| Description | This is an interview with Professor John D. Hargreaves, recorded by Terry Brotherstone, on the 7 February 2002 and 27 March 2003.
The interview transcription is available in three parts : MS 3620/127/1 : MS 3620/127/2: MS 3620/127/3
JH African universities were not well equipped for this. They were all having their own problems of expansion and so on. External foreign scholars, some of them made remarkable progress, but my ideal Africanist of this period was my dear friend, Adrian Adams, who came to Aberdeen in about 1970 as a lecturer in Anthropology. Although she had actually been to … a student at Dakar University … not primarily in the first place as an Africanist, but as one who was more interested in anthropological theory her Ph.D. was on Levi-Strauss, hit on a research topic by chance on Senegalese migration, became deeply engrossed in its human aspects and the repercussions of the causes of migration, and finally made her home and her marriage within a particular community, cultivated the fields herself, and measured the housing, measured the agricultural holdings, was instrumental in reducing the Soninke language to writing for the first time and became a true Africanist an Africanist of a very different sort, and a sort of which not many people could follow. So, as it were, the challenge of African studies was something it would not have been possible for me, at my age and in my circumstances, even if I had the abilities, to follow that particular line.
TB Can I just stop you there for a moment? I mean, you talk very affectionately about that approach … I mean, is there something in this link between academic work and real life as it were, between being involved with the people and yet having sufficient different background and detachment to write about them that you do see as a kind of ideal, and one perhaps, in different circumstances although you had a very active and practical life, as well as an academic one you weren't able to fulfil. Is that something you feel slightly envious of?
JH Well, I think it's something I've always tried to maintain a foothold in, in early life, … in the society about me. In a sense, my early years in Sierra Leone, in fact I identified … I had attachments, rather strongly, to the African students with their ideals and the splendid emerging African nation, and devoted some time to very amateur explorations in what passed for political science at the period, where they were being hopeful. So I have never felt detached from African life and I don't think I have ever felt detached from Scottish life in Scotland, as an immigrant in Scotland. And yes, I mean … I know I am not a candidate for sainthood (laughter) and I'm happy to leave my sins before the judgement throne, if you like. No, I've taken personal decisions at various times in my life, which have made this impossible.
TB I'm not sure if I quite understood that train of thought exactly! All that about sinners and saints.
JH Well, I am not quite sure what you're asking, but I would regard Adrian [Adams] she was not a religious person but I would regard her as a saint in the sense of a saintly person who took her great intellectual gifts into the service of a particular community and devoted herself to it with single-mindedness and that …
TB I suppose what I was getting at was that I know from other encounters and sources that you have very much wrestled on the role of the historian a self-reflexive role in looking back over the period which brought you into contact with Africa, brought you into African studies, and I remember you giving a seminar where you talked about working in the Labour Party archives of the period in the 1940s. Because I remember asking you at this seminar, as a result of something you said you'd said something to the effect that it was clear now, going back into the archives, that, 'In going to Africa and working the way we did, we were not exactly doing what we thought we were doing!' And I remember saying to you - 'Knowing … if you'd known then what you know now, as it were, would you still have done it?' And I do remember you pondering for quite a while, before saying 'Yes, on balance, I think I would'! So I suppose …
JH That would still be my answer. We work with foreshortened visions of our place in history, and do the best we can and I'm content for anyone who reads this interview and reads the memoir to make their own judgement and it may well be that I was naive and misguided, and so on.
TB Which of us are not? Except … What I was picking up on when you spoke about Adrian Adams in that way, did you have a kind of sense that it might have been nice to have another life in which you actually immersed yourself in that society in some way which in your period would have presumable have meant a much more political immersion in nationalist movements and so on.
JH Yes, I think it would… Well, not necessarily in nationalist movements. I can think of academics, who spent many years in African universities without being signed-up members of [political movements] … particularly in West Africa. I can think on the other hand of Terry Ranger who worked in Rhodesia, where it was not possible … it was essential for him … if I had found myself there I would have hoped to have his courage in engaging in political activity. No, it is not missed political opportunities… There could have been another sort of fulfilled life, but I would have had to sacrifice other things, personally and academically, in order pursue it.
