Monica had moved to what was probably the most prestigious university in South Africa. It is certainly the university with the best view. Its impressive line of buildings follows the contours of Table Mountain, high above the city, overlooking the suburb of Rondebosch, the Cape Flats and, beyond, the Hottentots Holland Mountains and the sweep of Table Bay. Behind the university, Devil’s Peak rises steeply. The focus of the campus is the pillared Jameson Hall, named after Dr Leander Starr Jameson, whose raid on the Transvaal Republic was pivotal in precipitating the South African War. Up until 2015, a bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes, mining magnate, Cape Colony politician and a major benefactor of the university, brooded portentously in bronze. UCT is indebted to a particularly piratical form of British imperialism.
The post-war settlement led to the formation in 1910 of the Union of South Africa and an ever-shrinking franchise increasingly and then totally confined to whites, with the result that, by the 1930s, Afrikaner nationalists were beginning to dominate the political system. In 1948, the National Party won the general election. Some among the English-speaking minority were still in positions of privilege, especially in the economy, but with little formal political power. UCT was more in touch with international currents than the inward-looking Afrikaner institutions, and it had generally been suspicious and even contemptuous of the government, perhaps from prejudice as much as principle. With the new regime in power, it emerged as a sometimes ambivalent and conservative champion of liberalism and racial tolerance. But there were more forthright and consistent liberals among students and staff, Monica being one of them, and pockets of radicalism to the left.
For the next twenty-one years, UCT would be Monica’s professional home. She also travelled extensively abroad, presenting papers at conferences and other academic events. Over the years, she was awarded honorary doctorates, medals and fellowships, and was frequently invited to present prestigious lectures. She returned to Hogsback every holiday, including the ten-day vacations. At the end of each academic year, having attended the graduation ceremony in full academic regalia, she went straight to her car, all packed and ready, and began the two-day trip to the Eastern Cape with Makheswa Mxotwa, her cook and friend.1
Yet, at least early on in her Cape Town career, Monica had ambitions beyond UCT. The old English universities, formative influences on herself and Godfrey, had a powerful grip on Monica’s imagination. In 1954 she hoped to be appointed to the Rhodes Chair of Race Relations at Oxford, and was ‘bitterly disappointed’ that she had been passed over. She had felt the appointment was ‘meant’ and that ‘a call was coming’. However, though weary of lecturing ‘fluffy and flabby-minded undergraduates without serious purpose’, Monica resigned herself to a post that she felt was probably as good she deserved, and resolved to ‘pull [herself] together and do some decent work’. The real ‘call’, she realised, may have been ‘to remain in the battle’ in South Africa.2
‘You didn’t argue back with her – you did it!’
Across the empire, when Monica was young, those aspiring to the best higher education tended to assume that this could only be found in Britain, particularly at Oxford and Cambridge. This changed to some extent as universities multiplied in former colonies and dominions, but the inclination to favour postgraduate education abroad persisted among liberal South African academics. The assumption of metropolitan superiority had transmuted to the desire for a less stifling academic world, and many of Monica’s own best students went overseas for higher degrees. She also acted as a South African contact, and was often appointed external supervisor for postgraduate students from Britain.
This pattern was a contributory factor in her failure to found a distinctive Cape Town school of social anthropology. A 1957 journal entry indicates that one of her greatest concerns was that she had not established a group of research students. However, this was also partly because she was sceptical of some of the theories around which ‘schools’ tend to form. Also, it is difficult to imagine a John or Jean Comaroff, or an Archie Mafeje, flourishing in the South African academic environment of their day and forming the nucleus of a distinctive UCT anthropology school. Many such people either chose, or were obliged, to make their careers elsewhere. So, though Monica was not herself at the centre of a distinctive school, she did launch careers that helped the development of the discipline in South Africa and elsewhere.3
Martin West notes that Monica was often perceived by students as tough, remote, disciplined and ascetic: ‘People were quite nervous of her … she was … shy … but she had that steel as well.’ She did not suffer fools gladly. Her teaching style was not flamboyant, but those who engaged with her found her ‘precise, clipped’ lectures highly stimulating. She told new students in 1958 that they were there to work, enquire and argue. Believing that lecture notes inhibit discovery and discourage reading, she refused to follow the common South African practice of distributing such material to students. Instead, she used a system of essay writing and small-group tutorials, based on the Cambridge model. In 1973 she insisted to a group of first-year students: ‘Natural scientists have practicals, you read and write essays’.4
According to her colleague Archie Mafeje, Monica identified students ‘she thought had the greatest potential, and … tended to expend a lot more energy on those’. This led some to say she was elitist, which she indeed was in terms of intellectual ability and achievement. When she saw potential, says John Sharp, ‘then her interest just went up exponentially … Her attention was turned on and off around: “are you ever going to be able to talk to me … I don’t mean that you should be able to do it now … but are you ever going to be able to talk to me … in professional terms?”’ On the one hand, she regarded ‘written work as much more important than attendance at lectures’, and demanded of her students: ‘Think about every word you write.’ This was, in a sense, Oxbridge in Cape Town. On the other hand, Monica insisted that she and senior colleagues should lecture students new to the field. As in her department at Rhodes, students were permitted to study anthropology only from their second year, which her colleague Sally Frankenthal interpreted as a ruse to prevent immature, sometimes listless first years crowding her department. There was a problem, Monica wrote in the student newspaper, when too many members of the university community were ‘not students at all, but schoolboys and schoolgirls or bright young people who enjoy games and parties but are not concerned with the pursuit of truth for which a University exists’. Comprehending anthropology, she said, required a maturity not to be expected of first years. This might have been, Martin West suggests, a ‘specious and self-interested’ argument, yet it is likely that Monica’s perceptions and policy were influenced by the fact that she herself only began to study anthropology in her third year at Cambridge.5
Professor of social anthropology John Sharp recalls his honours course in the early 1970s. He and a fellow student would meet in Monica’s ‘famous office’ behind the green baize-covered door twice a week. They spent a whole quarter reading Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, with Monica’s approach being ‘it doesn’t matter what they do, it’s how they do it’. She based her teaching on close reading and analysis of particular texts: ‘it wasn’t a question of big sweeping judgments, but rather the well-pursued detail – that was absolutely sufficient’. Rather than shyness, Sharp remembers Monica’s forcefulness and authority, though at times she could seem lost for words and ‘would just look rather strangely at you’. Once, she told Sharp at short notice that he had to stand in for a student who was ill and do a presentation. There was no getting out of it: ‘You went and wrapped a wet towel around your head and you did it! You didn’t argue back with her – you did it!’6
Monica was, according to a former student, ‘the stereotype of the British model of an academic’, an austere bluestocking. Her lectures were formal, absolutely punctual, and without rhetorical flourishes. She was, at the time, the only UCT lecturer who wore a gown, and the students surreptitiously kept count of the number of times she hitched it up as it slipped off a shoulder. She had ‘presence’, giving students ‘that sense of engagement that she had had with the material, in the field, which was extremely powerful’. Nobody called her ‘Monica’, but always ‘Professor Wilson’. Sally Frankenthal remembers the informality of the African Studies tearoom, ‘a very positive place … lively … close’. Mary Simons also stresses the ‘real intellectual excitement’ over morning and afternoon tea, and over lunchtime sandwiches. But Colin Murray remembered how the atmosphere changed when Monica’s footsteps were heard in the corridor: people removed their feet from chairs and sat up straight, ‘because she was very proper’. She had ‘a certain kind of quiet, understated, upper-classness – from the metropole’. Monica never joked in lectures. Indeed, humour was not her forte: she was furious when Andrew Spiegel pinned up a newspaper article by Joel Mervis, claiming that on a visit to the Kalahari he had met more anthropologists than Bushmen. However, unnerving to some, touching to others, Monica would also soften in a lecture and ‘giggle like a little girl’ when something amusing came to mind. There was, indeed, a childish, even twee side to Monica, rooted in the classic children’s books of her youth: her car was ‘the heffalump’; recommending the classic studies to her Anthropology I students, she said that ‘text books like lettuce are very soporific (Remember the awful fate that befell the Flopsy Bunnies)’.7
In the context of growing tensions between Owen Horwood, the new pro-government principal of the University of Natal, and students and staff, Monica argued for maximum freedom of thought and expression. Citing traditions going back to medieval student guilds, the best defence against anarchy at universities was, she believed, ‘the willing organization of student societies under the general direction of an elected Students’ Representative Council’. Student newspapers were important, and should be subject only to the law of libel; they should not be answerable to university administrations. At a time when freedoms were being assailed, and university autonomy threatened, Monica argued for full participation by student representatives on councils, senates and faculty boards, except when examinations were being discussed.8
