The Rise of Colonial Studies

The intellectual crosscurrents linking Africans and West Indians to colonial experts in Britain grew stronger in the 1930s. Sojourners and migrants gravitated toward those in the metropole interested in colonial affairs. Not only were they potential allies in the struggle for colonial reform but their curiosity and concern also distinguished them from the average Briton who knew comparatively little about conditions in the empire. As Philip Zachernuk observes, black students and intellectuals were attracted to “the notion of belonging to an expert community which might better guide colonial policy.”Footnote 7 Exploiting their proximity to the seat of governmental and cultural power in the empire, they increasingly attempted to intervene in public as well as academic debates on the future of the colonies. Intellectual discourse, a free and equal exchange of ideas evaluated according to set procedures of knowledge, offered both a model for relations of “reciprocity” and “co-operation” as well as the means by which progressive change might be achieved within the empire.Footnote 8

As pressure from the colonial intelligentsia for substantive reform mounted in the 1930s, particularly after labor disturbances in the Caribbean and Africa in the middle and later part of the decade, the “tropical empire” garnered greater attention within Britain's top universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics (LSE). These developments were linked to the rationalization of the colonial service as well as the professionalization of anthropology, which oriented itself toward the needs of a restructuring British Empire as the discipline took shape in the 1930s and 1940s. Advocates of colonial reform and the Colonial Office drew increasingly on the methodological tools of, or spoke from within, the social sciences.Footnote 9 Led by Ralph Furse, the director of recruitment and training for the colonial service from 1919 to 1948, the Colonial Office began to take a more systematic approach to colonial administration during the interwar period, creating a unified colonial service for the whole of the British Empire in 1930 and instituting Tropical African Service courses at Oxford, Cambridge, and, beginning in World War II, the LSE. Reginald Coupland, who succeeded H. E. Egerton in 1920 as the second Beit Professor of Colonial History, played a significant role in shaping the new curriculum at Oxford, which included his own courses on the history of the British Empire. A recognized expert on Africa and tireless defender of the colonial administration and indirect rule, Margery Perham taught part of the latter in 1927–29 and 1933–34 in addition to her course on “Native Administration.” Soon thereafter, she was elevated to the position of Research Lecturer in Colonial Administration, one of five new research lectureships at Oxford funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States, which was devoted to advancing social science research. By the start of the Second World War, she had become Reader in Colonial Administration and a founder-fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford.Footnote 10 Perham and Coupland also organized the annual summer program for colonial officers on leave in 1937 and 1938. In the late 1930s, Perham and the anthropologist Lucy Mair at the LSE pioneered the idea of a new discipline devoted to the “art and science” of colonial administration, an ill-defined program designed to meld the Lugardian ideal of the colonial officer who ruled intuitively and by strength of personality with the social science ideal of the scholar who investigated with methodological precision.Footnote 11 Within this context, intellectuals from the colonies found new, if frustratingly limited, opportunities to intervene in scholarly discourse and influence colonial policy.

Elite families in the colonies commonly sent their sons and, in some instances, daughters to study in metropolitan universities from the nineteenth century on, and the number of West Indian and African students, many of whom would go on to become influential politicians and intellectuals, increased consistently during the early twentieth century. Beginning in the 1930s, however, a growing number went into fields concerned with the history, economics, and social organization of colonial societies in addition to the established bastions of the colonial intelligentsia, legal and medical studies. Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, was an Oxford-trained historian of the British Empire. The first postcolonial leaders of Nigeria and Kenya, Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe and Jomo Kenyatta, were trained anthropologists, as was Kofi Busia, Kwame Nkrumah's successor in Ghana.Footnote 12 African anthropologists held other important posts within these newly independent states, such as “the leading expert on Asante royal regalia,” Alex Atta Yaw Kyerematen, who became the director of the Ghana National Culture Centre.Footnote 13 Still others like Nkrumah and Peter Mbiyu Koinage, a high-ranking official in the Kenya African Union, began but never completed advanced-degree programs in the field. Thus, many within the generation of black leaders who oversaw the transition to independence in Africa and the Caribbean studied and wrote within academic disciplines linked to the development of colonial studies in Britain.Footnote 14

Although as late as 1946 50 percent of African university students still entered law or medicine, the remainder pursued training in education, science, and a range of other fields.Footnote 15 The introduction of new scholarships as part of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, which was passed in 1940 and then renewed with additional funding in 1945, facilitated the entry of colonial students, including two hundred Africans, into metropolitan universities during the last two years of the war.Footnote 16 The number of West Indian students in Britain also grew dramatically, rising from 166 to 1,114 between 1939 and 1950.Footnote 17 After the war, the Colonial Office allocated many of the scholarships for training in the social sciences.Footnote 18 In rare instances, these new sources of funding supported black intellectuals in their quest for advanced degrees. For example, in 1945, the British Council awarded the Ghanaian historian and economist J. C. de Graft Johnson, who was then a student at Edinburgh University, a scholarship to continue the research for his PhD thesis.Footnote 19

More than ever, British universities became an important site of social interaction and intellectual exchange among people of African descent from around the Atlantic. The African American economic historian George Brown, the Nigerian H. O. Davies, and the Saint Lucian W. Arthur Lewis, who pioneered the field of development economics, met while attending the London School of Economics in the mid-1930s. Brown served as publicity secretary in the League of Coloured Peoples before departing for Liberia in late 1935 to “conduct an economic survey.” In 1935, Davies served as president of both the West African Students Union and the Cosmopolitan Club, “the most important multi-racial platform” at the university, while Lewis remained active in the League of Coloured Peoples during this period. Their friendship helped to reinvigorate the ties between the West African Students Union and League of Coloured Peoples in the late 1930s, despite the quiescent rivalry between the organizations’ foremost personalities, Ladipo Solanke and Harold Moody.Footnote 20 As Eric Williams observed in the wake of decolonization in West Africa and the Caribbean, “My university generation has taken over not only in the West Indies but also in many of the countries emerging from colonialism. … Many West African friends in my university days are today in politics, some on the side of the Opposition, others holding high office in the new Ghana and the new Nigeria.” Williams maintained that those in Trinidad who bemoaned the “intellectualism” of his party, the People's National Movement (PNM), failed to appreciate this general characteristic of the transition to independence throughout the British Empire. “Our PNM Movement,” he argued, “is part of the world movement against colonialism. Those who oppose PNM's intellectualism seem ignorant of the fact that the leaders of [anti]colonialism the world over are the very colonials who formed part of the university generation of the thirties.”Footnote 21 For many like Williams, their university experience in Britain had a profound impact on their political development both for the frustrations it provoked and the chance encounters and collaborations it fostered.

The growth of colonial studies held out the promise that colonial problems might receive the sustained intellectual treatment that many viewed as a prerequisite to reform. The new emphasis on expertise in policy making and relevance in academic colonial studies, which was linked to the shifting conception of colonial authority, provided black intellectuals with a set of theoretical tools and a new basis for their political demands and claims to represent colonized populations in the Caribbean and Africa.

