A Man Divided: Michael Garfield Smith, Jamaican Poet And Anthropologist 1921-1993 (Press Uwi Biography Series,)

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THE PRESS UWI BIOGRAPHY SERIE

Douglas Hall, Editor The Press University of the West Indies invites the submission of work to be considered for publication in this biography series. We recognize the need to record the lives and achievements of people of the Caribbean, but we would not exclude biographical account of expatriates who have lived and worked long and hard with us to our mutual advantage. The series will not be limited to accounts of those who, by whatever means, have achieved wide acclaim or notoriety. Far more numerous than the famous are the many individuals who by stern and skillful performance in the fields, the workshops, the market-places, and in the service of their compatriots have contributed much but remain unrecognized. This series is also for accounts of them, and is dedicated to the solid contributions of the unsung.

1 A Man Divided: Michael Garfield Smith Jamaican Poet and Anthropologist 1921-1993 DOUGLAS HALL 2 Law, Justice and Empire The Colonial Career of John Carrie 1829-1892 BRIDGET M. BRERETON Forthcoming 3 White Rebel The Story ofT.T. Lewis through the Eyes of Contemporaries GARY LEWIS

THE HON. PROFESSOR MICHAEL GARFIELD SMITH OM BA PnD (LOND), HON LLD (McGiix), HON DLnr (UWI)

A MAN DIVIDED

Michael Garfield Smith Jamaican Poet and Anthropologist 1921-1993

Douglas Hall

THE PRESS UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES • Barbados • Jamaica • Trinidad and Tobago

Permission to use extended quotations from Edna Manley: The Diaries was given by Rachel Manley on behalf of the Estate of Edna Manley. Permission to reproduce diagram of Hausa compound (p. 34) was given by Editor-in-Chief, Yale University Press, Charles Grench Cover illustration: Rex Dixon, "Inside-Out", 1993 Diptych - enamel and acrylic on canvas - 56" x 49" (142 x 124cm) Collection - the artist The Press University of the West Indies 1A Aqueduct Flats Mona Kingston 7 Jamaica W I © 1997 by The University of the West Indies All rights reserved. Published 1997 Printed in Canada ISBN 976-640-034-2 ISSN 0799-057X 01 00 99 98 97

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CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Hall, Douglas A man divided : M.G. Smith, Jamaican poet and anthropologist 1921-1993/Douglas Hall p. cm. - (The Press UWI biography series 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 976-640-034-2 ISSN 0799-057X 1. Smith, Michael Garfield, 1921-1993. 2. Anthropologists -Jamaica - Biography. 3. Poets -Jamaica - Biography. 4. Jamaica - Biography. I. Title. GN21.S6H34 1997 301.92 Set in 11/15pt Adobe Garamond Book and cover design by Prodesign Ltd., Red Gal Ring, Kingston, Jamaica

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements CHAPTER ONE Youth

vii 1 17

CHAPTER TWO Transition CHAPTER THREE Nigeria

28

CHAPTER FOUR Achieving Attention

51

CHAPTER FIVE Professor M.G. Smith

82

CHAPTER SIX Patriotism and Party Politics CHAPTER SEVEN The Man in Academe

105 122

141

Notes

143 755

APPENDIX I Testament by M.G. Smith APPENDIX II Obituary by Murray Last APPENDIX III M.G. Smith's Publications 169

Index

Further Acknowledgements

v

173

160

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PREFACE AND A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

Michael Garfield Smith was my friend. At Jamaica College we moved through Forms 1 to 6 together, but not closely so, for he sat always at the top and I somewhere in the middle. On leaving school we went through similar experiences: brief enrolments at Canadian universities, he at McGill, I at Toronto; active service in the Canadian army in World War II, he with a motorized regiment in Western Europe, I with an infantry regiment in Italy; then return to university, he at London, I at Toronto; and afterwards both doing our PhDs at London where we renewed personal contact. We both came home to the Caribbean to work. I was able to stay. He was not; but he never forgot either his homeland or his friends. We visited whenever opportunity arose, when at times he came home or I went to England. I last saw him on such a visit to London in the autumn of 1991. He died in England in January 1993. In this brief account of his life I have tried to tell of M.G. Smith the man, the talented, hardworking Jamaican and how he made his way, rather than of the academic performance of Professor M.G. Smith the internationally vii

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 distinguished anthropologist. Thus my choice of the title A Man Divided for throughout most of his life M.G. Smith was divided between his capacity for deep emotional attachment and his early determination to be governed by intellect rather than by emotion. At school he was torn between devotion to his classroom disciplines and a more heartfelt yearning to express himself in poetry; in his academic career, between his wish to live and work in his homeland and the necessity to seize opportunity elsewhere since nothing permanent offered here; in his brief return home as Special Adviser to the Prime Minister in the 1970s, between Mike Smith the ideologue with his vision of a new 'democratic socialist' Jamaican society, and Mike Smith the pragmatist who realized that nothing can be achieved if ideological commitment is not joined with competent administration and performance; and finally, in his last few years finding sure contentment in England, though he would have preferred to find it in beloved Jamaica. This book would not have appeared without the interest of Sir Alister Mclntyre, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, who invited me to write it; and it most certainly could not have been written without the unstinting help and advice of Mary Felice Smith, M.G.'s wife, and their sons. Many others have helped. I thank them all and apologize that space permits only inadequate recognition in the listing of their names; but here I must express my special indebtedness to Douglas, Michael and Rachel Manley for several interviews and access to private documents; to Michael Manley for permission to reproduce or quote from correspondence and papers addressed to him as Prime Minister; to Mr Brian Speirs, the UWI Archivist, who made it easy for me to consult the university's records and M.G. Smith's personal files; and to Professor Edward Baugh for helpful comment as the work progressed. Douglas Hall Darliston, Westmoreland October 1995

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C H A P T E R

ONE

Youth LANDMARKS When Michael Garfield Smith died on 5 January 1993, he was 71 years old. The landmarks of a full and distinguished academic career recede into the distance of his youth, and we go back with them: 1986-1993 Professor Emeritus of the Human Environment, Yale University, and Senior Research Fellow, Research Institute for the Study of Man, New York. 1989 Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa, University of the West Indies. 1978-1986 Franklin M. Crosby Professor of the Human Environment, Yale University. 1972-1977 Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Jamaica. 7.976' Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, McGill University. 1969-1975 Professor and Head, Department of Anthropology, University College, London. /

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D SMITH 1921—1993

7.972 The Order of Merit conferred by the Government of Jamaica, and the Gold Musgrave Medal awarded by the Institute of Jamaica. 1961-1969 Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles. 1961 Awarded the Talbot Prize by the Royal Anthropological Institute for the best book written on Africa in I960. 1960-1961 Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University College of the West Indies. 1958-1959 Senior Research Fellow, Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research, Ibadan, Nigeria. 1952-1958 Research Fellow, then Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Social and Economic Research, University College of the West Indies. 1955 Awarded the Curie Bequest Essay Prize by the Royal Anthropological Institute. 7.953 Awarded the Wellcome Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute. 7.957 Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology, University of London. 1942-1945 On active service with the Canadian Army. 1939 Awarded the Jamaica Scholarship. 1929 Awarded a scholarship enabling him to enter Jamaica College as a boarding student. The first recorded notice is in the school's register: NAME

Charles J Maxwell SMITH Michael Garfield SMITH

PARENT

Charles Garfield Smith, Timsbury, Enfield

ADMITTED

Jan 1930

PREVIOUS SCHOOL

'Collegiate Preparatory'

Thus to the child, the father of the man.

2

A.R. Monroe

Douglas Hall His grandfather, William Smith, an English army drill-sergeant, had been posted to Jamaica in the early 1860s. In 1866 he married Elizabeth Davis of Barton's, Old Harbour, and they had three children - William John (b. 1867), Mary Jane ('May, b. 1870), and Charles Garfield (b. 1874). A few days after the birth of Charles Garfield, Elizabeth died. William Smith did not long survive his wife. He too died in 1874. Their three children were raised by their maternal grandfather, John Davis, who had come to Jamaica from Somerset, England, in 1840. Charles Garfield later became an agent for the United Fruit Company in Central America. He learned Spanish, and used to claim that he was "the lightning calculator of the Costa Rican coast". After World War I, in his mid forties, he acquired a wholesale business in Kingston, and is said to have done well in the provisions trade and as an exporter of local produce. He married Lucille Campbell who was of a Linstead family. She was a trained nurse, an amateur pianist and, as her photograph shows, an attractive woman. In 1919, their first son Charles John Maxwell was born in the family house on Church Street in Kingston. With them, helping in the house, was Cathrin Gregory (Kate) who came from Cross Keys in Manchester.

Lucille Campbell Smith

3

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 Two years later, on 18 August 1921, Michael Garfield Smith was brought into a comfortless world. His mother, Lucille, had died in childbirth. The attendant midwife was Miss Lillian Fisher ('Aunt Lil'), a registered nurse and close friend of Lucille Smith. Cathrin was deemed too young - she was then twenty - to take care of the baby, so 'Aunt Lil' shouldered her grief and the two boys and set off for St Ann. They remained there, for some time with her brother at Richmond Llandovery, and then until Michael Garfield was three years old, with 'Uncle Willie' (William John) and his sister, 'Aunt May' (Mary Jane) Smith. Some time in 1924 Charles Garfield, who had remarried, sent for his sons, and Michael Garfield was thus separated from 'Aunt Lil', whom he had come to know as 'Mamma'. Back at Church Street the two boys were taken in charge by Kate who tended them and, when the time came, saw them off to school. But Charles Garfield's second marriage was short lived. His second wife died and soon there came another separation. Perhaps because he so obviously missed her, perhaps because he too much reminded his father of the death of his first wife, Michael Garfield was sent back to 'Aunt Lil', now living on Duke Street with Miss Lowndes, a family friend. The boy was then six years old, and in his later years his memories of childhood went no further back. He could vaguely recall going to a little school in Kingston, near where his father lived on Church Street, and being looked after by two kind ladies. He could not, however, recall his second return to the family home when his father decided that Max and Mike should no longer be separated. Sometime, apparently in 1929, Charles Garfield sold his Kingston business and purchased Timsbury next to his first wife's property Evandale near Enfield, St Mary. He intended to go there, taking the family with him. By early 1930, however, there were new considerations. In November 1929, Kate Gregory had borne him a daughter, and, in that year, Michael Garfield had won a scholarship which would allow him to enter Jamaica College as a boarder. The boys were then attending the 'Collegiate Preparatory' school run by A.R. Monroe. It was Aunt May Smith who insisted that they should remain in Kingston and go to JC. And so they did, in January 1930, as boarders: Charles John Maxfield as a paying student, and Michael Garfield on a scholarship. They entered under the headmastership of William Cowper, an Englishman

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Douglas Hall

and classical scholar who, with frequent canings instilled the Latin grammar. There, the boys - Max and MG to their schoolmates - were officially recognized as 'Smith, major' and 'Smith, minor'.

AT JAMAICA COLLEGE IN THE 19308 They were very unlike. Max was a large, rough extrovert. MG was smaller, quieter, withdrawn, but he soon demonstrated a clear individuality. They were less often in each other's company than might have been expected of new-boy brothers in a boarding school; except that Smith, major, from time to time came to protect Smith, minor, from physical assault. Jamaica College in the 1930s has been well described by one of its distinguished old boys, Gladstone Mills, who entered in 1931 as a boarding scholar. Behind the playing-fields bordered by the Old Hope Road, and two large ficus trees standing guard before the main building . . . . . . were the hallowed halls and corridors which had been graced by distinguished old boys such as Reginald Murray, Norman Manley, Noel ('Crab') Nethersole, N.N. and Leslie Ashenheim, C.M. Morales, W.N. Dickenson, H. Lawrence Lindo and K.H. Ross -all Jamaica or Rhodes scholars between 1904 and 1931, and outstanding sportsmen. Their names and photographs were generously and conspicuously displayed on the walls of the main 'tower' building for all to see and emulate as role models. In that era, high priority was accorded to allround proficiency in scholarship and sport and to the qualities of leadership.1 Behind all that lay the other side of the 'Mid-Victorian English public school' on which Jamaica College had originally been patterned. Relics of racial and social prejudice still remained. Younger and weaker boys were bullied, sometimes viciously; masters were, almost without exception, playfully but sometimes cruelly ragged; new boys were subject to initiation rites, some of them violent; and there was the forbidding presence of William ('Pross') Cowper behind whose constant emphasis on the ethic of hard work and fair play and his not infrequent acts of individual kindness lay a fine sadistic streak. Gladstone Mills recalls:

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A Man Divided: M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993

A contemporary of mine, a brilliant student in most other subjects, later won the Jamaica Scholarship and became an internationally renowned scholar, at one time also on the UWI staff. On one occasion he was caned on a platform in front of the entire class, the Head's anger rising to boiling-point when, after inserting his finger in the boy's collar from the back, while drumming in each individual Latin word and phrase, the unfortunate student, twisting and writhing, ended up facing him. The justification for the punishment was expressed thus: 'You nearly broke my finger and almost asphyxiated yourself.2 That 'unfortunate student' was Michael Garfield Smith. No wonder that 20 years later, in a lunchtime conversation, he would refer to "my horrible school career and the various forms of punishment I enjoyed". In January 1930, when MG entered Jamaica College he was only eight and a half years old, and 'horrible' as the memories were, it was in that sojourn that his intellect was cradled. In 1933, after the Easter holidays, Reginald Myrie ('Reggie') Murray succeeded William Cowper. Murray is remembered as a great headmaster and educator. Quiet, self-effacing, and yet strong and highly respected, 'Reggie' had a talent for recognizing those among his students who showed promise beyond the ordinary. On his side, as MG proceeded through the school, he recognized in his headmaster a man beyond the ordinary. 'Reggie' taught Mathematics, French and a course in Religious Knowledge - 'The Acts of The Apostles'. A Jamaican, a JC old boy, a Rhodes Scholar of 1904, a decorated World War I veteran, a cricketer, rifle-shot and mountaineer, he was one of the school's role models. And he loved his countryside as much as he respected his countrymen. On his frequent trips into the Blue Mountains 'Reggie' often stopped for a while at Abbey Green, about halfway up to the Peak. From dewey banks, where stag ferns creep Unmarked, lone bluebells shyly peep, And down the slopes red lilies blow Soft-nurtured by the streams that flow And mountain mists that curl and sweep By Abbey Green3

6

Douglas Hall

Many years later, MG told another distinguished JC old boy and close friend, Michael Manley, about an incident which had greatly and permanently affected him. One afternoon on the school grounds, he came upon 'Reggie' who was gazing up at the mountains. He was then Head Boy, and as such was accustomed to brief informal chats with the Headmaster. So he approached. 'Reggie' turned and saw him and asked, "Smith, what is the quality that the mountains have?" Smith replied, "Tell me what you think, Sir"; and Mr Murray putting the thumb of his right hand up against his lips in familiar gesture, said, "Permanence, Smith. Permanence. That is what they have." There were others on the teaching staff of Jamaica College in the 1930s whose influence bore on the developing character of the young MG. Hugo Chambers, another Jamaican and old boy of the school, taught Mathematics and Geography. 'H.C.' as he was known, was the master most respected by colleagues and students alike. A strict and fair disciplinarian and allround sportsman who would later become headmaster, H.C. contributed to MG's academic success, and led him into his only keenly active sport - boxing. Practising with diligence, and putting his intelligence to work on tactical precision and proficiency, MG became captain of the school's boxing team, and led them into inter-schools' competition as JC's aspirant to the middle-weight title. Among those watching his bout against Garth Moodie of Wolmer's were two schoolboy friends, Michael Manley, who attended JC, and his older brother Douglas Manley from Munro College. Michael Manley later described what befell: I'll never forget to my dying day MG coming out looking very cool and scientific, and Garth Moodie looking very muscular and unscientific. Moodie gave him one shot to the stomach and MG subsided into a crumpled heap, defeated not by lack of courage but by lack of wind. But MG did not hang up his gloves in defeat. He continued boxing, and later in the Canadian army he sparred convincingly with members of the regimental boxing team. After the war, he showed his friend Michael that he was no rabbit in the ring. Both were then students at London University, living next door to each other in war-damaged rooms in south London. They

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 spent much time together, listening to music, talking, and occasionally boxing, for MG had kept his gloves. Michael Manley learned not to underestimate the now much practised skills of the once crumpled Smith. On one such occasion, he recounted: "I don't know whatever got into me to throw a really hard hook at him, which landed, and the next thing I knew was that I was on the seat of my pants." That was MG's only active sport, but he followed events in others cricket, tennis, football, track and field, and gymnastics — with continuing interest. Most of the teaching staff at JC and other secondary schools in the 1930s were expatriates and, at JC, there were two who profoundly influenced not only Smith but many others who were taught by them. Ewart HJ. King taught History. A young Englishman from Wiltshire, a predominantly rural county, King showed his students what History is all about. He de-emphasized the names of admirals and kings, and their comings and goings. He showed that History is about people and their philosophies and processes. He demonstrated how, notwithstanding his own leanings, the ideas and actions of people who in their time were very much alive, could be objectively examined and assessed; and, perhaps above all, his enthusiasm for his discipline was exemplary. There was another Englishman who, more than anyone else in the school, stimulated the literary interests of M.G. Smith, his classmates H.D. Carberry, Kenneth Ingram, and others like them who, in addition to preparing themselves for later eminence in their chosen professional fields, were already, at school in the later 1930s, measuring their minds in the creative writing of poetry and prose. K.R. 'Soapy' Pringle - so called for his unkempt appearance - was a shy, nail-biting, introverted, mumbling figure of fun in the eyes of most of his students; but for the few who searched behind that outward shabbiness, Soapy's love of literature, particularly of the poetry of Shelley, Keats and the Romantics, was inspiring. Of those few, in his time, MG was the widest read and their self-appointed monitor. Kenneth Ingram was a close friend. MG used to give me long lectures about philosophy, and he was very interested in nineteenth century philosophers and philosophic systems. 8

Douglas Hall I remember him talking a lot about Kant and Spinoza, and he was very much taken with the philosophic theories of monism. I think that comes out in one or two of his poems - the idea of a single reality in life. But later, after we had left school, he seemed to have a sort of rejection of intellectualism. I remember him quite clearly telling me what I needed to get out of my system; for he thought I was a poet, but was being hamstrung by my intellectualism and my extreme selfconsciousness. He said that I should forget about myself and reject all intellectualism and all systems, and give myself wholeheartedly to something, because that was the mainspring of creativity. After 1941 Kenneth Ingram lost touch with MG for many years, but he once vividly described him: "MG was at times a very angular character, and he could fall like an axe on you." The last year of MG's sojourn at Jamaica College was that in which the protests against Crown Colony Government in Jamaica broke out into open revolt. The striving towards self-awareness, self-respect, and self-government had materialized into action in which Norman Manley, another JC old boy of great distinction, was an outstanding figure. Small wonder then, that MG felt the call, and responded with his song, which every schoolchild in Jamaica should know: Let the thunder shake The old Gods awake Past and future break. I saw my land in the morning And O but she was fair The hills flamed upward scorning Death and failure here. I saw through the mists of morning A wave like a sea set free Faith to the dawn returning Dark tide bright unity. I saw my friends in the morning They called from an equal gate 9

