monica on Christian groups. In addition, Monica was to focus on women and family life, as had been the purpose of her Eastern Cape work before she realised the impossibility of studying a society by looking at one gender only. Godfrey soon began to pass on information, for instance on monogamous Christian marriage in communities where polygamy seemed crucial to social organisation, and, though too late for her proposal to the IIALC, the need to consider the growing influence of Islam. The proposal she eventually submitted was brief, and pointed out the difficulty of developing a research plan in ignorance of the society to be studied. Though she had expressed reservations, telling Godfrey not to take the proposal too seriously, the institute approved her plan.2
Godfrey stayed in Tukuyu until 4 October at the guesthouse of Major Wells and his wife. Wells, an ex-soldier and administrator turned coffee-planter, ‘just staving off bankruptcy’, according to Godfrey, was part of the small European community in and around Tukuyu, where, later on, Godfrey and Monica occasionally went to play tennis and bridge, or to see the doctor. They also conducted some of their research nearby, once they were based at Ilolo near the Rungwe Moravian mission.3
Soon after he arrived in Tukuyu, Godfrey employed Leonard, or Tulinawe, Mwaisumo, first as ‘secretary-cum-interpreter-cum-teacher’, and then increasingly as research assistant and informant. An important figure in the Wilsons’ research, he also taught Godfrey to speak kiNyakyusa. In addition, Godfrey employed Owen Kabiki as a ‘houseboy’ – he too became an important informant in his own right – and Timothy the ‘cook’s boy’ who assisted Alidi, a ‘wonderful cook’; as a Yao, Alidi was almost certainly Muslim. Later, Godfrey added a messenger to his personal staff. He told Monica that it was a ‘damned waste’ she was not there: ‘the world is altogether very good fun’. While studying the language, Godfrey also gathered material: Leonard was about to get married, and he told Godfrey about marriage and dowries and about tensions between Christian and traditional customs. Though he and his mother were Christian, the rest of his family, including his elder brother, the head of the family, were traditionalists. After their marriage, Monica and Godfrey developed a close friendship with Leonard, and attended a ceremony where family members took medicine to protect themselves after the death of a sister who was believed to have succumbed to the sorcery of a former husband. ‘Rarely one gets a chance of seeing such private family affairs,’ Monica wrote. So trusting was this relationship that Leonard even disclosed to Godfrey accounts of intimate sexual behaviour such as masturbation and lesbianism, filling notebooks with information, some from his own experience and that of his family. The first notebook described details of Leonard’s life, from herding to farming, to a series of schools where he became literate and learnt kiSwahili, increasingly the lingua franca of Tanganyika. He became a Christian, he explained, because it was crucial to getting an education. He told a friend: ‘if we have got enough education, we can change ideas and leave the missionaries’. He financed his studies by trading, brewing, and growing vegetables and selling them to Europeans. He also worked for two months at the Lupa goldfields. Another informant at this time was Lazarus Johnston Mwambulwa, head clerk at the Boma, who at first conversed in English, though within hardly more than a month he and Godfrey were communicating in kiNyakyusa.4
With Godfrey’s talent for languages, one of the locals told him he would soon be speaking kiNyakyusa ‘“better than the missionaries … [who] … don’t go round talking to people.”’ From his first encounters, Godfrey deduced that cattle, women, children and land, in that order, were the important things in Nyakyusa life. He relished his first local meal, of banana and chicken stew, at Mwambulwa’s home, and surmised that, until Monica arrived, he would find out little from women, who lived almost entirely separate from men. Monica told him that she would find it easier to talk to women than he did; also, because she had ‘a more Victorian background’ than he, and ‘having grown up in S.A.’, she had an understanding of the women’s ‘stand offishness’. In Godfrey’s research notebooks, the preponderance of information is from men, though he was not misled by apparently ingrained custom. From the start, he focused on the Nyakyusa world as it was, including its commercial markets, colonial administration and labour migration, rather than trying to extract a supposedly archetypal traditional life from contemporary data: ‘Paradoxically these people are at one and the same time very rich and extremely poor – rich by the old standards in food and cattle – poor, very poor by the new standards of money and all that it buys. And both standards count now-a-days.’5
On 4 October, ‘on safari at last’, Godfrey set out with twenty carriers from Tukuyu, stopping to talk to old men and chiefs on the way to his first base, the lakeshore village of Mwaya, whose name was derived from Fred Moir, the African Lakes Company pioneer. Monica was amused at the image of Godfrey ‘as the complete Englishman in the tropics, marching at the head of [his] string! Priceless!’ But Godfrey had no other option, as the road from Tukuyu to Mwaya had not yet been constructed. His destination was an abandoned mission house where he was to stay until December before moving to a higher and healthier area. The level of the lake varies substantially, and Godfrey arrived at the end of a twenty-year period of low water that ended in 1935, so that the place where he stayed is now submerged.6
Lake Nyasa, also known as Lake Malawi, is one of the East African Rift Valley lakes, the third largest by surface area in Africa. To the north and east, buNyakyusa is bordered by high mountains, with the plain spreading across the Songwe River between Tanzania and Malawi to the territory of the Ngonde. This plain is itself bordered to the west and south by rugged country. The mountains and lake provided the Nyakyusa with a certain amount of protection from the nineteenth-century depredations of Swahili slave-traders, from the Hehe to the north, from the Bemba to the south-west, and even from the Ngoni from the far south. Colonial occupation came with less disruption than in many other areas. Compared to the dry savannah on the other side of the crescent of mountains, buNyakyusa, both its mountain foothills and its lakeside plain, is lush and fertile, an oasis in the generally arid and sparsely populated Tanzanian interior. Then as now, the area supported a dense population of farmers and herders, producing bananas, rice, palm-oil and much more, and cash crops such as coffee, tea and cacao. While journeying from Tukuyu to Mwaya Godfrey traversed buNyakyusa’s climatic zones, from the cooler uplands to the humid lakeside, where quite soon he had his first bout of malaria.7