The Voice of Africa

Working in a discipline still in search of a professional identity, many social anthropologists in Britain set out for Africa to conduct their fieldwork during the 1930s and 1940s. As the first chair of anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927 to 1938, Bronislaw Malinowski had an unparalleled influence on the development of the discipline during the interwar years through not only his seminars and scholarship but also his influence within the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (later known as the International African Institute). From the start, the institute epitomized the “complex intertwinings between the needs of colonial administration and the interests of anthropologists and other scholars of Africa.”Footnote 22 Created in 1926, the institute and its journal, Africa, which first appeared in 1928, represented a significant step toward consolidating an amorphous group of individuals with an intellectual or professional interest in Africa into a community of experts. Lord Lugard described the institute as “a connecting link between science and life” in the inaugural issue of Africa. Due in large part to Malinowski's efforts, it became an indispensable vehicle for the consolidation and professionalization of the discipline of anthropology in Britain.Footnote 23 The institute established a grant program funded by American capital from the Laura Spellman Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations and, after the Second World War, the Colonial Social Science Research Council, which supported much of the new anthropological work on Africa produced over the following two decades. By the end of the war, the creation of new sources of financial support related to the greater emphasis on colonial development had a major impact on the development of social anthropology in Britain. By 1945, the Colonial Social Science Research Council supported a number of “surveys” of areas for future research. As Goody notes, these surveys—a type of intellectual mapping of existing lacunae carried out by Firth in West Africa, Schapera in East Africa, and Leach in Borneo—helped to establish the research parameters for a generation of anthropologists in Britain and the United States.Footnote 24

Anthropology emerged as a popular field among African intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s due its unique relationship to Africa. After receiving a master's degree at Harvard University in the United States, Prince Hosea Akiiki Nyabongo from Uganda earned a PhD in anthropology at Oxford University.Footnote 25 Nyabongo's The Story of an African Chief, which appeared in the United States in 1935, was reprinted in Britain the following year under the title Africa Speaks Back, and, in 1937, he published The “Bisoro” Stories. Alex A. Y. Kyerematen and Kofi Abrefa Busia also attended Oxford, and both went on to produce significant ethnographic studies on Ghana. Busia studied under the South African anthropologist Meyer Fortes during the late 1940s and published his PhD thesis, The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System of Ashanti (London, 1951). He subsequently became the first Ghanaian professor at Oxford, where he held the chair in sociology.Footnote 26 When Kwame Nkrumah arrived in London in 1945, he registered as a PhD candidate in anthropology at the LSE but withdrew after only one term.Footnote 27 In a period when the Colonial Office placed a greater premium on expertise, African anthropologists like Kyerematen, Busia, and Jomo Kenyatta worked within the discipline whose fortunes were tied to colonial Africa. While numerous scholars have noted the importance of colonial rule to the development of anthropology, this has obscured the ways in which intellectuals from the colonies found it enabling.

The International Institute of African Languages and Culture and the seminars of prominent anthropologists like Raymond Firth and especially Malinowski brought together black intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic and European colonial officials and anthropology students in a stimulating and, at times, contentious intellectual atmosphere. Jomo Kenyatta attended Malinowski's seminars on culture change at the LSE in 1936, as did the African Americans Alison Davis and Eslanda Goode Robeson in the mid-1930s. With Malinowski's assistance, Kenyatta and Nathaniel Fadipe received grants from the institute to support their research on the Kikuyu and Yoruba, respectively, and Malinowski contributed the introduction to Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya. In 1937, the institute's journal, Africa, published the latter's essay, “Kikuyu Religion, Ancestor-Worship, and Sacrificial Practices.”Footnote 28 Kenyatta also worked intermittently as a translator for Malinowski, Ida Ward at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the institute, where he befriended the African American linguist Lorenzo Turner and Paul Robeson.Footnote 29 These interactions often produced lively debate and led, in some cases, to fierce intellectual rivalries, but, they also created the possibility for personal friendships and political alliances.

The new emphasis on the study of “culture contact” and “diffusion” in Malinowski's work and Anglo-American anthropology, more generally, informed many African intellectuals’ understandings of race and cultural change and buttressed their attack on the color bar.Footnote 30 In their writings on West African history and the impact of European imperialism, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Ladipo Solanke, the cofounder and general secretary of the West African Students Union, challenged the notion of intractable racial differences. Citing Franz Boas, Rev. A. G. Fraser of Achimota College in the Gold Coast, and others, Azikiwe claimed that “no reputable anthropologist to-day entertains the notion of a racial inferiority for government or other institutions of society,” while Solanke identified a consistent pattern of cultural synthesis and movement toward “re-admixture” and “universal brotherhood” as the distinguishing feature of African history.Footnote 31

In a pair of programmatic essays that appeared in Africa in 1929 and 1930, Malinowski championed a conception of anthropology as a practical science and outlined a new research agenda that emphasized “relevance” and privileged “culture contact” within a rapidly changing colonial scene. He sought to demonstrate the necessity of anthropological knowledge to the administration of the British Empire. “Whether we adopt in our practical policy the principle of direct or indirect control,” Malinowski asserted, “it is clear that a full knowledge of indigenous culture … is indispensable.” He opposed his vision of the “science” of practical anthropology and the work of the institute to the extant “antiquarian” studies of African customs and institutions associated with the African Society, which was founded in 1901 in memory of Mary Kingsley. In “Practical Anthropology,” Malinowski maintained that “a new branch of anthropology must sooner or later be started: the anthropology of the changing Native” and envisioned an instrumental role for the new institute in the advancement of this new field of inquiry. Gesturing toward the recent work of Boas, he observed, “Nowadays, when we are intensely interested, through some new anthropological theories, in problems of contact and diffusion, it seems incredible that hardly any exhaustive studies have been undertaken on the question of how European influence is being diffused into native communities.” “So far,” he added, “most contributions on that subject have been made by enthusiasts, while the specialist in his field work still tries to close his eyes to the surrounding reality and reconstructs laboriously a savage who does not exist any more.” For Malinowski, anthropologists relinquished any claim to relevance as long as their research continued to be oriented around a fiction of hermetically sealed cultural units. He argued that “the study of the diffusion of Western cultures among primitive peoples” would not only “throw an extremely important light upon the theoretical problem of the contact of cultures, transmission of ideas and customs, in short, on the whole problem of diffusion” but also produce knowledge “of the highest importance to the practical man in the colonies.”Footnote 32 Similarly, in “The Rationalization of Anthropology and Administration,” which was in part a reply to the critical responses to “Practical Anthropology,” Malinowski insisted, “The anthropology of the future will be concerned with the study of the ‘changing’ native and of the ‘in-between’ or ‘barbarous’ races; it will be as interested in the Hindu as in the Tasmanian, in the Chinese peasants as in the Australian aborigines, in the West Indian negro as in the Melanesian Trobriander, in the detribalized African of Harlem as in the Pygmy of Perak.” These cultural hybrids, the growing ranks of those “in-between” cultural formations, required the anthropologist to be more attentive to “the processes of culture and cultural assimilation.” Malinowski linked anthropology's status as a science to the study of the “changing native,” implicitly challenging the epistemological categories of indirect rule in which the deracinated native figured as a dangerous excess. “Such anthropology,” he contended, “will be not only practically more important but it will become, at the same time, real science.”Footnote 33

Malinowski's eagerness to obtain “first-hand information” from educated African informants legitimated their claims to insider knowledge. More radically, in a significant departure from the tendency to denigrate the perspectives of “detribalized” Africans, he insisted that the growing body of work produced by African intellectuals could not be ignored. By the 1910s, as Vivian Bickford-Smith puts it, the British had “betrayed” creole and educated elites in favor of white settlers in southern and eastern Africa and “traditional” rulers in West Africa as partners in colonial administration.Footnote 34 Although Malinowski was critical of both the motives behind and quality of ethnographies produced by African practitioners, he insisted that neither the “man of science” nor the colonial officer could afford to dismiss their work. “The African,” Malinowski wrote, “is becoming an anthropologist who turns our own weapons against us. He is studying European aims, pretenses, and all the real and imaginary acts of injustice.” While “such an anthropology is no doubt mutilated and misguided, full of counter-prejudices, … charged with bitter hostility, … [and] often blind with intransigence and sweeping wholesale indictment,” “it cannot be ignored by the man of science; and it would be better if the practical man did not treat it is as a joke or as an insignificant minor excrescence.” Furthermore, in a footnote Malinowski argued, “The literature produced by the educated Africans … constitutes a body of evidence on which scientific work by a White anthropologist must sooner or later be undertaken.”Footnote 35 Notwithstanding their paternalistic tone, Malinowski's remarks echoed the views of African intellectuals in London like Solanke, who, in United West Africa, called on British officials in the colonies to work with the African intelligentsia and “give up the idea (if any) of regarding every educated element as his enemy.”Footnote 36

