1949–1951: OXFORD

For my first term at Oxford University in 1949, I had a room in Wadham College, which had a loose association with Christ’s College. Many years later, when Bernard and I were living in Dorset, our friendly neighbours, the Cochranes, had a cocktail party, where Anne introduced me to a pompous retired naval commander, saying, ‘Oh, you’ve both been at Oxford.’ The commander spent some time telling me how he had been at Balliol, (one of the oldest, grandest and most intellectually prominent of the Oxford colleges), then he asked me which was my college. When I told him that I had been at Wadham, he paused, then said, ‘Oh, Wadham. Yes. Nice little college.’ This was the sort of remark that used to irritate me when I was getting used to the strange ways of the English, but on this occasion Bernard (who had overheard our conversation) and I were amused.

And indeed Wadham was a very nice little college, even though I, as a postgraduate, and living mostly out of college, was much less involved in college life than I had been at Cambridge. I did, however, join the Wadham College Swimming Club, and even swam for Oxford University, although not against Cambridge in the major competition. In the summer I used to swim at ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, a stretch of the River Isis where men could swim naked; several times I saw our Warden, Maurice Bowra, there. He would greet me cordially, while inspecting the talent. Bowra, whose tenure lasted thirty-two years, was one of Oxford’s characters.

I continued my Catholic instruction, meeting once a week with Father Fitzgerald, a Jesuit at Campion Hall. After some months, I suggested that I was ready to be received into the Church, and it was a shock when Father F disagreed, telling me that I still had a long way to go. I had thought that the RCs were so eager for converts, and here was the priest putting more difficulties in my way! However, on 6 June 1950 I was eventually received into the Church at St Aloysius, in Oxford. This was the church where Gerard Manley Hopkins had been an assistant priest, producing some marvellous verse, such as ‘Binsey Poplars’ and ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’.

My sponsors when I was received into the Church were Godfrey Lienhardt (then lecturer in Social Anthropology) and ‘E-P’ (my professor, EE Evans-Pritchard). There were several other converts in the Institute of Social Anthropology at about this time (including my friend David Pocock), and it was often said that E-P and Godfrey ‘lured’ us into the Church, and that the Institute favoured RCs. Both allegations were untrue. I knew E-P fairly well, as is inevitable in a small department, but before my reception into the Church, I had never discussed religion with him: he offered to be my sponsor as a voluntary – and, it seemed to me, a kindly – act. I treasure the certificate, with E-P’s and Godfrey’s signatures.

Over the years, various friends, either implicitly or explicitly, have accused me of evading responsibility by surrendering my free will to an authoritarian church. On the contrary, however, one of the aspects that consciously attracted me to Catholicism was the emphasis on personal responsibility. Throughout my instruction the stress was on being responsible – blaming not parents, nor childhood circumstances, nor anything else. I was also attracted by the responsibility of using one’s talents, whatever they were, to best advantage.

When I told my father of my conversion, he wrote a gracious letter, a model of a letter from a father to his son, saying that while he could no more understand my faith than he could his own father’s faith, he envied us both for having the capacity to believe.

In my second term I moved out of college to a flat in North Oxford which I shared with Ouma, who had by then separated from my father. (There was no formal separation, but from 1949 until their deaths, both in 1967, Ouma and Dad lived separate lives, although remaining on cordial terms.) Ouma was ‘a good mum’, fitting in well, and being regarded with affection by my contemporaries. Julius once remarked, ‘Ouma is unusual, in having no capacity for boredom’ – a nice compliment. When she joined me in 1949 she was seventy-one years old, and enthusiastic about the world. She would take herself off to stay with her sisters, Hilda near Chipping Norton, and Olive in Lancaster, or with friends. After I left for

First Court, Wadham College

152 Tanganyika, Ouma stayed at a guest house at Boars Hill, near Oxford, where she became friendly with Mrs Lawrence, the mother of TE Lawrence, and they maintained a correspondence for years. Mrs Lawrence had left her parson husband for her lover, who was the father of TE and his brothers. She was said to have remarked that, having committed – by the Church’s standards – one grave sin, she was determined that the rest of her life would be beyond reproach. I saw parallels with my own life – shared with Bernard when ‘society’ disapproved – and I was determined to try to live beyond reproach, though of course I did not always succeed.