Looking at buNyakyusa after his recent depression, whose re-emergence may have haunted him, it seemed to Godfrey that ‘all round are men and women so much less ashamed and afraid of being men and women than at home’. He declared: ‘Moché, these people are delightful, and they’ve never been cowed and are self-respecting and intelligent and very friendly … Sweetheart I am so happy here already, and when you come it will be unbelievably perfect.’ From the start, Godfrey, whom the Nyakyusa called ‘Mwaipaja’, invested his intellectual energy in research that became like an extended honeymoon, linking Monica and people and place in a potent emotional and sensual blend. Exultantly, he wrote: ‘I know now that I can do this job.’ He was shedding his dependence, and now needed his wife ‘not to live, but to live well’.8
Godfrey had emerged from his at times fragile and abject state, and though he confessed to still being ‘raw in funny odd places’, with his new confidence he could now tease Monica: ‘you do things and enjoy them enormously (like tennis and bridge and gossip) – then you pretend you did them out of a sense of duty either to society or to me or to someone else, and take a lot of credit for doing them – having it both ways’. Monica parried by remarking it was just as well Godfrey had ‘enough humour for two’, since she herself tended ‘to grow very solemn’. Godfrey’s passion inflamed his eloquence – ‘I think of the day when I will look at you with desire and you will not turn away’ – while Monica, repeating that she could not ‘talk very much on paper’, tried to keep up, saying for example that she hoped he did not mind her ‘boiling over sometimes’ and, choosing perhaps not quite the right word, ‘being frightfully sentimental’. Godfrey’s riposte was that he was so glad that they were two ‘body-conscious’ anthropologists. He would ‘hate to marry a prude’.9
Godfrey soon developed a good rapport not only with local people but with the officials, officers of the King’s African Rifles (KAR), planters and missionaries of the area. He was fortunate with the open-minded District Officer (DO) Philip Huggins and his wife, who became good friends, and with Bernard Coghlan, a young Irish doctor. Being a good tennis player gave Godfrey, and later Monica, an entrée to local white society. He had a gift for easy intercourse with people, both African and European. At Mwaya he met up with the officers of the KAR detachment based at Masoko, as well as Huggins, who was touring his district. Godfrey and the others went hunting, and afterwards they played bridge, ‘sitting in the middle of the village of old men peacefully sleeping’. He and his partner, the DO, won two shillings from the KAR officers.10
Once established at the lakeshore, Godfrey also visited the inland Selya area, to the north-east, and planned a base at Itete, ‘a delightful spot in the middle of the Garden of Eden’, to which he would return with Monica in March 1935 after they were married. At first he planned a new house built in the local manner, but he later accepted the nearby Itete Lutheran Mission offer of the use of a house on Isumba Hill, in Selya, on the boundary of the territories of chiefs Mwaipopo and Mwaihojo.11
‘In the front line of young anthropologists’
Of all his students in southern and eastern Africa, Malinowski told Joseph Oldham that he was most pleased with Godfrey. He reported regularly to Malinowski, who on 22 November 1934 praised the two reports Godfrey had sent so far, parts of which he said he would read to the seminar group. He was, however, reluctant to support the request for Monica to be paid a full salary, annoying Godfrey by citing his own financial struggles as a fieldworker and speculating that Monica and Godfrey would ‘not have to linger long before having good employment’. Monica was ‘a competent anthropologist’, and Malinowski was certain of Godfrey’s abilities, energy and decency, ‘even though you are a Christian!’ Then, possibly recalling the often disconsolate Godfrey of London and unaware of the revitalised Godfrey of buNyakyusa, Malinowski wrote encouragingly: ‘there is a time when one has to summon ones [sic] courage, and fling one’s energies and powers fully into the balance’.
Godfrey’s relationship with Malinowski was a blend of financial, professional and – at first – intellectual dependence, with restive straining at these constraints. Godfrey expressed his frustration to Monica: ‘Damn the man, he knows I can’t object too much for fear of giving him a year’s pique when I want his help in looking for a job.’ There were opportunities in England also, and Malinowski advised him to publish something quickly, so that he ‘could show with good reason that [he was] in the front line of young anthropologists’. Malinowski seems to have sensed he was overdoing the knockabout anti-Christian tone he affected in his letters to Godfrey. In an argument as to why anthropology was not at the time ‘a recognised science’, he decided to cut the following from a draft: ‘if your good friends, the missionaries (damn their eyes!), were not such bloody swine, and did not fight us on every point they can; if they recognised the necessity of Anthropological knowledge, instead of messing about in a slough of ignorance; if, further, the Colonial Governments, instead of treating us as a nuisance, would recognise our utility, we might be out of the soup’.12
Malinowski supported a second year of fieldwork for Godfrey, noting confidentially that, since financial prospects for anthropology were not favourable, he would ‘start moving’ in Godfrey’s interests soon, even before receiving his official letter; he also urged him to return to England between the two fieldwork phases, implying further expense. Godfrey had reported on his interactions with anthropologists in South Africa, to which Malinowski responded drolly though not without a hint of menace:
I am exceedingly touchy as you know, and have what the French call amour propre or a sort of self-regarding complex (in absurd terminology of psycho-analysis) developed to morbid dimensions. I do not think I would resent it if you associated with any of my ‘professional enemies’ in any way. As you quite rightly say, if you were not good enough to withstand any more or less surreptitious hostility to me, and if you were not able to join yourself in a few good or perhaps less good jokes against me, and in a good deal of sneering or caricaturing – though yet seeing that there are some points worth while in my method and that I have a good deal of friendship for my decent pupils; then there would be no real reason that I should care about your opinion and attitude towards me.