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993

'Build now: whilst time is burning Forward before it's late'. Then Jamaica Let the thunder shake The old Gods awake Past and future break On as the voices roll Move as a single whole Forward Forward Forward O country to your goal.4 In 1939, Michael Garfield Smith at the end of his sixth-form studies sat the Higher Schools Certificate examinations, conducted by universities in England. His fellow students, indeed almost the whole school, expected him to do well. He was the school's head boy, with a remarkable record in all his previous examinations. Now the real test had come. In competition with candidates from the sixth-forms of the other secondary schools, MG would be contender for the single Jamaica Scholarship then awarded to boys. The results came out. And here, let Michael Manley, one of the schoolboy watchers take over: My first recollection of 'MG' is of a strange, shy, aloof person and like all shy people you might easily have thought it was a sort of arrogance. It was only when you got to know him that you realized that he was a person of enormous tenderness. To us, younger boys, he was at first a figure of mystery, and boys tend to laugh at the mysterious, so there was a tittering about this strange young man; but by the end he was a figure of awe, he was so brilliant. MG became an intellectual hero. When he went for the Jamaica Scholarship, Munro College had a very bright student named York Slader. Slader was in Maths and Science where you can score perfect marks. MG was doing English Literature, History and Geography. You're not supposed to be able to get even nearly perfect marks in subjects like English and History because so much depends on 10

Douglas Hall

personal evaluation and interpretation. When MG beat him you would have thought the JC football team had won the inter-schools Manning Cup. The whole school was in excitement, all agog, because for the first time we had an intellectual hero. And unquestionably so, for Michael Garfield Smith had not only outclassed his Jamaican competitors. With distinctions in all three of his subjects he had also achieved the highest marks of all Higher Schools Certificate candidates in the British Commonwealth. By that time, Michael Manley and his family had come to know MG very well. His poetry and his reputation had reached Drumblair, then the home of the eminent barrister, Norman Washington Manley and his wife Edna, whose great creative talent enlivened and encouraged a new artistic coterie of young writers and painters burgeoning out of the challenge of the times. MG's schooldays, on his own admission, had not been happy. Withdrawn, of extraordinary intelligence, and often sharp in comment, MG won great respect, but little popularity among his peers. Not popular, neither was he disliked, for although he never sought popularity he found his own level of participation in nearly all the usual schoolboy romps and recreations. He gleefully ragged masters whose performance he thought in some way deserved it; he took part in some field sports, without distinction but sharing in enjoyment of the game; and he made a few close friendships which would last throughout his life. In his family circle, he had never managed to befriend his father. His holiday visits, with brother Max, to Timsbury had become less frequent. Cathrin Gregory had borne two children by his father: Hazel, born in Kingston in November 1929, and Leo, born at Timsbury in June 1932. It was their company, rather than that of his father and brother, which MG enjoyed in the St Mary bush. Hazel remembers him there as a silent boy, sitting on a large stone under a gourd tree by the roadside near the house, or wandering alone through the property. His father called him 'the dreamer'. Max teased all the others, sometimes roughly. But neither brother showed much interest in the business of the property which, after heavy storms in the 1930s, declined so much that Max, the paying student, had to leave Jamaica College in 1934. He later went to work with large firms in Kingston, St Elizabeth and St Ann. 11

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993

DRUMBLAIR AND THE MANLEYS Finding Timsbury less and less congenial, MG went there more and more infrequently. When not boarding at JC in term-time he would stay with his Aunt May, then living on Half Way Tree Road. There he enjoyed the company of her son Jack Smith, several years older, who sometimes took him sailing in Kingston Harbour. He also spent more and more time at Drumblair where, by invitation, he had followed his intellectual reputation and his poetry. There in the company of the Manleys and their friends, he became 'Mike' to distinguish him from Michael Manley. Douglas Manley described the schoolboy holiday scene, recalling Mike's appearance in it. Michael went to JC and I went to Munro, and my first recollection is of Mike coming from JC with Michael. There was a group of us, Dennis Hall and his younger brother, 'Dossie' Carberry, Mair from Munro and others. We hung out at each other's houses, mainly at Drumblair which was sort of centrally located, and perhaps more permissive than the others. Mike used to come, but he was not so much in the hurly-burly of getting on to bicycles and riding down to Bournemouth to bathe things like that that we did in vacation time. In those days, for youngsters like ourselves, the bicycle was the preferred means of transport. Mike was a little bit on the margin, and in a sense possibly related more to my mother than to us. But he did some things. I can remember going up to Blue Mountain Peak with him, I think at his suggestion. In those days, walking up to the peak was a sort of 'in thing'. I used to go up quite often with George Campbell, and 'Dossie' Carberry and others used to go up. But to get back to Mike Smith; I was a fairly introverted person, and so was he. We were both fit, so we got up quite easily, but when we got there we discovered that there wasn't very much to talk about. I didn't know him very well, and he was even more introverted than I was, so it was a fairly ridiculous situation with two introverts standing silent on Blue Mountain Peak. Of course there was much that could have been said. MG, following 'Reggie' Murray, loved the mountains. 'Soapy' Pringle often took a group of 12

Douglas Hall

his students up to Flamstead, over the hills beyond Gordon Town. There, on the mountain's edge, overlooking Kingston Harbour, he would hold informal class. Perhaps it was of Flamstead that Smith wrote when World War II had begun: The trees are peaceful here The trees are still. Birds without bombs in air Curve as they will. The trees are peaceful here The trees are still. There are no rivers here To choke their flow In flood. No blights to steer Green growth below. There are no rivers here Nor one black crow. At Drumblair and sometimes at Nomdmi, the Manleys' mountain retreat not far from Flamstead, Mike Smith found a whole new world of companionship, of music and literature, of conversation, and of poetry. For him as for many others who knew Drumblair, the centre of this new world was Edna Manley - artist, mother-figure, and poetic muse. Full of life and loving, Mike Smith wrote his "Glory Poem": With golden hands my golden throat Here cut my golden throat Free sun gold music Here let me bleed my joy Wild flame-tide sunlight Here pass your golden hands Dawn on the tree-tops And let the song pour through 13

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993

Surge through Gold torrent Let the wild glory steed Mane flaming wildly Here let the golden light flood This greenness sleeping Cut cut my surging throat To flood the world with dawn. The Manleys responded to Mike as they did to others of like promise; but Smith's enormous intelligence, informed by a wide range of reading, marked him out. Edna Manley noted in her diary on 28 January 1941: Human relationships are entirely dependent on a gift for objectivity. The biggest mind achieves the highest pinnacle of thought - but in its development it often appears crude and half-formed to a lesser mind who has already achieved a lesser, but complete peak. I write this as a very minor artist. Minor artists are essential and valuable because by crystallizing early, they achieve complete 'realisis', where the bigger mind is in a state of process - and unrealization. Poetry should not depend on the 'right word'. Poetry is the art of building (or finding) realization out of a sequence of words — realisis that can be achieved by the use of one word is scientific. This does not conflict with the fact that poetry must not descend to the process of thinking, but must be the last nucleus or kernel of it. Because poetry is not thought, but awareness. Realisis is Smith's coinage. Awareness -me.5 In 1941 Smith was teaching at DeCarteret School in Manchester. He had been there since leaving JC after getting his Higher Schools Certificate results, and in those years the poetry poured out of him. He was in mental and emotional turmoil. He wanted to write poetry. Some of his poems had already been published in Public Opinion, a weekly journal at the time. Edna Manley wanted to publish more, including the work of 'Dossie' Carberry, George Campbell, Victor Reid, Kenneth Ingram, Roger Mais and others. But not until 1943 was she able to launch Focus, an anthology of new poetry and 14

Douglas Hall prose. The hope was that it would make an annual appearance, but wartime restraints, uncertainty of a market, and the departure of many of the young writers, including Mike Smith, delayed the next issue until 1948.

THE SHATTERING OF EARLY DREAMS In 1941, Mike Smith, in love with Jamaica, and in love with poetry and his muse, was in deep dilemma. Never before in his life had he been so much embraced by the golden admiration of those whom he himself admired. The Jamaica Scholarship hung heavy on his neck. To go abroad to study would be to lose all that, to be alone again, this time in full awareness of the loneliness, and in some distant place to be without the spark that lit his creativity. And the moon came Like a woman Out of the dark clouds, The wind was silent wonder The hills With humbled backs Kneeled in the circle of that glorybe And I Poured out towards that woman Ceased for all time to hear The blind choric denial sounding from the pines. Moonlight spread the shadow of uncertainty. I took my poems out Into the moonlight And if I wept The tears fell Silently on the new grass Or on the dead leaves.

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993

In the autumn of 1941, Michael Garfield Smith, with honours round his neck, left his land. It was not a glad departure. These golden moments All flow out of pain. When next you hear my songs Remember how Only this singing like a sacrifice Can keep me sane; And when you sing my songs Remember too How all the grief that flows From this mad heart Would not be gold nor flow Apart from you. But the song silent And the singer dead And madness sitting By her sacrifice. But though the going was painful, there was no surrender. I was hurt at birth By a fall on earth And never again O never again. And so he went, taking with him his dilemma, massively wrapped.

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CHAPTER

TWO

Transition

MARY MORRISON In September of 1941 Smith sailed to Canada where he enrolled at McGill University. That was not by choice. Sad patriot and anti-imperialist, he would have preferred to find himself in the distant multitudes of Bombay and its University; but in the view of officialdom that idea was entirely out of order. Officialdom would have sent him to the imperial cultural heartland, but Britain was under siege. Therefore, like others at the time, Mike Smith took the available route. At McGill, for the few months from September 1941 to March 1942 he read English Literature. In April he enlisted in the 17th Duke of York's Royal Canadian Hussars, a reconnaissance regiment with the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division. It was not surprising that he chose English Literature. Neither is it really surprising that he so soon abandoned it. He found that much of the work he was required to do was repetitive of his sixth-form studies at Jamaica College. The winter weather did not encourage attendance. Above all, perhaps, a desperate restlessness followed the severing of aortic ties to home. In 1942, 17

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 with his regiment in the converted liner Queen Mary, he was swiftly zigzagged east, between the German submarines to England, to Mary Morrison, and to war. But there was a lull. The 17th Hussars did not go into action until 12 June 1994, six days after the first allied landings in Normandy. Until then, they were stationed in the south of England. Mary Morrison worked as a typist in a Citizen's Advice Bureau office in Battersea, London. On a Saturday afternoon in January, 1943 she went with a friend from the office to see Donald Wolfit playing King Lear at the St James' Theatre. As we stood in the line waiting to get our tickets there was a Canadian soldier standing behind us and passing over the money he said 'Please could you get my ticket for me?' So we bought his ticket and he came and sat beside us. I remember that in the interval he started talking about Shakespeare and Johnson and the Jacobean playwrights in a very knowledgeable way. I thought this strange. The soldier in Canadian uniform was Michael Garfield Smith who, with a ready eye for a good-looking woman, had made his play. I had noticed at first that he didn't look like an ordinary Canadian, and I thought perhaps he was a Canadian Indian, so I asked him and he said 'No. I come from Jamaica.' After the play, my friend and I went to get our bus home. He walked over to the bus with us, and in a curious sort of impulse I wrote down my name and address and telephone number, and gave it to him, with an invitation to come and visit me and my mother if he should get back to London. Thus began visits on which Mike sometimes brought his friend, Keith Saunders, who was known as 'Slim'. Mary learned more: "I remember that we went to a Beethoven concert at the Albert Hall, and I found that he knew a whole lot about classical music as well." This was certainly no ordinary soldier, and Mary Morrison equally was no ordinary soldier's date. The companionship grew strong. Then Mary was called away: "In August I was called up and joined a unit which was attached to the Royal Signals, and provided the radio link with resistance groups in 18

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Canadian Soldier Smith 19

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993

Europe. So I was busy being trained, and he was with the Canadian Army in the south of England." M.G. Smith, England, 1943: The gift of you is Birth Pride And new purpose You have united life With light for me The gift of you is Strength Stillness And splendour Here at the inmost silence of my tree. Even though you are gone And there is nothing O but the gift of you Fills Like a sea. And in that year much more, including 'Transition - A Poem Sequence' - in thirty-six parts, of which a few: 2. This is no song of joy Nor lamentation When wonder comes in Like a soaring bird Hills take the bird-song

'Freely thou feedest me Whole be my song to thee'. But know this iron time Stubborn and long to bear And not to yield 20

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Or lessen Establishing the line All all my own Breaching cliffed night to dawn. I heard a strong man at his work Slowly and deeply singing 'Let one unflinching purpose turn the mill-wheel round Pour one great flood to drown the stars in dawn.' 11. If I could make a song As sunny as the day On which my love made known That I alone Had won her heart away If I could sing that song With all the sunny life That flows from me to her My love, my wife, Then flame should never cease Singing had never done Till all these cold grey lands Danced in the golden sun.

13. Sheerly upon the verge we walk How frail the bridge that trembles Above this flaming gulf. Is this sweet spring then sweetest Because it may be last? Are these white blossoms whitest Because of darkness past? Is this blue heaven bluest Because it's overcast?

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AND WAR On 12 June 1944, quite out of character, Mike Smith went with his unit to meet the German guns at Caen. During the campaign there occurred one of those remarkable coincidences which sometimes shake us. Mike was wireless operator in one of his regiment's reconnaissance carriers. At a crossroads in Normandy, they met a tank manned by Canadian Grenadiers, one of whom was Jack Smith. The meeting was brief before they went their different ways into further action. Jack's tank was hit, and he was badly burned, but not fatally. After the war, Mike and Jack and their families kept in touch, and visited whenever opportunity allowed. The Hussars fought through France and on into Belgium, Holland and Germany. Smith was not popular in his unit. His friend, 'Slim' Saunders, who was, like Mike, a lover of classical music, suggests reasons why: MG, as he was known to me, was a dear friend and is sorely missed. My best recollection of him was in basic training in Montreal. He had just left McGill University, and when I asked him why, he said that although it was a fine university, there was nothing there to help him fulfill his ambition. He became a good soldier, but his mind was more in his books, reading, and the finer things of life. Here is an example of his basic disinterest in military life. One day an officer of the Canadian Grenadier Guards who had a bad limp was giving us a lecture on gas warfare. MG was obviously paying little attention. The officer called him out, and told him that as a penalty he would have to write a poem on gas warfare and deliver it next day. Next day MG stood before the class and began to recite a long composition of which, unfortunately, I can only remember the first verse which went like this. Here stands Judas Maccabeus The Grenadier with broken knees Who thought he knew all about gas But got a bayonet up his ass. There was lots more, each verse better than the last. The room was in uproar, and the lecture was cancelled. MG had a dry sense of humour. 22

Douglas Hall He also had a strong sense of fair play. While stationed at Woking, in Surrey, Private Smith had been kept on kitchen duty washing dishes after meals for over a month. One day, exasperated, he piled all the dirty dishes at one end of his trestle table and tipped the lot on to the floor saying, 'O.K. Sergeant, you can take it out of my pay.' Sauntering off, he was held and taken to the guard-room and eventually before the Duty Officer who, on hearing Smith's explanation, released him but certainly made him pay for the damage. In England and Europe he was a good soldier, but his mind was never with it. Many were the nights when in a dug-out he would spend time reading or writing by candlelight and, on one occasion, reciting to me Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. He also knew his Bible very well. I can still hear him telling me of Blue Mountain Peak, of Jamaica rum, and of the people. He also told me of his close relationship with Norman and Edna Manley, his informal involvement with the People's National Party, and his hope for the future of Jamaica. And another memory - MG was an excellent boxer, and although he would not permit himself to fight in competition, he used to put on the gloves as a sparring partner with many of the top boxers in the regiment, and certainly put them to the test. But aside from that, he was not a fighter, but a man of peace.

WITH MARY INTO ANTHROPOLOGY Mike and Mary kept in touch. When the war in Europe ended he returned to England and, as the holder of a Jamaica Scholarship, was able to get himself demobilized there rather than return to Canada with his unit. In October 1945 he registered at University College to read Law, and in June 1946 he passed the Inter-LL B examinations. His choice of Law as a profession marked a resolve to abandon his literary interest in favour of a more 'useful' concern. Perhaps, too, it reflected the high regard in which he held Norman Washington Manley; but the subject disappointed him. He felt that legal advocacy was often less motivated by a search for truth than by a search for reputation. 23

A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 Meantime, Mary had also been demobilized and had entered a certificate course in Social Science and Administration at the London School of Economics. This required her to attend lectures in Sociology and Anthropology. As she and Mike discussed their work, he became interested and decided that Social Anthropology would be the right choice for him. He wanted to examine how society works, and how people relate to one another in their societies. Mary went and spoke to one of her lecturers in Anthropology, who then went to Professor Daryll Forde, Head of the Department of Anthropology at University College. After interviewing Mike, Professor Forde agreed to admit him, and in September 1946 he abandoned the LL B and re-registered as an external student to read for the BA general degree in Anthropology, Psychology and Ethics. Having in a sense 'wasted' a year in Law, he had only two years left in which to complete a three-year course in Social Anthropology. The time passed quickly. There was much to do. The academic work pressed hard, but there were diversions. In postwar London, Mike was reunited with some of his friends who were now there at university. Among them were a few of the old Drumblair company - Douglas and Michael Manley and 'Dossie' Carberry; Ken Ingram was also in England, though farther north. Mary was introduced, and they shared visits to the theatre and concert-hall, and discussion of news from home, conditions in postwar England, the exploits of West Indian cricketers and athletes in Britain, and much else. Mike and Mary had now become very close and wanted to get married, but both she and her mother had some uncertainty. Marriage to Mike, and leaving England to make a home with him in a distant country would be, in a sense, a leap in the dark. But Mary and Mike had a great deal in common. They shared an intellectual interest in Social Anthropology, and they were both excited by the relevance of social and anthropological studies to a colonial people moving towards independence, as in Jamaica. Mike himself was increasingly taken with the study of Anthropology. He felt that he had now found the work that would enable him to make a contribution to the understanding of societies and of the relationships between different peoples. The shared interests and excitements overcame the doubts, and in April 1947 24

Douglas Hall Mike got a special license and they were married in a very quiet ceremony in the Battersea Registry Office. The newlyweds moved into a room in a bomb damaged building that housed the Youth Club of the Battersea Parish Church. The unheated bedroom was on the top floor. On the first floor was another vacant room which had a fireplace and this became their kitchen and 'study'. The ground floor was useless. There was no bathroom. The toilet, an ancient water-closet, was in a shed in the garden. The Smiths acquired a large zinc bath, and filling it with water before the fireplace, abluted. In the kitchen there was a sink which, as a consequence of bomb damage, had no pipe to cary the waste water. If they used the sink without putting a pail under it, the dirty water ran out and down to the ground floor. There, it formed a pool by the front door, convenient when they preferred not to entertain a visitor. Mary's final examinations for the certificate course were coming up in June. Her fellow students predicted that marriage in April would jeopardize her chances, but she had enjoyed the course and, spurred by Mike's interest, had read far more widely than was necessary. He also gave her advice on how to tackle the examination papers. First of all, you must never be frightened of exams. You look through the paper and find the questions that you think you can answer well and do them first. If you can only do three, and they want five, you know you can take your time because you are going to leave the paper unfinished. But you're going to leave it having done three questions well, and leaving the examiners with the impression that you could have gone on if you weren't such a slow writer. I find that a few bogus footnotes always come in very handy. Most examiners are in too much of a hurry to check everything, and in any case you mustn't make your reference too exact. With tongue in cheek, Mike continued his questionably honest advice. Then, in more serious vein, he told her to put down what she knew, and not worry about what she didn't know. Since she was so well prepared she really could not fail. She didn't. She passed with distinction. After the exams, Mary got a job in London with the Family Welfare Association. 25

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Mike still had a year to go for his final examinations in 1948. When he came to them, his paper in Social Anthropology was so outstanding that his examiner, Professor Gluckman at Manchester University, wrote across it: "This man should go on to graduate work" - a rare allowance for an external student doing a general degree. Mike registered to work towards a doctorate in Social Anthropology, and had to decide where to do the necessary fieldwork. Impatient as he was to return home, he wanted to broaden his experience by working in some place other than Britain or Jamaica.