Succeeding generations of anthropologists, including former students like Max Gluckman, have criticized Malinowski for the failure to adequately account for the dislocation engendered by colonialism within his functionalist method and his naïveté, if not disingenuousness, concerning the anthropologist's capacity to influence colonial policy and practice on the ground in the colonies.Footnote 37 Yet, in light of more recent critiques of the discipline, Malinowski's call for a “new branch of anthropology” that would focus on processes of cultural exchange and mixture appears more prescient than these accounts often suggest, and it was here that Africans found his work to be most useful. Many black intellectuals believed that the University of London and London School of Economics offered a more amicable and stimulating atmosphere than Oxbridge. The West African Student Union's journal, for example, recommended Malinowski's seminar at the LSE to those interested in colonial studies and anthropology. In the 1930s, the faculty at the University of London and the LSE included an array of prominent scholars with international reputations.Footnote 38 However, the union did not endorse the latter solely on the merits of the institution's curriculum or its distinguished scholars, although both were cited, but stressed its commitment to internationalism and emphasis on intellectual cooperation. “The School of Economics,” Wãsù claimed, “is not the hot-bed of Bolshevism as represented by A. A. B. of the Evening Standard and other fanatic imperialists. On the other hand it stands for sympathy, humanitarianism and internationalism and understanding among the various member States of the British Empire.” The editorial singled out Malinowski for praise, noting that the union's members had been influenced by his ideas. “From our own personal experience the course under Prof. Malinowski is very well taught. Students under him are made to do field work (practical Anthropology) and so they get to know and understand the mentality of the people of the place concerned. The Professor very often interviews African students about problems in connection with his work[;] as a result he gets first-hand information.”Footnote 39 Three years later, in 1936, the journal listed Malinowski among the recent “important visitors” to the union's hostel.Footnote 40

While Malinowski's willingness to engage with educated Africans set him apart from many of his peers, his ideas also attracted many because they called into question the central premises behind indirect rule. Black students and intellectuals often evaluated Malinowski's work more favorably than that of other anthropologists like Lucy Mair, Fortes, and Schapera. In a review of Native Policies in Africa, W. Arthur Lewis noted, “Though Dr. Mair sets out dispassionately, and without the vehemence of Mr. [George] Padmore's How Britain Rules Africa, one feels from time to time that it is only academic restraint which prevents her from describing the majority of the whites in these colonies [in East Africa] as a bunch of rascals.” Nonetheless, Lewis argued that her support of “Indirect Rule policy” demonstrated that Mair, “like all good Lugardites, … is suspicious of the educated African, who dares to have his own views as to how Africa should evolve.” At present, he continued, “There is only one place for the educated African … and that is in the technical branches of the administration. Those who expect Africans to tolerate for generations a system in which every European, however ignorant or uncouth, is an aristocrat, and every African, however cultured, a subordinate, are dreaming a dangerous fantasy.”Footnote 41 Whereas Malinowski sought to reorient anthropology toward the “changing Native,” Mair and other anthropologists produced a picture of Africans’ unchanging difference despite political and cultural fragmentation. Black intellectuals criticized this view for, as Lewis observed, according nicely with the administrative structure of indirect rule and casting the emerging African intelligentsia and its anticolonial, nationalist, and internationalist goals as little more than a bothersome anomaly.

The Oxford-trained Alex Kyerematen believed that Malinowski's approach to “processes of culture change,” by contrast, represented the most promising recent development in anthropology. Kyerematen evaluated the relative merits of “three schools of thought” with regard to this “comparatively new field of social research”: the “historical school” of Mair and Monica Hunter, the “functional school” represented by Schapera and Fortes, and Malinowski's “three-column approach.” Those associated with the “historical school,” he wrote, “assume that when two cultures contact, they do not result in a new homogeneous culture, but in a ‘mixture of partially fused elements, whose separate parent stock can and must be traced in any attempt to understand the new situation.’” Like Malinowski, however, Kyerematen viewed this as an essentially “profitless” task, which yielded little insight into ongoing processes of cultural exchange. While Kyerematen saw the work of Fortes and Schapera as a useful corrective, he maintained that the “functional school” failed to adequately appreciate the role of conflict in cultural change. “The weakness of this view of culture contact,” he explained, “is that it evades the fundamental fact that it is concerned with two cultures, which, though they may integrate, are nevertheless, different, and may even conflict. The District Commissioner has an obligation to safeguard imperial interests, while the Chief has the rights of his subjects to conserve.” Only the “three-column approach of Malinowski,” Kyerematen averred, “recognised three aspects of the problem, namely, the impinging culture with its institutions, intentions, and interests; the reservoir of indigenous custom, belief and living conditions … and lastly the result of the impact, the actual processes of contact and change, in which members of the two cultures co-operate, conflict or compromise.”Footnote 42

Kyerematen's reading of Malinowski appears to be based in large part on the latter's “Introductory Essay” to Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (1938), a collection of essays by leading anthropologists that were reprinted from Africa, and The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa, an edited collection based on his lectures and seminars on culture change between 1936 and 1938 that was published posthumously in 1945. Here, Malinowski devoted greater attention than in his earlier work to conflict, racism, and the “selective” withholding of cultural influence under colonial conditions. “To ignore the fact that there is a selective giving on the part of the Europeans,” he argued, “makes for a distortion of evidence, and … a sin against science. Selective giving influences the process of change perhaps more than any other element in the situation.” Malinowski asserted that European racism, not the reputedly primitive mind of backward races, represented the greatest obstacle to cultural exchange and mixture. “If power, wealth, and social amenities were given, culture change would be a comparatively easy and smooth process. It is the absence of these factors—our selective giving—which makes cultural change such a complicated and difficult process.” Rejecting “the mechanical concept of the mixture of cultural elements,” Malinowski wrote, “We also see how unreal is the view of Black and White forming a well-integrated whole in a situation in which the color bar cuts right across the very determinism in the process of cultural give.” Thus, he insisted: “The color bar, wherever it enters into the phases and details of culture change, has to be put on the methodological map, not as a political indictment but as a theoretical appreciation of an important force—perhaps the most important of all.”Footnote 43

Yet, in mobilizing Malinowski's theoretical work on culture change, Kyerematen took anthropology in a direction quite different from that envisioned by the doyen of the field. As an interconnected zone of cultural exchange, West Africa assumed wider significance as a region where anthropologists could study broader issues related to global integration. Following Malinowski, Kyerematen maintained that “human institutions are not static, but are subject to constant modification or even extirpation, with the impact of foreign ideas, and as the people themselves develop new ideas due to changing conditions of living. What happens when such institutions are in the melting pot is what anthropologists call ‘culture contact’ or ‘culture change.’” Equally important for him, Malinowski “also stresses that, all things being equal, it is not to be assumed that one culture dominates all the phases of another culture. Rather, it is a process in which both cultures are active, and each contributes its quota to the new culture content that emerges. As Firth points out: ‘It is not a question of just introducing development, enlightenment and progress to backward races.’” Kyerematen argued that the dynamics of culture change belied the notion of a “civilizing mission” as well as the existence of static cultural units. British rule did not—indeed, could not—“uplift” colonized peoples through a one-way process of imposing ready-made cultural and political practices. However unequal, the colonial encounter inevitably entailed transformation for all parties. In addition to Malinowski and Firth, Kyerematen drew upon S. F. Nadel's experiments at combining psychology and anthropology or “culture psychology.” Although “people may originally have lived in separate communities with their own distinctive cultures,” he argued, “they constitute sections of a single small commonwealth, ‘a social symbiosis’ as Nadel puts it,” after an extended period of contact.Footnote 44 On this basis, Kyerematen asserted that West Africa “is unique as a cultural area for the study of culture contact and changes. For it has had contacts not only with modern European countries, dating from the fifteenth century, but also with the ancient civilizations of Carthage and Egypt.” If “the problems concerned with culture contact … are acute anywhere in the world today,” he suggested, “it is in West Africa and some other parts of the continent.”Footnote 45 In identifying a long and shared history of cultural exchange as the defining characteristic of West Africa, Kyerematen implicitly legitimated the political aspirations for a United West Africa expressed by the members of the West African Students Union and other African intellectuals in Britain.Footnote 46