In other words, Godfrey was free to work with whomever he chose. Malinowski advised Godfrey to focus on Johannesburg rather than Cape Town, asserting that Isaac Schapera displayed ‘a great deal of mental sterility’, and he went on to deride what he called ‘the slightly camouflaged, typically Jewish attitude of egalitarianism’. Godfrey had apparently referred to Winifred Hoernlé as ‘sentimental and humanitarian’ but Malinowski thought this better described her husband, and that she was far from having a ‘docile and uncritical mind’. Also, Schapera was young, so there would be little chance of promotion in Cape Town, while Hoernlé had mentioned the prospect of resigning, and there was no successor in sight.13
The relationship between Godfrey, Malinowski and Schapera had an ironic outcome concerning Godfrey’s eventual career. In November 1936 Schapera, signing himself ‘Schap’, wrote to Godfrey, urging him to apply for a lectureship in native law and administration coming up the following year. While he could not guarantee that Godfrey would get the job, he would support his application. Schapera and his colleagues would divide up the work of the School of African Studies to enable each member to have a term off every year for fieldwork. Also, funding from the ‘Carnegie crowd in America’ for a survey of the Langa native location in Cape Town might augment Godfrey’s income. If he took the job, Schapera wished to involve him and Monica on the anthropological side of the survey. But when Godfrey consulted Malinowski about the scheme, they agreed that completing the Nyakyusa research was a priority, thus dashing Schapera’s plan.14
The upshot was that Jack Simons, Malinowski’s student and Godfrey’s seminar colleague, got the post. Simons pursued the Langa research, but, after repeated bannings in the 1950s and 1960s, and his eventual forced departure from the university, he left South Africa. At that stage he was not only Monica’s colleague at the University of Cape Town (UCT), but also her friend. The Langa survey was then taken up by Monica and Archie Mafeje. In the world of anthropology, small in Britain, and smaller still in South Africa, personal and professional paths crossed and re-crossed.
Malinowski gave full support to Godfrey and Monica in their request for funding for their second tour in buNyakyusa, ‘going even beyond’ what they were asking for, as he wrote to Godfrey, by seeking six months for them in England rather than in South Africa. Monica, with her obligations to her parents, must have considered this a dubious benefit. Godfrey already had the strong support of the Fellowship Advisory Committee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Malinowski’s letter to the foundation, which he copied confidentially to Godfrey, was filled with high praise. He spoke of Godfrey as ‘the coming man in anthropology … bound to become, barring unforeseen accidents, the leading British anthropologist of British extraction’. Malinowski asserted: ‘I have not had a really first-rate student, both as regards intelligence, application and character, of purely English nationality and heredity. Godfrey Wilson is one.’ He and Monica, with her ‘keen sense of realities, a sense of humour and great abilities’, would make an excellent team. ‘In the interests of English anthropology, and even Social Science in general’, he had his eye on a good academic job in London for Godfrey. Therefore, he and Monica should be supported for six months in the city between fieldwork tours. Monica, picking up on Malinowski’s slight on his non-English students, wrote to her mother that the reference was ‘rather Hitlerish but very complimentary’. His praise of herself she found ‘most unexpected’.15
Monica’s reports to the IIALC were succinct and formal. Godfrey’s to his supervisor Malinowski were generally in the form of handwritten letters, with some typed, probably by Monica after her arrival in buNyakyusa: in their mix of the personal with detailed ethnographic description and analysis, they suggest an often strained relationship between favoured student and brilliant but irascible mentor. Though pleased that Malinowski was presenting the ethnographic content of his letters to the London seminar, Godfrey expressed misgivings: ‘I always find myself thinking: “Now he is sure to ask me about this, and this, and this, and to curse me roundly if I don’t find it out;” on bad days it is terrifying but it does make for better work.’ By way of example, he told Monica that on 23 March he had dealt with the nature of the ‘State’ in buNyakyusa, emphasising contradictions and inconsistencies, for instance in rules of succession, particularly regarding chieftainships. Godfrey commented: ‘the law is not complete, there is a gap, in the old days filled by war’. He believed he had stumbled upon ‘a point of great theoretical importance’, since in Western societies this ‘gap’ is filled by ‘a meticulous elaborated legal code, or by a vast number of precedents’. But with war threatening, Godfrey noted: ‘Where the gap exists as in the case of international relations we also fill it by war.’ What Godfrey describes here represents, in embryonic form, the theory of ‘disequilibrium’, which he and Monica would later develop.16
The year 1935 was a difficult one for Malinowski. The Rockefeller Foundation was terminating its direct research endowments, and intended to reduce and ultimately end its support to the IIALC. Yet despite these shrinking opportunities, Malinowski continued in his efforts to secure an academic post for Godfrey, pledging: ‘You certainly will always have the first claim, as far as I am concerned, and I am not saying that lightly.’ It was primarily to improve Godfrey’s chances that he insisted the couple come to England if possible in the first half of 1936; together with Joseph Oldham – ‘Oldham and I would probably put you in the first place of all candidates’ – he pressed for the IIALC to support their stay. He assured Godfrey that all would be well, scrawling ‘bloody private!’ on an enclosed extract of a letter to the institute in which he had pressed for such support. He had argued that Godfrey and Monica were ‘the very best proposition in which the Institute has ever been engaged’, believing that Godfrey would become ‘one of the mainstays of British Anthropology’: ‘The fact that he is an Englishman, a Christian (practicing, etc.) and a gentleman, qualifications which none of our other Fellows satisfy, makes him specially precious. Besides this, he is the only pupil I ever had whom I fully trust, both intellectually and in matters of character.’ Godfrey responded that his generous estimation was ‘alarming but also very delightful’ to him and Monica. Such were the stepping-stones that enabled not only Godfrey, but indirectly Monica also, to advance professionally.17
Caught as he was within this web of dependency and obligation, one can only surmise what Godfrey’s actual opinion was of Malinowski at this time. In a draft letter to the Hertford classicist N.R. Murphy, Godfrey acknowledged that in fieldwork Malinowski was ‘head and shoulders’ above anyone else. However, the theoretical basis of his work was ‘insufficiently thought out, and the word “function” defined only by long and wordy paragraphs is a snare and a delusion’. He elaborated the point in a letter to Monica in which he praised Raymond Firth’s recently published We the Tikopia. Firth was Malinowski’s deputy, and they both knew him well. ‘Full of admiration’ though Godfrey was for the unique material that Firth had gathered, he felt ‘it doesn’t bite conceptually’ (though writing to Firth himself, Godfrey praised his book as ‘theoretically lucid’). He goes on to say: ‘B.M., being a genius, fills the vagueness with suggestive points of light … but Raymond sacrifices the half-truths to commonsense and really puts very little in their place.’ Ultimately, though, Godfrey was no more a wholehearted devotee of Malinowskian functionalism than Monica herself. It is possible, too, that she felt a certain sexual wariness: as she wrote much later, about advances she herself had never needed to deflect, while it might be ‘fun making a visiting supervisor pant … Malinowski was a bit of a menace to some of his students’.18