This was a golden age in British social anthropology, with Professor Evans-Pritchard presiding at the Institute of Social Anthropology. The staff included Meyer Fortes, John Peristiany, who had also moved from Cambridge, MN ‘Chamu’ Srinivas (later one of India’s foremost social anthropologists) and Franz Steiner. Encouraged by Godfrey Lienhardt, who was then a lecturer at Oxford, I used to visit Franz in his little bed-sitter. It was only in 1999, when I read a biography about him, that I appreciated Franz’s many facets, including a close relationship with Iris Murdoch, and his stature as a writer and poet. Franz, a Jewish refugee whose entire family had been wiped out in the Holocaust, had been brought to Oxford by E-P. He encouraged me to talk about my wartime experiences; I seldom spoke of those years, being – or making myself – too concerned with the present.

Meyer Fortes left Oxford in 1950 to become Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, where he soon established a first-class department. At that time, only six British universities offered postgraduate training in social anthropology, three of the professors being South African, and Jewish – Meyer Fortes at Cambridge, Isaac Schapera at the London School of Economics, and Max Gluckman at Manchester. All three had been attracted to anthropology, as I had been, at least partly by discomfort with the circumstances and racial divisions in our native land.

There were few formal lectures, the emphasis being on the ‘Friday Seminar’, when a member of the department, or a visitor, would present a paper, followed by discussion until 6 p.m., when the pubs opened, and we repaired to The King’s Arms to continue the discussion informally. Another South African student at the Institute was Piet Koornhof; very Calvinist, he did not join us at the pub. His closest friend was a Nigerian, who shared his evangelical Christian outlook. On his return to South Africa Piet joined the Nationalist Party, eventually becoming the Minister of Co-operation and Development – a euphemism for enforced removals. In an ironic twist, Koornhof later divorced his wife and married a coloured woman thirty years his junior.

Among those who gave seminars were Godfrey Lienhardt, who had recently returned from his first fieldwork among the Dinka in southern Sudan; the American couple, Paul and Laura Bohannan, back from their studies of the Tiv of Central Nigeria; and John Beattie, who had spent eight years in the British Colonial Service in Tanganyika, and had started his studies with the Bunyoro of Uganda. They all gave exciting, challenging seminars, and were available to us both formally and informally.

Perhaps I should have been over-awed, the little PRC (‘poor ruddy colonial’ as a contemporary once jokingly but affectionately called me) among these sophisticated giants, but I was not, mainly because I was met with kindness, and constantly pushed to be articulate and to defend my own positions. The French sociologist Emil Durkheim was then much in vogue, as was Marcel Mauss, and I did feel at some disadvantage when everybody else (apart from the Americans, and other PRCs) was fluent in French. The basic conversational French I had learnt in our Italian POW camp was not adequate for reading Durkheim’s Anomie, or Suicide, in the original text.

We all read a great deal. We did fit in time for non-anthropology books, but our main attention was on becoming familiar with the anthropological corpus. This was much more a practicable aim than it would be today, with the explosion of publications, many of which I, and many of my contemporaries, find unreadable. The Institute of Social Anthropology had a good library, and less frequent visits to the university’s Bodleian Library always left me awed. When today I see first-year African students gazing round the library at the University of Cape Town, probably on their first visit, I recapture my own reaction at the Bodleian.

