An Historian’s Passage to Africa by Bill Freund (review)

This autobiography is published posthumously following Bill Freund’s untimely death in August 2020. The genesis of the book is indicated in Robert Morrell’s fine ‘Preface’ and in Bill’s ‘Acknowledgements’, signed off in June of that year shortly before he died (212). There Bill noted that the autobiography started as ‘a personal project’ (211) but that following readings of the manuscript by several friends he was persuaded to submit it for publication. It is a compelling book for those who know his work, and in some ways perhaps an unsettling one, which I return to after outlining its contents.

The first three chapters explore the family histories of Bill’s mother and father from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of the First World War and its impact on life in central Europe, in particular Vienna, and especially for its Jewish populations as the ‘dark years’ of the 1930s unfolded (Chapter 3). Bill’s parents were able to escape Nazi rule and the subsequent Holocaust, making their separate ways to Chicago where they met and then married. Bill, born in 1944, was their only child. These first three chapters are illustrated with items of contemporary correspondence and photographs, and contain illuminating sociological sketches of the times and places they address, a feature of the book throughout.

Chapter 4 (‘A new life in America’) describes Bill’s early life on the North Side of Chicago and his experiences of the social worlds of the ‘Chicago Viennese’ (56), including his extended family there, and of his elementary school years. He notes that his parents ‘shared more or less the same political values from the Austrian socialist tradition’ (45) although his mother later ‘gradually evolved into more or less a US liberal’ (57). From elementary school Bill went on to high school at Lake View from 1958 to 1962. There he was included in the elite grading of the ‘100s’ system with numerous other Jewish students and friends. He ‘enjoyed Hebrew and Sunday School lessons and learning about Jewishness, up to a point’ (68). It is in this account of his high school and adolescent years that one starts to get a sense of Bill’s personal formation with all its subsequent developments. ‘I think as a teenager I was already acquiring many of the traits of an intellectual within what was a rather congenial and protected environment. But I hadn’t much idea of the wider world and how I would fit into it’ (70).

The only offer for undergraduate study he got was from the University of Chicago. At first he was ‘shattered’ that his applications elsewhere were unsuccessful (71) but he went on to spend apparently happy years as a student in Chicago, filled with intellectual, cultural and political openings, encounters and friendships that he describes with considerable animation. Unusually, as there were no historians of Africa on the Chicago faculty, he ‘decided to try to put together a major in African history’ (79). His graduation present (presumably from his parents) was a first trip to Europe. This enabled him to meet diverse members of his extended diasporic family, and proved a foretaste of his keen appetite for travel and skill in pursuing it: ‘There was nothing I didn’t enjoy’ (83). Travel offered opportunities to learn about other ways of life, other cultures, and Bill was not subject to ‘Americanitis – the inability to manage without the familiar and the banal’ (84).

With his BA grades, and the support of the University of Chicago History Department, Bill set off with high hopes on a scholarship to study for a PhD at Yale. Although he ‘never felt at home in New Haven’, his first two years at Yale ‘were by no means unhappy’ (88). He immersed himself in reading and study, and was able to take a summer course in Swahili at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1967. He made good friends at Yale, including Fred Cooper, ‘also a great intellectual partner’ (93). 1969 gave...