Monica’s academic reputation during her UCT years and into retirement rested on an output that includes her Nyakyusa monographs; the Scott Holland lectures on religion and society; the two-volume Oxford History of South Africa; the work on Langa township with Archie Mafeje; and the edited autobiography of Z.K. Matthews, with Monica’s memoir. This wide-ranging body of work is unified by moral purpose and an insistence on evidence; it also reveals a return to a historical approach. This chapter is an overview of more than twenty years of her work.
‘How it becomes’
‘I am an anthropologist by profession,’ Monica wrote in 1975, ‘but I have always been more interested in social change than in the analysis of social systems as if they were static’. After forty years, she was ‘still wrestling with problems of how to document and analyse social change’. In 1957 she wrote to historian Sylvia L. Thrupp: ‘the link between social anthropology and history seems to me so close that I cannot understand why many of my colleagues overlook it’. Unlike other major contemporary anthropologists of the British school, Monica saw her discipline as a way of revealing the history of African societies. Particularly in South Africa, she was in the vanguard of those who believed that African societies had a history that could be retrieved and written down, and was ahead of most scholars in pointing historians towards the importance of the history of South Africa’s black majority. Above all, she saw herself as an anthropologist concerned with ‘how it becomes – that is with an analysis of process’ over time.1
Monica was joint editor of the Oxford History of South Africa, to which she also contributed substantially. The crowning achievement of a school of influential liberal historians, the Oxford History was almost immediately followed by the work of a new generation of Marxist or Marxist-influenced scholars. This had a number of negative outcomes: the sidelining of the historical dimension of Monica’s work; the underplaying of her role in moving anthropology in a historical direction; and the neglect of the interdisciplinary and comparative nature of her work. She kept abreast of the latest archaeological findings, followed contemporary British, French and other social history, and read widely in fiction and poetry. Of her approach, she observed to Archie Mafeje:
[A]n interdisciplinary approach is very difficult, but it is obvious that rigid divisions in subjects are as stultifying as group areas. I think my colleagues here get pretty cross at the way I stray into what they regard as their preserves (history, ‘sociology’ etc.) but that cannot be helped. Students say that they are not taught, in other departments, to connect the different disciplines. How can one learn without doing that?
Still, she defended extended fieldwork, the characteristic research method of her discipline, writing that ‘neither historians, sociologists, nor economists get deep enough or grasp the combination of factors relevant in village life’.2
Monica had grown up with a strong sense of the history of the Eastern Cape. In 1982 she recalled that at school in Lovedale she ‘was always peering back, wondering about earlier black people’, noting also that whites were ‘aggressively conscious of the last hundred years’. Her early anthropological work was atypical in that it was not the work of a metropolitan intellectual observing the exotic ‘other’. Instead, she researched the lives of people very like the ones she had been at school with at Lovedale, people with whom she had prayed, or who had been her neighbours at Hogsback.3
At Cambridge, Monica recognised that in her final year in history she ‘would get nothing on the African side’, and the realisation dawned on her: ‘I must read Social Anthropology.’ The Cambridge anthropologists had been ‘light weight’, she later recalled, and it was only when she did fieldwork in Pondoland, and even more in buNyakyusa, that she realised the importance of ‘observation’. Crucially, she understood that observation always occurs within ‘preconceived categories of thought’. It would be a distortion to say that Monica converted from history to anthropology: instead, she came to believe that the anthropological approach was the only possible way of attempting to write the history of African societies. Indeed, it was only later that new developments in African historiography made it possible to study African societies in the same way as others, adding techniques such as archival research and analysis of oral testimony and tradition to the insights of social anthropology.4
Monica was critical of the mainstream historians of her day – specifically G.M. Trevelyan of Cambridge and French historian Charles Seignobos – for their treatment of change over time. In her view, this was the stuff of history, and historians were failing to treat it with sufficient seriousness. Instead, they treated history as a ‘more or less entertaining’ chronicle. To her Fort Hare students she explained the consequence of failing overtly to examine relationships between events: ‘They do in fact make connections, but they expressly deny the possibility of systematic and certain connections. To accept that position is to abandon the possibility of understanding how society works.’5
In South African historiography, W.M. Macmillan had broken with traditional approaches such as those of George McCall Theal and George Cory. Macmillan also dismissed what he took to be the static and conservative vision of contemporary anthropologists, implicitly scorning their attempts to preserve outdated customs. But Macmillan did not know any African language, and his research relied heavily on the missionary archive. He analysed neither the nature nor the development of African societies, and it is possible that his animus towards anthropologists may have been because some of them at least did attempt this. Reading Macmillan’s Cape Colour Question, Monica noted that he was good on events affecting indigenous people, but that there was ‘nothing on [the] structure of Hottentot communities’. She was critical of historians who, unlike their best French counterparts, did not concern themselves with changing social structures, and who merely provided ‘a succession of events’. But she remained aware of the difference between her own approach and that of historians whom she did indeed respect: she told one of them that she weighed the importance of the ‘“archive” rather differently’, and contrasted the ‘approach of the historian accustomed to dealing with records which are accessible and the anthropologists used to having only his own record of events and correspondence as his source’.6