We all had bicycles, and even if I found Oxford relatively congested after Cambridge, traffic was still manageable compared to today’s crowded scene. I made frequent visits to the cinema, mostly to see the new, exciting French and Italian films, and went on frequent walks – in the parks very close to the Institute, where E-P liked to walk his visitors briskly around, and I also went further afield, to The Trout, a riverside pub on the Thames, or to Binsey, immortalised in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘Binsey Poplars’. When I walked out to visit David Pocock, then living in a caravan at Binsey, I would murmur:

Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

Postgraduate students were required to write a library-based thesis, of about ten thousand words, as a test for their ability to pursue studies in anthropology. Preparing my thesis, ‘Some Political Institutions of the Southern Nguni’ (i.e. the Xhosa) gave me a much keener insight into the South African frontier wars fought in the Eastern Cape from about 1780 till 1850. I read with anguish of the ruthless exploitation and the inexorable collapse of Xhosa society, culminating in the young visionary girl, Nongqawuse, persuading her people in 1856 that the ancestor spirits had commanded them to kill their cattle and burn their crops, so that the white men could be driven away: the results were catastrophic.

My thesis was accepted, after a gruelling hour with the external examiner, Max Gluckman. The viva was ‘gruelling’ because Gluckman had read my thesis intensively, and asked me searching questions, almost page by page, demanding satisfactory answers, no shillyshallying allowed. Afterwards, I felt flattered by this keen and most professional interest in what was at that time my most ambitious academic attempt. Max Gluckman had moved in 1949 from Oxford to Manchester, founding what became one of the leading departments of social anthropology in Britain.

When I went to Oxford in 1949 I had fully expected to return the following year to my native South Africa, as stipulated in my scholarship conditions. The Department of Native Affairs, in Pretoria, grudgingly offered me a temporary, poorly-paid post as a clerk: clearly they were not interested in employing an English-speaking, liberal young man, who had three university degrees, two of them from England. The National Party, which had taken power in the previous year, was already implementing their apartheid policy. Neither they nor I could see any place for me in their grand design.

I explained the circumstances to the Elsie Ballot Scholarship trustees, who agreed that I might fulfil my obligation by doing administrative work in another part of Africa. My first thought was of southern Sudan (which fell under the British Foreign Office, not the Colonial Service Office). Having been steeped in the lore of the Nuer (by E-P) and the Dinka (by Godfrey Lienhardt), I found the prospect of being a District Officer in remote, romantic Sudan highly appealing. I was disappointed when I was turned down, the rejection being tempered by a civil letter, explaining that while I was considered a suitable applicant, and while E-P (who was held in high regard by the administration in the Sudan) had recommended me, it was not politically expedient to appoint a white South African, with independence for the Sudan looming (it became independent in 1955). I was beginning to learn the handicaps of being a white South African, as apartheid was being implemented with increasing ruthlessness and repression.

In 1953 I was granted British citizenship (my mother having been born in England), so I gave up my South African citizenship, which was automatically restored on my return to South Africa in 1999. Despite the change in nationality and passport, I always regarded myself as a South African, and I never pretended otherwise. During the apartheid years, friends sometimes advised me to say that I was British, to avoid possible criticism, but, perhaps perversely, I declined.

When I was deciding what I should do, my friends at the Institute of Social Anthropology intervened. John Beattie pointed out that after his colonial administrative experience he had returned to university to study social anthropology, and was convinced that his eight years in Tanganyika had served as an excellent preparation for academic anthropology. Meyer Fortes echoed these comments, assuring me that I would always be welcome should I decide, later, to resume my studies. Chamu Srinivas urged me to become a colonial administrator, and to take advantage of my anthropological training by making a study of my colleagues. (Years later, Anthony Kirk-Greene, who had served in the Colonial Service in Nigeria, pioneered major studies of this topic, but I did not find time to tackle it.)