Monica particularly encouraged female students. In the face of widespread scepticism, she supported John and Jean Comaroff in their joint studies and fieldwork. In a 1967 testimonial for the couple, she wrote that ‘it would be useless to offer a place to John Comaroff and exclude his wife … it is one of the cases in which team work seems much more efficient than individual work’. Jean remembers Monica saying to her: ‘you know, you could be like Godfrey and I were … it’s wonderful to do fieldwork as a couple, because you will be able to complement each other and cover a field’. Monica did not make the stereotypical assumption that John would study politics and Jean religion in a gendered division of labour. The Comaroffs recall Monica paying close attention to talented students’ future plans, and, with the two of them being politically oriented, advising them both to go on to the LSE. Pragmatically, and alert to the politics of fieldwork, she advised them to work in a border community, where, if necessary, they could escape police harassment by crossing to Botswana: ‘it was basically she who directed us to where we went to do our fieldwork, on those grounds … she read it far away in front of us’.9
Monica also strongly supported talented students in areas other than anthropology in the School of African Studies. Robert Molteno, she wrote to Meyer Fortes in Cambridge, was ‘quite exceptionally able’ and ‘needed to be with people of his own weight’. She had a lively and affectionate correspondence with the remarkable Isaac twins, archaeologist Glynn and historian Rhys, both of whom had studied at UCT. His disciplinary approach apparently paralleling that of Monica, Rhys wrote to her that ‘in the best current early American historiography historians are finding at long last their kinship with anthropology’.10
‘Sitting around and listening and watching’
Monica had relatively few doctoral students, partly because she dispatched many of her most talented ones abroad, partly because of diffidence, and perhaps also because she did not develop a distinctive theoretical school that might have attracted postgraduate students. Indeed, she herself seemed to lack the ‘theoretical punch’ which she perceived in some others. Martin West remembers her lack of interest when, beginning his doctoral studies, he asked what theoretical work he should be reading. She appeared to have a ‘suspicion of theory as almost ideology’. However, she was immensely helpful to talented visiting students. She assisted Max Gluckman’s students Jaap van Velsen, William Watson and Victor Turner during their breaks from fieldwork in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. A mutual interest in ritual and symbols made the relationship with Turner particularly fruitful. His first letter to Monica struck the right note. Working in the field in Northern Rhodesia, he mentioned his wife, Edie, who was vital to their research: ‘somehow or other we work better united than separated’. Both Turners wanted to work under her in Cape Town, and afterward Victor Turner thanked Monica for ‘a marvelously stimulating series of discussions at U.C.T.’ in which ‘unobtrusively you brought me to an awareness of the main characteristics of Lunda ritual’. Monica found it ‘a great stimulus’ to have him working on ritual, and she told him: ‘I really am very grateful for discussions with you.’ Turner dedicated his study, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, to Monica Wilson.11
Colin Murray was another visitor to Monica’s department. After completing his Cambridge undergraduate degree in anthropology, Murray worked on an SAIRR project in Durban. Then, ‘rather washed up’, he wrote to Monica asking if there was a job available. She offered him a junior lectureship on the strength of what he termed her ‘inflated view of first-class Cambridge degrees’, and he worked in her department for the next eighteen months. He became interested in Lesotho, partly nudged towards it, like the Comaroffs with Botswana, because it was outside the jurisdiction of the South African police. Monica drew on the assistance of a Hogsback neighbour, the secretary of the Anglo American Chairman’s Fund, to arrange support for Murray’s fieldwork; she also arranged with Cambridge, where he was registered, to be his ‘fieldwork supervisor’. An appreciative Murray later said, ‘I don’t think it would be easy nowadays to arrive at such a mutual understanding; the times are harsher, the intellectual purposes less committed.’12
Monica supervised Colin Murray for two and a half years, from July 1972, closely involved with his project and always respecting his judgements. She did not visit him in the field, but expected monthly written reports, to which she wrote detailed and thoughtful responses. A letter early in the fieldwork gives the flavour of their exchanges. ‘Sitting around and listening and watching’ was vital, she said: ‘You have to know a lot about the community before systematic enquiry can be really effective.’ She remembered her Pondoland experience, at first apparently not ‘achieving anything substantial’, though after some time ‘it became apparent that evidence was indeed accumulating though not quite in the way one expects’. When Colin needed to identify cuts of meat that were crucial to nutrition and ceremony in Sotho society, Monica sent him illustrations from the copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management that her mother had given her for her work in Pondoland and buNyakyusa; it was, she said, the best guide she was aware of. Familiar with the personal stresses of fieldwork in a harsh environment like Pitsie’s Nek in the Lesotho mountains, she warned that he should ensure he had ‘enough to eat even if it only involves adding powdered milk … to breakfast and supper’. When his thesis was published, he could see that Monica was gratified, ‘albeit obliquely’, that her confidence in him had been justified.13
Newly appointed at UCT, Monica was appointed the internal examiner of a doctoral thesis on the Bhaca, neighbours to the Pondo; the candidate was Isaac Schapera’s student, David Hammond-Tooke. A ‘competent ethnographic description’ was her measured verdict, though she played an important role in ensuring its subsequent publication. They conducted a lengthy correspondence, but it would be ten years before they were on first-name terms. Monica’s students researched a range of topics: Berthold Pauw wrote on Tswana religion; Max Marwick on sorcery and witchcraft among the Cewa; and Peter Carstens, a colleague and student of Monica’s, on a Namaqualand Khoisan community. Later, when Jack Simons left South Africa after being banned from teaching, Monica took over supervision of David Welsh’s study of segregation in Natal.14
Ugandan-born Robin Crosse-Upcott contacted Monica from remote south-eastern Tanganyika, across the Livingstone Mountains from where she and Godfrey had worked. Crosse-Upcott had a degree in modern languages as well as an Oxford diploma in social anthropology. He had resigned from his position as a cadet district officer at Liwale so that he could carry out self-financed research on the kaNgindo-speaking people of the area. A former RAF pilot and Devon county cricketer, Crosse-Upcott was a dashing individual in the John Buchan style. He approached Monica, wanting to write up his study in order to get a further qualification. She brushed aside prerequisites, which she said would be covered by his Oxford background, and, going further than Crosse-Upcott had anticipated, suggested he register for a PhD. In early 1953 they met up in Cape Town, and he returned to Tanganyika to continue his research, now as her student. He then wrote up his thesis in conditions of even greater student poverty than usual, which may have influenced Monica to employ him on urban research in Langa, an African township on the outskirts of Cape Town. But things went badly from the start. Hoping to get Crosse-Upcott a job, she wrote to Tanganyika government sociologist Henry Fosbrooke that she very much liked him and was impressed by his Tanganyikan fieldwork. But he was ‘an odd chap, not designed to run in a set mould’; and, she added, ‘he clearly detests the town’.15
Crosse-Upcott was completely out of his depth in the urban environment of Langa. While he was happy to ‘plunge’ into a rural area, ‘the street’, as he put it, ‘is a hopeless proposition … It is merely a thoroughfare along which I must pass as unobtrusively as I can, en route for a specific assignment.’ It is hardly surprising that Monica told Audrey Richards his urban fieldwork was ‘painfully bad’. There could not have been a more striking contrast with Archie Mafeje’s supple urban presence. Crosse-Upcott abandoned Langa and took a job as a pilot with the International Red Locust Control Service in Northern Rhodesia. He promised Monica repeatedly that he would write up the Langa material he owed her, and eventually did send her some, but his plans to carry out anthropological research in the Abercorn area came to nothing: his efforts seem to have been undermined by work, marriage and perhaps also his growing conservatism. He was, as he put it in 1962, increasingly ‘tinged with Rhodesian scepticism about multi-racial utopias’. Monica offered to name him, together with herself and Mafeje, as an author of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township. He replied, however, ‘in all modesty (and shame)’ that it would not be correct to do so.16
Monica’s approach to Crosse-Upcott is intriguing on a number of counts. She displayed excessive reverence for his Oxford background and she respected his Ngindo ethnography that had been hard-won in difficult circumstances; yet she failed to anticipate that he might have difficulties working in an urban African environment. It is possible that she was susceptible to the romance of an engaging personality emerging from one of the most remote areas in Tanganyika. In the end, though, Crosse-Upcott defaulted to conventional white southern African racial attitudes, and let Monica down over Langa. Yet she seems never to have badgered him or been anything other than kindly and supportive in her behaviour towards him.