In the 1930s, Monica came to regard anthropology as the sole means of understanding African societies, though with the implication that such an understanding was a type of history. In her Pondoland work, however, she had found the available documentary sources tendentious and their study frustrating. Later still, she noted the growing association between anthropology and history. Though Reaction to Conquest now seemed old fashioned, historians and others who had previously considered the book irrelevant to their pursuits no longer did. As Monica explained, ‘The early anthropologists provide a sort of quarry, like early travellers.’7
Monica’s connection to Malinowski’s LSE seminars had been marginal, through Godfrey. This is not to say that she had not been touched by her London experiences, from which in any case it is impossible to separate her close intellectual and emotional interaction with Godfrey, but she was, as Audrey Richards later said, ‘outside the spell under which we were bound’. Coming from a Cambridge tradition, she did not share the dismissive approach to history that tended to characterise Malinowski and his circle. In Monica’s view, he was difficult to pin down on the subject of change, and instead ‘always sticks to nice “simple primitive communities”’. For him, history was for the most part ‘conjectural’, a malleable creation of the present, which was of interest and value only as a rationale for contemporary societies. Looking back on this time, Monica observed that she was not a ‘natural functionalist’, and in 1973 told her students about Malinowski’s ‘silly book on change’, probably referring to a posthumous collection of his writings. Though in the 1930s she had used the term ‘culture contact’, rather casually, in her work, she stressed that she and Godfrey were interested in social change rather than culture contact as conceived by Malinowski. Indeed, the title of their 1945 book, The Analysis of Social Change, deliberately emphasises diachronic change, or change over time, rather than synchronic contact, occurring at a particular moment.8
‘Facts are not intelligible in the contemporary moment alone’
In 1952, long before she embarked on the Oxford History in the 1960s, Monica gave a clear outline of her views on history in her correspondence with American anthropologist George Murdock. In an article in American Anthropologist, he opened with a critique of African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, to which Monica had contributed. He criticised what he took to be contemporary British anthropology’s lack of interest in history and how cultures change over time. In her rebuttal, she conceded that the charge was true of Malinowski and also of African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, yet only because of space constraints. But the charge was not true of a number of Malinowski’s pupils, among them Evans-Pritchard, as she went on to argue: ‘A number of us who were bred in history schools feel very strongly that facts are not intelligible in the contemporary moment alone and fought a long battle with Malinowski and others on it. We thought we had won.’ She expressed the hope that Murdock would look at her Good Company, published the previous year, and tell her whether it ‘gives you the history you want or not’.9
Murdock then presented his theory of ‘cultural distributions’, by means of which the diffusion of cultures could be traced. Monica effectively dismissed the notion as speculative and premature, and lacking an empirical basis. The correspondence concluded with Monica acknowledging that she had been mistaken in suggesting that empirical study should precede rather than go hand-in-hand with analysis: ‘About the need for historical depth in anthropological studies I have no doubt whatsoever; our only difference turns on whether it is possible with the sort of material we have.’ Mischievously, she asked Murdock whether he would carry out a distributional study on some part of southern Africa himself, to demonstrate how to achieve historical depth with available materials.10
This correspondence reveals Monica’s shifting position in terms of the developing African historiography of the day. At the very least, she acknowledged the limitations of detailed ethnographies that were necessarily snapshots in time, though sticking to her belief that historical deductions based on insufficient evidence were not history at all. In other words, she underlined her belief that in contemporary conditions ethnography was the only possible mode for writing the history of African societies. But as she later contended, this did not mean she was a naive empiricist. She dismissed as ‘nonsense’ the Cambridge advice to ‘go without any preconceived ideas’ when she was about to undertake her Pondoland fieldwork, and remained adamant that observation is ‘shaped by previous experience’. To her, Murdock’s broad-brush interpretations seemed to be at variance with the emphasis on detailed evidence and alertness to exceptions and inconsistencies which were intrinsic to historical research. The correspondence reveals her avowedly historical approach. As she drily observed to a student, ‘Murdock is impervious to fact: but he does give you a very nice lunch.’11
In the 1950s the study of African history was about to come of age. Historians like Jan Vansina provided the necessary methodology, as well as the comparative framework, required to write histories of African societies. This revolution in the discipline, which began in tropical Africa and was directly related to decolonisation, took some time to filter down to the white-ruled south, where apartheid was tightening its grip. As one who kept up with the latest literature in her own and related fields, Monica was aware that the old Eurocentric approaches to the African past had been jettisoned, and that new scholarly histories of African societies were beginning to appear. It was at this point that she herself shifted to a more overtly historical position, though she believed that, fundamentally, she had never really abandoned it.