TB Perhaps I was slightly getting into a diversion there it is very interesting to me what you have said, certainly. I think I kind of interrupted you. You were going on beyond …
JH Well, I was merely saying that the decline of African studies … The other factor of course, and this particularly applied to Aberdeen, is that when the academic world as a whole was under pressure, African studies tended to be the thing that went, and in Aberdeen where the African Studies Group had been entirely dependent on the University's chances of the Economics Department appointing an Africanist it had Joe Kemp of course was nil. The sociologists, after Adrian herself and Chuck Jedrez moved on, didn't have an Africanist. The History Department didn't replace either me or Roy Bridges with an Africanist. And so as Africa became less of a hot speciality either academically, or from the political point of view, so the profession suffered. Now, at the moment I think that the Africanist profession seems to be in not too bad shape. It's reshaped itself. Some of the new universities have put up departments of their own. Membership of the African Studies Association is I gather fairly stable in its numbers. I don't go to their conferences any longer. I think … I haven't got much to contribute that's new. It's been reshaped. I think it has lost something from the early days but that's maybe just nostalgia!
TB So just to, sort of, round that off. Over your lifetime, coming in as a pioneer of the subject in British academic life certainly, up to the present, what would you say there have obviously been ebbs and flows what would say the main achievements have been in terms of how historians have contributed to understanding of African societies, and maybe even, have there been politically beneficial effects in your opinion? What would your overall judgement of your lifetime the achievement of the profession in your lifetime's involvement in it?
JH Well, I think the main achievement here, of course, one's talking of achievement in terms in western culture … it's a bit like the discovery of Lake Nyasa, which of course the Africans had known had been there all the time! African studies has revealed to the world, that what it previously thought of as a dark continent is not a dark continent. It is a continent of people with cultural aims of their own. It has removed any vestige of intellectual basis for a certain sort of racism. In the process it's added this process of discovery has enriched a number of disciplines. The work on oral traditions, which I haven't particularly engaged in, has affected the way oral traditions are being utilised by historians of other countries, and economists and sociologists and political scientists and anthropologists would all, I think, have something similar to say…
TB I suppose the other grand question is, do you see anything optimistic in the future of Africa?
JH The main ground for optimism is in the initiatives, which Africans are taking, and continue to take, in very adverse circumstances, in all sorts of ways. Where, if you read the literature and never meet any Africans, you probably do tend to come out feeling pessimistic. A small example, when I was latterly [external] examining over a number of years on two occasions in Freetown, reports on the university would not have indicated a very strong body, but I was extremely impressed by the way it was kept going and was maintaining university values. I would have great confidence in the future of communities like the village of Kounghani where Adrian …
TB Kounghani, can you spell that for the benefit of …
JH K.O.U.N.G.H.A.N.I. which was where Adrian lived. I only visited it once, very briefly … but it was a visit which has enlarged my understanding of the word 'community', which we use so much in this country nowadays.
TB Yes, absolutely.
JH So it is at that sort of level that I would remain in the long run, hopeful, optimistic about the future of Africa and Africans. That is not to give any prediction about the level of national income or achievement …
TB Or the future of the Aids crisis for that matter. Yes, although we have alluded to your trips to Africa, I mean, you have made very regular trips over this whole period, haven't you?
JH Irregular, but yes.
TB You have been … because as well as your research trips your period there, your research trips you have been an external examiner, which must have taken you there annually, presumably, over various periods?
JH Yes, Yes.
TB Well, that brings you back to Banchory. But there is one other University link, which is your involvement in the University History itself as indeed now, in the University Oral History Project. I wonder if there is … any thoughts about the University's History, its distinctiveness, the way it's been done, memories of being involved in it, that you would like to speak about?
JH Very briefly, yes. I think we had a good concept of working or not sitting down and commissioning a book called The History of Aberdeen University, which would be out of date in ten years' time, but of commissioning a series of independent studies, backing it up with a resource base of bibliography and of oral interviews. I still think that was a good concept.
TB And the University History although it was for the Quincentenary in '95 it was planned from the early 1980s on, wasn't it?
JH I remember, I think in the late '70s, I raised a question in Senate of planning for it and I think there was a certain amount of derision, about there being more urgent things to do, and it was a few years later that the University agreed to sponsor it. I have been slightly disappointed, and I am sure that Jennifer has too, that it hasn't had more recognition in the historical world. Because I think it has been a good example, and it has been carried out on very minimal resources, thanks to the readiness of the authors of the various studies to engage in what is not exactly a fashionable subject.