Crosse-Upcott was similar to another of her students, Axel-Ivar Berglund, only in that both focused on detailed ethnography. Berglund came from a Swedish missionary family and was a missionary himself. Born at Ceza in Zululand, he was fluent from an early age in isiZulu. In 1962 he contacted Monica about his research into Zulu religion. With a shared interest in ritual and symbolism, and with their common Christian and mission backgrounds, the relationship quickly flourished, and in 1967 Berglund registered for a doctorate in her department. Monica was delighted by Berglund’s study. She thought his work on ‘the shades’ immensely important and was ‘very happy indeed to be the midwife … in making sure that this splendid material [was] published’. She perceived his study as having broad socio-political importance. So closely did she identify with it that she slipped into the first person in discussing it: ‘I very badly want to complete this work; it is far more than just a thesis; it is a key to understanding for whites in Africa.’17
The two examiners did not agree on the merit of Berglund’s thesis: Victor Turner praised it, but Audrey Richards was sceptical. In her opinion, the work was flawed: ‘There is no thesis.’ She would have referred it, but assumed that Berglund was ‘a salt of the earth missionary and that he would be too busy and too set in his ways to undertake any drastic revision’. Accordingly, she recommended a pass on the strength of the impressive ethnography. Monica weighed Berglund’s work differently. Despite the study being over-lengthy and without any clear theoretical basis, she discounted the importance of these weaknesses ‘in a thesis which provides such a great body of new ethnographic material’.18
Monica always assigned great importance to accurate and extensive data, or what she termed ‘facts’. In 1971 Richard van der Ross, the coloured educationist who would later be a founder member of the Labour Party and eventually rector of the University of the Western Cape, approached UCT to enquire whether he might be awarded a DLitt for his vast historical compilation documenting coloured politics and culture. Monica, as internal examiner, was clear that the work had little order or logical development, but she appreciated that it was an insider’s account using valuable original material, and it was ‘likely to remain a major source for scholars for generations to come’. She therefore had ‘no hesitation’ in recommending that the degree be awarded to Van der Ross.19
The external examiners were the respected C.W. de Kiewiet and Leonard Thompson. Both recognised the value of the material as well as the significance of the authorship. Thompson wrote that he had never before given so much time and thought to a thesis. It was not rejected outright, but referred. Breaking the news to Van der Ross, Monica noted that, while she herself was inclined to award the degree, she had deferred to the historians. She emphasised that the work constituted an ‘essential record’; as such, once the volumes became available, ‘every serious historian of South Africa [would] have to refer to them’. Indeed, to this day, the typescript, now in UCT Manuscripts and Archives, is widely consulted by scholars.20
It should be emphasised, however, that Monica was a rigorous supervisor and examiner. In response to an honours student’s request for a re-mark, she tersely replied: ‘Dear Registrar. This department is not in the habit of failing honours students by mistake. Yours sincerely, Monica Wilson.’ When the eminent scholar of African religion, G.C. ‘Pippin’ Oosthuizen, registered for a PhD – his third such degree – he was not spared Monica’s precision. From the beginning, Monica questioned his approach, for instance dismissing his idea of the ‘soul’ which was, she argued, alien to southern African religion. In 1973 she sent him a trenchant critique of his submission. Pointing out that she was about to retire, Monica firmly stated that there was ‘not the slightest chance of my going on as supervisor’.21
‘Aunt Monica’
Monica believed that in Archie Mafeje she had found an exceptional student, the best fieldworker she had ever supervised. One of the tiny cohort of black students at UCT in the late 1950s and 1960s, he began by studying biological sciences but changed to a combined degree in sciences and social sciences, anthropology in particular. As an undergraduate, replacing Robin Crosse-Upcott, Mafeje worked as a paid research fellow on the Langa project, following which he did an MA.22
The relationship between Monica and Archie Mafeje was warm and affectionate. When Tim Wilson was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, and Monica had successfully urged the SAIRR to finance Mafeje’s studies, she said she felt as if two sons had won scholarships. He was friends with the Wilson brothers and seemed to have enjoyed a boisterous relationship with them as undergraduates, with Francis at one stage apologising to his mother for borrowing her car without permission to teach Archie Mafeje to drive. Joking that Monica and her sons were migrant labourers, Mafeje said he hoped that she and Tim were enjoying themselves at Hogsback: ‘amagoduka always do when they are back in the country’. Mafeje took eagerly to social anthropology, telling Monica it was ‘the sort of study [he] would like to do for a whole life-time’. She advised him about survival strategies in a conservative academic environment: in a psychology examination he should ‘stick tightly to orthodox ideas and facts’. She also encouraged him with his early article, ‘A chief visits town’, but wrote presciently that though she detested ‘this sort of cutting’, some of his statements should be reconsidered as they might be dangerous to him or to the people about whom he was writing. At first, Julius Lewin, the liberal editor of African Studies, accepted the article for publication, but he later rejected it, saying it was defamatory and unsubstantiated in parts. Monica dryly observed: ‘I find it odd, to say the least, that on April 26 you should accept an article for publication, and then write three months later rejecting it.’ Eventually, her efforts to get it published in a British journal were rewarded, though again, not without difficulty.23
Monica received a grant for fieldwork in Langa from the NCSR in 1955, yet she remained suspicious of the council. The book Langa examines sports clubs, churches and other voluntary organisations. As Mafeje remarked, ‘that was not exactly her interest. Her interest was in what these social-political groups were doing, but it was at a time when such work had become dangerous, so these sporting things were in fact a way of coming around and avoiding direct investigation.’ Neville Alexander and others in the Trotskyist Yu Chi Chan club criticised Mafeje for participating in what they saw as a liberal study. But when, later, they embarked on political work in Langa, they acknowledged the book’s usefulness. While Langa is a competent and interesting study, Hortense Powdermaker’s criticism is perhaps accurate. Questioning whether the book had ‘the richness and depth’ that people had ‘come to expect in Monica Wilson’s work’, she asked: ‘Is it possible for a mature and sophisticated anthropologist as she is, to attain these qualities in a report on fieldwork, without participation in the field?’24
Monica had high expectations of Archie Mafeje. She wrote that it gave her ‘great joy’ to work with him, and said: ‘I look forward to the time when you, in your turn, will be a professor of anthropology in a South African university – and I don’t mean a tribal college.’ Monica’s efforts ensured that he was awarded a British Council scholarship to study for his doctorate at Cambridge. Motivating the application, she wrote: ‘only seldom do I feel that a student … is potentially a professional anthropologist, and I feel this strongly with Mr Mafeje. The combination of theoretical interest and ability as a field-worker is rare.’25
Monica’s relationship with Archie Mafeje demonstrates the fluidity of the more progressive sector of South African society at the time. The Extension of University Education Act of 1959, which segregated higher education along racial lines, was anathema to the full range of radical and liberal opinion. But there was more to it than this. Mafeje was a member of the Society of Young Africa (SOYA), an affiliate of the left-wing NEUM. Monica was a liberal. But ideological differences were generally ignored. Later, he remembered their easy and humorous interaction, exemplified when Monica was asked to advise on an African name for a new township. She consulted Mafeje and they went to the site, which he described as just ‘sand-dunes: absolutely nothing. So I said to her we’ll call it sand-dunes, ethlabatini’. The recommendation was of course rejected. Of the chosen name, Gugulethu, meaning ‘our pride’, Mafeje later remarked: ‘I don’t know where they got that.’26
On 16 August 1963 Mafeje was arrested in Cape Town on a Transkei warrant. Like all black people, he was trapped in a web of discriminatory laws. For instance, he was the illegal tenant of Ghaioonesa ‘Ghairo’ Hendricks, a coloured woman who continued to support him after he was jailed, bringing him food in prison. She also destroyed incriminating correspondence with a Transkei chief that she found in his room. A week later he was remanded to the small Transkei town of Flagstaff, charged with attending an illegal meeting at Sigcau High School on 26 July. On 25 August, the authorities took him to Cape Town train station to begin his journey to Flagstaff. When Monica arrived to see him off, he leant out of the carriage window to talk to her, a grey blanket covering his handcuffs. There was a large crowd of UCT colleagues and others on the platform, and Ghairo Hendricks rushed through the ‘Whites Only’ entrance to the station, with the police in pursuit. When the train pulled out, Monica put her arm around the woman’s shoulders and walked with her out of the whites-only entrance. Monica then drove behind her car, protecting her from further harassment by the police.