‘It is an explosive document’
Later in the decade, Monica interacted increasingly with her historian colleague, Leonard Thompson. Like her, he had become aware of the new currents in African historiography, mainly through exposure in London, but also by visiting Ghana, the first British colony in Africa to achieve independence, soon after the inauguration as president of the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah. Soon afterwards, Thompson reiterated his view that South African history needed to be decolonised. For Monica, as for Thompson, African societies were as worthy of study as any other, and both held that a country’s history should always be written with the majority in mind.12
Early in 1959, as universities such as UCT were resisting the threat to their autonomy, the minister of external affairs repeated the myth that ‘[t]he Bantu began to move from the North across the Limpopo just … when Van Riebeeck landed in Table Bay’. The implication was that South Africa’s whites had settled an empty land and had as much claim to it as anyone else. Refuting this myth, Monica wrote an article for African Studies on the early history of the Transkei and Ciskei. It drew upon records of shipwrecks along the south-eastern coast of South Africa which clearly demonstrated that Bantu-speakers had lived there from at least the sixteenth century. Then in the early 1960s she and Thompson decided to edit a major new collaborative history of South Africa, with ‘interaction’ as its major theme.13
Detailed planning of what eventually became the two-volume Oxford History of South Africa began in 1963. Monica was at the time on sabbatical at Stanford, while Thompson had already moved to the University of California, Los Angeles. It is no accident that Monica’s name precedes that of her co-editor, for she was the main driver of the project. In selecting contributors, it was not a simple case of Thompson favouring historians while Monica chose anthropologists. Thompson was keen to have the anthropologist Hilda Kuper as a contributor, while Monica put forward the name of UCT historian Eric Axelson, a suggestion that Thompson firmly rejected, telling her: ‘if in any doubt at all, read his published work’. At one point, Monica expressed her fears regarding priorities: ‘you, a historian, think the chronology should be dominant: I, an anthropologist, must work from observation to deductions’. While historians criticised her chapters for what they saw as an insufficient sense of chronology, Monica remained critical of what she described as their ‘and then and then’ approach. The two editors were united, however, in the emphasis they placed on the black majority. This was implicit, for example, in their decision to have separate chapters for Natal and the Highveld, rather than the standard approach of ‘following the Voortrekkers around the country in one chapter’. When there were points of difference, these were in general easily resolved. Monica accepted without demur Thompson’s rejection of her suggestion that there be separate chapters on the creation of the nineteenth-century African kingdoms. His argument was that this constituted ‘only a portion of the … historical experience of the people of Natal and the High Veld in this period’. Just before publication of the second volume, Thompson wrote to Monica: ‘How deeply glad I am that you and I have been in such complete harmony on all the basic issues related to our work.’14
For the first volume of the Oxford History, published in 1969, Monica co-wrote the introduction and contributed four chapters that dealt, respectively, with hunters and herders, the Nguni, the Sotho, and the Eastern Cape frontier. It was only in the last of these that whites entered the story in any significant way. Keen to have Archie Mafeje’s opinion, she sent him draft chapters of each. By this time there was a close bond between them and he could address her frankly, though there is an ironic ring to the shortcoming he mentioned: Monica had ‘left out the whites’ in the chapter on the frontier. In this, as in her other three chapters, she drew upon her anthropological knowledge as well as her wide reading of the primary sources. Thompson was ‘profoundly impressed’ by Monica’s ‘superlative and crucial’ Eastern Cape frontier chapter. It was, he wrote, ‘a splendid example of … the contribution which an anthropologist with an historical sense can make to our understanding of the historical process in Africa’.15
The editors’ theme was ‘the interaction between people of diverse origins, languages, technologies, ideologies, and social systems, meeting on South African soil’, in other words, ‘cooperation and conflict’. They had to assemble a team capable of dealing with the topic. Thompson considered J.S. Marais to be the only ‘objective scholar’ of the Dutch period; this was not only ‘astonishing’, but also ‘an unfortunate fact’ from the point of view of their project. When Marais was unavailable, Thompson suggested that he and his colleague John Galbraith write the crucial chapter on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cape Colony. Because it would be the first to have as its ‘central theme the interaction between white settler and other peoples in South Africa’, it needed to be written by ‘a person who is known to be thoroughly sympathetic to the objectives of the editors’. This was a central issue throughout the shaping of the book. It took a while for the editors to gather a suitable team of contributors: some declined the invitation (Keith Hancock, Hilda Kuper, Ellen Hellman, Sheila van der Horst, Eric Stokes, C.W. de Kiewiet), some became ill and withdrew (J.S. Marais, Leo Marquard), some were not available or eventually deemed unsuitable (Isaac Schapera, Marcus Arkin, Jack