WEST AFRICA BOUND The British government, under its Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, had set up a number of institutions intended to carry out social, economic, and political studies in the colonies then moving towards independence. A Colonial Social Science Research Council (CSSRC) had been established, and had prepared a list of desirable research projects. Acting in collaboration with the CSSRC, Professor Forde arranged that two socioeconomic surveys should be carried out in Nigeria - one in the north, and one in the south. Eventually, Smith was chosen to do the work in the north. This was very much what he wanted. With an enabling studentship at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, and under Professor Forde's supervision, he spent from October 1948 until May 1949 learning the Hausa language and preparing himself to go into the Northern Nigerian province of Zaria, to work among the Hausa, Kadara and Kagaro peoples. Professor Forde was also very happy. He anticipated that Mike Smith would produce much more than the bald socioeconomic data required of him, and he knew what others seemed to have overlooked - that in a Muslim community Mary's help would be essential. In May, 1949, Mike and Mary left England on their way to West Africa. As Mary put it: I accompanied him simply as his wife. However, we soon found it was very useful to work as a team, especially in that Muslim field situation, and I quickly acquired enough Hausa. I studied the domestic side of life 26

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with the women, while Mike did farming, craft, trade, and the political life with the men. My typing was also useful for copying out all kinds of records, district notes, tax returns, and so forth. The team, outstanding workers in the field of Anthropology for the next forty years, had been formed. And what of poetry? In 1945-46 Mike had written much, of which the best known and longest is his Testament. But to quote Mary again: He wrote poetry after the war too, but one day, while he was a student in London, a friend took him to see the Fulham Power Station, where he worked as an apprentice. This was shortly after Mike had written his long mystical poem Testament. He told me: 'We climbed right up to the top of the main hall in the power station and looked down on the great turbines producing electricity to make life easier for thousands of people. That's the modern world. That's what we have to try and understand and cope with. No more poetry for now. Of course, we know that the other world's there, but we have to work and live in this one.' And so to Social Anthropology with a parting verse: Let us be thankful for a little light Now it is gone and darkness on our eyes Stamps blind denial, let there be no tears But in remembrance of the early dawn And sure expectancy of a new day Let us achieve attention, yet aware That love creates no claim upon the light. M. G. Smith, London 1946

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CHAPTER

THREE

Nigeria6 LEARNING ABOUT THE COUNTRY Before leaving London, with a kit-allowance from the CSSRC the Smiths prepared for camping out. They acquired a full range of equipment: folding beds, chairs and tables, blankets and mosquito-nets, a small zinc bathtub fitted with a removable inner basket and a lid, which formed a trunk, a cook's box with all the basic pots, pans and utensils, summer clothing, and two second-hand metal-lined trunks impervious to ants and other insects. All that constituted great luxury when compared with the meagre furnishings of the rooms in Battersea. When they arrived in Nigeria in May 1949, the authorities were much engaged in considerations of constitutional reform, and discussions and bargaining would continue throughout their stay. The British territories which then existed included the three regions of the country. The Northern, by far the largest and most numerously populated, had become part of the Fulani Empire established in campaigns of 1804-1810. Then, following penetration of the Nigerian interior by British trading and missionary interests in the nineteenth century, British forces under Sir George 28

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Goldie and Captain Lugard in the late 1890s overpowered the Fulani Kingdoms. The British government, in 1900, abrogated the Charter of the Royal African Company and established the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria with Captain (later to become Lord) Lugard as High Commissioner. Most of Northern Nigeria was the Muslim domain of the Fulani Sultan of Sokoto. Within it were five emirates, of which one of the largest and most powerful was Zaria (Zazzau), in which Mike and Mary Smith would work. There the population was largely the ruling Muslim Fulani and the subject Muslim Hausa. In Southern Nigeria and west of the confluence of the rivers Niger and Benue, lay a Western region peopled for the most part by Yoruba. Here, the centre of authority was at Ibadan. East of the confluence, in an area occupied mainly by the Ibo people, the administrative centre was at Enugu. In each of the three regions there were small ethnic groups possessing various measures of self-rule, subject to controls exercised by Muslim Emirs and British authorities in the north, and by other native rulers and the British in the west and east. In all three regions the British, following the precedent established by Lord Lugard, based their authority on a system of'indirect rule'. Native rulers were kept in power subject to their adherence to overall British policies. The understanding of these policies and agreement on their objectives by Native Rulers, and British understanding of the measures and purpose of local governance by Native Rulers were greatly undermined by language barriers and by much more general and important cultural differences. In Zaria (Zazzau), as Mike Smith would later put it: "In the Fulani view the role of the British was to institute change, while that of the Fulani rulers was to limit it." In 1945 Sir Arthur Richards, previously Governor of Jamaica, then Governor of Nigeria, set out constitutional reforms intended to bring the governments of the three regions into a federal national authority. He had however failed to invite wide native opinion and his proposals were vigorously opposed by Nigerian nationalists. Nonetheless, his new constitution was introduced by the British Government in 1947. It was proposed that it should hold for nine years, but with the possibility of revision after six. 29

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Nigeria in 1950

In 1948 Sir John Macpherson, previously Comptroller, Development and Welfare in the British West Indies, succeeded Richards as governor. Soon after his arrival he set up a consultative process aimed at new constitutional reforms. First, a series of questions on desirable constitutional changes was circulated to all native, provincial and regional authorities. Then, regional conferences were called at Ibadan, Enugu, and Kaduna (the centre of British administration in the North) to consider the responses. The recommendations of these conferences were then forwarded to a national Constitution Drafting Committee, under the chairmanship of Sir Hugh Foot (later to be Governor of Jamaica). This committee was to consider and prepare recommendations which would then go to an all-Nigerian constitutional conference to be held at Ibadan in January 1950.

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At that conference there were further disagreements. Representatives of the Northern region demanded half of the seats in the proposed national legislature on the basis of much larger land area and population. Minority ethnic groups in each of the three regions argued against the tripartite regional division and proposed a federation of a larger number of ethnic states in order to preserve their particular interests. Muslims were opposed to the inclusion of women, not recognized in Mohammedan law as legal persons, in the scheme of adult suffrage. These and other issues were in wide debate during the Smiths' stay, but the new Constitution was not introduced until 1951, after their departure. On arrival at Lagos, Mike and Mary proceeded to Zaria City, and spent a few weeks in the European reservation, one of three such suburban enclaves. One other was occupied by Ibo and Yoruba migrants from the South, the third by Northerners from Emirates and Districts beyond Zaria Province. In the reservation they accustomed themselves to another luxury by Battersea standards - a domestic staff of three. At first, a steward and his wife and a cook seemed excessive, but later proved not to be. There were tasks for which the Smiths were inadequately qualified, such as preparing enjoyable meals on an outdoor fireplace; but more importantly, assistance in a labour intensive household regime allowed them to give full time to the work they had come to do. From the reservation they moved into Zaria City itself for more direct contact with the Hausa people. Allotted a large and comfortable 'rest-house', they spent about two months there gaining a useful command of the Hausa language and beginning to collect official statistical data on tax and population returns, railway haulage of goods and passengers, and whatever else was available. And Mike, because he wanted to do an anthropological as well as the required socioeconomic study, found an intelligent and informative young student with whom he held long conversations about family life and relationships, local political systems, local history, and life in general among the Hausa. With Mary at the typewriter and Mike searching out the information, the team had begun to work; but Mary's involvement would soon become much deeper. Sponsors in Britain seem not to have taken into account the fact that 31

A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 in a Muslim community men and women do not gather in social exchange. Mike could not therefore have ready access to valuable information held by the women, but Mary could. It was only from the women that they would be able to get essential information on domestic consumption patterns, on domestic production by women of important items such as clothes and foodstuffs for the market as well as for household use. The Northern region of Nigeria comprised five provinces. Representing the British Government overall was the Lieutenant-Governor, Northern Provinces, whose offices were at Kaduna. In each province, such as Zaria (Zazzau), there was a British Resident, and in each district of a province, a district officer. They were supported by a small number of various technical officers. On the native side there were five emirates of which the Emirate of Zaria was one of the largest, most illustrious, and most powerful. Each emirate was divided into districts, presided over by native district heads. Zaria contained seventeen such districts, of which Zaria City was one. Each rural district included a number of villages headed by village chiefs. In the villages were the compounds of its residents. If the Resident, or any other British official, proposed to visit a village, he would be required to first inform the district head who would set a date, inform the village chief concerned, and ensure that the visiting official would be escorted to the village. The selection of an area in which the Smiths would work had to be agreed, in Zaria City, by the British Resident and the Emir. They finally agreed on the Giwa District, rather more than an hour's journey north-west from Zaria City by the road to Sokoto. The Resident had wanted a site not too far removed from Zaria City because of difficulties of travel and transportation. The Emir wanted an area in which the Smiths would not be made unwelcome by native officials, and also one in which the Smiths would not discover anything which ought not to be brought to light. So, by different criteria, native and British authority reached agreement. The Smiths left Zaria City en route to Giwa on 2 August 1949.

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INTO THE FIELD In the cab of a large lorry, with typewriter, flashlights, and other bits and pieces on their laps, and trying not to jostle the driver beside them, they set off. Mary described the departure: ". . . with the household goods in the back - beds, tables, chairs, pouffe, mats, boxes and cases, meat-safe and all the rest; and perched on top, Cook, Isa, Mamman and wife, and Mallam Sa'idu and the Emir's representative." Three miles up the road they stopped at the British Reservation to collect £5 from the bank manager and to do some shopping. Then, an hour more on the Sokoto road to Giwa and the house of the district head, Fagaci Mohammadu. The Emir's messenger went to inform him of the arrival. Fagaci came out, offered them seats on his verandah, and after consultation with the Wakili (his second-in-command) explained that the Emir had neglected to tell him anything about their visit. The Emir had had a very busy week, so the Smiths were understanding. Nonetheless, Fagaci and his aide ordered the rest-house to be swept out, and escorted Mike and Mary to their new abode. The rest-house is a nice one, just outside the village on the edge of a big cornfield, and it is divided by a partition into bedroom and living room. It is a rectangular mud-brick hut, thatched, and there are three round ones in the compound for our retinue and for the kitchen. There's a horrible E.G. (pit latrine), best forgotten. The place is dry, and the village is a new one. It's most attractive and clean and nice and the country is green with the rains. Fagaci inundated us with presents - mats, fowls, eggs . . . I think this place is much nicer than Zaria, and being small, one can get around it easily. And incidentally, Fagaci's green gown is gorgeous. Small and easy to get around as the villages might be, Mike and Mary discovered that it was no simple matter to collect the information they wanted. Collaboration between the emirate's hierarchy of officials and British officials working with the Resident was generally greater in declared intention than in real achievement. It was hampered by different views of an ideal world

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Hausa Compound (or GIDA) held by representatives of widely differing civilizations rather than by particular political disagreements. British policy for the administration of justice provides illustration. The policy of indirect rule left the Emir and the emirate's hierarchy of native courts and judges and their procedures in force. The powerful Emir of Zaria had full judicial authority within his emirate, including the power to pass sentence of death; but in this last, confirmation by the British Resident had to be secured before the sentence could be carried out. In all other cases, however, the native courts retained their full authority to administer native law and custom, "except in so far as this is repugnant to morality and justice". Clearly, the Muslim officers of the emirates and the Christian officers of the British government would be unlikely to find general agreement in the interpretation of that condition. 34

Douglas Hall Of more immediate effect on the ability of enquirers to acquire precise and reliable information were the very complicated, medieval-like hierarchical structures within the emirate. Official linkages and degrees of authority operated beside equally formal linkages based on highly organized networks of clientage and patronage. There were always personal or group interests to be safeguarded, favours to be sought, and debts to be repaid. Associated with all that was a prevailing emphasis on status in one's community, and this was soon made obvious to the Smiths. Mary remarked on the early frustrations. She was glad they had been sent to Giwa (though the Resident had first suggested another district) . . . because the District Head is very cooperative, unlike most of them who for one reason or another don't like anyone to study their districts and activities. Also, we have made an exceptionally good set of contacts - School Mallam, Agricultural Mallam, etc. - among the educated men, who can help us enormously. Evidently, the Emir wanted to be helpful when he insisted on Giwa. He couldn't very well say that most of the District Heads (Hakima) would be fed up to have us. This one is intrigued with our goings-on and Mike is going to explain it properly to him. Since he definitely runs the place he can help us smooth out the rough places. Mike Smith described the land in which he and Mary would exemplify the motto of his old school in Jamaica. Hausaland is open, rolling savannah, at a general elevation between one and two thousand feet, broken only by numerous rocky outcrops and thickly wooded watercourses. Aptly described as orchard-bush, this vegetation, like the rainfall, thins out to the north. At latitude 12°, rainfall averages between 40 and 45 inches per annum. The Hausa year divides sharply into a long dry season, followed by a long period of rains from October. Brilliant electrical storms in late April and May herald the coming of the rains. During damina (the wet season) the country is clothed in green, and the people grow the bulk of their food for the following year. In August there is a brief break in the rains, when bulrush millet and maize are harvested; the first peanuts are

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picked in late September. Kaka (the main harvest) begins in November with wet rice, cowpeas, late millet and guinea corn and continues until February when the sweet potatoes, cotton, sugar-cane, and tobacco have all been reaped. The kaka season is followed by rani, when days are cool and clear and the nights chilly. Rani ends when the harmattan blows from the desert, bringing the clouds of dust and a dry burning heat with room temperatures of about 100°. Bazara, the season of the harmattan and meningitis epidemics, ends with the rains, to everyone's relief. Intensive farming was carried out in the rainy season. The dry season was traditionally the period of craft production, trading expeditions, marriage celebrations, hunting, clearing bush for new farms and, formerly, slave raids and war. Situated in the centre of Northern Nigeria, Zaria (Zazzau), an area of about 13,000 square miles, contained a population of about 800,000 in

1950. With occasional breaks and relaxations, Mike and Mary were immersed in field work and in bringing their collected information into formal report. Between August 1949, when they arrived and December 1950, when they returned to London, they carried out detailed research in Giwa village, in another village in the Makarfi District (to which the British Resident in Zaria had first suggested they should go — so, in the end, concession by the Emir), and then about three months divided between two small non-Muslim, ethnic groups in South Zaria, the Kagoro and Kadara. Between the Giwa and the Makarfi stints there was a two-month period, at the beginning of 1950, spent at Bukuru a mainly European mining centre near Jos high on the Bauchi Plateau of Bakuru Province. It will not be necessary to follow Mike and Mary all the way. An account of their labours in the Giwa District will sufficiently indicate not only their enormous industry, but also some of the difficulties they overcame in performance, and some of the happier circumstances which kept their spirits up.

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THE TEAM AT WORK Soon after their arrival in Giwa on Tuesday 2 August, Mike discussed with Fagaci the choice of an older, more isolated village in which he could spend about a month checking historical information and gathering what he could about life in an older settlement, since Giwa was a new village recently built under pressure from the British administration to replace the old insanitary one. They agreed on Fatika, about seventeen miles westward. The Sarkin, or village head, Fatika, was due to go to Zaria on Sunday 7, so in order to catch him, Mike set out on his bicycle on the Thursday morning, followed by his retinue of five carriers, his two retainers, and Fagaci's representative. The nature of their work demanded close contact with people from whom they would seek information so, as they travelled, the Smiths 'camped-out' in villages. When a local authority was informed of the arrival of a stranger, in a country without inns and hostelries, traditional village hospitality brought comfort to the traveller. A 'rest-house', if available would be offered. So, for the Smiths 'camping-out' really meant moving about with all the basic furnishings of beds, chairs, cooking utensils, and other household needs. With all of that, going on bicycle or on foot as they often did, the retinue of followers was both desirable and unavoidable. Mary did not go to Fatika. Having seen Mike off, she . . . went to bed with fever, as a result of four very busy days plus the cold (comparative) out here. Fagaci came to see me and immediately went in his car to the Government Stock Farm eight miles away to tell the nearest Europeans. They phoned Dr Innes in Zaria, and at one o'clock he was here in his car! Good service! I wasn't bad, and it soon subsided so I sent Cook after Mike to say I was all right. I was feeling a bit odd when he left. Both Mary and Mike took daily doses of anti-malarial drugs, but no matter what the preventative measures were - drugs, mosquito-nets and long pants, mosquito boots and long sleeves donned at dusk - Mary frequently succumbed. On the Saturday evening, on his way to Zaria, the Sarkin Fatika came in with a cheerful note from Mike. The path to Fatika had been rough and rocky, but everybody there was welcoming, he was collecting their 'family 37

A Man Divided: M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 trees', and would probably be there for about three weeks. He got back to the Giwa rest-house on Saturday 3 September, satisfied with progress, but slightly damaged. Riding on a rock-strewn path he had fallen off his bike and knocked in his front teeth. No permanent damage, but it would be several tries and many weeks later that he would get to Kaduna, fifty miles south of Zaria City, and succeed in seeing the nearest dentist. He and Mary exchanged news. Having recovered from her fever she had been around, talking with the women in Giwa: "My Hausa is getting quite serviceable and Mike's is even better for real work, though my social conversation outshines his! We're in a nice cheerful mood and feeling pleased with progress." The separation helped them both to become more fluent in the language because there was no one in the villages with whom they could converse in English. Time for a break and to touch base with the British authorities and importantly, their bank manager, so they went to Zaria where they stayed with their friend Dr Innes. Mary compared the European reservation with the 'bush': "It's very pleasant, just like a holiday — the large house with shutters to the windows and a fan in the sitting room and a wireless and a fridge and our own bathroom with a full-size bath with taps, etc. etc." Breakfast was disquietingly sumptuous. After working from 7 till 9.30 in the mornings, the Europeans sat down to ". . . fried potatoes, bacon, sausage, eggs, porridge (if you're a Scot like Dr Innes), coffee, toast, marmalade, and perhaps fruit if there is any about." But despite a Spartan frugality, life in the bush had its compensations, especially for those who, like the Smiths, were dependent on small, and often overdue, funding from abroad. Mary conceded: One advantage of living out in the bush is that one is saved expenses for entertaining, etc. In fact, our expenses are confined to boys' wages, food (no drinks except occasional fruit squash), kerosene, firewood, cigarettes at 9d. for 10, local make. 'Extras' are an occasional gift to someone who is helpful, and if there is a party, two shillings or so to the drummers, which is regarded as a gift to one's host. 38

Douglas Hall Their local food, with occasional splurges on imported tinned goods which were relatively expensive, was limited to eggs, chickens (small and tough at two shillings each, but they last two days), meat or kidney once or twice a week on market days, one green vegetable - the local spinach - sometimes potatoes, rather expensive at 6d a Ib so, more often, rice. Pudding is baked custard, steamed sponge pudding with or without jam (an imported luxury), or pancakes. Total household expenses came to about £25 a month, but there were other demands — travelling expenses, messenger's wages, payments for lessons in Hausa, and presents to various people. Mike's trip to Fatika, for instance, had involved presents to all sorts of people who had helped him there. Before leaving Dr Innes and Zaria, Mike and Mary met the British Agricultural Officer who complained that the lack of two assistants made it impossible for him to carry out detailed surveys in the villages. If the Smiths could survey even one village, discover the farm boundaries and gain information about farm owners, their families and work teams, his department would be very pleased. He invited them to spend a weekend at Maigana, the government farm, at the end of September so they could work through the records there. The Smiths eventually gave him what he had asked for, and more. Just as well - for considering the problems that Mike would soon encounter, it is doubtful that any assistants from the Agricultural Department would have been able to gather (if they were British), or willing to disclose (if they were Hausa) much reliable data. At the end of September there was more travelling to be done. The rains were coming to an end and the days were getting hotter. The forty-mile bicycle ride to Zaria and back was to be avoided if at all possible. The Smiths asked and the District Head lent them his car, an ancient Ford V-8 with an iron constitution, and his equally magnificent chauffeur, an old soldier and careful driver. Mary did her shopping in state: 10 Ibs of flour, 8 Ibs of sugar, other small items, and kerosene oil. Then she called on the bank manager and his wife for tea, and on from the reservation "down to the city in state (in car!) and called on the Emir and his wives". Then, still chauffeur-driven, back to Giwa before night. 39

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Mike, who had spent more than a day in unsuccessful attempt to see the dentist in Kaduna, remained in Zaria and in the morning of Friday the twenty-third, hired a government kit-car and went 15 miles east to Maigana. He stayed there only until Saturday morning; but in that time he went through the files and crop records of the Agricultural Department. The Director, overwhelmingly appreciative, kept saying: "We are thankful you've come. Your work will be the greatest help to us." Thus heartened, Mike returned to Zaria, had a brief meeting with the Resident, and by 4 p.m. was back, still in the hired kit-car, in Giwa. Next morning he was in the village collecting work diaries from thirty-five men - where they lived, where and with whom they worked, and general information about the personnel of the village and their daily activities. Following that, he proposed to collect precise data on the sizes of farms and households and the yields of crops.

