As a Student: Africa and England

Abstract

As a Student: Africa and England Bill Freund Chapter 7, from Bill Freund (2021) Bill Freund: an historian’s passage to Africa. Johannesburg: Wits UP. Beginning in 1969, I had my first real encounter with Africa, itself part of a more complicated trajectory through Europe as well. This was a long and wonderful trip, lasting more than a year, which I was very sorry to bring to an end. To give a simple account, it can be divided into four parts. The first was a phase of three months which I spent researching for my PhD in the Dutch archives and living in The Hague. The second was a further archival research phase, this time in Cape Town. The third was a remarkable trip through Africa based on the way flights could be arranged and paid for in those days: to Lesotho, Kenya and Tanzania, Ethiopia, Egypt and out via Cyprus. The fourth was harder to justify. Reunited with my fieldnotes (index cards!) faithfully taken to Oxford by a South African DPhil student, Chris Saunders, aboard a Union-Castle liner, which still transported people from the Cape to Southampton, I spent the last months starting to write up my thesis as a visitor to St Antony’s College, Oxford. But those few months had the biggest long-term consequences. In Africa, I certainly had a stunning time encountering the antiquities of Egypt and Ethiopia, seeing some of the awesome scenery of East Africa (Ngorogoro Crater, Lake Naivasha, Kilimanjaro) and, following my introduction to Kiswahili in UCLA, having an enjoyable look at the East African coast where the classic coastal culture spoke to me. It was sufficiently urban and had enough charm and handicraft and cuisine to appeal to me. I should be dishonest if I did not admit that the more typical African village culture that I saw, often through the eyes of young American researchers and Peace Corps volunteers whom I visited, did not draw me in. Much of the historiography of Africa as it was then developing (under the strong influence of the University of Wisconsin) was virtually ethnographic, [End Page 98] ethnographic, explorations of the minds of the typical villagers, sufficiently localised to make generalisations beyond a point very difficult. In effect African history was colonised by the better-developed field of anthropology. While I admired the best fieldwork expositions, I could not say that I was taken with the theoretical ideas in anthropology or its general project. I wanted to make a history for Africa that was historical and that could be placed alongside the histories of the other continents, and I wanted to focus on what I felt was the big picture while being sensitive to social nuance, incisive and not superficial. South Africa in 1969 was in a phase of quietude and repression. The African National Congress (ANC), not to mention its rivals, was nowhere to be seen and the government seemed to have matters in hand. The alternative youth culture sweeping America and Europe did not exist; I remember thinking that after three months I could virtually recognise all of the half-dozen white males in the city of Cape Town who wore long hair. They were massively outnumbered by elderly chaps in khaki shorts and blazers who clearly wished to identify first and foremost with their World War II service. Most pop music that I liked, most films I had seen or intended to see, were banned. And yet South Africa, archaic as it was considered to be, seemed to be doing very well indeed economically despite a stock market blip. This was surprising. Given my proclivities, much of what I had read about the politics of the country suggested crisis and acute tension. The most important writers on South Africa in America spent much of their time on the black opposition and its antecedents and prospects, often with a clear preference for more racial nationalist types than any prospective or real Communists.1 Yet, in reality, this political arena was almost entirely invisible or closed off in 1969. I was also amazed and sometimes fascinated by the strange political contortions exhibited by moderate white liberals who clearly wanted their own class...