Monica arranged legal representation for Mafeje, and gathered evidence to show that he had not been in the Transkei in July, as alleged, even arranging for witnesses to travel there to testify to this. She also arranged support for him at UCT by lobbying the administration and mobilising the Academic Freedom Committee. Mafeje wrote to her from detention that he had expected trouble and had counted on her help, but that she had done even more than he anticipated. If released, he would complete his MA quickly, even though more fieldwork might be needed. For him, anthropology was ‘no gentleman’s study’; it was ‘a living and a necessary study’. He also told Monica that he had bought her a gift that he had intended to give her before his arrest: a recording of music by Bach and Vivaldi.27
After all Monica’s efforts, it was discovered that there was an error in the charge sheet: Mafeje was in fact accused of addressing a meeting in July 1962, not 1963. Monica’s witnesses were not relevant, and the school principal and a number of pupils testified against him. Mafeje agreed to plead guilty. He avoided imprisonment and was fined R200, ‘a considerable victory’, his lawyer wrote, adding that it would be very unwise for him to re-enter the Transkei, even on bona fide research, as he might well be detained again. Monica paid the fine, as well as the Cape Town and Transkei legal fees.28
Monica organised Archie Mafeje’s enrolment at Cambridge, where Francis was also studying at the time. Mafeje feared he might be denied a passport, in which case he envisaged doing his PhD with Monica. With the assistance of the well-connected Audrey Richards, it seems that pressure was applied by the British authorities: ‘I understand the case was taken up to a very high level and used as a test case, but that Archie is not to know this!’ she wrote. Up to the last moment, Mafeje thought he might be arrested. Ghairo Hendricks says there was ‘a sigh of relief’ from his friends on the quayside when the gangplank was raised.29
There were soon problems, however. Mafeje felt that doctoral students at Cambridge were neglected, and hinted that his academic relationship with Audrey Richards, his supervisor and Monica’s close friend, was not satisfactory. Monica defended Cambridge, contrasting its method with what she saw as American spoon-feeding. Perhaps suffering the disorientation often experienced by foreign students confronted with the elitist Oxbridge style, Mafeje told Monica that he regretted that he had ‘abandoned’ South Africa, and that he did not want to do fieldwork elsewhere in Africa. Moreover, he said, it was his ‘right and duty to come and battle with you inside and outside the School of African Studies’.30
Despite these difficulties, Archie Mafeje persisted with his PhD. He went to Uganda where he did fieldwork on large-scale farmers. At the instigation of Audrey Richards, who had until 1956 been director of the East African Institute of Social Research, the material was also used in a report for the British Ministry of Overseas Development. Reports from colleagues like Victor Turner were positive, and, writing of Mafeje, Monica stated that it was ‘one of the greatest joys of teaching to see someone develop intellectually as he has done’. She ‘look[ed] forward enormously’ to his study, and posted him drafts of her chapters for the Oxford History. Of Volume 1’s chapter on ‘cooperation and conflict’, she wrote: ‘It’s not orthodox South African history, and I should like very much to know how it strikes you.’ Mafeje sent Monica his article on the role of the bard in contemporary African societies, which she criticised trenchantly but also praised. While setting off on his own intellectual voyage, he began to write to her, respectfully yet intimately, as ‘Aunt Monica’. Describing a clash with Eileen Krige who had, he said, treated African rituals as timeless and unchanging, he drew a contrast between this encounter and his ‘friendly and free’ relations with Monica, who, indeed, could never have been accused of ignoring change or context.31
It would be six months before Monica and Mafeje corresponded again, and in early June 1967 he wrote to her that he was ‘beginning to feel that I am one of your neglected sons’. He told her he had been asked to comment on Gwendolen Carter’s forthcoming book on the Transkei and that she had revised her ideas on bantustans, a shift of opinion in which Monica played a crucial part. Mafeje described his thesis as still ‘a bit sprawly’, and he hinted again that all was not well in his relationship with Audrey Richards. Monica subtly advised her ‘Dear “Neglected Son”’ to adopt a less headlong approach. She also discussed the concept of ‘interaction’ that was so important to her, and hoped that he would comment on this aspect of her draft chapter on the growth of peasant societies for the Oxford History. In addition, she told him about her work on ‘religion and revolution’ for the 1969 Scott Holland lectures in Cambridge, later published as Religion and the Transformation of Society. ‘I find it comforting,’ she wrote, ‘that social change should at last have become a respectable topic for anthropologists! Godfrey and I were very much out on a limb when we wrote on it.’ Encouraging him to continue with his work on the Transkei, she said she wanted him in her department the following year if there was a suitable vacancy. In response, Archie praised her chapter and said he wished to return and work with her, adding with a hint of irony: ‘I think you need assistance from people like me’, repeating her words to him when she had first recognised his talent. Though aware of the practical difficulties, a delighted Monica promised that she would get the registrar to send Mafeje a copy of the advertisement for the senior lectureship held at the time by Michael Whisson, though on a temporary contract. She declared she would ‘very much like to have you here and to be working with you again’.32
In the meantime, Mafeje’s relationship with Audrey Richards was steadily worsening. She complained that he did not spend enough time in the villages, had not learnt Luganda, and took the easy way out by administering questionnaires. She was clearly not impressed: ‘His easy popularity, his success with girls; and his quick slashing criticisms enable him to get away with things too easily.’ She thought his originality was overrated, and as his supervisor, she regarded him as her ‘most significant failure’. She also felt he was in the wrong field: ‘Political Science is his line, and not an empirical study.’ One can only speculate as to whether research in South Africa with Monica would have gone more smoothly, and whether they would have continued to work together, given their increasingly divergent viewpoints. But whatever the case, Audrey Richards’ censure did not alter Monica’s assessment of Archie Mafeje. While not openly defending him, she told Audrey that she hoped his PhD would be accepted, and noted his helpful comments on her Oxford History chapters, indicating too that she was likely to recommend him for the permanent post in anthropology over Michael Whisson. This, in fact, is what she did. Mathematician Dr Kenneth Hughes, who was at the time a postgraduate student, remembers Monica saying that the appointment of Archie Mafeje was important for South Africa and also for anthropology, ‘because up to now all the people we have appointed have been outsiders to the societies we are talking about – here for the first time we would appoint someone who was an insider!’33
The opposition to Mafeje’s appointment was led by D.C. Robertson, a senior lecturer in civil engineering. Mafeje was, nevertheless, unanimously recommended by the Selection Committee and the Committee of Deans. Robertson then put in a late objection, and the case was postponed to the April 1968 senate meeting. Writing to Monica, the dean of arts described the procedures as ‘fantastic’. Monica wrote to Audrey Richards from Hogsback: ‘I have been so upset and angry about the whole affair … that I could hardly speak of it, but digging in the garden this summer has helped.’ To Archie she wrote: ‘I want to say, “hold on if you can”, but it must be your decision.’ In spite of filibustering, the appointment was confirmed. However, next to the relevant clause of the council minutes dated 1 May there is a note ‘not to proceed with this matter on Registrar’s instructions until advised to do so’. A letter of appointment was never sent to Archie Mafeje.34
This failure was, without doubt, a reaction on the part of the university to government threats. The few black staff members at UCT, among them Johnny van der Westhuizen of the English department, were especially vulnerable. The council had buckled, far too easily in the minds of many, and rescinded the offer. The appointment process then began all over again, with Monica writing to Audrey Richards: ‘It is a bitter disappointment to me personally. I had looked forward to good teaching and research and a compatible person to work with.’ For Monica, Mafeje’s exclusion was comparable to the banning of Jack Simons and medical specialist Raymond Hoffenberg. She consulted with the vice-chancellor, Sir Richard Luyt, about writing to Archie Mafeje confidentially, informing him that, until the issue was resolved, Michael Whisson’s temporary appointment was to be extended. It was ‘very difficult not to’ tell Archie privately that he was the preferred candidate and that the failure to appoint him was due to ‘pressure external to [the] University’.35
It is clear that, though constrained by university protocols, Monica felt she had obligations to Archie, whom she had strongly encouraged to apply for the post. On 10 May she wrote to him saying she had been ‘commissioned’ to ask whether he was still interested in the post, even if his tenure turned out to be short and ‘the centre of a storm’, which ‘must make queer reading in Cambridge, but [was] horribly real’ in South Africa. Archie replied that he was ‘bewildered’: why did she not give him the full story, even if the university was too embarrassed to do so, since he was well aware of her difficulties and would not take her explanation amiss? Also, because he had always known that his appointment would be controversial, he would not be withdrawing his application and was not unduly worried about what might occur if he was indeed appointed.36
The usual practice was that candidates were notified only after an appointment was made. But after a lapse of a full nine months, it was clear that Archie Mafeje should be informed forthwith. So, on 10 June Monica wrote to inform him that he would not be appointed. Using quotation marks to indicate the official message she had been instructed to convey, she wrote: ‘In all the circumstances of South Africa it has been regretfully decided by the University that you cannot be offered an appointment. This is not known outside the University Council and Senate.’ Expressing her personal feelings, she wrote that it was all a ‘bitter blow’ to her. The department desperately needed him and ‘besides … I like working with you’. She described her dashed hopes for ‘a good concluding spell’ working together at UCT and then leaving him in the department when she, ‘like a good igoduka’ or migrant labourer, could go home. She cited St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians 6:12: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ She ended the letter, ‘Love, Monica’.37
Mafeje had no illusions about the probable outcome. He responded: ‘[I]t was bound to come, only it came sooner than I had expected.’ Though he was clearly disappointed, Audrey Richards suggested to Monica that he might in the end prefer working ‘in the open’ in Zambia, Tanzania or elsewhere. Again, she added that he was moving away from anthropology, impelled by ‘a deep current of political interest’. For all her wide-ranging experience, Audrey Richards lacked Monica’s understanding that it was impossible to separate social research from South Africa’s brutal and unavoidable politics.38