OVERCOMING DIFFICULTIES Despite the interest and support of the District Head, Mike soon ran into problems. As he moved around, dropping in on the men as they worked or talked in their compounds, and hoping for easy, friendly, welcome conversation, he was everywhere politely received; but embarrassed silences followed his appearance. There were, apparently, two reasons for this: he had begun to measure the local farms and was therefore regarded with some suspicion as a possible tax assessor; also, and more importantly, he was contravening local custom which did not approve visits by people of higher status to those of lower status. Mike as an associate of the British who were accorded high status, and guest of the District Head, should have received villagers, rather than visit them. For Mary, as a legal nonentity, it had been much simpler. Free to move among the women in their huts, as Mike was not, she began to gather the sort of information that allowed them to estimate how much corn had indeed been consumed in the households. She had been visiting the women. Later when I'm finished my lists of food eaten every day during the month of September in ten houses I'll go over and join him and get the 40

Douglas Hall tale of the women inside the houses there. The food lists are partly for budgeting (which people won't tell you directly, so you have to get it in a roundabout way), but mainly for a study of diet which both we and Dr Innes want to get clear. Next week I shall spend some days weighing all the food before and after preparation, timing the cooking, and weighing the portions of the different people - adult men, women, and children. Theoretically, we should then have the help of an analyst to determine the food values of samples I'd send him, but there isn't one in Nigeria. My miserable sample of ten households, if I can repeat it elsewhere, will at least be something definite about native diet of which nothing is accurately known. Michael Smith wanted reliable information on crop yields, and if the farmers would not give it, he would find out for himself. Using small areas selected for their apparently differing qualities of fertility and yields, Smith went into the cornfields. He counted corn-stalks and he counted ears of corn. Then using ears of full corn purchased in the market, he weighed them and the grain they produced. This allowed him a rough but workable basis on which to calculate the yields of corn on the farms from which he had taken samples. But problems remained. The labour was oppressive and time-absorbing, the results were helpful but inexact, there were other crops such as cotton which could not be dealt with in that way, and his activitites clearly exacerbated the suspicions of the farmers. There had to be another way, or else he would simply have to pack up and admit defeat. Characteristically, he sought the other way. If he could not 'gain the people's confidence' as anthropologists are supposed to do, he would become authoritative and demand information. He visited the District Head who agreed to call every tenth man on the tax roll and send them, two each day, to the Giwa rest-house to be interviewed by Mike who had prepared a formidable questionnaire . . . to cover the rural economies, farm crop rotations, number of workers available to the farmer, family budgets for the past year down to the last detail (for he now knew their habits thoroughly), people dependent on the farmer for support, and crop yields from each field.

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Then, accompanied by a man sent by the Village Head who could identify the owners of farms, Mike's messenger/assistant Umaru was sent out to measure all the fields belonging to the Village. Also included in the questionnaire was a 'family tree' with its information on population movement, family structures, marriages and divorces (frequent and unfrowned upon by the Hausa), and less dependably accurate vital statistics. The questionnaire was rigorously applied. Much later, a fellow anthropologist would write: . . . if field data are the bricks of a durable ethnography, then M.G. Smith was indefatigable in ensuring those bricks were the best available. Indeed the rigour of his fieldwork was legendary. Informants, on occasion, had to swear on the Holy Qur'an that they were telling the truth. Others were checked and re-checked on their consistency - whether it was on the details of their annual income and expenditure or their genealogical connections: and his interviews could take a long time. This was not bullying (though some informants later commented on their experience) but a formidable concern for the truth and for accuracy. The subject, he felt, was simply too serious for sloppiness . . . So, Mike got his men and "put them singly through the Hausa lie-detector, as we call it, because if you've eaten 75 bundles of corn and 'only reaped 20', where did the other 55 come from? (No, NOT Allah, think again)". The schedule consequently became much easier. Mike would sit comfortably at a table instead of being seen to prowl through fields and markets. Moreover, this procedure considerably advanced his local prestige. With all of that, Mary recorded satisfaction: I think we have got the place taped now, and it is just a matter of steady work to collect our economic statistics by the new interview method, plus market returns supplied by the authorities. The social part is mostly done, it only remains to fill in the details of family structure, political structure, land tenure, etc. and to sample in various districts to get a representative survey of the Province. But they wanted still more. Mike had come to the opinion that a proper 42

Douglas Hall understanding of the complex network of relationships in a community could be achieved only if it were elucidated by familiarity with the historical background of the place. Later, back in Zaria City, he read everything he could lay hands on and he sought out elderly knowledgeable informants from the four Fulani dynasties, and others who specialized in the history of the kingdom both before and after the Fulani conquest of 1804. Until early December, Mike and Mary were in the Giwa rest-house, he doing his interviews, she learning from the women, I spend the mornings from 9 - 1 sitting in houses, usually on a mat on the floor, taking down family trees and as much of the life history of each woman in the family as my informant knows. We have lots of jokes and fun in between, and they tell me about their ways of doing things from birth to death, their charms and beliefs and all the rest of it. Then, to the rest-house for lunch, coffee and a cigarette, and rest while Mike interviewed his second farmer sent by the Village Head. That session might go on until about 5:30 p.m. then We have tea, and go for a little walk in the cool till it gets dark at 6.30 when we go back to the house. Then we have our drink and retire into that extravagant and blessed Tin Tub. At about 7.45 Mamman serves up the dinner - soup, something or other, and 'The Custard'. One evening there was a visit from one of Mike's interviewees. He brought a covered calabash in one hand and a protesting chicken under his arm: He was ushered in by Mamman and knelt down gracefully and performed the greeting ceremony, to which we replied in a few well chosen words and eyed the calabash apprehensively. He then placed the chicken on the floor, put a foot on its legs and coyly opened the calabash. To our greatest pleasure, it contained quantities of honey in the comb. We thanked him cordially and produced the customary tuckurci or gift to the gift-bringer, of two shillings, and gladly offered to buy any more he could bring. The chicken subsequently appeared in brown stew, and the honey, gently boiled for safety and left to cool, tastes very good.

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SHARING IN LOCAL FESTIVITIES AND LORE In between the routine labours there was time for learning by attendance at local festivals. Two of the more impressive were a wedding in Giwa and a Festival or Sallah (the Muslim Id el Kabir) when people flocked to Zaria City. There, they joined the Emir at the Idi prayer-ground outside the city walls, and then watched as the District Heads, their splendid robes billowing behind them, followed by their escorts and local officials, galloped their horses to the beat of drums and the playing of long metal trumpets in salute to the Emir. The wedding ceremony in Giwa included a performance of the local form of spirit possession (Bori). Mary described events of the first few hours: The chiefs wife's hut was thick in lovely mats, and she and about thirty friends all squeezed in and ate kolanuts and smoked cigarettes disapproved of by husbands, but all the men (including Mike) were outside singing and making merry (but no alcohol). The women wore their best clothes, which have to be seen to be believed - shiny blue damasks with a silver interweave, embroidered satins, dark blue or dark green paisley patterned cottons . . . After the friends had given their gifts (3d to 21 - depending on wealth and connections) they decided to do Bori. Three of them cleared a space in the middle of the crowded room and sat down with upturned calabashes on which they drummed. Then they sang the song of Sarkin Rafi (a town official's tide, but also a spirit) and a woman sitting quietly near them, with another behind holding her shoulders, began to sway to the rhythm. As her movements became more violent they covered her head with a cloth which she soon pulled off and began to stride about in the small space with a very masculine gait. She said nothing, but making guttural sounds she grasped several women's hands in greeting and finally fell down and greeted me. Then she seized another woman by the shoulders and shook her violently, at which they said Sarkin Rafi wanted his wife Nana to possess her. When she also went off in a trance, 'he' showed every sign of delight and welcomed her. After a while, Sarkin Rafi was said to have gone away and another took his place, apparently without the woman coming out of her trance . . . 44

Douglas Hall The celebrations went on most of the night. Mary, who was still recovering from a malarial bout, went home just before midnight. Mike stayed on and, with taboos blurred by general festivity, moved into the women's part of the house, remaining long enough to watch the rest of the evening's celebrations and to observe the penultimate act of the wedding ceremony. The bride had been fetched from her house by two women and taken to her hut where with her female friends and supporters she was gaily entertaining. Later in the evening her husband came, drove out the partying females, and went in to join his wife. The Smiths were flourishing in the satisfaction of work going well; and there were interesting side-lines. We are beginning to learn magic, which is very useful. The chief Mailam of the place, who is a renowned magician, is very friendly with Mike whom he calls Mallam Mika'ilu, and they have a pact to swop wisdom. Mike's is mainly concerned with statistics and sounds good in Hausa. I have an old lady who is a Bori (possession cult) expert and is also telling me about the non-Islamic side of life. The trouble with the district, she says, is that Fagaci is too clever and has given up sacrificing goats and white cocks to local spirits every Friday. Hence various troubles have descended on the place. The 'old lady' was 'Baba of Karo' whose life story would eventually be told by Mary in her book of that title. Intriguing and time consuming as was the recording, in Hausa, of Baba's account, Mary was equally engrossed in providing Mike with all the women's lore which he could not collect. The main food was corn of two sorts: bulrush-millet, harvested in July-August, and guinea corn, harvested in November. Both were used to make porridge eaten with a soup made from vegetables and spices. Meat was also prepared every day, or once or twice a week on market days or, by the very poor, not at all. There was a variety of other dishes made from beans, ground nuts, yams and sweet potatoes, corn, and greens of different kinds. The cooking was done with groundnut oil, palm oil, or Fulani butter, but again, the very poor could not afford to use these every day. Wives farmed very little. Most had other sources of income which they 45

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 used to purchase clothes, or for marriage gifts of household equipment for the girls. Most women spun the locally grown cotton, and some wove cloth. Some prepared marketable items such as beancakes, groundnut oil and cakes, and Jura, a paste of millet, flour and spices taken with milk for a midday snack. The women's earnings by these enterprises were their own, separately kept but sometimes offered in assistance to a needy husband. And there was much more, so when in early December Mike went off to Fatika to visit friends he had made during his short spell there, Mary remained working in Giwa until Christmas when she joined him. They were given the round entrance hut of the village drummer's house. It was a tight fit with a camp bed on each side and a table in the middle, but Mike's messenger, Umaru, did wonders over an open fire round the corner and fed us on chicken, beans, yam and onions, well seasoned with red peppers, and followed by pancakes. We had some good walks because Fatika is high up in the rolling country — much nicer than Giwa village. All Mike's old friends there were delighted to see me and very pleased I had come to spend Christmas. Some hadn't seen a European woman before. And they were able to discuss the good news brought by Professor Forde who, having come to Ibadan for a conference, had visited for a day just before Christmas. He had promised to help secure a grant of £150 for Mary's work; he had clearly been pleased with their performance, and he had arranged that they stay at Bukuru to write up a preliminary report which he thought would encourage larger financial support for field work of that kind. We were very glad of the suggestion because we wanted to stand back and see just what we have done and where the gaps are. Also we've been working all out, 7 days a week for 7 months now! It begins to get on top of you, and we found we were getting very worried, perhaps too much so, about the 'political' side of things - bribery, corruption and oppression in general - and in particular about protecting our informants from any reprisals by Native Authority officials after we leave. We hope we have achieved this by Mike's sending for the District 46

Douglas Hall Head, getting his budget and family tree, explaining that this is all he has been doing with the other men, and then asking him to take special care of them 'and see that no one troubles them'. Our District Head heartily agreed to do this, perhaps because he was nervous about what Mike knew about him. Whatever his reason, the District Head kept his word. On Boxing Day, Mary attempted to get back to Giwa to finish her work there: "Mike walked with me the 8 miles into Kaya, where there is a motor road of sorts and we were assured a cotton-transporting lorry would be leaving there at 9 a.m." They waited until 3 p.m. and then returned to Fatika. A few days later they both set off .. . with one of Sarkin Fatika's 'boys' (exactly that - Yara - in Hausa) to show us the way across the short-cut path which gets you to Giwa in 15 miles instead of 23 round the Kaya way. Umaru followed with 7 good men and true carrying the beds, tables, chairs, kitchen box, etc. all comprehensively referred to as one's 'loads'. The work in Giwa District was now, in early January, completed. Farm economy, family budgets of 70 families, the same number of farms actually measured and their yields known this year, figures for the turn-over of goods in local markets, details of craftsmen's activities, and so forth. In addition to these dry figures we have learned an enormous amount about ordinary life among different classes, their interests and beliefs, how families are run, and much more. It is queer to talk to Europeans who have been out here for 15 and 20 years and find they know hardly anything about the people - they have always lived in the European 'garden suburbs' as I call them, and only contacted the native people in trade or in the office. There are some exceptions among the Farm and Forestry men, the doctors, the District Officers, and a few old traders; but the rest are quite cut ofT, and so we feel rather odd, knowing so much after seven months. On 4 January 1950, Mike and Mary boarded a truck in Giwa, with their 47

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Mike and Mary by a stream in Nigeria 48

Douglas Hall worldly goods and retainers, and "my old lady Baba". They descended on Dr Innes in the Senior Medical Officers' s house outside the walls of Zaria City. He warmly welcomed them. For a week they stayed there. Mary recorded in Hausa Baba's life-story: "It's a marvelous tale, since she was nearly twenty when the British got here, and so remembers all the wars and raids and slavery and the bad old days before the British came and stopped all that." Mike was checking the finances, repairing the bicycles, and readying for Bukuru, nearly 150 miles from Zaria City. There, when after some doubtful moments they arrived by "The Bauchi Light Railway - narrow gauge and eccentric", they would stay for two months. During that time, Mike would write a preliminary report on their work so far for Professor Forde and the CSSRC, and Mary would help with the budget calculations and the typing.

AMONG THE KAGORO AND KADARA Then on to the Makarfi district for the work similar to that achieved in Giwa, and for shorter spells among the non-Muslim Kagoro and Kadara peoples in South Zaria for comparative material. But in many ways Kagoro became special. There, and in Kadara, Mike Smith, who had not been comfortable in the hierarchic, almost feudal, society of the Muslim Hausa-Fulani, felt more at ease. In Kagoro, the Christian Chief Mallam Gwamma, a few years older than Mike, became a life-long friend and godfather of their first-born son. Occupying a thousand-foot-high mountain outcrop of the Jos Plateau, the Kagoro had kept their independence. Attacking cavalry had been unable to climb the mountain, and the Kagoro tribesmen had showered arrows down on them, and thrown down pots containing bees that stung and maddened the horses. They had also resisted British attempts to pacify and tax them; but eventually they had been brought into Christianity by an empathetic married couple of missionaries. By the time the Smiths arrived the Kagoro had schools and a teacher training college, and the Christian Gwamma, on the insistence of the whole tribe, had been appointed Chief following the death of an unpopular pagan predecessor. Gwamma acted as interpreter when Mike interviewed the old pagan chief 49

A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 priest about traditional custom and belief; and together they worked out the very complex system of'secondary marriage' which Mike later wrote up in the essay which would win him the Wellcome Medal in 1952. When the Kagoro wanted to build a road Gwamma borrowed Mike's surveying tape, and sections were measured and manned by inhabitants of the various villages through which the road would pass. Then Gwamma, the chief, took off his gown and he and Mike, hoes in hand, went with the people to work. By noon, the bush was cleared and the earth road ready. Kagoro was the 'home' of the Smiths in Nigeria. Whenever in that country they would spend a few days with Gwamma and his family, and when Gwamma came to London he visited them. In December 1950 they returned to London where Mike, with assistance from the CSSRC and a subsequent Research Assistantship in Professor Forde's Department of Anthropology, wrote up his full report and doctoral thesis. Mary typed away - but with a difference. They now occupied a comfortable and adequately furnished flat in Battersea, secured for them by Mary's mother. On the table beside her, as she typed, there was a basket. In it, was Daniel Kagoro Smith, born 13 April 1951.