Simons, Philip Mayer, Noel Garson, Martin Legassick, Godfrey le May, F.A. van Jaarsveld, Jeffrey Butler, Eric Axelson), and some produced work that the editors quite simply thought inadequate (Ralph Horwitz, Peter Carstens). Clement Goodfellow, who was to have written on the late nineteenth century, fled South Africa because of his involvement in the African Resistance Movement (ARM), and then took his own life. For the chapter on farming in Volume 2, various scholars were considered before the editors settled on Monica’s son Francis, who was at the time completing a doctorate at Cambridge. Given their later critical reviews, it is ironic that Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, ‘both first-class people with the right approach’, were considered for the Highveld chapter in the first volume. Neither, in the end, seems to have been invited.16
The Oxford History was not well received by Marxist academics, whose focus Monica did not share. Rather than debates about capital and its relationship with racism, Monica’s interest was South Africa’s early history. She would surely have dismissed sociologist Ben Magubane’s view that the Oxford History was ‘the ultimate word of liberalism’s irrelevant wisdom’, exemplifying ‘wishful thinking and the limits of bourgeois thought’, and essentially ‘unable to go beyond the limits imposed by its interest in the status quo’. Magubane went on to make the bizarre claim that ‘the intellectual inertia or indifference to historical reality exhibited by Wilson can be explained by Freudian theory as resulting from an individual’s wish to hide what is shameful, fearful and socially unacceptable. The dispossession of the Africans and its consequences are extremely unpleasant to contemplate and equally unpleasant to explain.’ Monica never responded directly to these attacks, however, possibly because she recognised that writing history is an ongoing process with no one having the last word.17
The reception of the Oxford History made clear the division between ‘liberal’ history, emphasising ‘interaction’, and the neo-Marxist history of many of its critics. To Monica, Marxism seemed ‘an ephemeral terminology’. For example, the characterisation of husbands and wives as members of different and competing classes seemed unhelpful to her. Her commitment to empiricism, and her deep knowledge of the nineteenth-century Eastern Cape frontier, is demonstrated in her essay on the Xhosa prophet Mhlakaza. Published in French, it unfortunately found few readers in southern Africa.18
These attacks obscured the significance of the Oxford History, particularly as it related to the liberation politics of the time. It was intended as an intervention against the historical distortions of apartheid. Powerful figures like General van den Bergh, head of the Bureau of State Security, clearly understood this, though in his opinion the book ‘confirm[ed] the Communists’ view of history’. Monica was acutely aware of the impact the History might have: insisting on complete accuracy in one of the settlement maps, she told the publisher, ‘it is an explosive document’. To state censors, however, the first volume appeared to have no contemporary relevance, and it was available to political prisoners on Robben Island. Inmate Neville Alexander, who was studying for an honours degree in history, obtained a copy that passed from hand to hand. ‘It opened up peoples’ minds,’ Alexander said. ‘I remember even somebody like Nelson [Mandela] was absolutely fascinated by the fact that it was these sources that we didn’t even know about, and the book had a major influence on the way people saw their history – there’s no doubt about it.’ This was Monica’s hope and intention. Using veiled language in case her mail was opened, she told Audrey Richards that she had received ‘a special message from … dusky people about the Oxford History which had provided a new blik [view] for those enclosed’.19
At a 1968 conference on ‘African Societies in Southern Africa’, organised by Thompson and held in Lusaka, Zambia, Monica found herself addressing mainly historians. She drew the attention of delegates to studies focusing on change in economic and social structures. Conceding that she was not ‘a well-brought-up historian who holds fast to chronology and frowns on comparisons that stray out of time’, Monica went on to provide a wide-ranging overview of continuous and ongoing changes in the social structure of African societies. She had only recently completed the chapter on the Nguni and Sotho people in the Oxford History, and so she teased out comparisons between these and other societies. She also drew delegates’ attention to Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost, which demonstrated that historians were beginning to find ‘changes in family structure a fit subject for study’. As Monica put it in notes for another paper, she was seeking a ‘model that moves’, which would enable anthropologists and historians to interact productively.20
In 1971 the second volume of the Oxford History, which included Monica’s chapter on the history of peasant communities, appeared. In the prevailing atmosphere of banning and censorship, she was determined that both volumes of the History should be available. In this climate, the publisher, Oxford University Press, had decided not to publish Leo Kuper’s chapter on African nationalism in its South African edition of Volume 2. Because Kuper had quoted banned sources, it was felt that the book was at risk. As a gesture of protest, Monica insisted that Kuper’s chapter be replaced by fifty-three blank pages so that the banning would be clear for all to see. As things turned out, the Oxford History was not proscribed, though the incident caused a major rift with Kuper, who accused the editors and OUP of censorship. Monica was extremely upset at the attack: ‘[it] seared very deep with me just because it was from someone I had counted a friend’. While this was a most unfortunate turn of events for a ground-breaking historical project, the two were eventually reconciled, with Kuper regretting the break in their ‘long friendship’.21