In January 1935 Godfrey flew to South Africa and he and Monica were married on 5 February at Hogsback. The ceremony was performed by Rev. Arthur Wilkie, principal of Lovedale, in the tiny interdenominational chapel of St Patrick’s-on-the-Hill; it had been consecrated just days before, with thatchers rushing to complete the roof in time for the wedding. Monica had said that once they were married she would convert to Anglicanism, though Godfrey thought it immaterial who married them and to which denomination they formally belonged. After the nuptials, the couple set off by train for their honeymoon in the Royal Natal National Park; for two days they were happily marooned at the Royal Hotel in Ladysmith as they waited for the next railway bus to take them to their destination. They stayed in the park until 27 February. They climbed Mont-aux-Sources, with Monica and the guide using Sotho ponies much of the way, while Godfrey, no horseman, accompanied them on foot. Anticipating life in the field, she wrote to her mother requesting recipes for pastry and – ‘these Englishmen!’ – steamed pudding. The newlyweds spent two days in Johannesburg and took off before dawn on 2 March on a flight to Mbeya. They landed for morning tea at Bulawayo and for lunch at Salisbury, progress further interrupted by a search for the small plane piloted by Lady Young, wife of Northern Rhodesia governor Hubert Young, which had gone missing en route to Lusaka. At Mbeya, in Tanganyika, a group of German settlers were celebrating the return of the Saar Basin to the fatherland. German flags and swastikas were on display, and free drinks were on offer in one of the hotels on this incident-filled start to Monica’s research.19
Monica’s life was undergoing radical change: buNyakyusa was new to her in a way that Pondoland had never been; she was just married, dealing with sexual relations in her own life, a far cry from observing this among others; and she was housekeeper in a succession of makeshift homes. Previously researching independently, she was now collaborating with the intellectually and linguistically talented Godfrey in an environment in which he had already lived for five months, making it his own. On arrival, Godfrey’s staff threw a party for her where she drank – or pretended to drink – local beer from a common pot, ate meat from a bull slaughtered by Chief Mwaipopo in her honour, and was given the Nyakyusa name ‘Kagile’. On top of all this, she was managing, from a great distance, the publication process of Reaction to Conquest.20
‘Many thanks for adjectives!’
Monica had always been close to her parents, especially to her mother. Where there were real disagreements, however, Monica went her own way. Now she had to balance her relationship with her parents with that with her husband, a challenge that she managed skilfully.
One of the first things Jessie did for her daughter in Tanganyika, testifying to their common values and mutual trust, was to supply her with appropriate vocabulary for letters of thanks describing wedding presents that Monica had not seen: ‘Many thanks for adjectives!’ Monica wrote. As always, her mother fussed about Monica overworking, and, as usual, Monica replied, certainly inaccurately, that she did ‘a trades unionish 6 hours a day’, adding: ‘Mornings in bed are not unknown.’ When a visit by her parents was mooted, Monica discouraged the idea. They lacked extra beds and other necessities; the Mbeya Hotel was ‘horrible’, and Mrs Wells’s establishment in Tukuyu was ‘quite quite impossible’, with walls in the bedrooms that did not go the whole way to the ceiling, so that ‘everything can be heard’. Hosting her parents in buNyakyusa was far too challenging to even contemplate: ‘It’s very sad,’ she wrote.21
Monica’s earlier reassurances to her parents clashed with the IIALC’s insistence that she and Godfrey spend the first six months of 1936 in London, and so she wrote a long and careful letter to her mother. ‘I do so badly want to prowl around the garden with you and talk,’ she wrote, before explaining that Rockefeller funding depended on their going to London, as might a future job for Godfrey. There were indications that Reginald Coupland, Beit Professor of Colonial History, wanted Godfrey to work with him at Oxford, and Godfrey was also exploring possibilities at his old college, Hertford, and at Balliol. Also, Godfrey wanted to take the route eastwards around Africa, which he had not travelled before, and that would mean not going via South Africa. She promised that they would visit Lovedale on the return voyage, and pleaded: ‘Oh Muz do write and tell me that you are not too unhappy about our not coming now.’ But Monica need not have been concerned: her mother wrote back and was ‘understanding’.22
Though sources are sparse, there is evidence that Godfrey’s relationship with his parents was at times somewhat fraught, especially with his opinionated and occasionally aggressive mother. One such illustration is the story he must have relayed to Monica about the time his father was appointed Regius Professor of English at Edinburgh University. Godfrey’s mother was ‘far from complimentary’ about the city, and refused to keep her observations to herself. Monica reported to her own mother that Mrs Wilson claimed to have detested every place in which she had ever lived, and she wryly observed that in this case her mother-in-law should be careful: ‘Edinburgh might take her seriously.’23
‘The prison gates have not closed on me yet’
Monica was delighted with the thatched, stone-paved home at Isumba that Godfrey had secured for them; from its position 600 metres higher than the lake forty kilometres away, they could see the immense clouds of lake flies that at times swarmed in the distance. Godfrey described the scene:
[F]rom the east the Livingstone Mountains fall thousands of feet into a corner of the lake; over them Dawn trails a russet mantle strangely similar to the one which Shakespeare saw her wearing in distant Europe … while from beyond them the thunderstorms walk on stilts of lightning towards our house. The immediate foreground slopes away from us filled by well-tilled gardens, by cows at pasture, by bamboo houses half hidden among groves of bananas and by the lovely Mwale … trees.24
Immediately, Monica was immersed in the way of life and the manner of research that Godfrey had evolved, ‘entertaining neighbours in return for being entertained by them’, or, in the formal language of her Quarterly Report, ‘reciprocal social intercourse’. In a way that was ‘laughing but half serious’, traditional priests performed a ritual for rain and included Godfrey as a participant. Indeed, he would write to his mother-in-law early in 1937: ‘Knowing individuals well is the only method of finding things out – I have just met my best friend here for the first time this tour and he has told me more about ritual in 2 days than I had found out in the previous 4 months.’
