Go There!

The wanderings of Thomas Lionel Hodgkin (1910–82) took him to Palestine and West Africa as well as to more conventional destinations. He worked as an archaeologist; as an official in the Colonial Service; as an adult-education tutor, a journalist and an academic; and for two important decades of his life he was a member of the Communist Party. His was, figuratively and physically, the long journey of a continuously enquiring, creative and generous intelligence.

A letter written at the age of twenty-two, when he wavered over the offer of a post in the Gold Coast administration, indicates how far his journey was to take Thomas:

I am certain that it would be impossible to give up friends and sociabilities unless one could continue learning, and forming relationships in that way – and one couldn't do that in The Gold Coast – a country with no past and no history – and no present either – only perhaps a promising future – and that at a Kindergarten level. So now I shall try to find Archaeological work . . . at Ithaca and then Jericho: that would take me where I want to be – and it will at any rate be an interesting beginning.

It was indeed 'an interesting beginning' for the man whose greatest achievements originated in his perception that, notwithstanding the persistence of British and French colonial rule, the West Africans among whom he worked, taught and travelled in the 1940s constituted societies in their own right, which were both drawing on their own cultural traditions and creating their own political responses to modernity. Thomas might not have been the only distinguished Africanist of his generation but he was the only historian of Africa who could have written the books Nationalism in Colonial Africa (1956) and African Political Parties (1961) as well as fostering and inspiring, in the 1960s and 1970s, a hugely important body of research on nineteenth and twentieth-century Africa from the circle of his graduate students and associates in Accra and Oxford. In later life he gave his students the advice encapsulated in his youthful aspiration 'that would take me where I want to be', saying: 'Decide where it is you want to observe history, and go there'.

In 1932 Africa was clearly a closed book to the young Oxford graduate whose interests followed slightly more conventional lines. In another letter of that year he wrote to his mother: 'my heart leaps at the thought of Arabs and my tongue tries to shape Arab remarks'. There is little indication of the particular origin of this enthusiasm. But it led Thomas first to middle-eastern archaeology and then into the service of the Palestine mandate. Here his sympathies with Arab nationalists (and Jewish socialists) quickly brought him to the conviction that the British imperial system could not be a force for good. After clandestine travels in the neighbouring mandates and North Africa he returned to England a communist, and became active in the adult-education movement and the League Against Imperialism. He retained a lifelong interest in Arab culture and the spread of Islam; and his later recognition of the role of Islam in African history was one of the most important features of his life's major intellectual project.

Thomas was educated at Winchester and Balliol (where his maternal grandfather had been a celebrated principal), and belonged to a cousinhood occupying the upper echelons of British governance, scholarship, science and the arts. He did not settle into any of the niches which these connections offered, and for which his many gifts qualified him. Not for nothing is Wolfers's first chapter entitled 'Charmed Circles'. The biographer permits himself very few comments on his narrative, but obliquely suggests something of the weight of expectation to which a scion of the house of Hodgkin might be subject. He records that in the examinations for the first stage (moderations) of his undergraduate degree 'Thomas, for whom a first was expected, took a second. He...