As she neared retirement in 1973, Monica delivered the third Dugmore Memorial Lecture in Grahamstown, where she addressed the key role played by the interpreter on the frontier. The following year she participated in a conference at Rhodes University where the theme was the history of the Transkei and Ciskei, writing a chapter for the published volume that followed. In this chapter, she pointed to areas for further research, drawing attention especially to the need for black writers to offer new interpretations of the past. In 1976, at the opening of the Missionary Museum in King William’s Town, she spoke of the role of missionaries on the frontier, whether as agents of conquest or servants of God.22
‘I’ve always seen anthropology and history as part of one whole’
In the nearly twenty-five years from the early 1950s to the late 1970s Monica published four important monographs. They were based on her fieldwork in buNyakyusa with Godfrey, as well as fieldwork on her 1955 return visit. Aspects of her approach were challenged, particularly by anthropologists Simon Charsley and Michael McKenny, and by historian Marcia Wright of Columbia University. Wright’s meticulous 1971 study, German Missions in Tanganyika, was based on mission archives, and made relatively little use of the Wilsons’ work, merely referring to Monica’s Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor as ‘of great value … [n]otwithstanding certain [unspecified] misconstructions of history’. She subsequently taxed the Wilsons with projecting the situation in the 1930s into a past that was in fact marked by conflict, change and constant reinterpretation. Specifically, she accused them of misinterpreting the relationship between religious and chiefly authority.23
Replying ‘with reluctance’ to her critics, Monica defended detailed ethnographic observation and pointedly asked: ‘What periods of time (if any) have the three critics spent in Bu-Nyakyusa?’ She rejected Charsley’s charge that the work she had done with Godfrey was ‘timeless’. They had dealt, for example, with Christianity and change, and with diversity, ‘the cross-section of social change’. Conceding that ‘except in the Constitution of Ngonde, the flow of time [had] not been the main focus of attention’, she stated that her forthcoming For Men and Elders would combine its discussion ‘with analysis of the complex relationships of generations, and of men and women’. She remarked: ‘It is coming out somewhat womens’ libish, which I had not intended, but that is where the evidence leads.’ When the book appeared, she wrote to an old friend: ‘I await brickbats from the anthropologists who dislike one discussing history, and historians who disapprove of anthropology.’24
When the brickbats came, they clearly hurt: ‘a vicious and prompt review of For Men and Elders by Marcia Wright … sank it with most historians’. Sadly for Monica, more positive reviews by Aidan Southall and Jan Vansina came too late to redeem its reputation. Wright claimed that ‘anxiety about the consequences of radical change permeates and perhaps motivates the book. Diversity then emerges as part of a counter-ideology, liberal towards traditional values and hostile to the new socialism.’ More cogently, perhaps, she stated that any book that ‘rejects’ documentary evidence ‘is seriously handicapped’. In spite of some ‘highly suggestive materials’, For Men and Elders was, finally, ‘disappointing’. In contrast, Jan Vansina, doyen of African historians at the time, described it as ‘an extraordinary book … a “longitudinal” study of an African society … the social history of a rural community in the colonial and postcolonial age’. He noted that broad statements were supported with actual case studies, a method that ‘historians welcome with glee’. In Vansina’s view, ‘the Wilsons never were “pure” functionalists. They were fascinated by social change, almost right from the onset.’ He considered Monica’s account of change ‘remarkably clear’, praising her for eschewing unsupported generalisation and instead focusing on the specific: ‘Her work beautifully shows how a generalization such as “dependency” is just that: a big generalization that attempts to explain situations on a world-wide scale, or at least a continental one … the local society is not just a dune to be moulded by the dependency winds.’ He concluded: ‘this is an important book … [it] carries a message to historians, especially social historians. It also is grist to the mill of economic historians in that it shows the coincidence of so much social change with economic change.’ In 1985 historian Martin Chanock characterised the book as ‘the most significant work yet of Central African social history’.25
Monica’s work foreshadowed what came to be known as ‘contemporary history’. Writing to Audrey Richards about For Men and Elders, Monica said she was convinced that analysis of diversity in contemporary societies, the result of many transformations in the past, was the key to understanding change. She also noted: ‘My historian friends look shocked when I say “diversity is change in the contemporary moment” – they can’t conceive of a contemporary moment of change which I think is arthritic!’ After informing Audrey that she was returning to their 1930s approach, her friend replied that the second chapter, ‘A Model that Moves’, should be ‘read by every student of change’. She said that the long and arduous work on the Oxford History had made For Men and Elders ‘the best book’ Monica had yet written, giving it ‘a perspective that no other anthropologist [had] achieved’.26
