Participant Observers by Dr. Freddy Foks;

Author:Dr. Freddy Foks;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520390348
Publisher: University of California Press

HAILEY AND THE AFRICAN SURVEY

Students attending Malinowski’s seminar on 2 May 1933 heard a paper presented by historian and expert on colonial administration Margery Perham. In her presentation she fantasised about a future in which the LSE would ‘multiply Malinowski indefinitely to staff our districts.’8 A discussion was held a week later, and students at that event sat alongside the former governor of Nigeria and Britain’s permanent member of the League of Nations Mandates Commission, Lord Lugard. A transcript of the ensuing discussion exists in the archives of the LSE. In it, Malinowski declared that ‘the most interesting point for us anthropologists here is to realise the difficulties of the political officer.’ ‘The anthropologist,’ he went on, ‘must often lower the prestige of white people, he must say and do things at the cost of being discreet. And this would not be approved of by government officials.’9 Such a willingness to court controversy impressed Perham. Hilda Beemer, a twenty-two-year-old South African student and later a prominent anthropologist, disagreed with Malinowski’s views, however. She thought that the anthropologist should play a more detached role, stating that ‘a government anthropologist is an anomaly.’ But Beemer only got this single sentence out before Malinowski cut her off. ‘It is futile and a sign of mental laziness,’ he snapped, ‘if the man of science pretends he can keep away from ethical questions or that he should not state it when his scientific outlook contributes to real welfare of humanity.’ After some time speaking, he concluded: ‘It is our duty to present these facts. Are we then political or scientific?’10 Malinowski’s question and the context in which it was uttered strikes to the heart of this chapter’s discussions of differences over development, expertise and policy advice.

By the late 1930s, Malinowski’s seminar at the LSE was attracting students from across the world and across the British Empire, keen to make sense of, and sometimes to challenge, British colonial policy. It was a hub of research and activism, with colonial civil servants (like Lugard) contributing to classroom discussion alongside an increasingly cosmopolitan, multiracial student body. Malinowski’s African students included Jomo Kenyatta and Z. K. Matthews. Other attendees were critical of British imperialism, like the African American political scientist and critic of imperialism Ralph Bunche and the anti-colonial activist, actor and academic Eslanda Robeson, as well as many other critics of the British Empire.11 With an emphasis on applied research and with extensive discussions of colonial policy, Malinowski’s seminar has been described as the first school of colonial studies in Britain. Although as one administrator remarked drily after a long discussion of how useful anthropology might be to men like him: ‘Expert opinions are not a final criterion in British Government.’12

Nevertheless, when the former Indian administrator and civil servant Malcolm Hailey began research for his compendious and influential book An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara, it must have seemed natural to rely on the anthropologists at the LSE for a great deal of relevant information and advice.

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