TB This, perhaps, again is another way of reflecting on Aberdeen, which semi-accidentally became your home, and coming from outside, and its distinctiveness and sense of itself … I mean, obviously, there are many university histories of one sort or another, but this is a distinctive one. Our History Department has a history of itself, which I doubt if very many history departments have, quite frankly. Now we have this Oral History Project, which I certainly hope we will publicise … will become more publicised, as we hopefully develop oral history at the University more. I wonder if you feel a subject we have come back to in different ways that there is something special about the University of Aberdeen that promotes this sense of community perhaps to do this sort of thing?
JH I think there is. I don't quite know how to define it. It certainly is something rather quirky and difficult to define in academic terms. Perhaps, I might end … I tell a story in the memoir of the night before my interview in Aberdeen when I was first time in the city, I had an offer of another job, in my pocket, and I'd had dinner with the Secretary of the University, W.S. Angus, in Old Aberdeen, and I was standing outside the Old Aberdeen Town House, waiting for a bus back to my hotel and suddenly there was a noise and a herd of cattle stampeded up St. Machar Drive on the way to Kittybrewster. I thought for a moment I was back in Africa! I was in a rather special place and it might be more interesting to work here than, even in such a fine city as Durham! (Laughter)
TB Yes, and you don't go to Durham. Yes, in one sense, that would be a great end. There is just one last thing I was going to you may or may not want to give you an opportunity to do and that was to perhaps say something about some people. Now one of them, at least, that I had in mind I think definitely is on tape, so it may be redundant for you to say more, and that was Ken Alexander. The other one we mentioned was Judith Hook, and another one, who of course sadly has just died, is Ann Gordon, and there may be others that you would like to suggest. These are three very different people who you have had involvement with that you might have a unique insight and be able to say something about which would be important for the record as it were? Given that two of them, at least, we can't interview.
JH Well I would be happy to say something brief, but no doubt I could think of other people as well. Ken became a friend very soon after he came to Aberdeen. It was partly due to the fact that we had young families I suppose that we came together, but it was clear that we approached university education in the same sort of way, we approached politics in a comparable way. Ken was an economist of distinction … and complete clarity, very much devoid of the technicalities. So, as an economist I admired him, as a university statesman I admired him, and as a friend he was very close.
TB And he was somebody else who became involved in the local community very much. I know he is still remembered on the Aberdeen Trades Council and so on.
JH Absolutely. Very much.
TB Well, he wouldn't have been a member actually, but he must have gone quite often to speak there, because the AUT wasn't affiliated, so he wouldn't actually have been a delegate there.
JH I don't know, but certainly he was very close …
TB He had links through Jimmy Milne, I think?
JH Yes. And he was the centre of a little group of social scientist and historians within the University and without, who met … Judith, yes. Possibly the …
TB You wrote her obituary in The Times, didn't you?
JH Yes. I would just say - one of the best historians we've had in the Department. Personally, as you know, enormous integrity, who, it seemed to me, to have burned herself out by trying to serve the cause of scholarship she was a better scholar than I was at the same time to serve the cause of the University community and wider political causes as well. I don't think offhand I've anything particular to add.
TB No, she always strikes me as somebody that counterfactually who, had she lived, she died in 1984, one could imagine perhaps a different history for the Department. She would have been a candidate for the Head of Department obviously …
JH … she certainly would …
TB … and that might have been a very interesting agenda.
JH Yes. It certainly might!… Ann Gordon, simply to say, she was appointed as Departmental Secretary one of the first things I did. She said she always wanted to work for a professor and she was delighted that she worked for five…
TB Did you actually recruit her into the University?
JH No, she was working for Soil Science before that, and she wanted to move over. And it became clear, that here was somebody that was very efficient in the duties of the secretary, but also very good with people. She was an ideal centre for … to whom both staff and students could relate, that she was always looking for ways in which to do it better. Sometimes it wasn't better, but for the most part it was! She did many things for the University … I won't attempt to recapitulate … and ended up as, I'm sure, being valued by the community as a whole. It's a great shame we haven't got her on tape.
TB Yes, that is a loss. I mean, are there other people you can think of that you would like to particularly … perhaps who otherwise wouldn't appear in this oral archive … at least to give a hint of … or perhaps you can't … off the top of your head?
JH Off the top of my head, I think I would prefer not to try to answer that.
TB But you would agree those are three quite interesting ones in your career. Well, John, thank you very much indeed. I think we have added to your memoir and I think we certainly added to the archive and perhaps at that we will call it a day.
JH Thank you, thank you, Terry.
End of interview.
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