The fires beneath

Who would have thought that a book which charts the emergence of anthropology, sociology, South African history and African studies in the imperial and postcolonial era could be as gripping as a novel? For this Séan Morrow acknowledges the absolute freedom which he was allowed by Monica Wilson’s family to examine the intimacies of their parents’ passionate relationship and the advance and retreat of Godfrey Wilson’s severe episodes of depression. Morrow says ‘She was far more open in her journal, an extraordinary record which creates a more rounded picture of a woman often regarded as austere’ (p. 243). Monica Hunter, born 1908, was the daughter of Scottish missionaries at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape. She was accepted over dinner for Girton College, Cambridge where she read History but switched to anthropology in her final year in 1930 because she knew there would be nothing about Africa in her history course. At a League of Nations Students’ meeting in Geneva she met Godfrey Wilson who was an outstanding Oxford classicist and son of the renowned Shakespearean scholar Dover Wilson. He became fascinated with using the emerging philosophies of anthropology to capture the love of Monica.

League · Nothing · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Philosophy · South African History and Culture