Monica was excited at the changes that had occurred in historiography. She was particularly pleased that contemporary French historians were ‘using so much of what I would call anthropology’, she wrote to Leonard Thompson in 1982. She was delighted too at the ‘magnificent’ sweep of John Roberts’s Penguin History of the World, and to her Cambridge contemporary Muriel Bradbrook she observed: ‘I’ve always seen anthropology and history as part of one whole and it’s good to read a historian who does so and has really digested all the admirable work done in France.’ Monica regarded John Iliffe as the outstanding historian of Africa of the day, judging his A Modern History of Tanganyika ‘the best history of any part of Africa I have read’. Iliffe understood the nature of small-scale societies and what change in transport implied, and he also grasped the importance of solid evidence. And, she added, ‘he can write’. Historians who had not, from early on, read any anthropology, were severely disadvantaged, she believed, ‘almost as if they had missed learning to speak during the babbling stage’. But Monica’s criticisms were directed at historians themselves rather than at history as a discipline, and to her students she often quoted R.H. Tawney’s alleged remark that historians need ‘not more documents but stronger boots’.27
Monica’s broad understanding of history is exemplified by her interest in the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who attempted to combine evolutionary thought and religion. De Chardin’s emphasis on the historicity of Christian revelation resonated with Monica’s own sense of a world where God was at once incarnate in, and revealed through, humanity’s struggle towards understanding and self-consciousness. These ideas, together with Darwin’s theory of evolution and Freud’s studies of the unconscious, were, for her, landmarks in mankind’s growing capacity for social and also self-analysis. Though a close follower of Erik Erikson’s use of psychoanalysis in historical studies, she was contemptuous of the notion that there are differences between the mental processes of races. This is clear from her response to the superintendent of Tara Psychiatric Hospital in Johannesburg. When H. Moross approached her about the potential for a ‘different approach to African Psychiatry which may be more effective and economical than that practiced [sic] on White races’, Monica replied caustically that a good start would be to address issues such as compulsory education, crèches, playing fields, jobs, wages, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and a settled urban population.28
In the late 1950s, Monica even touched on conclusions that might be drawn from the study of primate groups. Reflecting on the emergence of language and human society, and taking an evolutionary-historical perspective that few historians would have contemplated at the time, she examined baboon behaviour at Cape Point. She did so with a group of students led by Professor Kenneth Hall of the psychology department at UCT.29
‘In a fog and a bog’
It may be argued that Monica became increasingly isolated in her discipline during her years at UCT. On a personal level, she got on well with J.P. Bruwer from Stellenbosch and certain other volkekunde anthropologists, despite the concepts of racial identity and separation that underlay their approach. But she only intermittently and reluctantly attended conferences of the Association for Anthropology in Southern Africa, a forum that uneasily united social anthropologists and volkekundiges until the latter split away in 1977. The academic boycott, initiated by the African National Congress in exile, had been in place since the 1960s, but Monica did not support this anti-apartheid strategy. For one thing, it added to her difficulties in staffing her department adequately. In a letter to the American anthropologist William Shack, who had spent time in her department, Monica argued that ‘if people are left isolated they believe their ideas normal as well as right, however eccentric as well as wrong they may be’.30
Monica became increasingly disenchanted, moreover, by what she saw as anthropology’s loss of direction internationally. ‘Some … are not scholarly and careless of evidence that does not fit current theory!’ she wrote to Audrey Richards in 1979. Two years later, she complained that clarity of purpose was ‘dismally absent’ and that the discipline was ‘in a fog and a bog’, though she did acknowledge that its practitioners were ‘feeling after something different and original’. She believed that the next generation might well ‘return to the detailed, scholarly reports, now out of fashion’, of which Reaction to Conquest was an example. Monica told Audrey that she thought her Bemba studies were ‘already historical documents, and much more reliable … than most of those with which historians deal’. Cognisant of African nationalist criticisms that were current at the time, she suggested that Audrey expedite the study of the English village of Elmdon, prioritising this over the completion of her Bemba studies; part of her reasoning was that ‘it would be helpful to anthropology, at this stage, to have a European study by an anthropologist, an Africanist at that, when anthropology is almost a swear-word among young Africans, and spoken of as part of Colonialism’.31
