Godfrey Baldwin Wilson

Godfrey Baldwin Wilson (1908–1944) was born on 31 July 1908 at The Vicarage, Harston, Cambridgeshire, the only son of John Dover Wilson (1881–1969), the Shakespeare scholar, and his wife, Dorothy Mary (d. 1961), daughter of Canon Edward Curtis Baldwin, vicar of Harston. After graduating from Hertford College, Oxford, with a first in classics, he went in 1932 to study with Malinowski at the London School of Economics. He met Monica—they shared the same socially engaged Christian faith—at a student peace conference in Geneva organized by Alfred Zimmern under League of Nations auspices. They married in 1935 and had two sons, Francis (b. 1939) and Timothy (b. 1943).

From 1934 to 1938, as fellows of the International African Institute, Godfrey and Monica Wilson undertook a large-scale joint research project on social change in southern Tanganyika, among the Nyakyusa and Ngonde peoples. Between them they spent over fifty months in the field, making this one of the most intensive ethnographic studies ever done. Immediately afterwards, Godfrey was appointed the first director of the Rhodes–Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia, the first social research institute founded in any African colony. He at once launched an ambitious programme of research and himself inaugurated the series of Rhodes–Livingstone Papers, which rapidly set new standards in applied anthropology. His important ‘Essay on the economics of detribalization in Northern Rhodesia’ (Rhodes–Livingstone Papers, nos. 5–6) signalized the new topics of research which the institute pioneered: labour migration, African urban life, and the effects of migration on rural areas. Though he insisted that the task of anthropology was not to advocate policy but to provide relevant data and analysis, his forceful criticism of how some policies affected African welfare made him enemies in the administration, and Rhodesian pressure was a factor in his resignation in 1943. Together the Wilsons worked on a statement of the theoretical framework that underlay their work: the pithy and lucid The Analysis of Social Change (1945), whose core idea was that the fundamental feature of the changing lives of people in central Africa was the increase in the scale of social relations. At one stage, drafts were passing between Monica in South Africa and Godfrey, who was serving with an ambulance unit—he was a pacifist—with the forces in north Africa. Back in South Africa early in 1944 but still separated from his family, Godfrey Wilson became deeply depressed and took his own life on 19 May 1944. Their work together made Godfrey and Monica Wilson one of the most remarkable husband-and-wife teams ever known in social anthropology, a discipline in which such pairings have been particularly important.

After a spell at Fort Hare University College, Monica Wilson was appointed to chairs of social anthropology, first in 1947 at Rhodes University, and then at the University of Cape Town from 1952 to her retirement in 1973. Though by disposition a modest and private person, she was a warm host, and was active in university and public affairs. She was an exacting but inspiring teacher, who set great store by empirical accuracy and clarity of expression. The crowning achievement of her own scholarship was the corpus of Nyakyusa monographs, based on Godfrey's fieldwork as well as her own: Good Company: a Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (1951), Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (1957), Communal Rituals among the Nyakyusa (1959), and For Men and Elders (1977). As the leading social anthropologist of her generation to stay in South Africa—her compatriots Max Gluckman and Isaac Schapera moved to England—Monica Wilson played a key role in training research students there, both black and white. Developing an interest in contemporary urban society, she co-authored with Archie Mafeje a study of social relations in Cape Town, Langa (1963). She delivered the Frazer lecture in 1959 and the Scott Holland lectures in 1971, both on religion, and published the latter as Religion and the Transformation of Society (1971).

As a liberal intellectual during the period when racial segregation was progressively imposed on South Africa, Monica Wilson actively opposed it in several spheres. She co-edited and wrote several chapters of The Oxford History of South Africa (two vols., 1969, 1971), which exploded the myth (cherished by apartheid ideologists) that the arrival of Bantu peoples in South Africa hardly predated European settlement. She was outspoken in resisting the restrictions of academic freedom which followed the passing of the Bantu Education Act in 1953. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, she served as a lay member of the Cottesloe consultation set up by the World Council of Churches, and she chaired the board of social responsibility of the diocese of Cape Town. She received honorary doctorates from Rhodes University, and the universities of York and Witwatersrand, as well as the Rivers medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. After her retirement she lived quietly at Hunterstoun, the family estate on the Hogsback in Eastern Cape Province, where she had created a fine botanical garden. Here she died serenely on 26 October 1982.

J. D. Y. Peel Sources

A. Richards, Man, 44 (1944), 125–6 · M. H. R., Africa, 14 (1944), 429–30 · A. Richards, ‘Monica Wilson: an appreciation’, Religion and social change in South Africa, ed. M. G. Whisson and M. West (Cape Town, 1975) · D. Brokensha, ‘Monica Wilson, 1908–1982’, Africa, 53 (1983) · C. Murray, ‘… So truth be in the field: an appreciation of Monica Wilson’, Journal of South African Studies, 10 (1983) · M. E. West, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: a memoir’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 45 (1984) · B. M. du Toit, ‘Compassion, truth and clarity: an appreciation of South African anthropologist Monica Wilson’ [draft MS, not yet published] · private information (2004) [Francis Wilson, son] · ‘Wilson, Godfrey’, www.britannica.com · b. cert. [Godfrey Wilson] Archives

University of Cape Town, MSS

Likenesses

charcoal drawing, repro. in Richards, ‘Monica Wilson: an appreciation’, frontispiece

Source http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/75515/?back=,36964