Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters ed. by Andrew Banks and Leslie Banks (review)

Inside African Anthropology is the fascinating story of Monica Wilson, one of the leading Africanist social anthropologists of the twentieth century. Although, as the subtitle suggests, its central theme is her relations with her interpreters and research assistants, it is also about her progression from the daughter of missionaries at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape through her undergraduate and postgraduate days at Cambridge University, to her marriage to Godfrey Wilson and their brief partnership as researchers, and finally to her rise as a distinguished researcher and teacher. In many ways it is her biography. Fortunately for the contributors, Wilson left very extensive personal archives, now deposited at the University of Cape Town, where she taught from 1951 to her retirement in 1973.

In the richly annotated introductory chapter, Andrew Banks surveys briefly the evolution of social anthropology in South Africa, and then turns to establishing the theoretical framework and the focus and tone of the book: the role of co-researchers, that is, interpreters and assistants. Here he credits the work of Lyn Schumaker and Nancy Jacobs, both of whom have demonstrated amply the extent to which researchers owe their success to their assistants/interpreters, “the insiders” whom they describe as co-producers of knowledge in the field. In her Lovedale-Alice environments, Wilson was an “insider”; she spoke isiXhosa and had gone to school there with black pupils. But outside the area she was, in a way, an “outsider.” Therefore, reliance on assistants (“insiders”) became important. The introduction also devotes some pages to the situation of female social anthropologists, especially the ways in which scholars, such as Wilson and her contemporaries, navigated a male-dominated world. Her Cambridge tutors had tried to convince her to stay away from topics that they felt were unsuitable to women researchers. In this regard she was an “outsider” trying to become an “insider.”

The book is divided into three parts, arranged thematically and chronologically. Part 1, “Pondoland and the Eastern Cape,” covering the period 1908–1930, has three chapters. In chapter 1, Andrew Banks discusses Monica Wilson’s influences up to her Cambridge days. The next chapter, also by Banks, is about her research for her Ph.D. degree, and this is the first time the reader sees the importance of assistants in a researcher’s life. In chapter 3 Leslie Banks ploughs through Monica Wilson’s papers on her initial work in Pondoland, and he confirms the key role that her various assistants played in her research. Interestingly, he also notes that she excluded from the published version of her thesis the fact that the woman she stayed with for seven months at Ntibane, Pondoland, and who helped launch her fieldwork, was in fact a Coloured woman and not white.

Part 2, “Bunyakyusa,” shifts the scene to southern Tanganyika where Godfrey Wilson had been researching in Nyakyusa country since January 1934 and where Monica joined him in March 1935, a few weeks after their wedding in South Africa. They remained here until January 1938. The role of the “insider” is illustrated in the story of Leonard Mwaisumu, their principal assistant during their initial years. Part 3, “Fort Hare and the University of Cape Town,” takes the reader back to South Africa where Monica Wilson was to spend the rest of her life, and each chapter focuses on her as a teacher and mentor. The “insider–outsider” dichotomy is also a major thread in this section. Equally notable in all the chapters is Wilson’s concern for the advancement of African students, as demonstrated by the cases of M. Godfrey Pitje and Livingstone Mqotsi. Their situation, like that of Archie Mafeje, also shows that no matter how talented they were, and despite the support of well-established scholars like Wilson, Africans had difficulty making headway in segregationist and apartheid South Africa. In chapter 8 Andrew Banks and...