When not abroad, Monica spent her university vacations at Hogsback, where she stayed permanently after her retirement at the end of 1973. It might be said that she lived fieldwork as opposed to making forays into other peoples’ cultures. Her depth of experience is apparent in her discussions of gender with Colin Murray during his research in Lesotho in 1974. Addressing his observation that ‘women [cope] with the daily problems in a way men do not’, she remarked: ‘[this] fits exactly with what I know of this valley (over 44 years!)’. And to Leonard Thompson she wrote: ‘living in this area its nineteenth century history is constantly near the surface of consciousness for me: I keep seeing the Xhosa, the Highland regiments, the missionaries, the burghers, as I drive around the valleys they frequented.’32
Contrasting Monica’s position with that of prevailing anthropological studies and the ‘moral vacuity’ he detected in much theorising, Colin Murray said that Monica’s work was memorable ‘for the quality of the fieldwork and the intensity of the collaboration with Godfrey in the Nyakyusa research’. He admired it for ‘the strength of the moral line that she took on the society in South Africa as she herself lived and worked in it’. He pointed out:
It was so easy within the British tradition of social anthropology to take no responsibility for those bigger issues. You lived and worked in Britain and occasionally you went away and did fieldwork in somebody else’s remote place, and it didn’t matter in the least if right or wrong was going on … I think that’s really important in Monica’s work.33
‘Your essence, and your testament’
The moral charge of Monica’s scholarship is inseparable from her religious faith, which is, however, rarely overt in her work. Yet it is unsurprising that, in 1965, when Monica was invited to give the Scott Holland lectures on religion and society, she enthusiastically accepted.34
The faith underlying Monica’s scholarship is clearer in these lectures than anywhere else in her published work. Asking Meyer Fortes to chair one of the lectures, she hoped that he would not feel it ‘an insidious piece of Christian apologetic in the guise of scholarship!’ In her journal entry for Whitsun 1966, she takes as her text John 15:16: ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.’ She felt she was ‘coming back to the centre of my life’s work’. Things which had seemed peripheral, such as the Keiskammahoek reports, Langa, her Christian Institute lectures, even the Oxford History, had contributed and led up to this moment. This was not a mere fleeting reaction: many years later, in 1980, she wrote to Francis that the study ‘came out of the depths and is what I really think’. She was reminded of how much she owed to Godfrey, not just in terms of philosophy, symbolism and anthropology, but also religion: ‘besides the magnificent mind there was a deep spiritual awareness. The root of the Scott-Holland lectures [is] his.’35
Monica gave the lecture series in Cambridge in 1969, confessing to Audrey Richards that she felt terrified on each occasion. She also recorded versions for the BBC Third Programme. Published as Religion and the Transformation of Society, their academic reception, though positive, was also measured. In a particularly perceptive review, J.D.Y. Peel said that the book was based on a simple evolutionist model that was unchanged from the 1945 The Analysis of Social Change, and if for nothing else, it was worth reading for its sensitive descriptions of traditional Nyakyusa life. Monica’s friend Bice Crichton-Miller reacted more personally: she thought the book was ‘marvellous … in a way your essence, and your testament’, and the dedication, to her two sons and to Godfrey, apt. She went on to remark, ‘I can see Godfrey and the work you shared with him haunting almost every page’.36
‘A man for reconciliation’
Monica’s final book was her edited biography and memoir of Z.K. Matthews, her friend and former colleague at Fort Hare. Because Frieda Matthews found it difficult working with her late husband’s papers, she decided, with full family backing, to approach Monica. She proposed she tackle ‘the Introductory Biographical sketch Zac’s Memoirs require’. Monica’s response was one of spontaneous delight: ‘My answer … dear Frieda is Yes!’ As she observed to her old friend Desmond Clark, ‘if black asks that sort of thing of white nowadays in this country one does not refuse!’ The project quickly escalated into a far more substantial task than Frieda had initially envisaged.37
The work that emerged, Freedom for My People, is a hybrid, comprising an edited version of Matthews’ papers, with Monica filling in where the material was inadequate. The gaps related mainly to Matthews’s political activities and his academic career at Fort Hare. This was odd, considering how central each was to his life. Monica was aware that she was not well qualified to write about Matthews as a political leader, but she had been asked by the family to carry out the assignment, and the book would be politically significant. The task could not therefore be delayed. Inevitably, there were inadequacies, one being the treatment of the Treason Trial, which may be ascribed to the fact that it was only after publication that Frieda Matthews discovered certain relevant letters.38
For Monica, the importance of the biography was that it showed ‘what it was like to grow up black in Kimberley, and at school in Lovedale and on to Fort Hare’. There were personal as well as political reasons for taking on the task. She wrote to publisher David Philip, noting the limitations of the source material, and explaining her reasons for undertaking the project:
[It was] out of love for both Z.K. and Frieda and close family ties. (Her mother was a friend of my mother’s; Godfrey was friendly with Z.K. and chose him for Tim’s godfather; I worked on Z.K.[’s] staff – a lecturer in his department – at Fort Hare, and the friendship continued until his death; I still visit Frieda and she me when distance permits).