At the council meeting of 5 June 1968, Vice-Chancellor Luyt reported on government threats to the university. While condemning the minister’s interference with ‘dismay and regret’, the meeting withdrew the offer to Archie, a decision carried by twelve votes to eight. A week later, Monica made a statement at a senate meeting: the decision to appoint Archie Mafeje was a considered one, and rescinding it would harm not only teaching and research, but also South Africa. Government had already deprived the university of two excellent teachers, and now they were being told not to appoint a third. This was the pattern in the Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany, Spain ‘and certain newly independent African states’. It set an ominous precedent, and the banning of academics was no different to the banning of books and authors. She warned: ‘It is time that we, as a Senate, took stock, and saw clearly where we are heading.’ On 1 August, Michael Whisson was offered the job. He accepted on the understanding that Mafeje was not able to take up the appointment at that time, and undertook to resign in his favour if the matter was reopened. Monica thought Whisson had ‘behaved generously and correctly in a difficult situation’. On 13 August the registrar notified Mafeje that the vacancy had been filled.39
Since that time, UCT’s decision has been widely debated. Among scholars, Fred Hendricks is highly critical of the university, equating its actions to complicity with the apartheid state. Lungisile Ntsebeza, however, emphasises the real threat to the institution and its employees and students at the time. Mafeje’s sister told him how the police detained her, took her correspondence with Archie, and threatened to arrest him if he returned to South Africa. This claim is given credence by Richard Luyt’s account of his meeting with the minister of education, who alleged that Mafeje was deeply implicated in subversive activities.40
At UCT, the ‘Mafeje affair’ became a cause célèbre. Echoing the May events in Paris in 1968, students occupied the main administrative building for nine days in August, protesting at the withdrawal of the job offer. Monica wrote confidentially to Richard Luyt that she had tried to dissuade Raphael Kaplinsky, one of the student leaders, from embarking on the sit-in, because it might develop into a conflict between students and council, and because the government might act against the student leaders. Every day over tea during the sit-in, Ken Hughes reported to her on events taking place a short walk from her office. Mafeje observed to Monica that, in spite of ‘genuine and dedicated’ friends among the protestors, there seemed to be little real interest in him or his predicament. Neither the university nor the protesting students had made any effort to communicate with him in England. He therefore concluded that the protests ‘had nothing to do with [him] or other Africans in South Africa’; instead, the entire protest was ‘merely a question of solidarity of the English-speaking South African universities’.41
After the UCT debacle, Mafeje embarked on an academic career in Europe and Africa. The relationship with Monica remained warm and respectful. He continued to confide in her, telling her in November 1968 of his marriage in 1963 to Gladys Nomfundo Noruwana, whom he had first met at school in Healdtown. He had hoped to introduce Monica to his wife, and to his family, and he asked Monica to go to the Transkei to see his parents and his son Xolani, who stayed with them. Monica visited the family, found his parents ‘charming’, and heard about Gladys’s plans to join Archie in the Netherlands. Monica herself visited Archie in England and also in The Hague, where, shortly before he left for the University of Dar es Salaam, she heard enthusiastic accounts of his teaching. She was pleased he had not ‘fallen for a lucrative American post’ as were becoming widely available to black African academics at the time. He applied for positions at the University of Zambia, the University of Dar es Salaam and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, and each time Monica wrote enthusiastic references. To the University of Zambia she wrote that she ‘bitterly regret[ted] that he is not coming to my Department in Cape Town’.42
Monica’s regard for Mafeje even survived his 1970 attack on Audrey Richards and Cambridge, Monica’s much-loved alma mater. He had written to tell Audrey that, while he was grateful for what she had done for him, he associated her with his unsatisfactory Cambridge experiences. He withdrew from the book project to which his doctorate had been linked, and said he would not allow himself ‘to be “adopted” by anybody’. Audrey, who sent Mafeje’s letter on to Monica, acknowledged his ‘quickness and ability’, but again questioned his academic orientation. Caught in the middle, Monica replied that she was saddened that Archie had been so impolite to Audrey. Then Archie wrote to Monica, saying that it had depressed him to write to Audrey in that manner, but he had felt obliged to do so; explaining his reasons for informing Monica of the altercation, he wrote: ‘as one of the few people I accept without any ambiguous feelings and as an important friend I have in common with Audrey, I thought I should let you know by sending you a copy of the letter’.43
Nonetheless, correspondence about Mafeje’s contribution to the festschrift for Monica is revealing. ‘“Aunt” Monica is my mentor par excellence,’ he wrote to the editors, undertaking to write a critique of her theories of ritual behaviour. But when it came to the point, he found himself unable to do so, arguing that Monica’s theory was ‘too closely tied up with her own personal religion’. He elaborated: the Scott Holland Memorial lectures ‘went beyond anything I can handle, without declaring her outrightly an ideological enemy. For obvious subjective reasons I would not want to do that … On the other hand, I cannot afford to compromise my own position.’ Her book had, moreover, received negative reviews from scholars whose position he supported, and he wished to avoid having to react in a similar manner; indeed, Monica was aware he ‘would be inclined to do that anyway’. He therefore suggested, with the editors agreeing, that he should write on the Christian church and African rituals, using Langa and Transkei material: ‘That would be a more positive way of confronting Monica’s ideas, without appearing to be confronting her personally.’ Well aware of their intellectual divergence, Monica never resented honest disagreement, especially from the left, and so Mafeje’s term ‘ideological enemy’ is unfortunate. Indeed, much later, Mafeje acknowledged Monica’s objectivity and tolerance: ‘despite the fact that she thought I was getting Marxist … but she did not mind that so much, because she thought the quality of the work I was doing was good’. Yet he correctly discerned the sensitivity of the issue as far as Monica was concerned: when, as a student, historian Clive Stannard argued that Marxism was a religion, she responded angrily, insisting on the distinction between religion and ideology. But, though fully aware of Mafeje’s leftwards trajectory, Monica continued to support him, as in 1974 when she recommended that he be invited to a conference on ‘Strangers in African Societies’, arguing that he would provide a valuable radical viewpoint.44
Though their relationship was attenuated by time and distance, the two friends stayed in touch. In January 1971 Monica received news from Archie’s father that his son had survived a near-fatal motor accident in Tanzania, and he gave as his reason for informing her that ‘you take Archie as one of your sons’. Two years later, back in the Netherlands, Mafeje told Monica about his break with Gladys and his relationship with Shahida el Baz, the Egyptian woman who later became his wife. Monica wrote that she regretted the end of his marriage and hoped he would commit himself permanently to his new partner. In September 1974 Archie telegrammed Monica that his father and one of his sisters had recently died: ‘family tragedy but cannot risk coming’. His youngest sister, Nandipha, wrote to Monica in 1979 asking for Archie’s address as her letters had gone unanswered. Monica enquired of Brigalia Bam – a Mafeje family friend working for the World Council of Churches in Geneva – but by then she too had lost touch with Archie.45
‘A sort of progressive clique within the staff of UCT at the time’
Archie Mafeje was just one of the African students whose interests Monica protected and promoted. Another was Fikile ‘Fiks’ Bam, who eventually became judge president of the Land Claims Court. Born in Tsolo, Transkei, in 1937, Fikile and his siblings were largely brought up by their mother, Temperance Eugenia, a devout Anglican. During the war years, her husband had been in the army, and he died soon afterwards in 1952. Temperance Bam had been trained as a teacher, but the rules of the day prevented her from practising her profession once she got married. She took a job as a domestic worker at the mission station, and afterwards as a hospital worker, first at Holy Cross Mission in Pondoland, then in Sophiatown in Johannesburg, and eventually at the pioneering Polela Health Centre in the province of Natal. Fikile’s sister Brigalia reports that young Fiks admired Father Trevor Huddleston, ‘who would often come knocking at township doors to collect his altar boys for the Sunday service’. Fikile attended the Anglican St Peter’s College in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, where he was taught by Oliver Tambo, among others. Though he was awarded a scholarship to the University of the Witwatersrand, his mother, fearing the big-city temptations of Johannesburg, arranged for him to go to UCT instead. In Cape Town he stayed with A.C. ‘Joe’ Jordan – who also came from Tsolo – his wife Phyllis, and their family. Before Fikile Bam had even registered as an undergraduate, Jordan took him to meet Monica and Francis.46
Only seven black students were registered at UCT at this time. In addition, there were also a few coloured students. Fikile Bam was one of the last black students to register before the paradoxically named Extension of University Education Act came into effect. Even allowing for well-disposed white students and staff, the tiny group of black students found themselves in an alien environment, hedged in by racism and restrictions not only outside of, but also within the university itself. The Group Areas Act forbade black students from entering campus residences, and a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ functioned similarly to prevent them from attending parties such as those organised by the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Dismissing all such conventions, Monica encouraged participation in the full range of university activities, even though black students lacked the middle-class experience and social capital which generally enabled students to manage. Few staff members comprehended this. Fikile noted that there were three who did, a ‘sort of progressive clique within the staff of UCT at the time’, who strove in an unpatronising manner to support and protect black students. The three were A.C. Jordan, who taught African languages, Jack Simons, and Monica, all good friends though with differing socio-political orientations: NEUM, communist and Christian liberal, respectively. When Jordan fled South Africa, never to return, he chose Monica to help settle his financial affairs at the university. These three staff members were, Fikile said, ‘people who went out of their way’, as indeed his own case demonstrates.47
Fikile Bam registered for a BA in law, but Jordan and Monica, feeling he needed something to fall back on, guided him towards social anthropology and African languages, much as Monica had done in encouraging Archie Mafeje to take anthropology when he was floundering in biological sciences. The environment was more sympathetic in these departments, and the subject matter itself provided a foothold for African students. As Bam later recalled, both Jordan and Monica took the opportunity to teach students ‘the routines and the disciplines’, so that after a year or two they would ‘be able to manage the other courses as well’. Monica’s classes were, however, not a soft option. Though maternal, her demeanour was ‘queen-like … there was a kind of stiffness, of the old order’. She was a strict disciplinarian, demanding punctuality in class attendance and also in submitting assignments, but ‘she had an aura about her … and you always wanted to do well … and you would listen very carefully’. Occasionally, she would invite the class to her home, and Bam remembered sitting on the pavement outside together with his classmates ‘because we didn’t want to get there too early – it might be improper: at the same time we wanted to make sure that we were not late!’ The group included Ruth, Bram Fischer’s daughter, and Carmel Schrire, who was later an eminent archaeologist. The two young women usually brought flowers, and many years later Bam disarmingly noted that the black students ‘knew nothing about these kinds of graces, and were, you know, sort of fidgety’.