If anthropological work in this vein had clear political relevance, Kyerematen, like Malinowski, was also careful to distinguish the procedures of the scientist from those who set policy. These observations represented “only a diagnosis and not a cure, for the anthropologist is an anatomist and not a doctor of society, although it is needless to add that his diagnosis helps in the formulation of policies which aim at healing social maladies.”Footnote 47 African anthropologists like Kyerematen and Jomo Kenyatta emphasized the objectivity of their ethnographic work, while distinguishing themselves from “outside” observers by the way in which they combined insider knowledge and the careful examination of empirical facts derived from it. “In the present work,” Kenyatta wrote in his ethnography of the Kikuyu in Kenya, Facing Mount Kenya, “I have tried my best to record facts as I know them, mainly through a lifetime of personal experience, and have kept under very considerable restraint the sense of political grievances which no progressive African can fail to experience. My chief object is not to enter into controversial discussion with those who have attempted, or are attempting, to describe the same things from outside observation, but to let the truth speak for itself.”Footnote 48 Kenyatta at once defended the objectivity of his work by bracketing the obvious “political grievances” of the Kikuyu in his analysis and distinguished it from that of “outside” observers, characterizing himself as both an informant and expert anthropologist.

Although colonial experts in Britain invited educated colonials to act as “native informants” for their own analyses, many continued to believe that the latter were incapable of the dispassionate study undertaken by the professional social scientist. They were openly skeptical of African intellectuals’ attempts to draw conclusions based on the raw material of their own experience. African anthropologists like Kyerematen were reduced ex post facto to native informants, at best, and most of their European counterparts dismissed those who did publish ethnographic studies like Kenyatta as overly political and, hence, biased. In some cases, European writers appropriated the work of African scholars without citing their sources. As late as 1974, the anthropologist Malcolm McLeod complained in a letter to Africa that Douglas Fraser's essay on “The Symbols of Ashanti Kingship” in the recent edited collection, African Art and Leadership, drew heavily upon the work of Alex Kyerematen without adequately acknowledging this debt. McLeod wrote, “the great majority of the data on which this whole chapter [on Asante art] is built are taken, with the very minimum of alteration, from the Oxford doctoral dissertation of Dr. A. A. Y. Kyerematen. … So far almost nothing of this long and detailed work has appeared in print, and the fact that part of it has now appeared … under Professor Fraser's name makes it doubly important that it is used with due care and that readers should know its true source.”Footnote 49 The fate of Kyerematen's work underscores the long-term repercussions of the silencing of black voices within anthropology during this formative period. Kyerematen's programmatic piece discussed above appeared in Africana, the short-lived journal of the West African Society, not one of the academic journals of the day. The immense difficulty that African intellectuals faced in getting published enabled the pilfering of their scholarship.

Few outlets existed for black intellectuals to circulate work that was more analytical, rather than purely descriptive or autobiographical. Short pieces by African intellectuals appeared intermittently within the Journal of the Royal African Society (later African Affairs), Man (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland), and Africa during the interwar period and with greater frequency after World War II. However, in most cases, their contributions were distinguished from the rest of the journals’ contents in various ways and limited to examples of African art and poetry or descriptive explorations of African social and culture practices.Footnote 50 In addition to its quarterly, Africa, the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures originally hoped to produce two other serial publications, African Studies and African Documents. Mirroring the distinction between the anthropologist and ethnographic subject, the former was envisioned as a scholarly journal that would publish “authoritative monographs by recognized experts,” while the latter would feature “brochures or texts written or dictated by Africans preferably in their own language, translated into a European language.” Although the institute never realized this more ambitious scheme, the inaugural issue of Africa, which included a section of poems under the title “La voix de l’Africain” (The voice of the African), provides an indication of what was envisioned for African Documents.Footnote 51

When contributors to these journals reviewed books by African authors, they routinely questioned the objectivity of the latter. For example, L. S. B. Leakey's review of Parmenas Gittendu Mockerie's An African Speaks for His People in the Journal of the Royal African Society stated that the “chief interest in his book lies in the picture it gives us of the thoughts of politically-minded East African natives.” While conceding that Mockerie “is surprisingly moderate … and is remarkably clever in putting his finger on the weak points in the administrative and other services in East Africa,” Leakey maintained that “his very brief chapter on Kikuyu tribal institutions loses much of its value from being written in the style of communistic literature.”Footnote 52 The author of the review in Man of Africa Answers Back by Akiki K. Nyabongo criticized the blending of fact and fiction in the text, arguing that “the author has written a piece of fiction which defeats its own ends, because … it is manifestly untrue.” In the future, the reviewer suggested, Nyabongo should focus his energies on providing a “living picture” of his community. “Mr. Akiki Nyabongo has been studying Anthropology at Oxford, and there is enough in his book to cause one to believe that he is capable of giving us a very useful account of his own people. … We know very little of the home life of native peoples, and Mr. Akiki Nyabongo shows himself to be a writer competent to give us a living picture of just this sort of thing.”Footnote 53 In his review of Facing Mount Kenya in Africa, A. R. Barlow, a former mission schoolteacher who once taught Kenyatta, contended, “The facility with which Kenyatta, the ethnographer, merges into Kenyatta, the general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association, makes it difficult to decide whether his book should be viewed primarily as a scientific study or as a vehicle for propaganda.”Footnote 54 Among established anthropologists in Britain, it appears that only Malinowski praised the work for its analytical content. In his introduction to Facing Mount Kenya, he wrote that the book “is one of the first really competent and instructive contributions to African ethnography by a scholar of pure African parentage. … As a first-hand account of a representative African culture, as an invaluable document in the principles underlying culture contact and change; last, not least, as a personal statement of the new outlook of a progressive African, this book will rank as a pioneering achievement of outstanding merit.”Footnote 55 Many African intellectuals foresaw a negative response to their perspectives from European experts, whose position of authority they linked to the racial hierarchy sustaining colonial rule.

Kenyatta expected his book to provoke criticism from many quarters, and his inclusion of Malinowski's foreword can be read as a preemptive, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to defend the work against the inevitable charges of bias. As he stated unabashedly:

Kenyatta anticipated resistance to the text because, he suggested, the work of the African intellectual, as a “rabbit turned poacher,” represented a profound threat to the power relations structuring the empire and, in particular, to the privileged position of those who claimed to interpret and speak for the “native mind.”

The title of C. L. R. James's review of Facing Mount Kenya, “The Voice of Africa,” which appeared in the International African Service Bureau's International African Opinion, underscored this quality of table turning. Appropriating the banner of the circumscribed space allotted to African perspectives in the journal of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, James implicitly challenged the normative claims to knowledge of colonial experts in Britain and ascribed special significance to the voice of the African intellectual. Likewise, in his review of Ten Africans, edited by Margery Perham, which was entitled “Africa Speaks for Herself,” Louis Mbanefo asserted that, while the book contains “nothing … which was not already known,” it represented a notable shift in the production of knowledge on colonial Africa. “For the first time,” he observed, “an exponent of British policies in Africa desists from wielding the pen herself, preferring to watch Africans writing about themselves.” Nevertheless, Mbanefo added, “There are thousands of able Africans whose ambitions to serve their own country are purposely killed by official suspicion and denial of opportunity. … African readers may hope that this method of giving the African a part will be extended to other fields than mere [auto]biography.”Footnote 57 As Mbanefo observed, the prevailing culture of racism set considerable obstacles in the way of black intellectuals who pursued the trappings of expertise—advanced degrees, scholarly publications, induction into professional societies, and university appointments.