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C H A P T E R

FOUR

Achieving Attention COMING HOME On 1 February 1947, the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) had quietly opened its first temporary office at 62 Lady Musgrave Road in Kingston. The College was one of several institutions set up under the aegis of the British Inter-University Council for Higher Education in the Colonies (IUC). It was a small gathering: Dr Thomas Taylor, the appointed Principal and his wife; Mr Phillip Sherlock who had worked hard for the creation of the College and was to be its first Director of Extra-Mural Studies and Vice-Principal; Mrs Sylvia Dunkerly the first Principal's Secretary; and Mr Granville Errar, the College's first driver.7 By the end of 1948 the UCWI had begun teaching in a Faculty of Medicine, was preparing to teach in the Natural Sciences in 1949, and in a Faculty of Arts in 1950. All that, and much more to come, on the chosen site on the Liguanea Plain at Mona - the abandoned sugar estate with its crumbling stone-built relics of slavery; Mona - the safe-haven of wooden buildings created for evacuees from Malta and Gibraltar in the heat of German bombardments in World War II, and the holding-camp for 51

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 prisoners-of-war, mostly taken at sea, and resident aliens interned by the government for the duration. As architects, building contractors, artisans and landscapers worked to create the campus, the academic fledgling moved into the empty wooden halls and residences of wartime occupation. It was an inspiring site. Ringed in semi-circle by the mountains the place breathed hope. On a cool morning Norman Washington Manley walked with Phillip Sherlock in a clearing where the Vice-Chancellor's house now stands. He put words to feeling: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, not so lofty as to fill me with awe and the fear of remote gods. At Oxford the sense of a living past lifted my spirits more than any lecture. Here it is a vision of our future. This is an uplifting place."8 In 1948, in accordance with the plan to instigate and support socioeconomic studies in the colonies, the CSSRC, with British funding, established an Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Mona. For administrative convenience and contact with teaching staff the ISER was associated with the UCWI; but its members were to be engaged only in research. They were to produce the materials which would eventually make it possible for the UCWI to offer courses in Caribbean socioeconomic studies. Dr Dudley Huggins was appointed Director of the Institute, and its performance was to be assessed at the end of the first five years. In 1951, he sought addition to his research staff. Dr Taylor, on a visit to Britain heard of the work of Michael Smith, a Jamaican then working under the supervision of Professor Daryll Forde at University College, London. Mike needed no urging to apply for appointment and was interviewed by a Selection Committee set up by the IUC. On 10 April 1952 he was offered the position of Research Fellow, ISER, Mona. Walter Adams, Secretary of the IUC had written to Dr Huggins telling of Smith's recommendation: "Those who best know his work speak of it as of first-class quality, and regard him as a scholar of great promise." Mary was enthusiastic. She had heard so much about Jamaica and shared Mike's eagerness to go and work there. Her interest had been deepened by the Nigerian experience. She had described the Nigerians she had met: They were so tough and energetic and yet extremely sensitive and skillful, not only in the arts and crafts but in social skills. They operated 52

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in an elaborate behavioural system - how you relate to people and how you behave in different social situations. They were able to handle all kinds of relationships that are complicated in any society - like how a man relates to his wife's family or a woman to her husband's, or if a man has more than one wife, the relationships between the wives. She wanted to find out what happened to the succeeding generations of these people who had been forcibly removed by the slave-trade from their accustomed social environment. So, in great expectancy, Mike and Mary with young Daniel nearly one and a half years old, sailed from Avonmouth, the port of Bristol, on 2 September 1952, on the S.S. Bayano. On the voyage Mike kept a diary. Social anthropologists, by the very nature of their work, are observant of people's attitudes, behaviour, and relationships. Mike and Mary cultivated this professional curiosity and followed it wherever they might be - in field research, at the theatre, watching a game, at a wedding, anywhere, even on board ship among passengers and crew. There was another member of the crew who attracted my attention during mealtime when he worked on the deck and I followed Danny on his ceaseless exploring. He was a large big-chested man. Large boned, with wiry legs and a round red weather-creased face like the smiling sun in numerous posters and advertisements, and frankly amused blue eyes. He was usually engaged swabbing the decks, and various constructions thereon, or painting, or checking over the life-boats, mast-ropes and other sea-objects. But whatever he was engaged on, he did with the utmost placidity and a pure immediacy of attention, an almost motherly tenderness, like a mother caring for her child. One morning he asked my destination and travels, and I his. He said he came from Somerset, a little village not far from Bristol where he had a 'cottage' in which he lived alone on his small farm. But when the wanderlust moved him, he would lock up the cottage and come off to sea. I told him how I'd liked the West Country when stationed there for a short while during the war, and how Mary and I had walked along the Ridgeway, from its ford over the Thames at Goring to Avebury where

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 the great circle of megaliths still stands. He was alert in a moment and referred me to a certain book, naming the author and the publisher, with date and place of publication, exactly as is done in footnotes, in which a theory of origin of the megaliths, and their astronomical intention was propounded, and much more. I was naturally astonished and interested at the sailor with such a keen archaeological sense and command of the literature and details. When I mentioned the matter to Mary, she remarked how attractive a person he was and later told me that one of the ship's officers had informed her that our friend had been a Major during the war, but after the demobilization, elected to leave for the sea and the life of a simple sailor where he enjoyed the greatest contentment. I have met few persons in my life whose peace of being and pleasantness of personality can compare with our old sailor friend. Among the passengers were four Jamaicans, a girl and three men. Valentine, the Test left-arm spin bowler, was the liveliest of the lot, with a pure unspoilt humour, an inconceivable modesty and lack of affectation, as spontaneous and bounceful as a rubber ball, utterly without racial shame or prejudice and its social confusion, though quite aware of the issues, methods and processes. . . On Tuesday morning Sept. 16 we came into Kingston harbour - my return after 11 full years from home to the questions: Is this the place where I was born still my home? Have I changed and grown away from it? Will I be able to settle down and live? MG, the schoolboy poet-intellectual with shattered dreams had left. Dr M.G. Smith, the promising young anthropologist-scholar with wife and first-born had returned. The first important contacts were with his family. His brother Max came to see him. He did not seem to have grown much or changed in many ways. He brought his wife and children with him. I asked Max about Aunt May, and asked him to drive me to see her. She was now living at 20 Beechwood Ave. with an old blind woman, Mrs Hill. I was overcome with emotion at the sight of her, and wept for about a minute. Young 54

Douglas Hall Michael, Max's seven year old, who accompanied me was mildly embarrassed, but Max sat in his car outside and waited. I arranged to revisit Aunt May and for Mary to see her, then returned to the Bogles, where we were temporarily lodged, washed, and was ready for Huggins when he turned up at 7:15. Next morning Huggins showed him around the ISER and the college, introducing him to Hugh Springer, the registrar. In the afternoon Max came

Dr. M.G. Smith

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again: "He took us to his new home on Phoenix Avenue, showed us around, and then took us up to Barbican to show us the new residential area with 'posh' houses." In MG's schooldays he had sometimes followed with other JC boys running 'hares and hounds' after Hugo Chambers and James Waterhouse, the sportsmaster, who set the trail through the bushes of the then ruinate Barbican and Widdicombe estates. Max's detailed knowledge of the residents, their occupations, building sequence, etc. was rather shattering. I found the bookcase I had left in Jamaica 11 years ago, and took out the prize dictionaries and some other books I wanted. They were in surprisingly good condition after such a long time. Next morning, the eighteenth, the Bogles took them to market, thence to the bank and then they "marched over to Henderson's and the old waterfront market where I bought Mary a hat, and myself an ashtray. It was rather amusing being mistaken for a tourist." After lunch, Mike went back to the ISER where he met "Lloyd Braithwaite, the Trinidadian sociologist in the Institute, and Raymond Smith, a student of Meyer Fortes who has been studying B.G. for a year and is on a little visit to the Institute. I also met Elsa Goveia, a B.G. girl, charming, who has just completed a PhD thesis for London in eighteenth century W[est] Indian History". At a seminar at the Institute that afternoon Mike Smith displayed the seemingly arrogant irascibility for which he is remembered by many who had to deal with him in those early years but who, perhaps, did not know him well enough. At the seminar: Raymond Smith summed up his findings on the family in E.G., Braithwaite poured forth vague emphaticness about his Trinidad study, and I said something about budgetting in Zaria which seemed incredible to the group, and produced a fine red-herring to the discussion. D.H., though he presided, had nothing to contribute. I clashed with Nora Mailer (nee Siffleet) and a nice black American who was passing through on a visit. In private conversation Huggins was full of schemes for publicity and its importance. 56

Douglas Hall Even at school MG had sometimes been acerbic in manner and speech; but now, back in Jamaica where he had always wished to be, the sharpness was chronic. There were reasons - personal and professional.

RENEWING OLD TIES He was again in touch with his family. In a few days he would visit 'Aunt Lil', living on Marlie Road, and talk for a long time about his early childhood, learning much. He had met his academic and administrative colleagues, and a few friends from London days; and he, Mary and Danny were settled on campus in one of the newly built Long Mountain Flats. But there had been no word of welcome from the central figure of his youth - Edna Manley who eleven years before had sacrificed her songster on the altar of a deeper commitment. The poet overcame the anthropologist. If I can see you once, then I am whole, Let not another day pass by Without one moment When we meet again. He got on with his work, but he also made arrangements. Saturday 29 September 1952. Visited Raymond Smith in his flat at Irvine Hall. Found him packing up to leave for E.G. by plane tomorrow. We spent two and a half hours talking quietly about E.G. Negro rural conditions, field problems and analysis. I was very pleased with Ray. He works hard and is very clear-headed. I thought E.G. owes him a debt, but he obviously loves it. He is a sound worker, interested in the practical and theoretical problems of anthropology. I wish him the very greatest success, sure he will deserve it. When Braithwaite arrived we helped Ray return his pile of books to the UC library. There I met the most exciting girl, Elsa Wooming, a half or full Chinese from E.G., with a magnificent sense of colour and design in dress. She attracted me both physically and as a person. We then proceeded to Webster's ice-cream parlour near Cross Roads in Elsa's car which Ray had been given the use o f . . . 57

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I had arranged to see Edna Manley that evening and Fairclough came for Mary, Danny and I in his little car. We found Edna alone at Drumblair with Rachel, Michael's daughter and two other children who were her companions. I was very glad to see Drumblair once more, but did not make much contact with Edna. With Fairclough all was easy. We resumed just where we had left off. I explained the programme of work I had set myself in the Caribbean, difficulties which I feared Huggins would present; and he told me about Miss Kate, 'B' [her daughter Hazel], and Leo, who he said was thinking of joining the army. I thanked him with the greatest sincerity for his kindness and care to all of us, but he said very warmly that he was fond of them. When Mike's father died Miss Kate and her children had been assisted by Mike, as far as his own limited resources allowed. At his request, O.T. Fairclough, editor of Public Opinion, and his friend, had acted as a sort of almoner, ensuring that whatever was sent reached her. From Drumblair Mike went on to pay another visit. After tea, about 6 [p.m.], we withdrew. Edna dropped Mary and Danny at Mrs Bogle's [for a visit], while Fairclough drove me up past Shortwood to Edith Clarke's home. Fairclough had one whiskey and then left. I remained with Edith till about 8 p.m. discussing her work. Edith Clarke was then writing up her sociological studies which would later appear, in 1957, as her book My Mother Who Fathered Me. I felt that she was seriously handicapped by the lack of a conceptual framework adequate to the analysis... I outlined with considerable detail and illustration my view of W[est] Indian colonies as plural societies, dealing with Jamaican institutions such as religion, family, marriage, law, kinship, land tenure, education and occupational employment, economic type, political organization and so forth in detail and comparatively for each section of the society. I suggested she recast her material in such terms, and pointed out that if she didn't produce a rigorous analysis of local society, I would.

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Several years later, as Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, M.G. Smith would write a 44-page introduction to the second edition of Edith Clarke's book. MG plunged into his reading. Work was his escape hatch. In particular, he was preparing to go to Grenada for about one year of fleldwork there and in neighbouring Carriacou, and he was reading every relevant text he could get hold of. He was rudely abrupt with almost everyone: "The Gleaner rang up. A reporter interviewed me over the phone. 'What school did you go to?' I said I was not interested in the Gleaner and put down the phone." The Gleaner tried again. Its UCWI student-reporter called on him. Mike Smith, a little more politely, said he did not wish to be publicized. On 3 November, three weeks before his departure, he went to hear Sir Thomas Taylor's valedictory address. Dr Taylor, knighted during his principalship, was to be succeeded at the end of 1952 by Dr W.W. Grave, Registrar of Cambridge University. Mike was much moved by Sir Thomas's address: "A splendid statement of faith and attitude", and it carried a coincidental relevance to his present distress. In part, Sir Thomas said: I should not urge anyone to be soft-boiled or soft in any sense. I should urge them to be hard in the sense of mental discipline and clarity of thought, but at the same time to be receptive and sensitive to the more intangible influences that lie around us. One should consciously cultivate hardness in thought and sterness in sense of duty but all the time remain receptive and sensitive.

EMOTIONAL PRESSURES It was not an easy time for Mary Smith who could remember happier days in Nigeria and England. Thurs. 6th Nov. Nothing special. Had talk with M. one night this week about lack of contact between us and came to the conclusion my trouble is an old one, and I can't go full steam ahead till I have dealt with it. Ever since I came here and was free of the routine of housework, cooking, washing and shopping interspersed with typing, which kept me busy 59

A Man Divided: M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D SMITH 1921—1993 from morning till night at home, I have felt exhausted and only half alive as if my main energies were occupied somewhere else. The idea that it might have to do with being cut off from my unconscious life, and that in turn because I have never worked out a substitute for the religious schema which satisfied me from 16 onwards, and which the appreciation of scientific method etc. rendered insufficient, or rather rendered it too remote from the reality I experienced. The symbols were too rigid to allow for the various things. Anyway this is not a diary of spiritual pilgrimage. But this idea that I needed to work out new and less rigid symbols and also that I needed to put myself in a frame of mind to experience certain extra-personal facts again, seemed to be a good one. At any rate I have been occupied with it since and feel I am on the right road. Less absent-minded and half alive. Oddly enough Edna produced Mike's novel Judas which he wrote in 6 weeks at a school where he taught in 1939 - six hefty volumes of it c. 900 pages single-spaced typing. It is concerned with my problem - of the fact of 'mystical' experience, its characteristic conviction of unity, etc., but it carefully avoids any religious symbols for expressing it. Am reading it with interest and find it very useful. Sunday 16th (Nov). Life is not pleasant at present. M. very irritated with me, and I can't do anything right apparently. Tuesday 18th. Edna Manley got in touch with M. and they went out for a drive, talked a lot, and at last got to feel relaxed again. She had kept away from us for fear of upsetting M's adjustment to life with her artistic approach, but felt that there must be something wrong. I think (and so does M. on discussing it) that it was largely because he came back to Jamaica hoping to see her again, and when he didn't, nothing seemed worthwhile. Edna Manley, then carving the 'Prisoner', had taken charge. One evening, as she carved, with Douglas Manley's wife Carmen and their son, Norman, keeping her company: Mike and Mary came. All sorts of things, good and bad, and through it all, intermittently, I carved. It's a dull little figure, but at no time did I 60

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ever feel that I was working on something that would blare out any aspect of the truth, and it's compromised too, in spite of my desire to be free. But it is sincere, and a sober statement of philosophy, I suppose. It moves no one, I wish I could feel that it did, and it will pass unnoticed in England. But I feel that I kept faith with myself in working to completion. One thing is important - I have finally broken out of the Nomdmi cycle. Eleven years is a long time. Michael [Manley] says that I escaped the difficulties of my life into a flying mysticism and I think he is right, but it seemed so radiant, so sure, and then slowly I have discovered that I was being held by the past - the fallen chain in the prisoner may be of some significance to me too. So the carving is finished and with it a new road is opening up. I don't know where it is taking me, but I feel it is to somewhere mature and good. She took hold of both the Smiths. Mike recorded on 18 November: Edna came at 10 a.m. as arranged and took the gramophone records to Drumblair, meeting Michael and Carmen on the way. We left Drumblair at 12, drove down to the Palisadoes airport, had lunch and left at 2:30 for BWIA offices in Kingston where I enquired about my ticket [to Grenada]. They then drove to the UCWI, meeting Norman Washington Manley, Carmen Manley and her mother Mrs Lawrence on their way to the country, and Mary and Danny Smith on their way for Mary's driving lesson with Ward, the college driver. Then from the UCWI, they went to Red Hills where we sat by the roadside and talked for about an hour. I was very, very grateful for our talk, and promised Edna that I would try to be happier, less intolerant, harsh and unkind and try to adjust to Jamaica again. During the day we told one another of the 12 years that had passed. I told her as best I could of the long absence. I was very grateful for our talk. 61

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And then Mary: Thurs. 20th. Edna called for me after lunch and we went up the Hope River just beyond Papine at Red Bridge, found a nice place on the bank to sit and talk. We felt at ease with one another and became friends. Told her about the war and our too-prolonged engagement, and said M. was much more cheerful today. She thinks he must at all costs become 'human' again and stop being so ruthlessly critical of everyone. We gossipped and made a date to buy clothes for me next year if'Baba' gets published! M. and I talked about it all later. I think most of it was of a temporary nature and due to disappointment at E.'s not coming to see him. The meetings and the long talks brought relief. The war has ended In my cloven soul Its night has finished And its terror flown See it awaits the sun That which was split is knit And I made one . . . From his window now Mike Smith could see more clearly the small important things that went on around him: Three little girls from August Town Have come to pick crab-apples By my room. One rides a bicycle With bare black feet In her blue frock. She goes to all the trees in turn And shouts instructions at the others Like a drill sergeant. The smallest wears a short white dress. She has a stick to get plums with 62

Douglas Hall And a brown paper bag Half full of them. They are going now, their shouts Fade with the distance, and I must continue work. The way they go their poem ends. Who will remember? And in the Mona night he could bring himself to see his closer circumstances as they really were. Mona A night of peace The contributing glass Is on reality In Mona. And the clear sky Cold winds of fineness And the trees Have themselves at last With leaves Talking of stars Stand silent like the sky In the blown bubble Of time's pure vase Reality finding Into Mona.

CARIBBEAN FIELDWORK AND PUBLICATIONS A few days later, on Sunday 23 November 1952 Mary described the departure for Grenada. Did the last minute packing after getting up at 6, had breakfast, and at 8:30 Mrs. Huggins called for us. Luggage was crammed in somehow,

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 said goodbye to Gwen and Phyllis [the helpers], collected Dudley at the Institute and so down to Palisadoes airport about 9:15. Carmen Manley, Michael and baby Norman appeared, then Fairclough, then finally N.W. Thought this very nice of him indeed as he hardly has a minute to himself, between law and politics. Edna had an art class. Got into our Viking 2-engined plane about 10 and off we went. The Smiths worked in Grenada and Carriacou until the end of 1953. Soon, even before their return to Mona, there would be signs of new distress ahead — this time professional and academic. Mike and Mary immediately set to work, she at first much taken up by Daniel's need for attention, but later assisted by the presence of Edlin, the helper, an attractive and intelligent young woman; and Mike later becoming increasingly aware of Edlin's charms. The efforts of one visitor about a week after their arrival to find out "when Dr Smith was going to start work" were neatly sidetracked. Mike, of course, had long begun: Mike is busily accumulating every report and memorandum from every Govt. Dept. in St. George's, and wading through them from morning till night, here in his study! The bookcase is in place and all the book-boxes unpacked. It looks very nice and inhabited in the study now. They discussed the work. Had a chat together after supper. The place seems to be in the bag, but the detailed documentation takes an awful lot of time. It is so small in actual numbers of population of middle and upper class, and yet so segmented, that each person has an individual situation which is unlikely to be exactly paralleled. Consequently they have to be documented exhaustively to let you get the factors involved and so work out some kind of general pattern behind it all. Income, heredity, colour, legitimacy, religion and education all play their part. Then, interrupting everything, Dudley Huggins arrived. It was now early 1953 and on 27 February he had been advised by the new Principal, Dr Walter Grave, that "the Colonial Social Science Research Council have 64

Douglas Hall invited Mr L. Farrar-Brown, Secretary of the Nuffield Foundation, and Dr Raeburn, Reader in Agricultural Economics in the University of London, to be their visitors to the Institute." Five years had passed. The time of assessment had arrived. Dr Huggins was, not surprisingly, a little alarmed. Mike Smith and others had long observed that although there were members of the Institute's staff whose academic qualifications and application to research were beyond reproach, there had been insufficient attempt to formulate a policy by which their work would be guided to meet the purposes for which the Institute had been established. Now, with Visitors' on their way, Dr Huggins wanted Smith's support. He wants Mike to go to Jamaica March 20 - 30 for the visit of a CSSRC person who is coming to take a look at the Institute. It seems a ridiculous waste of funds, but I think the break will do Mike a lot of good, and he can see Edna and his family, and generally get away from Grenada interviews and Govt. documents. He never relaxes and it's a problem, and he gets impatient. Part of it is due to the pressure he works under. It makes it hard for him to enjoy anything simple like sitting on the beach in the sun. On Mike's return the labour of interviews and data collection was resumed, but they did manage occasionally to relax on the beach. Of the interviews the best known is that of Norman Paul. Soon after his arrival in Grenada Mike had heard of him "as a healer, diviner and seer who practised a highly individual form of cult. I decided to seek his autobiography when opportunity arose". It later did and, entitled Dark Puritan, the work was edited by Philip Sherlock and first published in serial form in Caribbean Quarterly, the journal of the Extra-Mural Department of the UCWI, beginning in June 1957. In September 1953, Mary had returned to Jamaica. Mike came back in early January 1954, and on the eighteenth their second son David William was born. The family moved from Long Mountain Flats into a small wooden Bungalow 'A' which then stood near the present site of the University Bookshop. And there Miss Kate (Cathrin Gregory) came to them, to mind 65