Bam was drawn to Monica’s lectures, which were ‘very exciting’ and relevant: ‘She talked to us about things that mattered to us and to our lives’, that is, not merely about kinship and other anthropological staples, but also about history, thereby enabling students to perceive social change and to make their own connections and draw their own inferences. Bam was raised an Anglican, and so the Christian underpinning of Monica’s thought was clear to him, but she said nothing to inhibit, and never condescended to, their eager socialism. She reminded him of ‘the celibate priests who had been at St Peter’s, who were socialists in every sense of the word and yet … were wearing these cassocks, and were very, what’s the word, anti-class in their living and in their behaviour’. But it was not merely as ‘a mentor’ that the students got to know her: they ‘also got to know her as a parent’. Bam had an English girlfriend, a fraught relationship given the politics of the day, and in his second year she committed suicide. He was devastated, and Monica supported him, persuading him to abandon examinations and rather to repeat his courses. She extended similar support to all her students, but what especially appealed to him was her utterly unpatronising attitude. There could be no attempt to manipulate her: ‘you couldn’t say to her, as you sometimes were tempted to with the other professors, “oh! You know, I come from a poor family, and I’m a poor black person” … somehow, when she spoke to you, you wouldn’t insult her with that kind of nonsense. You had to come with a real problem.’
Fikile Bam was arrested in 1963 and sentenced under the General Laws Amendment Act. He was incarcerated on Robben Island for ten years, until his release in 1974. While in prison, he remembered Monica’s words to her students: ‘at the end of the day it’s not what happens to you that matters, but how you react to it’, and years later it struck him that ‘she was really speaking about herself, and her own experiences’. Monica wrote to him as frequently as regulations allowed, her letters circulating among the prisoners. She had the knack of writing in a manner that escaped the attentions of the prison censor. She was instrumental in organising Fikile Bam’s legal studies on the island, as is clear from a considerable correspondence in which she liaised with NUSAS and former inmate Dennis Brutus. Bam wrote that he would like Monica ‘to be principally responsible for everything concerning [his] studies’. This was a wise decision: it is clear that Monica closely studied the UNISA distance education courses available to him. She sent him the first volume of the Oxford History of South Africa, and got Alan Paton to send him law reports, which the prison officials seemed to regard as innocuous. As further support, she corresponded with his mother, Temperance.48
After Bam’s release from the island, he went first to the Transkei but then got permission to go to Johannesburg to finish his law examinations and to do his pupillage at the Johannesburg Bar. For three months he stayed with Tim Wilson and his wife Ilse, daughter of Rivonia defence lawyer Bram Fischer. Before this, upon Bam’s release, the Wilsons had brought two sheep for slaughter to the Bams’ cleansing ceremony in the Transkei. It was not long before Fikile Bam was made persona non grata and confined to the ostensibly independent homeland. This did not, however, prevent him from travelling the back roads to Hogsback to visit Monica, by then retired, and her sons.49
As her earlier assistance to Godfrey Pitje and others shows, Monica helped not only those black students who were formally her responsibility, or only those working in her field. She responded to a request for advice from Gabriel Setiloane, a family friend and later a prominent figure in African theology, urging him to limit and focus his expansive research plans, to take account of urban as well as rural contexts, and to modify some of his terms, suggesting, for instance, ‘reverence for’, rather than ‘worship of’, the shades. In the face of scepticism by funders, she successfully supported Setiloane in his application for an overseas scholarship. Monica went further, preparing the head of anthropology at Edinburgh University for what would ‘not be orthodox professional anthropology’, though acknowledging to Kenneth Little: ‘Perhaps I always have a soft spot for the men of two worlds or those of two disciplines because anthropology itself was so much a fringe subject when I began at Cambridge.’ She read and commented in detail on Setiloane’s research proposal, and, later, on his thesis, which, she felt, ‘must be published’, as indeed it was.50
Aware of the disadvantages endured by black students, Monica assisted wherever she could. However, where a student failed to measure up to her high academic standards she was cool and unsentimental. Sympathetic to Fort Hare lecturer Curnick Ndamse’s travails at the university, she was uncompromising about his doctoral studies: he had, she said, made no progress.51
‘We worked together for ten years in great comfort and amity’
In 1960, when South Africa tipped decisively towards racial tyranny, there was an episode that indicates who Monica regarded as her most acute colleagues. About to visit from the United States, C.W. de Kiewiet asked Monica to arrange meetings with people in Cape Town who might best inform him about contemporary South Africa. She arranged meetings at her home with Leonard Thompson, Jack Simons, economist H.M. Robertson, attorney and academic Donald Molteno, and A.C. Jordan. From beyond the university community she invited Richard van der Ross and radical Liberal Party member Patrick Duncan, who subsequently joined the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Afterwards De Kiewiet wrote approvingly to his sponsors, the Carnegie Corporation, of Monica ‘and the small group surrounding her’. They were the sort of people that funders should assist, he said. If places like UCT were to ‘maintain and strengthen the sort of atmosphere which Monica Wilson and her colleagues [were] creating’, it was vital that excellent new staff be attracted. This would be a problem that weighed heavily on Monica for the rest of her time at UCT. It became increasingly difficult to recruit scholars to an ever-more isolated South Africa, or to replace South African colleagues who moved abroad.52
Monica was appointed head of the School of African Studies and chair of social anthropology at UCT over the heads of two male colleagues: John Goodwin, head of the Department of Archaeology and Ethnology, with whom she had long had a tetchy professional relationship; and anthropologist, sociologist and legal scholar Jack Simons. Simons had studied with Godfrey under Malinowski at the LSE, and returned to South Africa to teach at UCT in 1937. He turned the unpromising Department of Native Law and Administration, later the Department of Comparative African Government and Law, into an innovative centre of critical teaching and learning. Requesting his promotion to senior lecturer in 1953, Monica noted his Langa research and commended him as ‘well qualified and an excellent teacher, with a personal concern for all his students’ in a department that attracted many. Mary Simons emphasises that Monica and her father were good friends and not merely respectful colleagues, as some have wrongly deduced from their apparent ideological incompatibility. About Monica, Jack Simons cautioned his young daughter: ‘Remember, she’s shyer than you are: you must take care of her.’53
Jack was a prominent member of the Communist Party of South Africa until it dissolved itself in anticipation of imminent banning in 1950, but he did not immediately rejoin when it was revived as the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1953. Mary Simons perceives her father as a humanist-socialist sailing under communist colours, his Marxism a method of analysis rather than a creed, in contrast to the orthodoxy of her mother, Ray Alexander. However, it should be recognised that, even when he had not yet rejoined the SACP, Jack Simons defended the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, events that stretched the tolerance of many SACP members.54
UCT has been accused of pusillanimity, even connivance, in the Mafeje affair. Jack Simons, however, thought differently about his own case, believing that the university behaved honourably, and that the same was true of Principal Jacobus Duminy, considered by many, including Monica, to be a government man. In clear anticipation of later events, Monica mooted a Simon fellowship for Jack to Max Gluckman and Audrey Richards in the event of her colleague having to leave the country. She also participated in UCT Academic Freedom Committee meetings where the teaching ban on listed communists was discussed. On 22 December 1964 Jack Simons was served a banning order that restricted him to Cape Town and excluded him from teaching. Monica wrote to Gluckman that Jack had been ‘more shaken than [she had] ever seen him’ for he was ‘one of the people who really lives through teaching’.55
In a heartfelt letter to the principal, Jack Simons stated:
[I am] deeply conscious of the fine spirit of tolerance that [UCT] has displayed, to me and in its dealings with society in general. Our University has always lived up to the highest principles of our academic profession, and you, Sir, have added lustre to a noble institution. I am proud to have been a member of so splendid a fellowship.