To welcome Monica to the area, Sister Hannah, who was in charge of the mission hospital five kilometres away, had baked ‘a grand German tart’ large enough to feed the masses of people who arrived to greet her and Godfrey. She was presented with gifts of a live hen, amasi (fermented milk) and bananas. Monica told her mother that she was writing her letter ‘in the intervals of a party’. It was clear that their five employees were all needed, and it took a while for Monica to adjust to the near-immersion in local communities which was the basis of Godfrey’s research method: ‘Visitors poured through the house all the time’, as she later recalled. ‘Not having yet a completely anthropological stomach’, Monica watched anxiously out of the corner of her eye to see if the customary gift of a hen would be presented alive or cooked. While she disliked having visitors while writing reports, Monica endured the inconvenience in the interests of ‘friendship and intimacy’.25
Much domestic work consisted of managing the household staff. Duties were varied, and on one occasion their house-servant Kabiki joined Godfrey in arranging a bushpig hunt. In addition to the runner’s basic task of fetching and delivering mail from Tukuyu, he carried notes between Monica and Godfrey when they were working in separate areas, and also collected oranges from trees at the lakeside, and fetched wheat for the chickens from the mountains and books from the Tukuyu Club library. The cook produced excellent three-course meals on an open fire in a hut, though Monica reported that his shrewish wife argued fiercely with Leonard Mwaisumo, and Godfrey had to step in and keep the peace.26
Loathing housework, Monica fitted into existing domestic arrangements. She spent barely half an hour a day on housekeeping, and was pleased to report: ‘The prison gates have not closed on me yet.’ Domestic and research issues were entwined. Their many visitors were offered tea or coffee, and, if they were particularly important, a meal of cooked bananas, the Nyakyusa staple. Monica wrote to her mother with a range of questions: How long would beef remain edible in a hot climate? Could she send her a copy of Mrs Beeton? Paraffin seemed to be disappearing fast: how long might she reasonably expect two gallons to last? Suspecting the cook of theft, Monica had, moreover, to patrol the domestic frontiers of race, class and gender, with all their underlying tensions. The chief at Rungwe, ‘a dignified, clever man’, had told Godfrey that while some European men were friendly, the women never were. Monica attributed this attitude to struggling with ‘housekeeping in a foreign tongue, in a hot climate, with some of the household at least rather given to appropriating food’. Occasionally, too, they were the victims of petty crime, with clothes stolen off the washing line. Though a dedicated gardener, Monica’s days were filled and she barely found time to grow a few tomatoes.27
There were unexpected moments, as when the servants ‘were all itching to hear’ recordings of classical music that had been sent to Godfrey. He and Monica arranged a party and the whole household attended, ‘the wives very douce in grand cloths on a mat on the floor’. They listened to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and some Wagner, and they all had tea. ‘They did enjoy themselves,’ Monica reported, and the event triggered a declaration of joy: ‘We’re absurdly happy. I thought it might be a bit of a strain living just two of us alone for so long away from everyone else of our own colour, but it isn’t a bit!’28
Godfrey’s apparent recovery was crucial to Monica’s sense of well-being. He had turned out to be a first-rate fieldworker and, as Monica put it three weeks after arriving, ‘material is simply poring [sic] in’. Visitors from fifty or more kilometres away came to visit Godfrey, bringing gifts and gossip. The rainmaker Kasitile, who had since December 1934 been Godfrey’s friend as well as his chief informant on matters of religion and ceremony, reportedly said of Godfrey: ‘[he is] not a European; they even follow him from Mwaya!’ When people came to grumble about warthogs ruining their crops, Godfrey would rush out with a shotgun; though ineffective against the creatures, Monica wrote that he enjoyed ‘dashing after them’, with the added bonus that it was ‘very good exercise’. The couple’s happiness and sense of fulfilment was reflected in, or transposed into, ‘a sense of the nearness of God’ which had ‘come to [them] both’ in buNyakyusa. Four months later Monica again told her mother, the day after Godfrey’s twenty-seventh birthday, that he was very well and enormously enjoying his work, ‘getting better stuff than [she] ever did in Pondoland. People like him so much and enjoy coming to pay calls, and fairly pour forth info.’29
Monica maintained a certain wariness, however, for she continued to believe that once a woman had chosen marriage, she should devote herself primarily to husband and family and put her career second. This was still evident some years later, in 1937, while she was at Lovedale, recovering from malaria. When she was asked to give the Bantu Trust lectures at Fort Hare on her return from buNyakyusa the following year, she expressed eager interest, saying that she would turn ‘sober and matronly after that and might never be asked again’. Though himself heedful that Monica might take on too much, Godfrey nevertheless made light of Monica’s fears: ‘it ain’t M.H.’s “last appearance” you know! Not by a long way. … I have neither the capacities nor the impulses of a Victorian. I am no more capable of swamping you in babies and domesticity than I am of wishing to.’ Clearly, Monica, daughter of Lovedale, was a Victorian in a way that her husband was not. As it turned out, Monica eventually declined to give the lectures.30
‘They are even glad to be pally with anthropologists’
Monica and Godfrey enjoyed the company of the people of buNyakyusa. And because distances were relatively easy to manage, they also interacted with European acquaintances in Tukuyu, at mission stations and on coffee plantations, as well as with young British officers at the Masoko KAR base. Among their entertainments were King George’s Silver Jubilee celebrations in Tukuyu in May. These involved an evening of bridge, a dance where Monica wore a favourite white dress, lunch at the local Tukuyu Club where the English community entertained a local group of Germans, and celebrations that took place in pouring rain with ‘Indians, Banyakyusa and Europeans … all there in their appointed stands’. Brief and occasional exposure to this world sufficed for the Wilsons, and their circle of friends was limited to DO Huggins and his wife, and, later on, Bill Eustace, an agricultural officer, ‘a principal ally as regards work’, and his wife, a cousin of the South African poet Francis Carey Slater. Intellectuals in a remote imperial outpost, Monica and Godfrey did not fully relate even to the doctor and his wife, who was ‘very “bright” and sophisticated’, as Monica put it.31