Many Africans and West Indians recalled how the innumerable slights and insults that they experienced strengthened their resolve and motivated both their intellectual and political activities. In the early 1930s, Nnamdi Azikiwe earned a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his thesis on “Mythology in Onitsha Society.” Azikiwe recalled, “I based it on the theory, popularised by Professor Malinowski and his school at the time, that myths and folk-tales have functional values in non-literate societies; I was able to prove it with illustrations from the experience of what obtained in Onitsha society.” As luck would have it, Malinowski, who was in the United States on a speaking tour, attended a presentation by Azikiwe titled “The Origins of the State.” Afterward, he approached Azikiwe and invited him to join the Royal Anthropological Society.Footnote 58 In anticipation of his return to London in 1934 after completing his studies in the United States, Azikiwe applied for a fellowship from the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures to support his ethnographic work on the Igbo in southern Nigeria.Footnote 59 The Nigerian education department and the institute were eager to give an African intellectual an award, and Azikiwe enjoyed the endorsement of both Perham and Malinowski. Yet, as Zachernuk notes, “Azikiwe's character was as much an issue here as his intellect.”Footnote 60 The executive committee of the institute initially granted him funding for one year of training in London but soon began to retreat from this decision. There were concerns that Azikiwe was too “political,” and some doubted the ability of an African to produce the same kinds of “objective” scholarship as a European. Ultimately, the institute informed him that, although interested in his work, they lacked the financial resources to fund his project. Azikiwe's fate exposed the power imbalance between African intellectuals and European “experts” on Africa. In much the same way as “the general atmosphere in interwar Britain constantly offered—but could never really allow—sustained cooperation between colonial and metropolitan intellectuals,” Zachernuk suggests, this episode both “reveals the fleeting possibility of sympathetic cooperation between two communities keenly interested in understanding contemporary Africa” and typifies the pattern of missed opportunities for intellectual dialogue and collaboration. Such treatment not only hastened African intellectuals’ politicization and alienation from Britain but contributed to their interest in racial unity as well.Footnote 61

Although his professional accomplishments were nothing less than extraordinary, racism also hindered W. Arthur Lewis early in his career. In 1938, while still completing his PhD under the liberal economist Arnold Plant and Hugh Dalton, who later served as chancellor of the exchequer, Lewis received a post at the London School of Economics, where he became the first black faculty member and went on to design the curriculum in colonial economics.Footnote 62 However, with little hope of advancement at the LSE, where younger and, thus, not soon to retire faculty dominated the economics department, Lewis applied and was recommended unanimously by the selection committee for the prestigious Chaddock Chair of Economics at the University of Liverpool. Despite the whole-hearted support of the head of his department at the LSE, A. H. Carr-Saunders, who stated in his letter of recommendation that “few appointments which have been made in my time at the School have been better justified,” J. F. Mountford, the vice-chancellor at Liverpool, rejected the nominee, citing “other considerations than high academic standing.” Mountford identified racism outside of the university—within the local business community and a constituency who did not have the option of attending other universities in the area (as they did at the London School of Economics)—as reason for not hiring the West Indian economist. Carr-Saunders, however, saw the university community itself as the real source of resistance behind this obfuscation.Footnote 63

Contesting the Intellectual High Ground

Many African and West Indian intellectuals also questioned the objectivity of those who played the role of colonial expert in Britain. From the 1930s, the African and West Indian members of the League of Coloured Peoples and West African Students Union became increasingly impatient with apologists for colonial rule like Margery Perham.Footnote 64 H. O. Davies recalled that Perham's visit to the West African Students Union drew a large crowd of Africans and West Indians. Although “the address was duly delivered to a solemn and interested audience,” Davies was forced to cut off the ensuing discussion as Perham “was bombarded with critical questions, and tirades on some of her past press publications.” “The whole affair,” he wrote, “seemed like a declaration of war against the most wanted critic of West Africans.”Footnote 65

In 1941, Lewis, at the time a twenty-six-year-old junior faculty member at the London School of Economics, contributed a damning review of Perham's Africans and British Rule to the League of Coloured Peoples Newsletter. “To Miss Perham,” the young economist wrote, “it is from his own savagery that the African needs protection; white exploitation is to be seen merely as the inevitable if unfortunate accompaniment of the effort to civilize him.” Although Lewis had solicited Perham's support for the league and its journal in the past, he was uncharacteristically severe in his assessment of the text. “Not merely smug and self satisfied,” the book “reeks of that self-conceit which typifies the colonial Englishman and which is doing more than anything else to poison the relations between the races.” “From the prosperous seclusion of Oxford,” he continued, “it is easy to ride the high horse of cultural superiority, to belittle the wrongs of a people and magnify their faults. … Africans fortunately are accustomed to being insulted. They will merely hope that Miss Perham will have learned a little manners before she settles down to write her next apology for imperialism.” The subsequent issue of the Newsletter featured a defense of Africans and British Rule by the British anthropologist Margaret M. Green, a specialist on the Igbo of southern Nigeria and a friend of Perham. “Mr. Lewis,” Green claimed, “writes … as though [the book] were a time bomb dropped by an enemy rather than a constructive piece of work by one of the most sincere and able of the champions of African advancement.” In conclusion, she added, “One would gladly have kept silent about the whole review. But the question at issue is too important. The cause of African advancement demands and deserves responsible treatment and a review of this kind does Africans a grave disservice.” Lewis, however, remained defiant in his reply to Green, stating, “I did not expect my review to please Miss Perham's friends any more than the book itself pleased me.” “The burden of my criticism of the book,” Lewis explained, “was that it ignores [the exploitation of Africans in British territory], and is therefore almost useless to the African cause because it does not suggest to Africans how they might meet the exploitation, or consider the radical revision of British colonial policy and reconstruction of the British Colonial service which are necessary if British rule … is to cease to be a cloak for this exploitation.”Footnote 66 For many like Lewis, Perham and other reputed experts were ineluctably complicit in the ongoing impoverishment of colonial peoples, despite their ostensibly objective stance and expressions of empathy for the latter. The degree to which the activities of colonial experts blurred the distinction between scholarship and policy seemed to confirm this assessment.

While black intellectuals drew upon the work of European scholars and even enjoyed the admiration of some, personal rivalries and professional frustrations often contributed to their desire for scholarly recognition and exacerbated differences of opinion. When disagreements arose, they often led to heated debates, which exposed political and philosophical differences between black intellectuals and their white interlocutors as well as competing claims to expertise and objectivity. Like African anthropologists, the generation of West Indian historians who were trained in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s often faced considerable resistance from established figures in the discipline. As F. R. Augier and Elsa V. Goveia, who earned her doctorate from the University of London in 1952, recalled years later, “The eagerness of the young colonial post-graduates after the Second World War to write the history of their own countries was a cause of concern to some of their English tutors.”Footnote 67 While the latter concentrated on the role of colonial officials, metropolitan politicians, and white elites in colonies in the development of Britain's civilizing mission, Caribbean historians like Goveia and Eric Williams focused instead on the underlying structures of and the interplay between the multiplicity of groups within the colonial situation, producing painstakingly researched scholarship with a clear political objective.Footnote 68

The Trinidadian Eric Williams was a student at Oxford in the mid-1930s, earning his PhD in colonial history in 1938 after completing his thesis, “The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery.” Williams's innovative reading of the relationship between abolition and the growth of capitalism in the British Empire targeted not only the prevailing “humanitarian thesis” within the historiography on abolition but also the historian most responsible for its ascendance in the interwar period: Reginald Coupland.Footnote 69 In 1920, Coupland was appointed Beit Professor of Colonial History at Oxford, becoming only the second historian to hold the chair after Hugh Egerton, who had occupied it since its inception in 1905. As his former student Frederick Madden notes, the choice of Coupland, who specialized in ancient history and the history of English “Greats,” was not an obvious one. Indeed, when he succeeded Lionel Curtis as lecturer in colonial history in 1913, “he had little more than an amateur's interest” in the subject. Though a relative newcomer to the field in 1920, the electors, according to Madden, “sought to give stature to the new discipline of imperial history” by selecting a prominent historian rather than a specialist—“a first-class scholar was better than a third-rate expert.” The move, if measured in terms of the number of students who took their finals in colonial or Commonwealth history, was a resounding success. An insignificant subfield on the margins of the discipline during the early decades of the twentieth century, imperial history became one of the most popular subjects at Oxford during Coupland's nearly thirty years in the chair.Footnote 70