Simons reassured Monica about arrangements for his department, expressing his thanks ‘for the whole-hearted and generous support you have always given me, and for your great tolerance and breadth of view. I have always been very happy serving under you, and shall always look back with a tender regard on our association.’ He signed off, ‘Affectionately yours, Jack.’ Monica’s respect for him is clear in a reference she drafted to Manchester University: ‘one of the ablest men I know’, a ‘brilliant’ teacher with ‘very impressive research … he would be an ornament to any university to which he is attached … a delightful and cooperative colleague and greatly loved by his students’. And to James Coleman, an American expert on African politics, she lamented that UCT had lost its ‘ablest staff member’.56
Monica protested publicly about the bannings. On 14 April 1965 she spoke at a protest meeting of students and staff organised by the SRC on the steps of Jameson Hall. She spent little time on the specifics of the Jack Simons case but rather set it in perspective, as ‘one defeat in the long struggle for the freedom of men to express what they believe to be true’. For eight centuries, she said, this struggle had centred on universities, which were essentially ‘communit[ies] of scholars searching for truth and instructing others’. A university teacher ‘precluded from following the argument where it leads, and communicating this argument … is precluded from carrying on his work’. A ban on an individual threatened and inhibited all: what had been done to Jack Simons, and, at the University of the Witwatersrand, to Eddie Roux, could be done to others too. She listed the rights that had already been lost: ‘the right to choose whom we shall teach. There has been a cumulative limitation on what we shall teach through banning of books. The prohibition on Professor Simons and Professor Roux is an infringement on the right of the University to choose who shall teach.’ Monica urged the students not to betray the search for knowledge and truth, even though meetings and protests might be a tiresome distraction. To Monica, this search was ‘something God-given, something sacred. To deny it, or impede it is an offence against the Spirit of Truth. And any acceptance of the principle that an outside authority may exclude a man from teaching because of his opinions implies that we dare not first seek truth. Instead we are to worship something else – perhaps the separation of races, or a particular form of government.’ Monica concluded by characterising the communist Jack Simons as a man who epitomised the ‘Spirit of Truth’. He was ‘first and foremost concerned with Truth; concerned to discover the facts and demonstrate their relationships, a man who weighed the evidence and set forth both sides of an argument. His crime was not distortion but a passionate concern to understand; a concern which communicated itself and drew students to him.’57
This was one of Monica’s most outstanding moments as a public figure. The SRC judged the speech ‘one of the most moving … that has been delivered at the University for many years’. Jack Simons thanked her for her ‘magnificent avowal of faith in the principle of freedom of thought and expression’. He wrote to Monica: ‘I am very proud that the declaration came from you, the head of the department and a dear friend.’ Writing to Max Gluckman in Manchester, the Simons’ first place of exile, Monica said of her friend and erstwhile colleague, ‘We miss him bitterly.’ She was one of his referees when he applied for a job at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, where he and Ray remained until their return to South Africa in 1990. Monica said of him: ‘He is a friend and colleague … of many years’ standing … We worked together for ten years in great comfort and amity.’58
‘She always exuded the divine right of Wilsons’
Certain people remained ambivalent about Monica, among them a number of postgraduate students, some of whom were staff. Usually this was because she seemed, in their view, to be uninterested in anthropological theory, her emphasis on fieldwork masking theoretical vacuity, so that she appeared not to have moved beyond her 1945 Analysis of Social Change. Also, on a personal level, Monica’s patrician style was annoying. Graham Watson is one of those who experienced her as such.
Watson began his university career by doing a degree in fine arts, but realising that a job would be difficult to find, he registered for an additional BA in Edward Batson’s Department of Social Studies. He quickly realised, though, that the department was concerned with welfare and social work, and had ‘nothing whatever to do with Sociology’ as he understood the discipline. Past examination papers revealed that Monica was ‘asking the kind of questions’ that interested him. When Watson decided to change courses, Batson summoned him to explain himself, and proposed that the conversation be taped. Quite incorrectly, he seemed to have assumed that Monica had been enticing his students away. The suspicions continued, with social science students being forbidden to take anthropology. After ‘a great deal of unpleasantness’ this led to an inquiry.59
Watson abandoned social studies, but he had certain reservations about Monica. For one thing, she ‘looked like a nursery school teacher’. Her lectures were ‘very old-fashioned stuff, even in her day’, and there was an obvious contrast with the more approachable Peter Carstens, Monica’s former student, who had an interest in theory. For Monica, the field ‘was everything … she never talked about theory; it was always facts’, though these were nothing more than a succession of anecdotes, in Watson’s view. The only thing that made him warm to her was the emotion he detected whenever she mentioned Godfrey. He always found her formal and distant, though she could also be ‘frosty and nasty’. She had once invited a visiting American anthropologist to talk about his book on African society, and when Watson asked him about his fieldwork, he replied that his book was based on secondary sources. At this, ‘Monica went rigid and pale, and stalked out without a word, and left [them] all sitting there stunned’, with the visitor being ‘terribly embarrassed’. Martin West similarly recalls that she could be ‘quite devastatingly cruel’. He tells the story of a fellow student collecting an essay from Monica’s office. She stopped writing as he entered, and then ‘picked up the essay and handed it to him, and said, “you’ve clearly done no work for this essay: this is your topic for next week. Good afternoon”.’ On one occasion during his own MA studies, West submitted work that was below par; he recalls Monica’s reaction: ‘one of the most unnerving moments of my life I think – she smiled at me, smiled, and said, “I’m absolutely furious with you”.’60
Graham Watson’s fieldwork in Cape Town schools focused on ‘passing for white’. Monica supervised this contentious topic researched in difficult circumstances: on the one hand, the Department of Education was monitoring Watson closely, while on the other, pupils and families were cautious and fearful of revealing their strategies. The research took him many years, but since there was no real meeting of minds between him and Monica, he eventually moved to Simon Fraser University in Canada. He completed the doctorate under David Bettison, to whom, Watson contends, Monica seemed all too eager to hand him over. But for all Watson’s misgivings, there are glimpses in his account of a broad-minded and indeed broadly humorous Monica. Once, as a postgraduate student, he visited Monica’s home for dinner. A servant, certainly Makheswa Mxotwa, served the meal, and Monica told her guests a story involving the woman, who lived illegally inside the house, in a room next to hers: ‘last night I woke up; I heard her making strange noises in the middle of the night. Then I thought, “she’s a married woman and entitled to make strange noises in the middle of the night”.’ Watson remarked that this was not what he expected ‘out of the mouth of Monica Wilson’. He was surprised, too, at Monica’s untroubled air when he submitted an essay referring to Christianity as a millenarian cult. But Monica was neither prudish nor intolerant; she was, indeed, perfectly accepting, in a far more moralistic age, of her unmarried son Tim and Ilse staying in the same room whenever they visited Hogsback.61
Monica was concerned that Graham Watson’s research, might, when published, result in his informants experiencing problems with the authorities. Indeed, in 1970 he wrote to tell her that because Jack Simons – a banned person who could not be quoted – had written the preface, the book could not be distributed in South Africa. Referring to his interpretation of the data he had collected, he pointed out that Monica was not responsible for this, and went on to acknowledge the depth of her contribution in other ways:
[W]hatever is worthy in my intellectual training to you must go much of the credit. It is only through working with colleagues of a lesser stamp that I have come to appreciate the greatness of the example which you have set in maintaining standards of academic probity. It is only through teaching a seemingly endless number of students that I have come to appreciate – with astonishment – how much time and interest you devoted to individual students, including myself. To have been your student was a privilege.