In June later that year, Monica described a weekend with the Roquettes, a police officer and his wife who lived in Tukuyu. To get there, Godfrey walked from Isumba to Masoko, while Monica was carried in a hammock, or machila. Once they arrived in Masoko, they were driven to Tukuyu in an Indian trader’s lorry. The return journey involved a three-hour walk to Masoko, with Monica in the machila and Godfrey following behind. It was, Monica reported, ‘very nice indeed to meet one’s own kind and to feel a little cold, and talk English all the time’. Soon after, they were paid a visit by a German mining engineer from the Lupa goldfields as well as some German coffee-planters. In late July they visited Tukuyu again and stayed with Huggins and his wife. The men argued noisily while the women ‘sat and laughed’ and enjoyed the display. Returning via Masoko, Monica and Godfrey had lunch with Captain McLean of the KAR and a new lieutenant, ‘a very lady-dah [sic] young man who knows everything there is to be known about natives – especially “mission boys” – after a month or two in Nyasaland’. Though the officers seemed incapable of believing that a woman might say anything worth listening to, they were so isolated ‘that they [were] even glad to be pally with anthropologists’. In 1982, Monica recalled that the officers had taken bets as to how long she would survive in camp conditions: two weeks at most, they thought. Subsequent visits increased the Wilsons’ amazement, and amusement, at the utter ignorance of most of the officers. Godfrey described Captain Watson blundering around the verandah, whisky and soda to hand, as the dogs barked uncontrollably. He stopped to read something Godfrey had written: ‘“Wilson, who taught you prose?” “Eh?” said Wilson “well, I mean, this is prose.”’32
During Godfrey’s absence at Lubaga, Monica had to put up with local disapproval when she entertained Assistant District Officer Malcolme, who was collecting taxes in the Isumba area. In late July, she and Godfrey visited Rungwe Mission where they had supper with Joseph Busse, a teacher at the Moravian school, and his wife. The following evening they dined with a Swiss-German missionary-planter named Dieppe, and his wife. While the Moravian missionaries were generally friendly, Otto Schüler, superintendent of the Lutheran Berlin mission at Itete, near Isumba, refused Monica and Godfrey permission to take communion or even to attend the service. He explained that ‘the congregation would think it curious’, this despite the fact that African Presbyterians from Livingstonia in Nyasaland were permitted as a matter of course. Monica told her mother that they later discovered that the congregation had kept seats for them and asked repeatedly why she and Godfrey were not present at the ceremony.33
After 12 September there were more opportunities to socialise with the local whites when they moved to their new base at Rungwe, a Nyakyusa-style bamboo house near the Moravian mission, convenient for Monica’s work on Christians in the community. In October they stayed again at Tukuyu with the Hugginses and went to a fancy-dress party at the barracks in Masoko. In an uncharacteristic lapse in taste, they intended to go as ‘Maussalini [sic] and the Queen of Sheba’, but other guests had chosen these roles already. In early November Monica and Godfrey again visited the Hugginses, and spent evenings with various German missionaries, including the liberal-minded Walter Marx, head of the Rungwe Moravian mission, and his wife Gertrud. Monica found them ‘quite the nicest of the German missionaries’ she and Godfrey had yet met: ‘They are educated and look clean which is more than most of the others do.’ The following week they stayed at Mrs Wells’s guesthouse and went on a picnic in honour of departing Tukuyu Club members. And to round off the year’s social calendar, they met the assistant inspector of mines at the Lupa goldfield, R.A. Mackay, and his wife. Envisaging future research in the Lupa mining area, Monica and Godfrey arranged to visit the Mackays after their return from London the following year.34
Missionaries formed an integral part of Monica and Godfrey’s social circle, especially the Moravians at Rungwe. They were particularly close to Bishop Oskar Gemuseus, and to the Marxes, who all understood the nature of the Wilsons’ project, gave them information and questioned them closely about their findings. But there was another, shocking, aspect to certain missions: in November 1936 Monica told her father about a court case involving a Berlin Missionary Society employee who had allegedly thrashed a ‘boy’ (perhaps a man) almost to death. Knowing the missionary’s reputation, Monica believed this to be true. Even more shocking, to the extent that it was weeks before she could bring herself to tell Godfrey, was her conversation with a university-educated Moravian mission wife (probably Gertrud Marx): ‘Do you beat your servants yourself when they do wrong, or do you leave it to your husband?’ the woman had asked Monica. But the Wilsons did not distance themselves from the white community: indeed, it would have been difficult, not only professionally but also personally, for them to have done so. They socialised with missionaries as well as white planters, both German and English, and considered many of them friends. In October 1937 they went to a party hosted by the German community, and danced outside ‘with a full moon and Chinese lanterns and sacks of coffee against banana trees, by way of couches for sitting out!’ Monica seemed in her element: ‘The clerk came in before we left w. news of a marriage I should have attended but I just made a face and sent him instead!’35
‘We get along so quickly when he dictates and I type’
It is not surprising that Monica was at a disadvantage in research terms on first arriving in buNyakyusa. She learnt languages slowly, and found kiNyakyusa intonation difficult. Ruefully, she said that though she often called Godfrey by his local name, Mwaipaja, Leonard, misunderstanding her pronunciation, had asked one day about what he assumed was the English name she called him. ‘I don’t like learning languages,’ she wrote, describing them as ‘a necessary evil’. Meanwhile, Godfrey had become fluent, and was corresponding with linguists about the structure of kiNyakyusa, with Monica typing out his information for scholars at the School of Oriental and African Studies. ‘Mercifully,’ she said, ‘one does not have to understand what one is typing!’ By October Monica felt she was ‘beginning to have hopes of learning Kinyakyusa’ though she was aware that she was still missing a lot of information. She may have been underestimating her linguistic grasp. Perhaps the problem was more confidence than competence. In early June she was well able to comprehend a woman guest’s horrified reaction to the unexpected arrival of her father-in-law, risking a culturally unacceptable encounter, though she had told Monica earlier that being a Christian she did not observe such avoidances.36
