TTT Interviewee: Francis Wilson Session #2 Interviewer: Mary Marshall Clark Cape Town, South Africa Date: August 3, 1999 Q: Thank you for being here. Wilson: It's a pleasure. Q: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your background, your early life, the influences that were brought to bear on you by your family, their education. Tell me a little bit about that. Wilson: Well, I guess I would start by saying that my roots are in the Eastern Cape province of this country, which is very much rural South Africa, in what is called the Ciskei, this side of the Kei River, near East London. It's inland, and it's a place in which black and white have lived in for a century or more. People go back many, many, many years in that area. Of course, Africans were living there way back in fifteenth, fourteenth century and so on. It's an area where in the nineteenth century British missionaries came in. Of course, there were all kinds of other British influences with what were called the settlers or the invaders, depending on the terminology one's going to use. But I grew up in the Eastern Cape, very close to a place called Lovedale, and Lovedale was one of the early mission stations, a Presbyterian mission station founded by Scots Wilson - 2 - 53 missionaries, which became, during the nineteenth century, became one of the great centers of education in Southern Africa. Lovedale itself was a -- they had schools, girls' school, boys' school, industrial training in carpentry and so on, a big hospital developed there. My grandfather came out in the 1890s from Scotland. I suppose my grandfather could be seen as one of the young men of James Stewart who, in turn, was a young man of Livingstone. So that's the kind of origins of all of that. My grandfather came out in the 1890s and settled at Lovedale, and, in due course, married my grandmother, whom he brought back from Edinburgh. He came from Glasgow. He was the administrator and fundraiser, essentially. Development requires fundraising, always has. He was involved with people like Dr. [Neil] Macvicar in building the Lovedale Hospital, and particularly one of their great contributions, I think, was in training African nurses, because they realized at a very early stage that it was enormously important that if there was education happening, it shouldn't just be for men, but for women as well. So I come out of that kind of family background, with a real consciousness of importance of that. There's a Cecilia Makiwane Hospital in East London. She was the first African qualified nurse, and she came from Lovedale, and so on. My mother was born there, in Lovedale, in 1908, and she grew up at Lovedale and went to school at Lovedale, and went to school with people like Frieda Bokwe who subsequently married Z.K. [Zachariah Keodirelang] Matthews and was herself a wonderful person and very well known, a great musician, musical teacher until well into her nineties. She only died last year. She, in turn, was the daughter of John Knox Bokwe, who had been a Presbyterian missionary -- minister, not a missionary -- a minister in the 1880s already, I Wilson - 2 - 54 think, one of the great musicians, very well known, and he himself had founded a school for destitute whites in Ugie, I think it was, in the 1880s or 1890s, a long time ago. So Monica [Wilson], as a child, as a girl growing up in Lovedale, was at school with somebody like Frieda Bokwe, who herself came from a long tradition of education, and at school with a granddaughter, I think it was, of Chief Maqoma. Maqoma was one of the great heroes of the resistance, of African resistance against white invasion in the land battles of the nineteenth century and so on. She always said that she was learning from people like Janet, who became Janet Mali, granddaughter of Maqoma. She was learning a history that she certainly wasn't hearing anything about in the textbooks. So Monica herself wanted to be a historian and grew up learning, studying as a historian, but realized fairly soon, after she went to Cambridge, that if she was going to get to the real history, she was going to have to find a way of moving beyond the documents, because the documents came from the settler side and were very one-sided in their interpretation. And that is why, having done Part One of the History Tripos in Cambridge, she then moved into anthropology and decided that really the only way was to go in and learn the language properly, which was Xhosa, which she did, and she moved into what is an area of the Eastern Cape called Pondoland, which is roughly between Umtata and the sea. There she worked as a very young Ph.D. student, and the interesting thing is that her parents were very advanced in those days in the sense of letting this young woman go off all by herself and move around, and she stayed in a trading station and so on, and learned the language and learned an enormous amount about black South African society. The book Wilson - 2 - 55 was called Reaction to Conquest [: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa], which gives you an idea of the context in which she was writing that. So I come out of that sort of background and grew up in the Eastern Cape. My father himself was also an anthropologist. He was an Englishman. Monica and Godfrey [Wilson] met when they were students at, I think, in Geneva at one of these summer schools, before the United Nations. They met in -- the League of Nations. They met in Geneva at a summer school about peace. He was at Oxford, reading Greats. He was a classicist. And nobody in the family's quite sure whether he became an anthropologist before or after meeting Monica, but anyway, he decided also to be an anthropologist, and they were both trained very much at Malinowski's seminars in London. He came out to Africa really to join her, and they got married in the Eastern Cape, went off into what was then Tanganyika, now Tanzania, Southern Tanzania, at the north end of what is now Lake Malawi, against the Livingstone mountains, where they worked in BuNyakyusa, which is roughly where Mbeya and Tukuyu now are. Then he became the first director -- I'm now going back to the 1930s. He became the first director in 1938, I think it was, of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute, which was being set up in what was then Northern Rhodesia, and was really the first -- I think the first kind of intellectual research institute -- there was no university there in those days -- in a place called Livingstone, just across the Zambezi River by the Victoria Falls. And that's where I was born in 1939. Wilson - 2 - 56 And then we came south as a family in 1941. He resigned from the Rhodes Livingstone Institute because he was a pacifist and didn't feel it right to go to war, which, of course, was very unpopular in colonial Africa, particularly when he was a person who was seen as being far too friendly. He was accused of offering African friends cigarettes and sitting down and just chatting with them, and people thought this was very bad behavior, people being whites, the white colonialists. I'm not sure that he would have ever been able to live long term in South Africa. My mother always said that he just found the racism too intolerable. But they came down to South Africa in 1941 and came to Hogsback, which is where my grandfather had some land up in the mountains which he had bought way back in 1910, I think, just around the time my mother was born. We lived there in a little iron hut, iron house with no running water, outside toilet, and so on. I can remember as a child having water boiled on a wooden stove and poured into a tub on what was then a mud floor in the kitchen. But absolutely no sense of deprivation. I mean, it was a warm, loving home, and I had everything I could desire, and spent my life out of doors, barefoot, just running around talking with my friends. My friends, because Hogsback was an isolated rural area, were all in those days black African. So I grew up speaking Xhosa, which was probably in those days as good as my English, because I was speaking English to my parents, my mother only, because my father then subsequently then joined the Red Cross and went off up north during the war. So I would be speaking English at home and I was speaking Xhosa most of the day with my friends, which meant at least that I got a very good accent. Wilson - 2 - 57 The difficulty was, and this was one of the deprivations of being white in South Africa -- there weren't many, but there were some -- was that when I was sent to school, first in Alice -- and I'll come to the reasons behind that -- first in Alice and then in Grahamstown, and I went to good schools in my childhood, the Xhosa that I had when I entered school was systematically knocked out of me in the sense that I just was never taught it, never learned it, and the teachers tried to teach me Latin, which I still regard as relatively useless in terms of priorities and learning in Africa.