Monica replied warmly: ‘it is a great refreshment to know that one has been of help to some students and that they continue to grow’.62
Monica’s colleague Mike Whisson had first arrived in Cape Town in July 1965, armed with a Cambridge PhD on education among the Luo in Kenya, and a year’s experience researching drug addicts in Hong Kong. By that time, both Graham Watson and Peter Carstens, wearied by South Africa’s intellectually stifling atmosphere, had departed, and Monica was running the department with the sole assistance of Ruth Sacks, a part-time lecturer whose doctorate Monica was supervising. Whisson came with an ambiguous recommendation from Audrey Richards: he was ‘opinionated’, but ‘a clever, critical, analytical sort of person and he might do well on a piece of research which is not of our type’. As in the case of Watson, Whisson’s relations with Monica were ambivalent: ‘she always exuded … the divine right of Wilsons’, he remarked. The reservations felt were clearly mutual. In mid-1966 Monica was due to go on leave and needed an acting head of department. To Ray Inskeep, her archaeologist colleague who was on the Staffing Committee, she noted about Whisson: ‘he is a difficult person to work with, and causes strains in the Department … but in view of the absence of any other qualified candidate, and the fact that he is able, and has been doing good field-work, and has established rapport in his field … I recommend him’. Indeed, despite being a popular and stimulating teacher, Whisson’s brash style did annoy some students and cause friction with the university authorities.63
Whisson believes Monica to have been a ‘purist academic’, while he himself was ‘more overtly applied’. He acknowledges: ‘The quality of my work, compared with hers was rubbish, at the academic level.’ Moreover, Monica did not accept Whisson’s ‘implied assumption that research is not worthwhile unless it can lead to amelioration of conditions’. According to him, Monica believed that ‘understanding society is something intrinsically worthwhile in itself’. Also, she thought he made no effort to incorporate a comparative dimension, an aspect that she valued, as is clear from her statement to Archie Mafeje that ‘it’s the comparisons that really interest me’. Monica did, however, arrange for funding from the Social Responsibility Committee and the Christian Institute to support Whisson’s work on housing in Cape Town. He was involved in other politically sensitive projects too, and later, when Monica was about to retire, she thought that, despite not having published a substantial book, Whisson was the best applicant for the chair.64
As a former south London scholarship boy with a nose for class superiority, Whisson perceives himself as hostile towards those who ‘assume that they have inherited authority’. Monica was an obvious target for his criticism: she had ‘an aristocratic air to her, always wore a hat to Senate meetings, and a tweed suit … When she spoke … if you disagreed with her on something, you always got the impression that you were not only arguing a point, you were demeaning a person and possibly offending God!’ He contrasts what he experienced as the cold reception he and his parents received at Hunterstoun with the welcome he and Cecil Manona received a decade later. Manona was the most significant black anthropologist in the Eastern Cape at the time, doing research in the Keiskammahoek area. Yet Whisson concedes that personality may have been a factor in Monica’s behaviour: ‘She was a very private person, and I don’t recall that she ever accepted an invitation to come to dinner … I always felt that there was a loneliness and slight sadness about her … that maybe I was too young and not self-confident enough to try and penetrate … one didn’t feel there was a way through.’65
Like Mike Whisson and Graham Watson before him, Martin West had also been a student of Monica’s who eventually became a colleague at UCT. Her eventual successor to the chair, West notes that his training in anthropology consisted of one undergraduate course with Monica and an honours course with Mike Whisson during a period when Monica was on leave. This was followed by an MA that was supervised by Monica, the topic of research being the small West Coast town of Port Nolloth. When Beyers Naudé and the Christian Institute approached Monica for information about independent churches in urban areas, she remarked to West: ‘The proposal arrived unheralded today. This may be the ravens arriving!’ Mystified, he looked up the reference, which turned out to be 1 Kings 17:6: the ravens feeding Elijah in the wilderness. Though he had not considered the topic of independent churches, he agreed to pursue it; subsequently, his doctorate was funded by the institute and supervised by Monica. She went on to arrange a post for him in the department without the usual formalities of an application or an interview once Ruth Sacks’s position became vacant. He notes that Monica had not really built the department up, and had kept postgraduate students to herself. As a consequence, and especially after Joan Vincent, a prominent political anthropologist, declined the offer of the chair, the department ‘stagnated’ in the wake of Monica’s retirement. In 1978 West himself, at a very young age, was appointed professor of social anthropology, an appointment that was the eventual outcome of the effects of apartheid on the careers of gifted colleagues such as Archie Mafeje, Adam Kuper, Peter Carstens and others.66
‘Professor Wilson’s mocking laughter’
Throughout her career, Monica held an uncompromising view of academic responsibilities. In 1957 Hugh Ashton wrote from Bulawayo asking whether W.A. Norton, a ‘charming old man’ who had been the first professor of Bantu philology at UCT, might, as a charitable gesture, be awarded an honorary doctorate. Monica replied that her linguist colleague G.P. Lestrade discounted the value of Norton’s work, and there were no public service grounds for the award: ‘we cannot give such degrees just out of charity or they would lose their value entirely’. She also regarded the work of Hugh and Andrew Tracey, and their International Library of African Music, with deep suspicion. This was undoubtedly because of their rapid accumulation of recordings without any reference to social context. Some music was recorded in especially problematic milieus such as mine compounds, which epitomised the migrant labour system and consequent destruction of African family life; this was a social catastrophe which Monica denounced, and which demanded nuanced analysis.67
The battle to block the awarding of honorary doctorates to ‘charming’ though essentially undeserving candidates was the least of Monica’s worries. She continually fended off attacks on a department and school that many saw as troublesome and far too left wing. In 1965, for example, she wrote to Ray Inskeep that it was ‘as plain as a pikestaff that various people in the University would like the School of African Studies to disappear all together [sic] (and be absorbed by Social Science) and/or to be very different in approach’. She suspected that Andrew Murray, the professor of philosophy who had been ridiculed for his evidence at the Treason Trial, wanted to absorb African government into his department. She also told Inskeep that she hoped not to retire until such time as the principal had left, strongly implying that she needed to hold the fort, since Jacobus Duminy ‘detests African Studies’.68
In her many battles at UCT, Monica gave no quarter to the generally substantial figures she took on. To quell the conservatives, she successfully proposed that in meetings no contribution could be longer than two minutes. When an especially loquacious professor challenged her suggestion on the basis of academic freedom, Monica rose, looked him in the eye, and said she was sure the faculty would grant a concession to anybody who had ‘particular difficulty in expressing themselves concisely’. The professor appealed to the chair for ‘protection from Professor Wilson’s mocking laughter’, but the dean remarked he could detect no such thing. Her doctoral student Colin Murray recalled slipping into a post-senate tea and sandwiches gathering of ‘various hypocrites and sycophants’, as he put it. Monica’s mordant reaction to the particularly tedious and acrimonious senate meeting she had just attended was to take Murray aside and whisper, mock conspiratorially: ‘Shush! I’m doing fieldwork.’69
Of all her adversaries, Monica’s bête noire was Edward Batson. In 1935, aged twenty-nine, Batson was appointed professor of social science; a statistician who developed the concept of the poverty datum line and contributed to sampling theory, he had an international reputation. But his approach was quite foreign to Monica. As early as 1953, while advising Daryl Forde of the International African Institute about urban sociology in South Africa, she praised the work of Ellen Hellman and Jack Simons, as well as that of Fort Hare economist Selby Ngcobo. Though she had also referred to Batson’s work, she noted that he only ‘touched on’ African poverty and remarked: ‘I do not myself find the statistical analysis without the sociological background very illuminating, but perhaps that is an anthropologist’s prejudice!’ By 1961, planning a series of African seminars, she listed possible collaborators, but warned: ‘Sociology cannot be drawn in because of Batson!’ When it seemed possible that he might gain control of what later became the Abe Bailey Institute of Inter-Racial Studies, Monica plotted to frustrate his attempts; she did so in collaboration with Audrey Richards, who was part of a commission to examine reorganisation of the social sciences at UCT.70
Ernst Westphal, son of Lutheran missionaries and professor of Bantu languages, was another foe. Like Batson, Westphal had a substantial scholarly reputation. A clue to Monica’s dislike is her relationship with Daniel Kunene, a lecturer in Westphal’s department and one of the few Africans teaching at UCT. In the early 1960s, UCT seemed to Monica to be under siege. She was deeply committed to defending the interests of Archie Mafeje, and her allies Jack Simons and A.C. Jordan had left the country. In April 1961 Monica recommended Kunene for the position of lecturer in African languages at the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. She praised him as a delightful, alert and humorous colleague, with ‘a gentleness and humanity that make him so essentially a civilized man’. She went on to say that ‘his reasons for wishing to move [were] external to the University’, and explained that ‘Group Areas and Bantu Education [were] making life intolerable for civilized families’ in South Africa.71
Monica also made efforts to enable Kunene to visit the United States. When he received a Carnegie travel grant he decided, as had A.C. Jordan, to leave on an exit permit, which meant he would not be permitted to return to South Africa. The last straw was the arrival of Westphal in mid-1963: Kunene, who was acting head at the time, had to surrender the position. He later wrote to Monica from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was working, explaining his relations with Westphal. While superficially friendly, Westphal had apparently connived in plans to move Kunene and other African staff to Langa or Nyanga townships, had criticised him to students, and had referred to him and another African colleague as ‘my two little Basotho’. Monica’s sympathy with embattled black students and staff, and the similar conflicts in which she herself was often involved, help to explain her hostility to colleagues such as Westphal.72