JB That’s right. We took the line that this was terribly dull but it was important that it should be dull and uncontroversial so that one would know where to look for the material. Our job was then to look at the material in a new light but it was important initially to file it non-controversially.
JG Non-controversially, how was this achieved?
JB By taking the very pedestrian categories that Schapera had used. For example, you have chiefs and commoners so you have a section dealing with the chiefs’ recruitment to the office, what their powers are, their relation with senior councillors, the relation with commoners, etc. all in that systematic and mechanical way, and I think it was very useful.
JG This was a kind of check list for political relationships and for phrasing your enquiry.
JB Yes.
JG And you were in Cape Town for six months?
JB Five months. Then we went back to where we were carrying out our own field work so Mitchell went to Nyasaland to study the Yao. Marwick was financed rather differently, I think directly from the Colonial Office and not through the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE Institute but was attached to Gluckman as one of his supervisors. Marwick had a plan to do a comparative study of a matrilineal and patrilineal people. The patrilineal group that he’d chosen was the Ngoni that I was to study as a major enquiry and in fact Marwick really set up a base camp among the Ngoni before I did, and then I took over the camp.
JG He wanted to move to a matrilineal people.
JB He wanted really to look at the Cewa rather than do a contrast between the Ngoni and the Cewa.
JG So that this, in anthropological circles in this country, almost unique collaboration between more than one anthropologist that you had at RHODES-LIVINGSTONE, then in a sense, finished because you all went off to your separate domain.
30:37
JB It didn’t finish in as much as we kept in contact with one another. We managed to visit one another in the field. I was perhaps more fortunate than most in as much as I visited Gluckman himself in Barotseland, and Colson among the Tonga, and I went to the Yao to see Clyde Mitchell with Elizabeth Colson.
JG And all this was being financed out of Colonial and Development Welfare funds which were funding the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE Institute, and who were funding Elizabeth Colson’s research, Marwick’s research..
JB Marwick was being funded directly from the Colonial Office..
JG Oh yes, Gluckman’s research and the rest. Although you were separated were you using sort of common schedules…
JB That’s right. We produced a few blank forms for doing census stuff and these were common to the Institute as a whole. There was an emphasis on producing material which would be comparable. And Gluckman himself produced a paper which was never published but was a quite ambitious attempt to produce a kind of comparative survey of the whole matrilineal belt of Central Africa, based partly on published material but partly on the new stuff that we were collecting.
JG You went to the Ngoni and you were there for some 20 months or so?
32:20
JB Well, I was there for a year in the first instance and then we went to Oxford and then came back for another year. So I was there for nearly 24 months.
JG You all went to Oxford?
JB We all went.., not Marwick but Colson, Mitchell and myself.
JG That was part of the contract, was it?
JB Well the idea was that we would have one year in the field and then one year writing up and then another year in the field. We had contracts that lasted for three and a half years and then there was six months leave at the end. We’d spent six months in the initial preparations among the Lamba and in Cape Town, then there was this year in the field. The argument was as to where we would spend the year in the middle. At one stage there was a proposal that we would go to the railway line in Northern Rhodesia but there was really no suitable place there, so then the Colonial Social Science Research Council suggested that we should go to Cape Town. But by this time Gluckman’s name had already gone forward for a lectureship in Oxford and so Gluckman was keen that we should go to Oxford with him. At one time it looked as though there was a deadlock between the two and Gluckman suggested as a compromise that we should go to St Helena and in the face of this suggestion the Colonial S.S.R.C. gave way and allowed us all to go to Oxford.
JG And Gluckman had gone there by this time, so there were all four of you there.
JB That was the academic year 1947-48. Then I went back to the Ngoni for another year. While I was in Oxford a job was advertised at U.C.L. and I applied for it and was offered it and I said that I could only come in a year’s time. I discussed this with Daryll Forde and he agreed that they would wait for a year.
JG When you went to the Ngoni, was this dictated by outside bodies or did it arise from your own interest?
35:11
JB No. I had no idea who they were. I hardly knew where Northern Rhodesia was. It arose out of a plan of research that Gluckman had drawn up and I think was largely influenced partly by theoretical considerations like patriliny and matriliny and things like that, partly by what we would now call applied considerations, that is to say there was a resettlement scheme among the Ngoni and he wanted to study the effects of that, partly also by the fact that some of these areas had been studied, and he thought studied not well, and Ngoni was selected partly because Margaret Read had written about the Ngoni and I think that whoever was to go to the Ngoni was to check up on what Margaret Read had written. I had the impression that I was being drawn into a quarrel among the senior generation..
JG Margaret Read having worked with Malinowski and being on that side.
36:33
JB That’s right. Mitchell went to the Yao. Reo Fortune was originally asked if he would study the Yao but he turned it down because he’d studied people called Yao in China and that he’d get them mixed up.