Between 1935 and 1938, Williams studied in the shadow of Coupland and wrote explicitly against the renowned historian. “The subject I had selected,” he later claimed, “was, of all the chapters in British colonial history, the least known. No work of any scholarly importance had been done in England.” Nevertheless, the “general British view,” Williams noted, “was that a band of humanitarians—The Saints, they had been nicknamed—had got together to abolish slavery, and had after many years succeeded in arousing the conscience of the British people against man's greatest inhumanity to man. Britain had repented and given earnest of her contribution by voting twenty million pounds sterling to the slave-owners for the redemption of their slaves.” Employing terms like “conscience,” “repented,” and “redemption,” Williams highlighted the role of sentiment in this understanding of abolition, which he attributed, in particular, to Coupland and opposed to an objective view of the past. “Much has been made of this case [of the Negro James Somerset], by people constantly seeking for triumphs of humanitarianism,” he wrote. “Professor Coupland contends that behind the legal judgment lay the moral judgment and that the Somersett case marked the beginning of the end of slavery throughout the British Empire. This is merely poetic sentimentality translated into modern history.”Footnote 71

For Williams, sentiment played a minimal role in abolition, far outweighed by economic and other considerations, but it had been essential to establishing the dominant humanitarian thesis. Writing in the League of Coloured Peoples’ journal, the Keys, he asserted, “The idea that the humanitarians, by the irresistible weight of their humanitarianism, would have abolished slavery is a pathological delusion. What turned the scale in favour of the Negroes was the attitude of the British industrialists.”Footnote 72 Williams conceded the importance of the abolitionist movement, noting that “to ignore one of the greatest propaganda movements of all time” would be a “grave historical error,” and admitted that his study “deliberately subordinated the inhumanity of the slave system and the humanitarianism which destroyed that system.” Yet, if the “humanitarians were the spearhead of the onslaught which destroyed the West Indian system and freed the Negro,” their significance, he argued, “has been seriously misunderstood and grossly exaggerated by men who have sacrificed scholarship to sentimentality and, like the scholastics of old, placed faith before reason and evidence.” He viewed Coupland's work as a paradigmatic example of this tendency. Williams maintained that he “understands the history of the abolition movement as little as his hero,” Wilberforce, and claimed that the connections between agents of the East India Company and abolitionist movement “has not been fully appreciated.” Coupland, Williams wrote, “is clearly unhappy about the whole thing, as is seen in his concern with the ‘sincerity’ of both groups,” rather than this convergence of interests.Footnote 73

Williams perceived a link between British racism, the abuses of imperialism, and this blind faith in the tradition of British humanitarianism. Williams's failed bid for an All Souls Fellowship left him convinced that the “racial factor” was insurmountable at Oxford. “It was not that I felt that I had won the fellowship,” he recalled. “I knew I had not. But I knew that I could never win one.” Furthermore, “No ‘native,’ however detribalized, could fit socially into All Souls. What, for example, could I say, in the very midst of the Ethiopian War, shortly after the announcement of the infamous Hoare-Laval peace plan, in reply to a question as to whether advanced peoples have any right to assume tutelage over backward peoples?” Under the circumstances, Williams added, “It was difficult to be polite to the author of one of the wretched textbooks I had used in Trinidad when he defended the Hoare-Laval peace plan.”Footnote 74

These observations led Williams to suspect a “fundamentally political” dynamic at work within the “traditional view” of emancipation. The humanitarian thesis, he suggested, was not only the central trope of the historiography on abolitionism but also a fiction upon which “Englishness” and the moral arguments for imperial expansion depended. According to Williams, Coupland was not merely an idealist producing poor scholarship. Due to his institutional power and public prominence, his work helped to mask the true face of imperial power. “Propounded by Coupland from his professional chair and … [with] all the authority of the British Government's special representative on commissions of inquiry in India, Palestine and East Africa,” he argued that the “traditional view not only involved large conclusions from no evidence at all; it also proceeded to draw still larger conclusions for imperialism in the twentieth century from its unsupported large conclusions about imperialism in the nineteenth.” Indeed, in 1933, the same year that Coupland published The British Anti-slavery Movement, he produced a pamphlet entitled The British Empire: An Outline Sketch of Its Growth and Character for the British Broadcasting Corporation.Footnote 75 Coupland not only contributed to and had his books reviewed in journals like Africa, African Affairs, and International Affairs but he also served on a number of advisory or exploratory committees related to colonial policy during the 1930s and 1940s. The various activities of an individual like Coupland exposed the interplay between the production of knowledge and the governance of empire. “In a lecture at Oxford,” Williams recalled, Coupland “stated that ‘The British will do justice to Africa because they are heirs and guardians of a great tradition.’ As it was clear to me that they had not and were not doing justice to the West Indians, as the Hoare-Laval peace plan seemed to me irreconcilable with justice to Ethiopia, it became imperative to analyse the great tradition.”Footnote 76 Like many of his contemporaries, Williams believed that his intellectual intervention was indispensable in the struggle against the apologists of empire, both within and outside of the university.

Similarly, according to St. Clair Drake, news that L. S. B. Leakey was preparing a book on the Kikuyu “created resentment and spurred Kenyatta to write Facing Mount Kenya to checkmate him.”Footnote 77 Leakey's father, Canon Leakey, was a missionary who had helped to introduce the Anglican church to Kenya at a time when forced labor practices and land alienation proceeded apace in Kikuyu areas. Raised in Kenya, L. S. B. Leakey, who later became a renowned anthropologist, claimed to speak Kikuyu better than English during his youth and, by the mid-1930s, to know “things about Gikuyu customs that no elders could tell young Gikuyus.”Footnote 78 Leakey's previous books, Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (Cambridge, MA, 1936) and White African (London, 1937), established his reputation in Britain as the foremost authority on the Kikuyu and the Kenya colony in general. In the spring of 1936, he gave a series of lectures at Edinburgh University and soon thereafter received a grant from the Rhodes Trust to cover his expenses for a minimum of two years while he conducted fieldwork among the Kikuyu. Around the same time, Peter Mbiyu Koinage, another Kikuyu intellectual, arrived from the United States to enroll at Saint John's College, Cambridge. There, Koinage attended Raymond Firth's lectures alongside Leakey. Koinage, the Guyanese Ras Makonnen, and the English socialist Dinah Stock, who edited the manuscript of Facing Mount Kenya, helped Kenyatta get his book published before Leakey produced one of his own. Although Kenyatta acknowledged the influence of both Malinowski and Firth in his introduction, he noted wryly, “I owe thanks also to my enemies, for stimulating discouragement which has kept up my spirits to persist in the task. Long life and health to them to go on with the good work.”Footnote 79 When Drake met Koinage in the late 1940s, he had returned to London from Kenya and was working “in a halfhearted way” toward a PhD in anthropology under Audrey Richards at the London School of Economics. Although his commitment to the Kenya African Union prevented him from completing the degree, Drake recalled that Koinage wanted it “very, very much as part of the game of one-upmanship on L. S. B. Leakey.” His failure to realize this aspiration “rankled [Koinage] for the rest of his life.”Footnote 80 Describing his motivation for producing a study of Kikuyu customs in his memoirs, Leakey detailed the shortcomings of previous works on the subject. He gave Kenyatta's book only a passing and rather dismissive reference. “At about this same time, while a student at the London School of Economics, Jomo Kenyatta, now President of Kenya, was writing a book entitled Facing Mount Kenya. It dealt with Kikuyu customs in general, but many aspects of Kikuyu life were covered either too superficially or not at all.”Footnote 81