The impression is inescapable that in research terms Monica felt she was struggling to keep up with Godfrey. He had arrived several months before her; he was outstandingly good at languages, and Monica was not; and while Godfrey related easily to local people, Monica, though she was the more experienced fieldworker, never overcame her diffidence and embarrassment in questioning people. She was a good typist while Godfrey was not. He was willing to communicate with servants and visitors: ‘in return, so to speak, I type quite a lot of notes for him. We get along so quickly when he dictates and I type.’ By October she was still typing for him: indeed, two years later, in January 1937, during her recuperation in South Africa from malaria, Godfrey had to send a manuscript to be typed in England. Godfrey and Huggins contemplated writing articles together, applying anthropological findings to administration. Monica told her mother that she and Godfrey both wanted their work to have some practical application, yet despite having been in the area for over seven months, she was not involved in these discussions with Huggins. In June, while Godfrey wrote a report for Malinowski, sent information to James Dougall of the Christian Council in Kenya for his work on sex-education, and provided reports for Huggins who was about to host Acting Governor Mitchell, Monica herself was ‘typing furiously’. Though this should not be exaggerated – Monica also wrote a report for Dougall, and had an active research programme of her own – during this first spell in buNyakyusa especially, there was a tendency for her to slip into the role of amanuensis, Godfrey into that of expert.37
Monica took photographs that they used in their study; for instance, when she was called to a purification ritual after the birth of twins while Godfrey was attending a ritual involving Kinga priests from the Livingstone Mountains at the Lubaga shrine ten kilometres away. It was Leonard’s day off so she went by herself, mainly, she reported, to take photographs: ‘one cannot listen, and watch, and manipulate a fiddly sort of camera in bad light all at the same time’. One might speculate that Monica was hiding behind the camera in the same way as she perhaps hid behind the typewriter.38
As in Pondoland, Monica found herself caught between the limitations of the funded project she had undertaken, which was to focus on Nyakyusa Christians and women, and making sense of this within the broader society. She wrote to her funders with apparent confidence that she was ‘concentrating on the study of ideals of and sanction for right behaviour, particularly on religious ideals and sanctions, since differences in ideals and effective religious sanctions are the root of differences between pagan and Christian communities’. But in July she told her mother that she was ‘gloomy’ about her work with Christians, since, in addition to language difficulties, ‘the real snag is that so many of the differences between pagan and Christian life are intangible sort[s] of things … desperately hard to pin down in actions’, and that Christians were more anxious than traditionalists to conceal quarrels and love affairs, and also a belief in magic.39
Despite these reservations, Monica had a clear sense of the practical potential of her study. It was in its way an exercise in ‘applied anthropology’ for missionaries, analogous to Godfrey and Philip Huggins’s planned handbooks for administrators. Also, the formidable mission bureaucrat Joseph Oldham had been crucial in securing fellowships for her and Godfrey, so when she responded in February 1936 to a request to tell him ‘how anthropology can be of use to the missionary, and what effect mission work is having on the Native’, she was paying her dues. She did so candidly, and in five pithy pages, using examples from Pondoland and buNyakyusa, Monica decried the ignorance of most missionaries about the societies in which they worked, as well as their racist attitudes, and advocated respect for African Christians. She also noted that, while missions were ‘to some extent a disintegrating force’, changes in the economy were even more so. In changing times, Christianity could offer ‘a morality which holds both in town and country’. Monica therefore welcomed the collaborative initiative that resulted in the United Missions in the Copperbelt (UMCB) in Northern Rhodesia, which, within a period of two years, became the Wilsons’ home.40
Though initially somewhat skewed by Monica’s late arrival and her diffidence, the collaboration between Monica and Godfrey was wide-ranging; it was, moreover, rooted in their emotional and intellectual life together and in their appreciation of each other’s strengths. The couple cooperated closely, treating their studies ‘very much as one investigation and dividing the work as seems most efficient’. Monica reported that, typically, Godfrey did ‘fieldwork with Christians’ for her, while she attempted to elucidate the intricacies of pagan birth ceremonies and women’s taboos for him. Women and men lived almost completely separate lives in buNyakyusa, and there were definite advantages in their arrangement, with Godfrey and Monica researching separately but collaboratively. She gave an example: ‘while Godfrey was talking to a man about agriculture this morning I was with his wives reaping a millet field’. Though the position of women in Nyakyusa society meant that they were, in contrast to women in Pondoland, ‘dreadfully diffuse – much more so than the men’, Monica did manage to find good female informants. By August, surmounting the structural difficulties posed by the way her research project had been formulated, Monica had made good progress. She had gathered data in collaboration with Godfrey on traditional religion, had collected material on dreams, songs, legal cases and other matters, for which they found Leonard’s texts invaluable, and had also studied Christian and pagan conceptions of sin, family life, polygyny and Christian monogamy. Monica had also noted the spread of Islam and the paucity of studies explaining this phenomenon. Characteristically, she commented that they all focused unhelpfully on doctrine rather than practice and social impact.41
As in the Eastern Cape, Monica observed modernity as closely as she studied the ‘traditional’. Not long after arriving in buNyakyusa, she went to a local store and noted that Tom, the proprietor, was an independent trader rather than an agent for an Indian businessman. Again, her appetite for the specific is clear. Tom had worked in Dar es Salaam and Kilosa and owned a bicycle. She itemised his wares, and made notes on the traders: the Kinga brought potatoes, peas and wheat from the Livingstone Mountains to exchange for cloths and cash. They needed millet, which the Nyakyusa were loath to sell, though when they did, Tom traded it for salt, a precious commodity. He also bought rice and beans from Nyakyusa farmers, selling this at the small trading centre near the Masoko military base, as well as to Indians from Tukuyu who sent it to the Lupa goldfields. He traded in calves, brewed and sold beer, and, with a treadle sewing-machine, made kapok-filled mattresses which he sent to Lupa. These had fetched forty shillings each in 1933, but the price had dropped to twenty or twenty-five shillings by April 1935, when Monica wrote her letter. She detailed Tom’s costs in cash as well as rations, for his carriers. In another engagement with accelerating modernity, Monica visited and closely observed various schools, writing vivid and sympathetic descriptions which nonetheless reveal the schools’ inadequacies.42