JG In most areas after the war there were these plans. I think Firth did one for West Africa. Schapera did one for East Africa and think Edmund Leach did one for Sarawak.
JB That was a little later I think.
JG I wasn’t thinking of research but a survey commissioned. You may be right that it was later.
JB There was a research plan for the Institute which I know was discussed at great length by the trustees which Gluckman was the author of. The Colonial authorities then approved that one person should go to the Yao. I think at one time I was to go to the Yao but because I was in London and Margaret Read was in London, and would have the opportunity of talking to her about the Ngoni it was thought that I should go there. I discussed what I was going to do with Margaret Read before I went to Africa.
JG The kinds of things that she had done, did they influence you in any way, either negatively or positively?
38:19
JB I found what she’d written very helpful, and it was she who put me on to the whole question of land ownership in the Eastern Province of Northern Rhodesia which has a very complicated history, and it was through her prompting that I eventually ended up at the Public Record Office and started reading dispatches and things like that after I got back, but it was because she’d pointed out what a complicated history of land settlement there had been in Eastern Province, more so than in the rest of Northern Rhodesia.
JG What year were you working in the Public Record Office?
JB When I was at U.C.L. in 1949-50.
JG But of course you could only get the records up to 1899…
JB 1902. But the Ngoni were conquered in 1898 so that all the interesting stuff was there. Once they were conquered they ceased to be interesting .., they were just a tribe. The span of record was narrow but there wouldn’t have been very much to discover after 1902 until much more recently. Northern Rhodesia was not controlled in that period directly by the Colonial Office but by the British South Africa Company whose records conveniently had all been destroyed during the war. I think they were not a particularly literate administration and I doubt if there was very much to discover. There was one year that all the published information available on the whole of Northern Rhodesia was the one sentence: The conduct of the natives has continued to be satisfactory’.
JG The actual problems that you dealt with when you worked among the Ngoni, they arose partly from your reading of and suggestions by Margaret Read, partly from your having worked with Gluckman. They would be the main influences.
41:06
JB I suppose so but I’m sure I’d read other things as well. The first paper that I published was on genealogies written for a seminar we had in Cape Town. I don’t think it was Gluckman who put me on to that. Margaret Read, perhaps, I doubt it though. I got onto that through reading Rivers. As an undergraduate I’d dined every evening beneath the portrait of Rivers with which I’m sure you are familiar.
JG Was that in the hall then?
JB Yes. He was in army uniform.
JG It was then taken away and I’ve never been able to lay my hands on it. I’d always wanted it in my room. As it is I’ve only got Palmer.
JB For seven years at school I walked past the tablet commemorating Henry Sumner Maine so that I had some sort of connection there too.
JG But at that time the name didn’t mean much to you…
JB No, but I discovered him later on.
JG Your interest in genealogies and more systematic modes of enquiry derive partly from Rivers too. Not much from Max Gluckman, he was not terribly systematic.
42:58
JB Max was full of ideas and one had to sift through them, but I found him a very stimulating person to work with. But one had to then convert his enthusiasm into something that would stand tests of falsifiability.
JG He was studying the Barotse. He’d also worked among the Zulu of course before that so he was familiar with some of the ethnographic, not to say the contemporary political background that you were dealing with.
JB Well he was familiar with the Southern Bantu origins of the Ngoni but they were pretty attenuated among the group that I worked with, much more so with the people I studied than with the people of the northern part of Nyasaland where Margaret Read did spend some of her time. So that the only Swazi or Zulu words that any of the people that I studied could remember were a few drunken snatches of songs and that kind of thing, and they would only talk “old Ngoni” as it was called, when they were drunk and it didn’t make sense. I certainly never tried to learn it.
JG So what did they talk the rest of the time?
JB They talked Chinsenga. It was a Central African language which had become the kind of ‘lingua franca’ of the people that they’d captured on their way north. So they didn’t represent anything like a northern branch of the Zulu or a northern branch of the Swazi even.
JG And all this had happened since fairly late on in the second half of the nineteenth century?
JB Well they left the Northern Transvaal at the end of the 1820’s and then went up as far as Victoria Nyansa and then came back again and settled where they were when I found them. They settled there in about 1880 and had been there ever since.
JG So they’d been there for seventy years or so when you were working there. So they were a fairly urbanised community?
JB They were urbanised in the sense that the great majority of the men had spent a lot of time working on mines in Southern Rhodesia or to a lesser extent in the Copper Belt. Some had even been down to the Rand in South Africa, even to Tanganyika in the gold fields, but there was just a little dorp, a township, of Fort Jameson in the Ngoni area that I studied. It was entirely rural there, and of course not all the women had been away to the mines.
JG But some of them had?
JB Well a few had been to the Copper Belt.
JG So Gluckman’s suggestions were not based on the work he had been doing earlier and what work he was doing then among the Barotse?