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 19x1-1993 the youngest Smiths as she had once minded their father. After the death of Charles Garfield she had for a time remained at Timsbury. Then, with her daughter Hazel ('B') she had come to live in East Kingston and then near Matilda's Corner in Liguanea. From now on, until they left in 1961 she would be with them and after that Mike and Mary never failed to visit her whenever they were in Jamaica. In 1978, Miss Kate and her daughter went to live in Florida. Her son, Leo, had long before migrated to Chicago. In 1955 Smith's Framework for Caribbean Studies was published by the Extra-Mural Department, UCWI. Parts of his "Introduction" and "Conclusion" to the argument must suffice. He began: Systematic social studies of the British West Indies is a recent development, hence the slenderness of our sociological literature, and its dependent character [which] reflect the fact that hitherto most of the researches in this area have been conducted by visiting social scientists from America or Britain, and have been guided by theories and themes of interest developed in studies of societies and cultures outside the British Caribbean. The resultant diversity of approaches has undoubted value for the systematic study of British West Indian society, as this diversity directs attention to a wide range of problems and aspects of local life. On the other hand, these researches have . . . an ad hoc, exploratory character . . . and, after a wide-ranging review of existing bodies of sociological research and theory, he concluded: Our analysis of the literature . . . has revealed the principal current approaches to the social and cultural study of our area . . . We have seen how a competition of models tends to obtain, acculturation studies presenting one framework, while stratification theory offers another. We have seen that each of these separate models is inadequate for the systematic and comprehensive study of these societies, and that both try to disguise their inadequacies behind a screen of vague unverifiable assumptions and indeterminate concepts. It has also been shown that when combined in terms of a theory of plural societies and cultures, these competing approaches provide a unified and refined frame of con66

Douglas Hall cepts which is of equal use in defining the problems under study as a system of area research, in guiding the investigations of psychologists, and in providing an integrated comparative framework for the study of this region. It was a controversial claim, and as Smith developed and further publicized his theory of the plural society he came into academic conflict with many, including his colleague Raymond Smith. Some years later, in April 1967, the Institute of Caribbean Studies in the University of Puerto Rico published a review article entitled "The Concept of Pluralism as Envisaged by M.G. Smith", by Harmannus Hoetink of the University of Amsterdam. Hoetink, who had very favourably reviewed Smith's West Indian Family Structure (1962) as "the most important [book] that in recent years has been written on British West Indian family structures", now had no objections to the concept of pluralism per se. He criticized what he conceived to be Smith's methodological error. In this reviewer's opinion, the group of mainly descriptive articles shows M.G. Smith to be an astute observer, as well as a talented social historian who, with a keen eye for what is sociologically relevant, knows how to etch a specific structure or process with convincing sureness and attention to significant nuance, with force and subtlety, thus conveying an impression of professional integrity and reliability; in Smith's theoretical exercises different and even contrary qualities are to be observed . . . such as rigidity and near-dogmatism, inherent of course in most theory-building; some of them consequences of specific theoretical partis-pris, such as the predominantly static quality of his concepts and models, and the extreme emphasis placed on cultural differences in the explanation of social sectionalism; it follows that those articles in which Smith's badly manoeuverable Armada of theory confronts his honest little ships of reality, are easily the most dramatic of the collection. As the years passed Mike would become defensive rather than aggressive in support of his theory of pluralism, and eventually would admit to a critic that he was himself becoming less convinced of its unassailability. Late in 1955, at the request of N.W. Manley, then chief minister, Smith 67

A Man Divided: M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D SMITH 1921-1993 undertook a survey of rural labour in Jamaica. In selected areas of eight parishes he and his field-team gathered information from establishments and individuals employing labour - the availability of labour, the numbers of labourers employed, the methods and wages of employment and the turnover of employees. Workers were asked for their views on types of employment, wages and the cost of living, and the attitudes of their employers. Households were questioned on the relationships between occupants, their employments, and the household budgets. Local economies based on agriculture, fishing, forestry, crafts, livestock, or other were described, and enquiries made about access to markets for whatever they produced. The detail of his field-notes, of which a page is reproduced opposite, was extraordinary; and when he had collected his data he indexed and cross-indexed the material in order to find the final form of his report. Receipt of the "Report on Labour Supplies in Jamaica, and Appendices" was acknowledged by Mr Manley: You certainly have done a tremendous job. The Appendices must rank as the most detailed survey of basic economic conditions in rural areas that has ever been undertaken. I think the whole work will be very valuable to Government and I thank you most warmly and congratulate you on it. Yours sincerely, N.W. Manley™ "When a man of my own grade employ me I get better treatment. You go to work, you work, when you tired, you can stop and take a 5 by lighting yuh cigarette & work again. He give you breakfast. In the evening you going home he give you yamfoot, even a potato, a cane, sompn you can help yuhself, him seh tek this. If rain fall him doan tell you about 2/3 day & 3/4 day. Pay the full day's pay. Yuh doan have a direct schedule when to go to work you go jus as you go to you own field. It may be 7, 7.30, 8.00 o'clock. He pay you 3/- & giyuh breakfas". When yuh work w. a man of a higher category yuh hah to guh to work 8 AM. Some yuh draw off4 PM Some 5 PM, 8 - 9 hours. If yuh jus stop work fe light a cigar him doan like it he call to yuh. If rain fall him tell you bout 1/2 day 3/4 day 2/3 rd day 1/3 day 6/8 2/8 day all them sort of something & cut the day's pay to suit those 8ths and l/4s. Same 3/- & 3/6 a day. And when yuh squeal him seh property cyan carry more. In case of distress him wudn lend yuh a dollar, while the poorer man, the man of my category, will lend you 4 or 5 or 10/- in any distress & yuh work it out little by little. Yuh get better food from the smaller man too when he employ yuh."

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A page of Smith's fieldnotes (transcribed opposite)

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PROFESSIONAL AND ACADEMIC DISAPPOINTMENTS Bureaucratic ineptitude of the sort Mike Smith could never tolerate then interfered. Some months later, a senior civil servant asked him: "When will your labour survey report be published? We need it." A little surprised, Mike went to the Government Printing Office to enquire. He was shown a pile of nicely printed and bound copies on the floor in a corner. "But why haven't they been distributed?" The answer came - "I can't until I'm told a price for them." Mike in angry resignation responded: "Oh I see, so they're lying there for the white ants to eat." Meantime the report to the CSSRC by Dr Raeburn and Mr Farrar-Brown on the performance of the ISER at Mona had been unfavourable, and in 1956-57 the Institute came under heavy criticism for non-performance. Dr Huggins protested that at the time of Dr Raeburn's visit the ISER was in a formative stage and that there had since been two excellent reviews of recent works by his staff: Raymond Smith's book The Negro Family in British Guiana, and an article by Alfred Thorne entitled "Size, Structure and Growth of the Economy of Jamaica". That protest carried little weight. Whatever criticism might be levelled at the Institute, there were individual members of it whose performance, though unguided by considered overall policy, was praiseworthy. Among them, certainly, was M.G. Smith. In the six years to the end of 1955 he had completed successful fieldwork in Northern Nigeria, Grenada and Carriacou, and Jamaica. He had published a long report and five papers based on his work in Nigeria, including the Wellcome Medal Prize essay "Secondary Marriage in Northern Nigeria"; also published were his "Framework for Caribbean Studies", a paper on British Caribbean social structure about 1820, and another comparing slavery and emancipation in Zaria and Jamaica; and he had submitted his detailed findings on rural labour in Jamaica. In April 1956 he was promoted to Senior Research Fellow, and from time to time in Dr Huggins' absences he would act as Director of the ISER. He thus became directly involved in academic dispute. It was a time of reconsideration of the activities of UCWI. Sir Philip Sherlock has described it:

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Douglas Hall Toward the close of the second quinquennium countless hours were spent by Faculty and Senate Committees preparing proposals for the expansion of the academic programme and of the physical plant during the period 1958-63 . . . The proposals included the establishment of Faculties of Agriculture and Engineering, assuming financial responsibility for the Institute of Social and Economic Research, the introduction of a new BSc General Honours degree, of special Honours courses in scientific subjects, Spanish and economics, of professorial chairs in classics, physics, economics and mathematics, the creation of a Department of Philosophy and the addition of teaching programmes in political theory and government in the Department of Economics [then part of the Faculty of Arts], and of new departments of geography and geology in the Faculty of Science. Hopes ran high. * * Dr Huggins had suggested that a Faculty of Social Sciences should be established and the ISER merged with it under a single head. A Senate Committee was set up "to consider implications of the integration of the ISERintheUCWT. The Committee included the Principal, and Vice-Principal, ex-officio, and the following members elected by the Senate: Professor G. Bras (Pathology), Mr S.L. Martin (Chemistry), Mr L.R. Robinson (Mathematics), Professor D.B. Stewart (Medicine), and Dr J.C. Waterlow (Tropical Metabolism). A team of distinguished individuals; but not a social scientist among them! At the end of April 1957, the Senate Committee made its recommendations. The ISER should be integrated into a Department or Institute of Economic and Social Studies to be established in the Faculty of Arts. An interim committee of Dr Huggins, Dr Morgan (who was the Economics lecturer in the Faculty of Arts), and "a person representing Sociology" should plan that development until a 'Professor of Economic and Social Studies' should be appointed. Mike Smith's verbal reaction to all of that is, perhaps fortunately, unrecorded; but at the time he and Mary had more important concerns. Their third son, Peter Edmund, was born on 16 May 1957. Philip Sherlock, Vice-Principal and Director of Extra Mural Studies, raised objections to the Senate Committee's proposals, and further discussion led to 71

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The FIFTIES: MG Smith (extreme left) with colleagues of the ISER Staff in Jamaica. With him from left are William Demos, D. Huggins, Ray T. Smith, RoyAugier, Lloyd Braithwaite and Derek Maunder (Reproduced by courtesy of ISER (Mona), UWI)

the decision to establish a Faculty of Social Sciences. The Director, ISER, was asked to prepare a paper on staff requirements for courses in Social Studies and Sociology. Dr Huggins was away, so M.G. Smith, as Acting Director, submitted a paper "drafted in consultation with Dr Raymond Smith, and approved by Dr Huggins before his departure . . . As planned, the research programme of ISER in regional Sociology requires three sociologists engaged in full-time research."12 He was unyielding in the view that the Institute should carry out programmed research in order to fulfil the purposes for which it had been established. Doubtful that these objectives would ever be achieved under the direction of Dr Huggins, he was also restless. He confided in Mary: "I shall have to write myself out of this place." Though he wanted to work in the Caribbean he could call on his reputation elsewhere. At the end of November 1956 he had submitted a proposal for research to Professor J.H. Parry, previously Professor of History at UCWI but now Principal of the University College at Ibadan, Nigeria. He 72

Douglas Hall wished to do a comparative study of government and change in the Fulani dominions of Sokoto, Katsina, Daura, Kano, Hadeija and Jama'an Dororo, and would be able to come in mid-1958 for a year. After discussing the proposal with Professor R.H. Barback, Director of the ISER at Ibadan, Parry replied: "It would be a pleasure to see you again." A grant of £2,400 would be secured to cover Mike's expenses. Back on campus after the labour survey Mike had applied for a housing allowance to enable him to live off campus. Bungalow 'A' was tight with the growing family and he preferred to live away from the current campus squabbling. In March 1957, a few weeks before the birth of Peter Edmund, the family had moved to a larger but still an older wooden house on Retirement Crescent, near Cross Roads. In that year, as the academic discussion went on, he would publish three more papers including the Curie Bequest Prize essay, "On segmentary lineage systems" - a largely speculative work based on classical anthropological theory. In January 1958 the UCWI granted him leave to go to Nigeria and a total supplementary sum of £850 to cover passages for himself and family to and from England. Mary and the boys would stay there while he was at Ibadan. They left Jamaica at the end of September, and Mike's leave was extended to the end of 1959.

A NEW PRINCIPAL APPOINTED AT UCWI In 1958 Professor W. Arthur Lewis, then at Manchester, was offered and accepted appointment as Professor of Economics at UCWI. Before his arrival to take up that post, Dr Walter Grave, in February 1959, gave up the principalship and the council lost no time in offering that appointment also to Professor Lewis who accepted. Other commitments, however, prevented his arrival at Mona until March I960, when he assumed the principalship and the professorship. In the interim, Philip Sherlock acted as principal. Before Mike Smith's return at the end of 1959 the UCWI's Finance and General Purposes Committee of Council, in constant communication with Professor Lewis, had come to decisions which were promulgated at the 73

A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 beginning of April. As of 1 October 1959, ISER would be integrated with the UCWI in a reconstituted Department of Economics. On that date, the title of Professor of Applied Economics would be conferred on Dr Huggins. Dr M.G. Smith, who would be a Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Mr G.E. Cumper (economist), Mr L.E.S. Braithwaite (sociologist), and Mr D.T. Edwards (economist) would be offered appointments in the reconstituted department. Professor Arthur Lewis on assuming the principalship on 1 October 1959, would continue to be titular head of the Department of Economics; but an attempt would be made to appoint a professor to that Chair. The UCWI would begin teaching for the BSc (Econ) Degree in October 1959, and draft regulations had already been submitted to London and would in due course reach the UCWI's Senate.13 While all this was happening at Mona an African Studies Center had been set up at the University of California, Los Angeles ". . . for the purpose of encouraging research, coordinating teaching programmes, and providing a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration among Africanists in the social sciences, education and linguistics". In January 1959 Professor James Coleman had written to Mike Smith on behalf of the Center to invite you to spend two weeks with us sometime during the coming Spring semester [2 Feb-mid May 1959]. We would like to have the opportunity to meet you and to benefit from your specialist knowledge in the field of African studies, enriched as it is in your case by your work in the West Indies. During his stay, he would be expected to conduct two or three seminars on topics of his choice, and to deliver guest lectures in the formal courses of the Centre. Mike, the letter pointed out, would be one of several such invited 'leading specialists' each of whom would be asked ". . . to prepare a short paper in which [each examines] the principal problems of field research in Africa related to his discipline and drawn from his own recent field experience". The Center would, of course, pay all his expenses and offer a suitable honorarium. 74

Douglas Hall Mike could not go in 1959 because of his ISER, Ibadan project. With the permission of Acting Principal Sherlock, he arranged to go in April I960 after his return to Mona in January of that year, this time to move back on campus in one of the larger wooden 'Gibraltar Camp' houses not far from the gate at Irvine Hall. When he did return from Ibadan, he quickly got back to work, impatient of unnecessary interruption, complaining sometimes of the children's noise. Toward the end of February his telephone rang. (From Edna Manley's Diaries) 24 February I960. Today for the first time there was a review of art in the paper, and they referred to my carving as 'dated' and in a cold, clear way, I heard a clock strike and I remembered something that had happened at the end of last year. I was driving along, I don't remember where or what time of day, and suddenly the thought swept over me that I am sixty and that it is all nearly over . . . This is the beginning of a new and a last phase and how does one spend it? Is there a story to be written about it all - is there a chronicle of events that should be recorded, and have I the gift to do i t ? . . . At this moment I picked up the phone and spoke to Mike Smith. This was my first gesture - a step outside the patterns. Mike is often so cross when you phone him, not wanting to put down his beloved work to speak to anyone - to me at any rate - but he was calm and cheerful an we talked of George Campbell [working in New York and aching to be home and writing]. . . I told him, too, that I wanted to write a book of all this and I waited a little nervously, knowing he would speak his mind. He said yes - but it would have to be the truth and I would spend a good deal of time steering off libel - so it had better be the sort of book that was published after my death. I said OK, and that I felt in such a hurry I would do it and die in five years. He laughed and said 'That's a bit short!' We talked of this and that. It made me feel good! that perhaps it could be done . . . He has one of those positive minds, which combine an amazing range with a fantastic self-opinionatedness. I believe in him, though, and deep down I like both him and Mary. I like to know they are getting somewhere, and I like to think Mary is keeping her bright mind and 75

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 ways in spite of much that is difficult in their relationship and in her life. But I don't like to see them often, its just that they are real and very uninfluenced by superficial and casual things. In March Arthur Lewis arrived. Within weeks he and Rex Nettleford, then Resident Tutor Extra Mural Studies, received letters from members of the Ras Tafari brethren in Kingston, then much feared, reviled and persecuted. They asked the assistance of the college in the educational field and in publishing the truth about them and their doctrine. Arthur Lewis responded immediately and appointed a team of three - Rex Nettleford, Roy Augier, historian, and M.G. Smith, social anthropologist - to conduct "a survey of the movement, its organization and its aspirations". The survey, held daily over a period of two weeks beginning on 4 July provided the substance of a report, The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica', which was sent with an explanation of its origin and procedures to the Hon. N.W. Manley. The report, setting forth the history of the movement and its proclaimed desires, subscribed in no small measure to the beginning of a greater understanding and a gradually increasing acceptance of Ras Tafari; and led the government of the day to attempt to meet the most important of the brethren's demands. In October, Mike received another letter from Professor Coleman. UCLA had clearly been impressed by his earlier performance there, and he was now invited to come as a visiting professor for either the spring or the fall semester of 1961. Mike applied to Professor Lewis for leave to go and gave clear indication of his unhappiness at UCWI. Dear Professor Lewis, I write about the invitation to visit Los Angeles for a semester's teaching either in February or September next year. I wish to go in September, especially because I am uncertain whether I will be remaining beyond that date. Yours sincerely, M.G. Smith Professor Lewis gave him leave to go.

