The Fires Beneath. The Life of Monica Wilson, South African Anthropologist, by Sean Morrow

The Fires Beneath. The Life of Monica Wilson, South African Anthropologist, by Sean Morrow. Penguin Random House South Africa, Penguin Books. Cape Town, South Africa, 2016. SBN‎ 9781776090396 / ISBN 978-1-77-609039-6

The Fires Beneath: The Life of Monica Wilson, South African Anthropologist, by Sean Morrow is a rich and illuminating intellectual biography of one of Southern Africa's most important twentieth-century social anthropologists.

Sean Morrow  

Chapter 1: Lovedale, Hogsback, Scotland, Port Elizabeth, 1908-1927

'Her feelings and her observations'

In 2008 Jonny Steinberg published a striking study of the impact of HIV-AIDS in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape. Seeking to understand the context of the disease, he read Reaction to Conquest, which he described as cone of the finest ethnographic monographs ever penned in South Africa; it had been researched in Pondoland from 1930 to 1932 by Monica Hunter, then in her early twenties. Steinberg goes on to remark that, as a social scientist, Monica 'seldom draws attention either to her place in the world she describes or to the relationship between her feelings and her observations'. While there are many themes in this book, among them religion, politics, war, race and class, love and death, extensive and often highly personal sources now enable an understanding of Monica's 'place in the world', and an appreciation of the relationship between emotion and intellect, not only in her life, but also in her scholarship. 'Feelings and observations' pervade and bind together this story.

'Who I was and whence I had come'

Monica was from Lovedale Mission, near the small town of Alice, in South Africa's Eastern Cape, and also from Hogsback, the forested village in the Amathole Mountains. Perched on precipitous cliffs, just off Wolf Ridge Road, is Hunterstoun, family home of the Hunters and, later, the Wilsons. Below Hunterstoun lies the Tyhume Valley grassland, stretching thirty kilometres to Alice. Monica was born at Lovedale on 3 January 1908. Today, like mission stations in many parts of Africa, Lovedale has a desolate and abandoned air. Once the premier mission educational centre in southern Africa, it has now contracted to its central buildings, which have been used for various purposes since the campus was taken over first by the South African government and then, in 1979, by the Ciskei homeland, a creation of the apartheid regime. Many have collapsed entirely, leaving heaps of bricks among the encroaching vegetation. One wall of what was once described as 'one of the finest technical workshops in the country' is gone, so that today the two-storey building gapes open. But the oaks, under whose spreading branches students and workers attended services and assemblies, remain. Across the Tyhume River, the University of Fort Hare, Lovedale's offspring, continues to thrive. Lovedale began as a station of the United Free Church of Scotland, a liberal evangelical branch of Scottish Presbyterianism. Its missionaries rejected the idea that Africans should have only enough education to equip them to be labourers and to read the Bible in their own languages. Many Lovedale missionaries, dissenting from prevailing notions of racial separation and hierarchy, refused to separate their message from its social context. James Henderson of Livingstonia Mission in Malawi, who from 1906 was principal of Lovedale, said in 1900: 'it is not possible to stem the tide of Western civilisation if we desire it; but there is a more excellent way. Christ is in the civilisation more than we at all realise, so let us give it to them, keeping none of it back.' There were differences of approach between individuals, and changes of emphasis over time, but in essence Monica spent her childhood surrounded by this atmosphere of high-minded Christian endeavour where it was presumed that all people, irrespective of race, are capable of the highest intellectual pursuits. [...]

This is an excerpt from The Fires Beneath. The Life of Monica Wilson, South African Anthropologist, by Sean Morrow.

Title: The Fires Beneath
Subtitle: The Life of Monica Wilson, South African Anthropologist
Author: Sean Morrow
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Penguin Books
Cape Town, South Africa, 2016
ISBN‎ 9781776090396 / ISBN 978-1-77-609039-6
Hardcover, dustjacket, 16 x 24 cm, 472 pages, 3 maps