Like Koinage's and Kenyatta's “game of one-upmanship” with Leakey, the African American Eslanda Goode Robeson recounted how her experience in the anthropology seminars of Firth and Malinowski at the London School of Economics and Arthur Hocart and W. J. Perry at the University of London motivated her first trip to Africa. Although she found them “very interesting and exciting and challenging,” she “soon became fed up with white students and teachers ‘interpreting’ the Negro mind and character to me. Especially when I felt, as I did very often, that their interpretation was wrong.” Goode Robeson recalled that when she protested, “it went something like this: … ‘Ah, no my dear, you’ re wrong. You see, you are European. You can’t possibly know how the primitive mind works until you study it, as we have done. … The primitive mind cannot grasp the kind of ideas we can. … You see, we’ve been out there for years and years (some ten, some twenty, some thirty years); we’ve studied them, taught them, administered them, worked with them, and we know.'” Goode Roberson's frustration led her to ask some of the Africans whom she met at the university and the West African Students Union, “What is all this about primitive minds and abstruse subjects [and] about only simple subjects and crafts in your schools?” In response, she was told, “Oh, that … there's nothing primitive about our minds in their universities, is there? And how can we cope with any but simple subjects and crafts in our schools, when that is all they will allow us to have?” After several such encounters, she recalled, “I began to see light. … We know we aren’t essentially different from our fellow Negroes. We know also that others’ merely saying we are different does not make us so.” Still, unlike African intellectuals, Goode Robeson had “no answer to the constant ‘You have never been out there,’” so she embarked on her own journey to Africa in 1936, where she and her son traveled to South Africa, Basutoland, Kenya, Uganda, and Egypt, and visited Zach Matthews, whom she met in Malinowski's seminar, and African friends from London like Nyabongo.Footnote 82 Like the contents of the Journal of the Royal African Society/African Affairs, Man, and Africa, the environs of Britain's top universities, down to the level of the seminar, often reproduced the racial hierarchies of imperial rule.

Black intellectuals also ran into difficulty publishing their monographs in Britain. Established in 1928, Victor Gollancz's imprint, the Left Book Club, dominated the market in socialist publications during the 1930s, releasing works that were consistently pro-Stalin and pro–Popular Front, exemplified by Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb's Soviet Communism. In general, the members of the Independent Labour Party were “at best ambivalent” toward the Soviet Union, so Fenner Brockway, a member of Parliament and mainstay of the party, approached Fredric Warburg with an offer to bring to his fledgling publishing house writers who were associated with the Independent Labour Party, like C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Kenyatta, George Orwell, Reginald Reynolds, Ethel Mannin, and Jennie Lee (Aneurin Bevan's wife). James was one of the first authors whom Brockway introduced to Warburg. His novel, Minty Alley, became the first of his books to be released on the imprint, although its sales were disappointing. Padmore's Africa and World Peace, which appeared around the same time, was similarly “a flop.” However, James published, as Warburg put it, “two important works” with the press soon thereafter. He recalled that James's World Revolution, released in 1937, “became a kind of Bible of Trotskyism” and “sold immediately well.” The work offered a resounding critique of the reigning idealism concerning Stalin's Russia, which James considered “a betrayal of the revolution,” and established its author as a leading intellectual in the “Marxist Group” within the Independent Labour Party. The following year Warburg published James's The Black Jacobins, which he later described as “an excellent book.” In addition to his own writings, the press released James's translation of Boris Souvarine's massive biography Stalin from 1937. As the “best book available on Stalin's life and policy up to 1936,” Warburg recalled that “by the time the book appeared, within a month of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the public was agog to read it.” Warburg also published Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya. Even before its completion, he believed that “it would be an original and indeed unique contribution to African Studies.” “No African before Kenyatta,” he explained, “had had the ability or the specialized anthropological training to turn out a work in any way comparable with his.” After the book's publication, Warburg “was immensely proud of it.” To his chagrin, however, sales of the book were initially modest, consisting of only 517 copies. Facing Mount Kenya enjoyed much greater success when Warburg reprinted the book amid the British suppression of the Land and Freedom Army in Kenya, the so-called Mau Mau rebellion, selling some eight thousand additional copies.Footnote 83

While Warburg distinguished himself from other publishers in Britain by consistently publishing texts by black intellectuals, their access to the imprint depended on not only Warburg's estimation of the sales potential of their books but also his personal judgment of their contents. Although the Oxford-educated historian Eric Williams tried repeatedly to publish his PhD thesis, “The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the West Indies Slave Trade and Slavery,” “no one would buy [it].” Even Warburg, who Williams deemed “Britain's most revolutionary publisher,” refused to publish the manuscript due to its un-British implications. According to Williams, Warburg asked, “Mr. Williams, are you trying to tell me that the slave trade and slavery were abolished for economic and not for humanitarian reasons? I would never publish such a book, for it would be contrary to the British tradition.”Footnote 84 As a result, Williams's central argument on the roots of abolition first appeared in print when the Keys published an excerpt from his thesis in 1939.Footnote 85 This later became the backbone of his seminal study of the links between the Atlantic slave trade and industrialization in England, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). The color bar in academic publishing was even more absolute. In 1940, Athlone Press of the University of London released the first in a new series of London School of Economics monographs on social anthropology, which were selected by an editorial board associated with the university's anthropology department. The series would include works by Firth, Evans-Pritchard, Green, Fortes, Mair, Leach, and other prominent anthropologists in the decades that followed. Yet, the first monograph in the series by an African anthropologist (G. K. Nukunya's Kinship and Marriage among the Anlo Ewe) did not appear until 1969. The Nigerian Kenneth Onwuka Dike, who earned his PhD at the University of London in the 1940s, produced the first book in Britain by a professional African historian when Oxford University Press eventually published his thesis, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1890, in 1956.

Black organizations in London and their publications provided a rare space for West Indians and Africans in an otherwise harsh setting for their perspectives. In contrast to the European anthropologists, former colonial officials, and other “professional friends of the African” whose writings dominated the leading academic journals of the day, the published organs of the West African Students Union, League of Coloured Peoples, International African Service Bureau, and the short-lived West African Society celebrated the combination of insider knowledge and scholarly acumen in the work of black intellectuals.Footnote 86 In his review of Facing Mount Kenya in the International African Service Bureau's International African Opinion, C. L. R. James wrote, “Similar books have been written before? Yes; but by white men chiefly … [and] even the best … wrote from the outside.” Kenyatta, he noted, “is an anthropologist trained at London University, and even an unscientific reader can see the scrupulously scientific approach, the order, the method, the objectivity, in which he questioned.” James stressed not only Kenyatta's training but also his unique insight into the “social and religious ideals of the civilisation which is being so ruthlessly destroyed.” Although he disagreed with some of Kenyatta's conclusions, he maintained that “anthropologically” the latter was “in addition to Mr. Kenyatta's knowledge and method, the main source of his strength. Here, indeed, Africa speaks.”Footnote 87

The West African Students Union viewed intellectual endeavors as part of the grander project of West African unity.Footnote 88Wãsù traced the contours of a distinctive African intellectual tradition through “pen portraits” of writers and public figures like Kobina Sekyi and Herbert Macauley, celebrated the professional and educational achievements of black students and intellectuals in Britain and West Africa, and provided a rare space for politically engaged research on African culture and history.Footnote 89 Financial difficulties, exacerbated by the effects of the Depression, compelled the union to cease publication of Wãsù between 1929 and 1932. When it reappeared at the end of 1932, the union reiterated its commitment to the production of knowledge on Africa. The opening editorial declared, “The aim of ‘Wasu’ is not only to foster nationalism, which is necessary for the preservation of her good institutions and a regard for African culture, but also to combat the false and exaggerated views given the world by strayed European travellers, anthropologists, missionaries, officials, and film producers.” An association “composed of Africans of African birth,” the members of the union “have the natural right to interpret the psychology and philosophy of their own people and to act as ambassadors between black and other coloured races (especially the white race).” As such, Wãsù told its readers, “Another of the chief objects of the Union is to encourage sound and scientific study of African history, laws, customs and institutions.” The editors lauded the recent scholarly contributions of members like “‘Akan Laws and Customs,’ by J. B. Danquah; ‘United West Africa (or Africa) at the Bar of the Family of Nations,’ by Ladipo Solanke; ‘A Collection of Yoruba Thoughts,’ by Julius Ojo-Cole; [and] ‘West African Nationhood,’ by J. W. de Graft Johnson.”Footnote 90 The West African Students Union not only cited and directed readers’ attention toward recent anthropological work but actively encouraged Africans to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on Africa. Its journal served a dual function in this connection, publicizing the work of African intellectuals and providing a forum for them to publish short pieces based on their research or, alternatively, making them otherwise available to its readers.