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TOWARDS A SECOND SAD DEPARTURE FROM JAMAICA In January 1961 Mike wrote to Dr Huggins resigning from the Faculty Committee appointed in I960 to draft a proposal for a Department of Sociology. It was not that he wished to have no say. It was because, as it had been at McGill though now for very different reasons, he felt there was nothing at UCWI to help him fulfil his ambition. In March 1961, Mike answered an invitation to go to Tallahassee. In May, the principal and the registrar both wrote congratulations to him on the award of the Amaury Talbot Prize. It was not that those in authority at UCWI were unaware of MG's ever growing academic reputation abroad. Perhaps it did not occur to them that his axe-like tongue and forbidding presence might have been swollen symptoms of discontent, or that even if his long recognized sharp impatience were to be continuingly suffered it would be a small price to pay for the services of a highly talented and workaholic academic who was rapidly winning international recognition. On May 14 1961, Mike Smith made a final gesture, and even then, perhaps, his going might have been avoided. He wrote to Professor W.A. Lewis, Principal of the College and Professor and Head of the Department of Economics. He pointed to the existing confusion in that department with Professor Lewis, Professor Huggins, visiting Professors of Economics, and ambitious individuals in the department vying for promotion. The seat of authority and leadership was unclear and the situation was demoralizing. The Senate had now proposed that a separate Department of Sociology should be established, that the three senior lecturers in Sociology now in the Department of Economics should be transferred to it, and that Professor Lewis should for the time being be Head of Sociology also. Smith argued that if Sociology were to be offered as a three-year course there should be an appointed Professor of Sociology and more teaching staff in that Department. Otherwise, the sort of confusion existing in the Department of Economics would be duplicated in the new department. Anticipating that his letter would have no effect, he made it clear that he would not be coming back from California. Three days later, Finance and General Purposes Committee of Council approved the recommendations of

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the Senate, and adopted also a further recommendation that as of that date economic historians should be attached to the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and not remain in the Department of Economics.15 The sole economic historian on the academic staff rejoiced. On 31 October, 1961, Dr M.G. Smith's resignation from the UCWI took effect. He went to UCLA as Professor of Social Anthropology. A brief memoir from one who knew him there is perhaps revealing: "He had arrived with the reputation of being rather stiff and formidable. He proved to be anything but." 1 Many years before, when young soldier Smith was visiting, Mary's mother had in quite normal maternal curiosity, no doubt tinged with anxiety, asked Mike what he wanted to do when the war was over. His reply was not calculated to soothe. He told her he wanted to go home and sit on Blue Mountain Peak and write poetry. By the time he and Mary had married and completed their studies at London, he knew that he wanted to go home to teach and to research the unexplored fields of social conditions and relationships in the Caribbean. In his few years at Mona he had clearly demonstrated his commitment to work for the UCWI and for the wider extra-mural society. The latter was made evident by his involvement in the "Report on the Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica", his much praised "Report on Labour Supplies in Jamaica, and Appendices", and a Sociological Manual for Extension Workers in the Caribbean, co-authored with GJ. Kruijer and published by the Extra-Mural Department, UCWI, in 1957. His year of fieldwork in Grenada and Carriacou would yield three books: Dark Puritan, Kinship and Community in Carriacou (1962), Stratification in Grenada (1965), and a number of essays in academic journals. Of the Carriacou book, published by Yale University Press, one reviewer wrote: "The book is exceptionally interesting throughout, not only because of its sparkling English, but because of much that is unique or extraordinary in the acculturation pattern there .. . Suffice it to say that if the Yale Caribbean Series will offer us books of the quality of this one, more power to it."17 There was, also, his developing work on cultural pluralism in the West Indies. Lloyd Best, the Trinadadian economist, who knew him at Mona would later write of the early days at ISER:

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Douglas Hall The first generation of anthropologists and sociologists at Mona at no stage failed to recognize the full complexity of the Caribbean context even if some did succumb to the temptations of the theory of class in its many variants. My single point about M.G. Smith then is that he never succumbed. He set out in an altogether different direction - a course which would have been suicidal had he not urged an enormous burden of output in the service of the cause. His attempts to test his hypothesis within a constant framework of method has made him the most formidable authority on the bi-racial Creole societies which he has of course studied directly in Jamaica, and in Grenada as well as in Carriacou. His industry is nothing short of legendary . . . We who were there at the time often were minded to tiptoe past his door along the corridor at the ISER at the turn of the 1960s when The Plural Society in the British West Indies was doubtless in the process of gestation. Sometimes we even thought that the social scientists (particularly the social and cultural anthropologists) were made up of races which mingled and mixed but never combined. Fortunately the poet was also always there along with the anthropologist, deploying an exceeding fund of passion, the Dark Puritan who had seen his land in the morning, the anthropologist as poet moved, by model and method, to tell us that in these places there is beauty.18 That was the man whom Professor W. Arthur Lewis, principal of UCWI, Professor and titular head of the Department of Economics, and proposed titular head of the new Department of Sociology, failed to encourage to remain where he wished to be. With offers of appointment from three universities in the United States, Mike and Mary worked out the pros and cons of each and decided on UCLA. It proved a happy choice. Mike had already met several of the academic staff there and had long known Professor Wendell Bell who had attended a seminar at UCWI in the mid 1950s. With Professor Bell's assistance the Smiths rented a house from an economist who was going to be away. A small bungalow in a residential area of West Los Angeles, twenty minutes away from the University, the place was 79

A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 comfortable and also very American suburban - neat small garden running to the road, no fences separating them from the houses next door and friendly neighbours. The Smiths settled in to make a home in a land which was home to neither. Five months after their departure, on 2 April 1962, a new Royal Charter constituted and founded the University of the West Indies as a degree granting institution in its own right, thus severing the official link with London University. Her Royal Highness, Princess Alice, Countess of Althone was the first Chancellor, and Professor Arthur Lewis the first ViceChancellor. Three years later he resigned in order to accept an offer of Professorship of Economics at Princeton. Philip Sherlock, who had earlier gone to head the campus at St Augustine in Trinidad, succeeded him as Vice-Chancellor. I found Mona a very different place from that which I left. The camaraderie of the pioneering days had gone. Some students and faculty had been bruised by the rapid pace of change, some by the shock of being told in rough terms by Jamaican politicians that they were foreigners and had no business meddling in Jamaican affairs, and some had been wounded by Lewis' sharp darts. St Augustine and Cave Hill were strangers to many and rivals for power to some.19 The new Vice-Chancellor needed help in mapping out a strategy "for the University to find its great unifying purpose in West Indian cultural development and economic growth". He wrote to Professor M.G. Smith at UCLA inviting him to come back. "I am sure," he wrote, "we could build something absolutely first class, and would give all my support to this." Smith replied that such a move was doubtful, but if it were possible "I should immediately cable you with very great joy . . . I write you personally as someone I have known and liked and admired since I was a boy". ° For various reasons - objections raised at UCLA, the possibility that he might go to Yale for a term, and his present business in writing a book, Smith could not come to stay. But he did come briefly at the end of 1963 as a consultant, and helped the Vice-Chancellor prepare a document for submission to Council in February 1964. In his book The University of the

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Douglas Hall West Indies co-authored with Rex Nettleford, Philip Sherlock made acknowledgem ent: [M.G. Smith] tackled the project with his customary relentless energy, and three months later presented me with "A Study of West Indian Development Trends and Their Relation to Future Development of the UWI", the first, and up to now the last report of its kind. A quarter of a century later many of his findings and conclusions remain valid.21 By 1961, Michael Garfield Smith had certainly achieved attention, but some of those in authority during his stay at UCWI had, for their various reasons, chosen not to notice.

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Professor M.G. Smith UCLA At the end of 1957 the Soviet Union had launched the Earth-orbiting satellite Sputnik I. The United States followed a few months later with Explorer I. The Cold War was spreading into outer space. On Earth, Soviets and Americans vied in expansion of their opposing philosophical systems, especially in so-called Third World areas, such as large parts of the African continent. The Smiths therefore arrived in California at a time when the United States government was enthusiastically supporting university education, especially in the physical sciences; and research, especially in Africa, not only because of Soviet rivalry there, but also because of social unrest among Afro-Americans and the growing civil rights movement in which Martin Luther King was the leading advocate of "equal justice for all". Professor Smith quickly settled down, teaching more than he had been required to do at Mona, but also with the opportunity to write up his voluminous research notes from Nigeria and the Caribbean. In his tenure there, 1961 to 1969 when he went back to London, M.G. Smith published 82

Douglas Hall four books on the Caribbean, and over thirty articles on Nigeria and the Caribbean in various academic journals. He enjoyed the teaching, and those students who were willing to work and to accept his stern dedication to the pursuit of excellence, came to know and appreciate his concern. Many later paid tribute to the teacher who demanded much but in return gave no less than he was given. One was Wyatt MacGaffey, who became J.R. Coleman Professor of Social Sciences at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. As a newly arrived postgraduate student at UCLA he met the recently appointed Jamaican Professor of Anthropology. I arrived at UCLA in 1962, unaware that there was any such person as M.G. Smith. I was immediately attracted by his serious dedication to his profession, and the rigour of his thinking; it still seems to me that most anthropology, before and since, is content with sloppy formulae and fuzzy concepts. I would go to his office once a week, mumble a few questions, and be given in reply a half a dozen books from his shelf to read in that week. I asked him to chair my doctoral committee and I was treated to a personal seminar every Saturday morning as I helped him walk the dogs on Santa Monica beach. On one of those days, as the time for my thesis defense grew nigh, he interrogated me concerning the kinship system of the Bakongo, among whom I had carried out field work. I was left in despair by the questions, but it turned out he was merely giving me practice in defending myself. In the event, no one asked me a question half as difficult. Three of his ideas have always been particularly important to me in my work: plural society, the theory of corporations, and the order of logical priority in status discrimination. The first has been widely criticized . . . although in Zaire (to take one example) it was both obvious and a matter of explicit concern to the government. The second, together with his definition of government was, and still is, the only logically cogent program for the study of political systems. The third is a little strange; he himself applied it only to Zaria, but I have used it to analyse processes of conflict and change in both non-hierarchical systems and in the United States; I have also used it very fruitfully in the study of cosmology. 83

A Man Divided: M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D SMITH 1921—1993 In retrospect one has to admit that Mike could be excessively rigid in both theory and interpersonal relations . . . He was intolerant of both sloppy thinking and any attempt to fiddle with the rules. I learned to tiptoe around some of his more outrageous dogmas, but he never attempted to convert me to them even after I had written things that opposed them. I also have to admit that I gave up on The affairs of Daura [published in 1978] halfway through. Mike's prose grew more and more turgid as the years passed. Another memoir, from Professor Wendell Bell, gives a glimpse of M.G. Smith who, with all his apparent fierceness, had a mirthful side: "He could in a quiet and sometimes roguish way say some of the most witty things with an absolutely straight face. With Mike, you had to be on your toes or you might miss half the fun." One incident involving M.G. Smith, Wendell Bell, James Coleman, head of the Africa Study Center at UCLA, and Professor David Apter of the University of California, Berkley, later became a favourite story. On a visit to UCLA before his appointment to a professorship there, Mike Smith had attended a reception in his honour as a visiting specialist. Time and liquor flowed, and suddenly Wendell Bell realized that Mike had to leave the party immediately or miss his plane. He therefore pushed Smith, Coleman and Apter, drinks in hand, into his car and drove headily to the airport. They arrived to find the departure lounge empty. An airline employee pointed them to the gate for the plane to Jamaica. They ran. Bell and Mike, then Coleman and Apter with Mike's bags and briefcase. The gateway was locked, dark and deserted. Outside, Bell could see a groundcrewman with wands in hand directing a plane about to take off. He rushed the party through a 'no-admittance' door, on to the tarmac, and shouted to the man, "The Prime Minister of Jamaica is here and has to get on that plane." The plane was halted, the boarding ladder put in place, Mike with bag and briefcase ran up and disappeared into the aircraft as the others shouted "Goodbye Mr Prime Minister" and watched the take off. Wendell Bell and company returned to the reception full of excitement over their dashing success. Next morning, Wendell Bell received a phone-call, collect, from one M.G. Smith. 84

Douglas Hall "Hi Mike", he said, "how was your trip?" "Okay, Wendy." "Weather good? Flight smooth?" "Yes, the weather was good and we had a very smooth flight." There was a pause. Wendell Bell waited for Mike to explain the reason for his call. Mike said, "But I'm in Mexico City." Over the years, as Wendell Bell, often at Mike's request, repeated the story: " . . . Mike always gave a hearty laugh. I laughed too but I sometimes wondered if Mike wasn't doing more than merely amusing our guests and, for my own good, gently reminding me of my fallibility." The Smiths spent eight happy years at UCLA. Mike found congenial academic colleagues and appreciative students. He enjoyed the teaching. Research grants in 1965 and again in 1968 freed him from the classroom and allowed him to write his Nigerian histories. Away from work, the family travelled - the Grand Canyon, the Yosemite and other national parks, and

The Smith family and friend in Los Angeles

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 two long memorable trips. In August 1963 they drove to Mexico City, through the Arizona desert by night to avoid the heat and slept in motels in the days. They went sightseeing through Mexican towns with their spacious central squares with cathedral and town-hall; they visited museums in Mexico City, and climbed the pyramids on ancient Aztec sites. In 1967 they went on a camping tour up the west coast of North America from Los Angeles to Vancouver where they stayed with relatives of Mary Smith who had six children, a boat, and a holiday cabin on an island in Howe sound. It was good, and Mike Smith used to say that if he could become a Californian citizen without becoming an American one he would gladly do so. But by 1968, Mike and Mary's contentment with quiet residence, congenial academic company and happy holidaying had been weakened by events beyond and in Los Angeles. In 1963, in circumstances which are still controversial, President John F. Kennedy was shot. In 1968, another assassination, that of Martin Luther King, and on that occasion young Daniel Smith, then in his teens, came home from school and said to his parents: "Have you heard? I wonder if the CIA did it?" The question suggested much about the state of American society at the time. In further disturbance of the national well-being there was increasing opposition of Americans to the war in Viet Nam. Twelfth-grade students at school were asking one another "When you leave school are you going to Viet Nam or to jail?" In Los Angeles demonstrations were frequent, and the Smiths warned their children not to join crowds, but to stay on the margins if they went to see. They had been thus particularly warned on one occasion when President Johnson was due to arrive. Mike and Mary watched a large crowd grow in peaceful demonstration. In it were students, lecturers from UCLA, mothers pushing babies in prams - a very "domestic looking crowd" as Mary Smith described it. Then the police came and drove their motor-cycles through the people scattering them aside. The Smiths again began to wonder. The final disillusionment came when the police, in an attempt to stem the growing use of drugs, visited Daniel Smith's school. They questioned suspected children, threatened them with prosecution and imprisonment if they were found to be involved as drug-users or drug-pushers, but told them they would not be punished if they informed on others. 86

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The Smiths were appalled. They then decided that the advantages of working at UCLA were outweighed by the social discomfort of living in Los Angeles. They decided to move to England. In August 1968 they drove across the continent from Los Angeles to New York. Mary and the boys, with car and dogs, boarded the Queen Elizabeth for Southampton. Mike went back to UCLA until he could find a post in Britain. In 1969 he was offered and he accepted appointment as Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology in University College, London, succeeding his former tutor and sponsor, Professor Daryll Forde, who had retired. In the year that Mike went back to London, Norman Washington Manley died. (From Edna Manley's Diaries) 1969 atNomdmi The clouds are hanging low around the house in the mountains and the air is still and it is very silent - no sounds at all. A man has walked slowly - summoning the end of his strength from the house to the glass doored library that stands a little distance away. Gravely he moves to the big desk and takes a seat in the swivel chair; his long sensitive hands move to the drawer and quietly, he opens it bending to look inside. He closes it - and gently touches the objects on the desk - slightly rearranging them with care. With great effort he pulls himself to his feet - and moves to the book shelves, drawing his fingers across the backs of the books on his way to the great plate glass doors. For a long pause he leans against them, his eyes going far across the crumpled mountains that are his country. He stands quite still - his face and particularly his eyes brooding and withdrawn. The woman beside him can bear it no longer and draws him away down the path through the pine trees to the waiting car. He alone knew it was good-bye. January 1970. To Mike Smith I think there is going to be a wild burst of creativeness one day - and not in the mountains, but near the sea, if I could find the place that could 87

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 evoke it. Perhaps somewhere on the St Thomas road near White Horses, with arid foothills on the left - or on the outside of the Palisadoes where the great sea horses come roaring in and the smell of salt and the tearing wind in one's face, and bits of cactus and driftwood. Still, still the solitaire utters its lone cry and the mist covers the memory of my Norman in a shirting yet revealing movement and I go on - learning to carry him with me and without a backward glance. Love to you all. Through the months correspondence continued - ongoing conversations with both the Smiths. 21 November 1971. Letter to Mike Smith Mike you mustn't talk about Jung like that. Jung was the wisest man in modern times and the most humane . . . I give to Freud everything that is his, but Jung has showed me the way to live. Do you remember when you and I discovered that to 'smile' was an approach to more than life, but to truth? If Jung were alive, at whatever cost, I would go to him - for HE is the image of the 'wise old man' and I would say to him: 'What was the image in that deep pool? Or in the deep dark blue?' And from him something would flow and I would understand. Mike darling - life never stops, does it? You and your beautiful Mary - a little like my Norman.

RETURN TO UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON In 1969 Michael Garfield Smith had returned to the corridors of University College, London, with a broom fashioned out of his own restless energy and academic commitment, tempered by his American university experience, and lightened by a touch of Californian sunshine. He flung open the windows of the Department of Anthropology. As one of his colleagues there put it: "Over the next six years, the Department expanded under his dynamic leadership into one of the largest and most prestigious in the country".

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Douglas Hall It was not an easy achievement. Professor Smith cajoled, converted, blitzed and bludgeoned opposition, winning support as his purpose became clear, but also offending some who lacked enthusiasm for change. Statistics are not always reliable guides to truth, but they will have to do. Before Mike's arrival the department offered teaching towards three first degrees: the BSc (Hons) in Anthropology, a joint BSc (Econ) in Economics and Social Anthropology, and a BA in Anthropology and Linguistics. During his tenure four more were added: the BA in Ancient History and Social Anthropology, the BA or BSc in Anthropology and Geography, the BSc in Human Sciences, and a BSc in Human Biology. His wide reading had led and enabled him to institute and chair seminars and discussions with academics from other disciplines and the new joint courses had evolved from those meetings. Undergraduate course structures were redesigned to introduce features such as the offering of'half units' which reflected common American rather than British university practice. The Department's postgraduate offerings were increased. In addition to the earlier Diploma, MPhil, and PhD programmes there was now an MSc in Social Anthropology. Student registrations, undergraduate and postgraduate, increased and academic staff grew to meet the heavier demands for teaching, tutoring, and the supervision of postgraduate work. In his concern for careful supervision of research, one of Mike Smith's numerous proposals for departmental consideration dealt with "The Supervision and Training of Graduate Researchers in Social Anthropology". Over the past decade, graduate and undergraduate honour enrolments in this department have increased as follows:

1960-61 1965-66 1968-69 1970-71

Graduates 3 23 45

Hons. Students 27

39 61 71

35

Our graduate numbers have grown over six times as rapidly as our honours enrolments . . . Thus the graduate program is a major activity of the department; as such it demands as much attention as our Hons. 89

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Professor M. G. Smith at University College, London

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Douglas Hall undergraduate degree. Unfortunately, due to pressure of other work, it has not yet been possible to systematize procedures for graduate supervision and training in ways that permit future evaluation of failure or success. This memo attempts to outline a mode of graduate guidance for discussion of this aspect of our program. Finally, after setting out his proposals he concluded I am therefore asking all Social Anthropologists and Technologists at the start of each term to arrange to meet with each graduate researcher assigned to our care for weekly or fortnightly discussions of their work at set hours, in order that we may improve our previously desultory supervision of these students, reduce their understandable anxieties and confusion, and thus ensure the reasonably rapid development and successful pursuit of their research projects. For Smith, himself, 'the pressure of other work' was soon to be considerably increased.