Monica might have added that her father had been a colleague and friend of Frieda’s father, John Knox Bokwe – ‘both Presbyterians through and through’, as Francis Wilson has remarked – and that she and Frieda had remained close friends ever since their schooldays at Lovedale. The Hunter-Wilsons and Bokwe-Matthews had of course been part of the religious and educational elite at Lovedale and Fort Hare, which goes a long way in explaining Monica’s attitudes: her sense of the importance of an inclusive southern African history; her racial openness; and her insistence on academic excellence.39
Promptly and efficiently, Monica set about the task of writing the book. She insisted that original material be brought to her in person by trustworthy individuals. She sent detailed requests for information to Frieda. She arranged publishing contracts with Rex Collings in London and David Philip in Cape Town. She wrote to many people who had known Matthews, and visited the World Council of Churches in Geneva, stopping off in Nairobi, where he had worked for a time. While there, she stayed with Kenyan attorney-general Charles Njonjo, an ex-Fort Hare student of hers; he made special arrangements for a visa, which, given the times, white South Africans were usually refused.40
Monica was willing to consider stratagems to prevent banning of the book, for example offering to sign the book’s preface from Cambridge, thereby avoiding links to its South African origins, but she did not self-censor or sanitise the text. Defiantly, she wrote to David Philip: ‘I have considered my own position and have decided to stand by what I have written. There are certain advantages in being over 70 and no longer responsible for any one!’ Fearful that the book might be banned, David Philip was prepared to publish with blank pages, as with the second volume of the Oxford History. Monica was more sanguine, and did not believe that Freedom for My People would be banned, a correct assumption, as it turned out. But even if it came to the worst, she said that the book would ‘seep into the Republic’.41
Freedom for My People is probably as good a study of Z.K. Matthews as was possible at that time and in those circumstances. Though preceded by some scholarly and popular biographies of ‘traditional’ leaders, and autobiographies and biographies of modern, educated black South Africans, it was an innovative record of a major African nationalist leader. Monica succeeded in creating a coherent narrative out of a collection of disparate documents by Matthews and chapters written by herself, sometimes on areas with which she was not wholly familiar, such as the internal workings of African nationalism in Matthews’ day. As with much of Monica’s work, particularly her overtly historical studies, she wrote with a political as well as a scholarly purpose. In the case of the Matthews book, her intention was to bring to the fore an African academic and statesman, ‘a man for reconciliation’, as she described her subject. To Monica, Z.K. Matthews embodied the possibility of a liberal and tolerant South Africa, which was under devastating attack in her time. Initially, she had suggested ‘If This be Treason’ – Patrick Henry’s words in the Virginia Assembly in 1765 – as the book’s title. Writing to Philip, she justified her suggestion: ‘For a title to be “provocative” is perhaps useful’. Since Helen Joseph had already used this as the title for her own autobiography, it was decided that the title be Freedom for My People.42
Monica never ceased to innovate. From at least the early 1970s she was considering social and environmental history and anthropology of a distinctly modern kind. When Bishop Hugh Montefiore approached her about a possible ‘Theology of Nature’, she responded with a complete lack of romanticism, unwilling to generalise or oversimplify. By the early 1980s, she had read widely in the area, writing to Audrey Richards that she was ‘thinking about a book concerning this range of mountains [the Amatholes] – the trees, and people, and water supplies’. Monica had a goal, she said: ‘A “flyer” in the form of an article for Veld and Flora has gone off and I want to do the book.’ Ecology would be the focus, but history was ‘necessary to explain ecological change’, and also to foster a realistic approach. This aim was related to the politics of the time, in particular the formation of the Ciskei bantustan and the regime’s attempt to incorporate the Hogsback. Another likely inspiration was Audrey Richards’ study of Elmdon, the village where she lived. Harnessing the insights of various disciplines, Monica nevertheless spurned intellectual fashion and wrote with clarity and simplicity. This imbued her scholarship with a moral force and relevance that continues to ensure its significance.43