46:34
JB The suggestions that he made that I found valuable were those derived from his study of group conflict among the Zulu, much more so at that level of generality rather than anything specifically ethnographically to the Zulu as such, and I think that also his view of Northern Rhodesia as a whole was rather highly coloured by the fact that he worked in Barotseland where legal institutions were much more elaborate than anywhere in the rest of Northern Rhodesia. And I think that he was perhaps disappointed that we couldn’t produce from our areas anything comparable to the material that he’d produced from Barotseland on law.
JG This is presumably because Barotseland was still a much more on-going state system and had been left to continue..
JB They had never been conquered properly. I think that partly, but also because the Ngoni were essentially a migrant band of robbers, as it were, and their legal institutions were probably never very elaborate.
JG They were free-booters. And how did you find them? Were they still free-booting when you were there?
47:56
JB Well they liked to think of themselves as such. For instance there was an expression I seem to remember culling from an essay written for a competition I organised amongst schoolchildren contrasting the Cewa and the Ngoni, saying that the Cewa were just like slaves, they spend all their time eating, whereas the Ngoni were like Europeans, they spend all their time drinking, and there was this sort of notion that they were rather superior. And then again, the notion that the English must have come directly from heaven because only such a powerful people would have been able to conquer the Ngoni, whereas they had conquered everybody else around them. So they thought of themselves very much as an elite in Central Africa.
JG And they used to spend most of their time drinking?
JB They didn’t spend most of their time drinking as sometimes the grog ran out but it often was rather difficult at weekends to find a sober informant.
JG This was because they’d been down the mines or what?
JB No, I think that the effect of the mines was an unfortunate one as they introduced from the mines a number of quick recipes which produced a rather inferior brew.
JG This was millet beer?
JB Yes, whereas the real stuff which took a week or so to brew was really very pleasant to drink. But it was quite strong, but it was quite elaborate and the beginnings of parties were very formal and you offered it to people, and there were these precautions against being poisoned.
JG When you came back from the Ngoni you went to University College and worked with Daryll Forde. How did you find that? You were working with Kaberry and Forde…
50:07
JB And Barnicot.
JG Four of you?
JB Well I enjoyed myself there. I wasn’t allowed to lecture on the Ngoni. I had to lecture on kinship and East Africa generally, and all sorts of things so that I had to broaden my range of expertise pretty rapidly but I managed to cope and enjoyed it. I was there for two years between 1949-51.
JG Why did you give that up?
JB Because I was offered a Simon Fellowship in Manchester by Gluckman who wanted I think to start sociology as he saw it in Manchester and thought that I should carry out some kind of field research which would qualify as sociology.
JG What research did he want you to do?
51:18
JB He didn’t specify what I should do but I think he hoped that I’d choose something that looked more sociological than what I’d done in Central Africa.
JG But the Simon research fellowship was just for one year?
JB No, it was for one year in the first instance but it was renewable for another year and I think rather exceptionally it was renewed for a third year in my case because I didn’t have a job at the end of the second year.
JG But at the same time you were a research fellow at St John’s College. You don’t count that as a job?
JB Well it paid £200 a year, something like that. It wasn’t enough to live on.
JG What did the other research fellows do?
JB I don’t know. Perhaps they lived in college. I know that I was the only research fellow actually thought to be doing research at that time, that is actually going away to do research.
JG The rest of them were working in the labs or that kind of thing.
JB I had a wife and three children to support. I wouldn’t have been able in the best of circumstances to live on a junior research fellowship.
JG I can see that. But you used to come down to St John’s occasionally.
JB Once a week to supervise.
JG You were supervising in Cambridge right through that time?
JB I was in Norway for most of the time I held my research fellowship but when I came back to U.C.L…. I’m not quite sure when it was, but I certainly used to come up for one night a week and sleep in Hollick’s rooms I remember, and I supervised people like Salisbury etc.
JG So your move to work in Bremnes was that part of Max Gluckman’s conspiracy to make him more sociological?
53:48
JB Well I suppose that’s how it might be seen. When I got my Simon Fellowship I had to decide where to go. I had found it rather claustrophobic 1000 miles from the sea in the middle of Africa. The Ngoni were Calvinist or rather lapsed Catholics so I thought I’d try another religion so the fact that these Norwegians were Lutherans was an attraction. I had been interned in Norway at the beginning of the war. I’d been working in a work camp just before the war and on the day the war started I was in a Norwegian ship coming back to England which turned round and went back to Norway so we had to wait for a month. I had never been to Bremnes.
JG What made you choose Bremnes?
55:05
JB I wanted to choose a place where there was fishing, I wanted something maritime to disprove what had been said about the fishers of Fife by Patterson and Watson and co. who said that fishing boats were inherited matrilineally, which seemed to be nonsense. I wanted to look at the inheritance of fishing vessels which I saw as an analogue of cattle, that is valuable property that is moveable as distinct from land that is immoveable.