Both Beattie and Fortes recommended that I apply to the Colonial Service, and Meyer arranged for me to be interviewed by Sir Roger Furse, head of the Colonial Service Office in London. I was accepted by the Colonial Service and, after another interview, was given my first choice of country, which was, with John Beattie’s influence, Tanganyika (now the major part of Tanzania). My other choices had been Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) or Nyasaland (Malawi). I decided that I would refuse to go to Kenya, if offered, not wanting to get involved in another simmering conflict between white and black. (The Mau Mau insurrection started a few years later.) The official told me that I would be required to take a year’s ‘colonial cadet course’, at a British university. This was June 1950, and I was twenty-seven years old, and impatient to start my career. I asked politely if I could go to Tanganyika right away, having already studied anthropology, history, economics and law, the staples of the course: the language, Swahili, was the only segment that would be new to me. ‘So, you think you know everything?’ he asked, ‘No, you must do the course.’

The year 1950 was a ‘ Holy Year’ in the Catholic Church, when pilgrimages were encouraged. I planned to join a Cambridge friend on a walk to Rome while I was waiting for the result of my interview for the Colonial Service. We had both read Hilaire Belloc’s Path to Rome, a vivid account of his pilgrimage from Toul in France to Rome, in 1901:

In early youth the soul can still remember its immortal habitation, and clouds and edges of hills are of another kind from ours, and every scent and colour has a savour of Paradise …

However, we had to forgo the pleasure of following in Belloc’s footsteps, because the Colonial Service Office told me that I should not leave England, as I had to be available to receive my orders. I could not say that I would keep in touch by email – France and Italy were then, to the official mind, more distant than Tibet is today.

My interview was successful, and the good news was that I would do the course at Oxford, so I was able to keep in contact with my friends at the Institute of Social Anthropology, and Ouma and I could stay on in our pleasant flat in north Oxford. I was also able to fulfil the six terms at Wadham College, which was later beneficial, six terms being a requirement for enrolling for a D Phil, which I did ten years later.

When I started my colonial course at Oxford in the autumn, I went to mass every morning at St Aloysius. On Sundays I used to join Godfrey and others for 11 a.m. mass at St Aloysius, after which we would go next door to The Horse and Jockey – the landlord was a sidesman at our church.

Ouma and DWB. Oxford, 1950

The year of my colonial course at Oxford was the most relaxing of my whole career. I had time for extensive reading, going to concerts, playing village cricket at weekends, making occasional trips to London, and generally enjoying myself – free from the constant pressure of the examinations which had been a major factor in my life for the previous five years.

The lectures were well-prepared and easy to follow, my fellow cadets, particularly the four who were also to be posted to Tanganyika, were congenial. In addition to formal teaching, we went on several trips: to the Law Courts (including the Old Bailey in London) to prepare us for our magisterial duties; and to prisons, hospitals, and social service agencies. We all got on well, and were highly motivated to be conscientious, and to pay attention, being keen to make a good start in our colonial careers.

We had a gem in our Swahili teacher, Ali Ahmed Jahadhmy, a gifted teacher and a born comedian, making all lessons both challenging and entertaining, and giving us a thorough grounding in the language. Ali Ahmed came from Kenya: his ancestral home was the pretty coastal town of Lamu, and his kiSwahili was kisafi sana (very pure). He insisted on high standards, which stood us in good stead later. I was so grateful to Ali Ahmed, when, on arriving in Dar es Salaam in September 1951, I found that I could easily engage the local people in conversation. (Twenty years later, I helped Ali Ahmed to come to the University of California, Santa Barbara, to teach Swahili.)

Looking back, I suppose there was some ‘stress’ during my Oxford days, but I do not remember this as a significant factor, nor did we talk about it: by this time I had acquired the Oxbridge style, lightly mocking all that worried me.

When British people discovered that I had attended both Cambridge and Oxford, the inevitable question was, ‘Which team do you support in the Boat Race?’ I was tempted to say, sententiously (and truly) that I did not give the matter much thought, but I did concede that my sentimental ties to Cambridge were much stronger, and I was pleased when the Light Blues won.