Godfrey worked with energy and empathy, and with Monica’s unstinting support and admiration. He was ‘doing awfully good work. I just know it’, and she declared: ‘He is collecting material hard and doing a good deal of theoretical work at the same time. Also some of the material he has on language is quite new – startling new facts about noun classes and verb forms.’ His gift for friendship led to highly productive relationships with, among others, Kasitile, a major informant, as well as other elderly traditionalists. Godfrey’s investigations could become a two-way street: the elderly Mwandisi and his favourite wife shook with laughter whenever, as Godfrey reported, he showed ‘a human understanding of what they say’, and particularly when he admitted that ‘we Europeans share with them a common sexual experience!’ He was permitted to attend solemn ceremonies, as at the shrine at Lubaga, where his companions had prayed to the presiding deity: ‘Do not be angry, a European comes to greet you.’43
Kasitile showed Godfrey the rain-stones, the most potent instruments of his calling, previously revealed only to his eldest son. ‘My father,’ Godfrey heard him pray at the tree where the stones were buried, ‘do not be angry … they are our friends … you did not know them, you feared them, but now we don’t fear them, they have come and met with us as friends.’ Later, in April 1937, Kasitile took Godfrey to the sacred grove inhabited by his late father’s spirit; he told him that, to his father’s horror, the Germans had cut down trees in the grove. Thereafter he had wanted nothing to do with the whites, and did not even wish to see any white people. At the grove, Kasitile ‘introduced’ Godfrey to his father, saying to the spirit: ‘sometimes I want to take [Godfrey] to my heart, and then I see his white skin and tremble lest he bind me’. Godfrey commented to Monica that ‘field-work is a marvellous experience, not only are one’s subjects of fascinating interest but they come alive and love one!’ But Godfrey surmised that Kasitile’s anxiety about his father’s dislike of Europeans was ‘connected with an occasional panic of his own’. Though the panic was probably a thing of the past, Godfrey noted the ambivalence of their fieldwork: mutual affection juxtaposed with irreducible inequalities.44
It is only possible to observe these deepening friendships from the reports of the anthropologists, with Monica more apt than outgoing Godfrey to consider the inherent inequalities. Also, in spite of her fieldwork in the Eastern Cape, she was well aware of the effects of her South African background, with her sense of social distance between races that was hard to overcome. She thanked Godfrey ‘for teaching [her] to be really friends with African neighbours’, readily admitting: ‘I should never have known how apart from you.’ Feeling that in South Africa she had always failed in this respect, Monica said, ‘I mind terribly about succeeding at that.’ In early 1937 Godfrey wrote to Monica that he and Kasitile had ‘broken through the crust of culture to friendship’. Having recounted intimate details of ritual and married life, Godfrey reports him as saying that he had ‘exhausted all the thoughts of [his] heart’ to Godfrey: ‘I have told you everything, I can tell you nothing more; if I were a woman I would go to bed with you, so you might know the very body of the Black People.’ When Godfrey confided in Kasitile about his nervous breakdown, he interpreted it as a visitation by ‘Kyala’ – the Nyakyusa term for God – and the source of great happiness. ‘Yes, he was right,’ Godfrey wrote, ‘it was Kyala giving me my happiness, my Monica, my life, my joy.’ Godfrey fantasised, humorously but with an underlying emotional charge, about settling permanently in buNyakyusa, either as a missionary or, teasing Monica, in a village with a Nyakyusa wife. She replied: ‘Don’t you bluff yourself … the imp ambition and the desire for libraries (not to say civilized dissipations) are lusty in you.’ Then, more calculating, Godfrey noted the importance of Kasitile to his research on ‘human nature and society’. It could not be rushed: ‘I wait on Kasitile’s moods and pick up scraps from other people meanwhile. It is very exciting and precarious; if Kasitile were to die, for example, I doubt if my relationship with anyone else is strong enough to bear such questions.’ A couple of weeks later Kasitile was in a ‘lucid mood’, and he made the Nyakyusa death ritual seem almost wholly intelligible; Godfrey expected to be able to write a full outline before Monica returned in June. He also devised the metaphor of an onion, later used to good effect by Monica, whereby meaning is likened to layers that peel off, revealing further levels of significance. Ritual, then, ‘is the manipulation of religious onions for practical ends’, and he noted that there were four or five identifiable layers of meaning in the death ritual, for example: ‘Very onion-like, eh?’45
In the end, as Monica had predicted, the company even of such a subtle proponent of Nyakyusa culture as Kasitile could not meet the needs of an Oxford and LSE intellectual. Only days after his encomium to cross-cultural friendship, Godfrey was reading Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. He found it ‘deliciously sophisticated and a grand antidote to the primitives’.46
As Godfrey researched, he also wrote articles. In September 1935 he sent one off to Africa, the leading British anthropological journal. It was accepted and appeared ‘with unheard of speed’, as Monica put it, in the January 1936 issue. Indeed, Malinowski had written to the IIALC, which published Africa, that parts of the article were ‘of first-rate importance’ and that it would ‘make Godfrey Wilson’s mark’. Taking an almost childlike pleasure in his achievement, Godfrey wrote to Monica that it was ‘fun being young and knowing that each thing one writes will be better than the last’.47
Monica and Godfrey’s first tour in buNyakyusa ended in late November 1935. Apart from Leonard, ‘a nice man and good at his job’, who was taking up a government post, their staff agreed to continue working for them on their return from England in six months’ time. They stored their belongings in the Boma loft and set off by Indian trader’s lorry for Dodoma, where they stayed with the provincial commissioner until the train for Dar es Salaam arrived. Hospitable though the commissioner and his wife were, they irritated the Wilsons. The husband was ‘woof woofish’, imperious and bombastic, towards his subordinates. His wife insisted on talking philosophy to Godfrey. Perhaps insufficiently appreciating her intellectual and social isolation, they thought her pretentious. Monica reported: ‘[I] sat and laughed inside myself all the time and changed my dress at appropriate intervals – it was the kind of house that required that!’ After boarding the train to Dar es Salaam, they embarked on 3 December 1935, and sailed northwards.48