London-based black publications valorized the politically engaged intellectual as an ideal to which students from the colonies should aspire. The League of Coloured Peoples singled out the work of individuals like C. L. R. James and W. Arthur Lewis as exemplary.Footnote 91 The Keys review of The Black Jacobins maintained that James “had proved himself a scientist and an artist of supreme excellence.”Footnote 92 Similarly, the journal asserted that Lewis “has set a great standard before all African and West Indian students and in his work for the League he has shown that it is possible for a man of ability to serve his race as well as to achieve exploits in his examinations.” The author expressed her/his hope “that young Africans and West Indians coming to this country will discover the wisdom of applying themselves to the work of the League as they seek to achieve success in their own academic career. It is a duty that all of us owe to the future of our race.”Footnote 93 An editorial in Wãsù on “Our Responsibilities” emphasized the special role of the West African student in Britain. “As soon as a West African student sets his foot on the soil of England, he … must … defend, without being bitter, the sanctity, integrity and honour of his native country and her ancient institutions against the onslaught of pseudo-scientists and self-appointed colonial experts, whose pens are being devoted towards driving a wedge between Great Britain and the peoples of West Africa.” Echoing the sentiments of many African intellectuals in London, the piece linked the work of these “self-appointed colonial experts” to the racism undergirding colonial policy and the color bar in British society. “The perpetuation of the colonial status—a system of herrenvolk, of superiors and inferiors—has become with such experts a lucrative source of livelihood. To them also the possession of second-hand information on Africa is a passport to glory, and entitles them to move in that section of English society which is separated by economic parasitism from the common mass.” Thus, the author contended, “A West African student abroad instinctively … assumes as a duty a dual capacity. As a merchant of light in search of the golden fleece, he becomes at once a student of his own special field of study and an interpreter of West Africa to Britain and America. … Under such circumstances, it is more of a miracle that Africans do achieve academic successes in British Universities and other Institutions.”Footnote 94 Black organizations like the West African Students Union, League of Coloured Peoples, and, after 1945, the West Indian Students Union called upon students to combine assiduous study and political activism in their endeavors, while working to establish mechanisms by which this might take place.

These groups not only pressured the Colonial Office to find financial support for promising pupils and denounced gross inequalities in the awarding of resources but also formed study groups as a type of critical supplement to their university education. Besides hosting a regular lecture series and a number of conferences, the West African Students Union launched a study group for students in 1941 that met on a biweekly basis.Footnote 95 Initially led by R. Kweku Atta Gardiner, the group continued to meet throughout the decade under the direction of Ako Adjei, Max Iyalla, and Bankole Akpata, who was a student at the London School of Economics at the time.Footnote 96 As Adjei explained in his report at the union's annual conference in 1946, “The aim is to approach [the manifold problems that confront the peoples of Africa in their relations with the outside world] with as much scientific objectivity as it is practicable for a scholar, or any group of scholars, to attain.” The union's study group, which included on average over twenty participants, collaborated on research projects and joint memoranda to the Colonial Office and secretary of state, and invited visitors as diverse as Rev. Ransome Kuti, George Padmore, the South African journalist and author Peter Abrahams, I. T. A. Wallace Johnson of the West African Youth League, and Rev. Dr. Edwin W. Smith, former president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, to attended its meetings.Footnote 97 In December 1945, 113 students registered for the first West Indian Students’ Conference in London and established the West Indian Students Union. The group's aims echoed those of the League of Coloured Peoples and West African Students Union, such as promoting fellowship among and offering assistance to West Indian students in Britain and stimulating “interest in the cultural, political and economic development of the West Indies.” Members of the union in its early years included future luminaries in the cultural, political, and intellectual life of the Caribbean.Footnote 98 The West Indian Students Union published a biannual newsletter and set up a study group on the economic history and development of the Caribbean, led by W. Arthur Lewis.Footnote 99 As Elsa Goveia wrote in the union's newsletter, this was a “field of study entirely new to most of us … and we are more than ever convinced that a people must know something of its past in order to plan for the future.”Footnote 100 In 1946, a small group of African women, many of whom had been active in the West African Students Union like the Sierra Leonean Irene Cole, formed the West African Women's Association, the first organization of its kind in Britain. In addition to its other activities, the West African Women's Association organized a women's study group that met on Saturday evenings.Footnote 101 Black organizations in London fostered a sense of community and common purpose between students from different ethnic groups and colonies, but their study groups and publications also provided a forum for them to present work in progress.

As the political demands of West Indians and Africans expanded in the late 1930s and 1940s, the ideal of the expert whose perspective transcended narrow sectional interests assumed a central place in their visions of development, international cooperation, and liberation. At a Fabian conference on Britain's relationship to the colonies in 1946, W. Arthur Lewis noted “that in all societies, however democratic or undemocratic they may be, it tends to be just a few leaders of the people who transform society.” “Where,” he asked, “is the leadership to come from in the Colonies?” For Lewis, the answer was obvious. “The only people who can transform the colonies into anything worth while are the educated Natives, the intelligentsia.”Footnote 102 The valorization of intellectual culture and education linked the first generation of postcolonial political leaders in Africa and Caribbean and became one of the legacies that they carried with them across the divide of decolonization, manifested in a commitment to establish public universities with flourishing history and anthropology departments. In nearly every case, they came to see themselves as, in a meaningful way, black intellectuals during their time in Britain.

Conclusion

With few exceptions, African and Caribbean intellectuals’ engagement with the disciplines of anthropology and history has been expunged from the history of colonial studies in Britain. As Frederick Cooper notes, it was only during the era of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s that African scholars became a recognized segment of the community of Africanists, a period in which the former increasingly distanced themselves from the study of colonialism.Footnote 103 Yet, West Indians and Africans, many of whom went on to become prominent politicians, gravitated toward the fields of anthropology and history in growing numbers in the decades before decolonization. They became critical, if largely forgotten, interlocutors in the development of colonial studies. Their interventions emerged within the context of new, if limited, educational opportunities for students from the colonies and an often conflict-laden but intellectually stimulating relationship between the dominant schools of thought in the social sciences and humanities in Britain and anticolonial, nationalist, and black internationalist political activism.

Black intellectuals embraced opportunities to engage European colonial “experts” in a productive dialogue, while at same time claiming the role of expert for themselves. Even in exceptional cases, however, the same inequities that characterized colonial rule marked their interactions with white anthropologists and historians. Practitioners from the colonies faced significant difficulties in producing and disseminating their work as well as in attaining recognition (and the funding that accompanied it). Within this context, the organizations and publications created by West Indians and Africans assumed intellectual as well as political importance. They nurtured an investment in the development of colonial studies in Britain at a time when the “tropical empire” attracted greater attention within academia, the Colonial Office, and popular culture. The arrival of the black intellectual in the metropole occurred alongside and was inseparable from the activities of black pressure groups.