BEGINNINGS OF POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT Following the death of his father, Michael Manley had been elected as leader of the People's National Party. On a visit to England in 1970 he and Mike and Mary Smith drank coffee in a cafe on Victoria station in London and talked about Jamaica. Thus began a friendly 'advisorship' which would later be made formal. General elections were due in 1972, and Manley wanted the PNP to be ready and, if they should win, he wanted to revolutionize Jamaican society. In July 1970, Mike Smith sent Michael Manley a long paper setting out his views on "Political Parties in Jamaica", of which the telling passages are quoted below: The capacity of a political party to initiate and institutionalize fundamental changes in the social order can never exceed the measure of its predominance in power. And since power is labile, its distribution fluid and subject to change, parties that seek to institutionalize fundamental

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 changes in social organization are severely tempted to seek indefinite periods in office by constitutional and extra- or unconstitutional action of differing kinds. The evidence suggests that major changes in the organization of a complex society may require a generation to establish; and two-party regimes can rarely admit such long periods of power to either party without thereby becoming one-party systems. Thus one problem that faces any Jamaican party which seeks to institute and implement a program of fundamental social change is how to secure a generation in office without revoking the constitution or suppressing its opponents, its critics and popular liberties. To achieve these ends in these conditions, the party should first formulate its long term goals clearly, then identify the constraints on these goals, and then convert these targets into an orderly series of programs, so phased in time that their implementation will sustain and increase its popular support. Despite its prolonged pragmatic period in office the PNP remains as it began, ideologically generated and oriented. Its designation declares its twin commitments to populism and to nationalism. But what precisely is the Party's ideology; and what are its present goals, beyond the attainment of office? If the Party has no disinterested and binding commitment to the relief, welfare and development of the Jamaican people, it would probably be best for the country that it should be defeated, abandoned or destroyed. The deteriorating Jamaican situation cannot forever support two pragmatic parties that place the acquisition and tenure of office as their highest or ultimate goals. Such goals, the acquisition of governmental power, remain primary as instrumental requisites of further ends. Thus the decisive question becomes: what sort of country does the Party want Jamaica to be? More precisely, what sort of society does the Party want to create or see in Jamaica? This question immediately raises two others, namely, what sort of country or society is Jamaica today? And by what strategic series of measures can this contemporary Jamaican society be transformed as rapidly and smoothly as possible - that is, within a generation of 20 to 25 years - into the society that the Party desires?

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Douglas Hall If the PNP proposes to see Jamaica prosperous, united, democratic (i.e. enjoying its present political and legal freedoms), egalitarian, developing and peaceful, a land of equal opportunity for all of equal skill and capacities and a land in which all have equal opportunities to acquire such capacities and skills, certain things follow. There is a generation gap in the aspirations, techniques, ideologies and personnel of Jamaican political leaders; and the younger radical leaders unable to find appropriate places in either established party, and aware that the situation does not invite a third party, are probably disposed to discredit both, and the regime with them, while generating a social movement with activist orientations that might sweep aside the structures of neocolonialism . . . Presumably it is only their recognition of the ultimate futility of such attempts to seize power violently that restrains those activist radicals who repudiate the present regime, parties and policies; but since American suppression awaits all who pursue social change in the ex-BWI by public violence, non-violent procedures are preconditions of successful social change. We can list as desirable and necessary objectives of Party action the following: (1) Progressive reduction of inequalities in the distribution of assets, opportunities, tax-burdens, legal, medical, and other facilities. (2) Maintenance or increase of the recent rates of economic development. (3) Policies to reduce rates of population growth and increase rates of outflow. (4) Reductions in the volume of national assets and products transferred abroad - that is, the termination of neocolonialism. (5) Correction of those disbalances listed above and others implied or deriving from them. In a nutshell, this paper argues that no Jamaican government will be free and able to introduce fundamental changes in local society for lack of adequate finance, in advance of effective control over the major assets held by foreign interests, namely in order of importance, bauxite, 93

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electric power, and sugar. With these assets and incomes available, the Jamaican government will then have the freedom and capital to finance the reforms required to change the local society. Without them, it won't. Thus Jamaican foreign policy should be oriented primarily to anticipating and neutralizing negative responses overseas to these programs of change. Within Jamaica, he concluded, the PNP should seek the support of all who sought to control and exploit local assets in order to transform Jamaican society, including 'Young radicals' and even such members of the Jamaica Labour Party who seemed in sympathy with that objective. Early in 1972 Michael Manley carried the PNP to a resounding victory in the general elections and was asked by the Governor-General to form the government. The news was widely welcomed throughout Jamaica, and abroad nowhere more delightedly than in the household of Professor M.G. Smith. Tired of the style and performance of the JLP, those who knew Michael Manley welcomed his leadership of government by the PNP, the party founded by his father on the principles of democratic socialism. Full of fire to create a new Jamaica in which there would indeed be 'one people' bound in common social justice and national aspiration, Manley sought the best advice he could recruit. He invited M.G. Smith to be special advisor to him as prime minister. Smith visited, and was happily and appropriately received. The government bestowed on him the high distinction of the Order of Merit. His academic colleagues in London shared his pleasure. As one of them later said: "He took pride in this recognition and liked to point out that he and Bob Marley were the first two holders of the honour." The Board of the Institute of Jamaica noted his international academic reputation, and awarded him the Institute's Gold Medal. He agreed to work with Michael Manley, but on a part-time, occasional basis for he would remain as Professor and Head of Anthropology at UCL. And he visited Edna Manley, still disordered by her husband's death. 7 June 1972-3.20a.m. An extraordinary night - fell asleep quickly, I was tired, and got awake around 1.00 A.M. to a dream . . . I didn't get back to sleep and could 94

Douglas Hall have succumbed to fear, but slowly the value I have been gaining from the book by Krishnamurti I have been reading helped me ... So I turned on the lights and took comfort from the familiar sight of the bedroom - and my thoughts moved over the week Mike had spent here, and how much in understanding and calmness it seems to have brought me - and then Norman . . . It's going to take quite a while to recapture his presence, but I think the garden is where there's still the best chance of contacting him. Mike Smith spent the last months of 1972 and the first three of 1973 on unpaid leave from UCL, as a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences at Palo Alto, California. During his stay there Mary joined him. He was in frequent correspondence with, and paid occasional visits to the Prime Minister's Office in Jamaica. In January 1973 Michael Manley had in brief conversation mentioned a number of matters on which he wanted MG's assistance. On 3 February, Smith sent him five closely typed pages of comments and recommendations on a wide variety of topics. He asked for a directive from the Prime Minister to go ahead with ". . . the sociological investigations required for the design, implementation and evaluation of all agricultural projects initiated by your government". He also asked for the arrangement of closer liaison between the Ministries of Youth and Community Development and of Agriculture "because Agriculture may overlook the human side of their projects, while Youth & Community Development need to know the location and plans of these agricultural projects in order to integrate and adapt their rural programs accordingly. In return, these agricultural projects should be conceived with conscious regard for the needs of rural people". He then remarked on the need, more generally, for the various ministries to consult together about their particular plans. This was urgent "in order to integrate the various fronts of your Government's plans and efforts". He promised to draft papers "assessing the situation in relation to our economic and manpower position" in education, and on the rationalization of public and private (voluntary) social services. As requested, he was studying the possibilities for the development of local government and cataloguing the resources, functions, location, staff and 95

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 organization of all statutory bodies. He favoured the transferring of "certain functions and resources from Central Government, and especially from the plethora of statutory bodies" to local government or to intermediate administrative units. He proposed the reorganization of the civil service administration and noted that a current reclassification of posts could not be properly done without reference to documented job descriptions throughout the service. Appeals to permanent secretaries and other administrative officers for that information had so far yielded small response. Should another appeal be unsuccessful, . . . it may be necessary to employ sanctions to secure the complete catalogue of jobs required for the reclassification. In that case all PSs or administrative officers whose subordinates have not turned in acceptable job descriptions by a given date might well forfeit any increment or upgrading of their posts, until such time as the reports from their units are complete. It was not always his irascibility that brought unpopularity to M.G. Smith. His letter continued with brief notices of longer papers to come and observations and recommendations on other subjects: tabulation of the 1970 Census Returns; the 'needs and future' of the Department of Statistics which, then scattered in four or five places, should be housed in a single building and ". . . care should be taken to recruit statisticians, and not merely UWI Social Science graduates whose statistical training is incidental to courses for degrees in Economics or Sociology". On wages and incomes policy: I fail to see how a rational Incomes Policy is possible; and hope that the Commissioner of Income Tax will be directed to publish the Annual Returns of his Department's activities for the years after 1964. Further, it seems, on the arguments thus far presented to me, that the issue is one of the costs of production and living rather than wages and incomes as such. With regard to proposals on income tax policy, Mike Smith, in unusual disclaimer, wrote "this is a technical matter, outside my competence". 96

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Nonetheless, he spoke for the majority of taxpayers when he observed: It certainly appears that the Commissioner of Income Tax treats persons with high incomes leniently, and that the Department rarely if ever questions the low incomes such individuals declare. For example, in 1972, only about 250 persons declared incomes of more than J$ 15,000. Over the past six years [he had been told] foreign Governments have informed the Commissioner's office of some 600 Jamaican residents in receipt of overseas incomes, on which it is said that no local tax has been collected. Should these allegations be valid, there is good ground for a thorough investigation and overhaul of the Income Tax Department. He observed that many ministries, departments of government and statutory bodies had in recent years ceased publishing annual reports, and obviously such delinquency was both undesirable and inexcusable. Other matters were touched upon: telephone company development; an approaching Third World conference; contingency plans for disasters; political-administrative corruption to be stemmed ". . . by some announcement from you of a procedure for impartial, independent investigation of alleged corruption by civil servants or politicians ..." And there was thievery on the wharves: Having spent a day on the wharf and observed its organization, I suggested the installation of scales, electronically connected (a) to a computer which would record the weight and time of all vehicles entering and leaving the wharfs, (b) to cameras installed opposite the gates which would photograph these movements, and (c) to some branch of the police which would trace the unauthorized removal of goods to their destination and enable prosecution of their recipients. Mike Smith then apologized to the prime minister "for the delay in sending this summary", and said he would be returning to Jamaica for 3 weeks on his way back to London at the end of March: Fortunately, on this visit, my fare will be met without charge to Government. I shall try to submit all the reports and papers referred to above either during or before that visit. If possible, could you kindly 97

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spare me an hour on April 1st or 2nd to brief me [and] let me know what you would like me to work on then? I shall also develop a program for these weeks. With best wishes, Yours ever. On 14 February 1973, from the Office of the Prime Minister: My dear Mike, Thank you very much for your most helpful note on our last conversation. You really have a formidable memory and I am tremendously encouraged by all the help that you are giving. I am having all the areas followed up. Incidentally, I am dying to see how Ali will perform against Bugner tonight!... I am predicting Ali to stop him in nine. In the postscript we will know how wide of the mark that was. Yours sincerely, Michael P.S. Ali on points in 12! He was very sharp but seems to have lost his K.O. punch? M. Boxing, always of interest to the two Michaels, was then much in the public notice in Jamaica. The heavyweight championship of the world had recently been decided in The Sunshine Showdown in Kingston when George Foreman knocked out Joe Frazier to take the title. Norman Washington Manley had been an outstanding athlete and also a boxing fan, and in January 1973, Edna Manley noted the staging of "the heavyweight championship of the world, in the stadium that Norman built, organized in the Ministry that Doug [las Manley] heads, and sanctioned by Michael, Prime Minister". From M.G. Smith, in Palo Alto, California, to Michael Manley, 28 February 1973. Dear Michael, Thanks for your cheerful note of February 14th with the P.S. on Ali's points victory. I'm afraid if he can't knock out Bugner he had better avoid Foreman. A sad admission for both of us. [But as we know, Ali 98

Douglas Hall did not avoid Foreman. Instead, he knocked him out.] With Mary's help, I have just finished writing up the stack of work I brought back from Jamaica four weeks ago. As requested I am sending you a memo on Local Government, together with another on Contingency Plans for Local Disasters, a third on 'Statutory Bodies and Other Strange Things' and a fourth, 'A Policy for Jamai can Educ ation... ' Tomorrow to fresh fields and my Hausa monographs. Mary and I have three and a half weeks in which to knock a thousand-page monograph into shape for the publishers before I return to Jamaica at the end of March, and she to London. [This would have been his Corporations and Society published in 1974.] Tomorrow is your first anniversary in office . . . I do believe you have made an excellent beginning and laid the foundations for an accelerating program of development and change. Our warmest congratulations . . . Yours ever In reply, on 6 March, Michael Manley marvelled at Smith's energy and application: "How you do it remains a mystery. I am going to settle down to read the enclosures this weekend, so will not comment now except to express my somewhat stunned appreciation." And he set a date and time for the meeting Mike Smith had requested. In that year, 1973, Manley asked Smith to leave University College, London, and come to Jamaica "to be in charge, within the umbrella of the National Planning Agency, of the sociological aspects of economic development in Jamaica . . . In the past, enough emphasis was not placed on the effects of economic development on people . . . " Professor Smith discussed this invitation with his College Provost who opposed his resignation and asked that he remain for at least another two years to establish his work in the Department of Anthropology. Smith then replied to Michael Manley in September 1973: The real problem behind this is that since 1969 I have doubled the size, programmes, reputation and quality of this department which is now one of the leading units in this country... If I resigned now on national grounds, neither the Provost nor I can see how to avoid or repair the de-

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partmental wreckage this would cause. Accordingly, the first step is to recruit someone suitable to take over the departmental headship, to settle him in the saddle, and then for me to pull out. Consequently, his part-time assistance as Special Advisor continued for the time being. By contractual arrangement, Smith would remain as Professor and Head of Anthropology at UCL but would be available to the Government of Jamaica for approximately 3 months in each year. The Government would contribute 3,000 pounds a year to UCL to enable a satisfactory replacement for him there while he was away, would pay for Smith's travel to and from Jamaica and allow him J$30 a day while in the island to cover his housing and subsistence. He received no other personal emoluments. Consultations had continued, and a large and more formal assignment had come on 15 August 1973: To Dr The Hon. M.G. Smith, O.M. Dear Dr Smith, I should be obliged if you would examine all aspects of crime in Jamaica with a view to determining its underlying causes and suggesting appropriate courses of action. I am asking you to work with the Ministry of Home Affairs and Justice on this investigation. Yours sincerely, Michael Manley On 27 August, Smith provided fourteen typed pages of "Notes on the Current Crime Wave and Some Proposals". Much of what he then said has since, from time to time, been hashed, re-hashed, and offered as fresh and newly informed comment. A summary of his account of the increasing incidence of criminal activity tells little that we do not now hear in the daily news. It does tell us, though, that it was all known more than twenty years

ago. The current crime wave in Jamaica may be traced back to 1966 when firearms became current among criminals in Kingston and several gangs were taking root in West, Central and East Kingston. 100

Douglas Hall In the General Election of 1967, some of these gangs supported rival candidates of the two main political parties in Western Kingston, and perhaps elsewhere. A state of emergency was declared and the Jamaican police were strengthened by increased enrolments and armed with pistols. In the 1972 General Elections, some gangs again campaigned for political parties; and it seems likely that this will recur in future elections. It is not clear to what extent politicians are able to direct or restrain the gangs that support them; but it seems clear that these gangs expect some protection against the law from their political contacts. As units, gangs attack one another, but they tend to splinter and segment when they expand numerically above certain thresholds, or when members compete for leadership. Normally, members of a common gang live near each other and have certain meeting places and a common territory. Solidarity, vengeance, territorial dominance and political loyalties motivate their violence. Non-political teams of 2 to 7 or 8 men who engage in crime for gain or amusement may account for 60-70% of the violent crimes in Kingston. Some police estimate that around 15-20% of violent crimes in Kingston are committed by males of middle or lower middle class status who work in small teams or groups. Often, these 'middle class' criminals are youngsters in their late teens or early twenties whose parents are prominent Jamaicans. Guns smuggled into the island or stolen from licensed owners are easily obtained by purchase, loan or hire by these and others of criminal intention. In addition, several Jamaican emigrants with criminal records have returned to the country after deportation from the UK, Canada and USA, without prior notification of the Jamaican police. For Jamaica as a whole, between May 1968 and May 1973 the incidence of reported murders doubled (the number in Kingston tripled), rapes and robberies islandwide tripled, and 'shootings with intent' rose from 16 in May 1968 to 75 in May 1973. 101

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 Smith then engaged in detailed discussion of the emoluments, strength, training, and effectiveness of the various branches of the police force, all of which he found inadequate. He concluded: No government committed to reduce unemployment, homelessness, poverty, illiteracy and inequality in Jamaica by policies of social and economic development and reform can accept prevailing levels and patterns of criminality, since they directly threaten those elementary foundations of law and order on which Government's programme of economic and social change directly rests. In order to control and reduce criminality, the Police Force must be strengthened and made more effective operationally. Then came his recommendations, all worthy of consideration and some since implemented; but surprisingly all concerned with improving the effectiveness of the police. There was nothing in this paper acknowledging, as Mike Smith knew, that in addition to the prevention of crime, the detection of criminals and the punishment of those found guilty, there is another more fundamental way which is to attack those demeaning social and economic conditions in which criminal intent is bred. Indeed, in late 1973 Smith produced another, much longer paper, 157 pages with numerous Tables of supporting data, entitled "Needs for Social Assistance. A Jamaican Inventory for 1974". In it he ranged the fields of public policy: income distribution, training needs, employment, land ownership and use, housing, health, insurance for the aged and the handicapped, family planning, literacy, legal aid, counselling and information flow and interpersonal assistance. It was not that he did not know. It gradually became clear to Mike Smith that he could not much longer carry the burden of the professorship at UCL, the consultancy in Jamaica, and the writing up of his research notes. Between 1969 and 1975 he published his book Corporations and Society, and nearly a dozen articles and book reviews in academic journals. This was much, but it was also much less than he had done at UCLA. The demands on his time made by Michael Manley were beginning to disturb his performance at UCL. In his Departmental Report in July 1973, for instance, he noted: "Dr Caroline Ifeka of Birmingham University has also 102

Douglas Hall been appointed as temporary lecturer for the coming season with funds transferred to the College by the Government of Jamaica." She would serve while he was again away. His colleagues observed the effects of strain on his behaviour. Accustomed to his impatience to get things done, his usual measure of obstinacy, and his concern with every detail of departmental organization and performance, they now noted with increasing unhappiness his gradually declining stamina and self-possession. One would later remark that "the pace and intensity of his activity continually amazed his much younger colleagues. Over the years, much of his work was carried out with little regard for his personal comfort or health". Mike Smith also knew that the time was coming when he would have to make a choice - UCL or Jamaica. In 1975 he was 54 years old. The next few years would either lead to retirement from UCL or give him time to contribute to the building of the new Jamaica. For Michael Garfield Smith there could be only one way to go. As he and Mary talked in search of final decision he remarked: "Well, there are less than a hundred anthropology students at UCL, and there are nearly 2 million people in Jamaica: it's my country and if I can be of use there I don't have any choice, do I?" In 1975 he gave up his academic and administrative post at University College London. His colleagues there grieved his going, but found some consolation in it. His friend, Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, in the increasing economic and political difficulties of the mid 1970s, encouraged his arrival. Professor Michael Smith, now far more experienced, and surer than he had been in 1961 of his competence and a welcome home, came once again to work. Mary and their sons, two of whom were still in full-time education, would have to remain in England. By a new contractual arrangement for an initial period of two years, the Government of Jamaica would provide an annual retainer fee of J$9,000, that being the amount Mike and Mary had calculated as necessary to maintain the family in London. While in Jamaica, Mike would receive a daily subsistence allowance, and motor car upkeep and allowances in accordance with existing government regulations. His own airfares between London and Jamaica when travelling on government business would be paid, and he would also receive transport expenses for Mary on one visit to Jamaica 103

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 per year. Having resigned his post at UCL he no longer received any remuneration from his college. M.G. Smith spent the next two years in Jamaica. He rented a government owned apartment in the New Kingston area, and Mary joined him each year during annual holidays from her job as a part-time Education Welfare Officer in London.

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C H A P T E R

SIX

Patriotism and

Party Politics "I saw through the mists of morning a wave like a sea set free"

When M.G. Smith gave up the leadership of a thriving Department of Anthropology in a distinguished College of London University and the prestige attached to his leadership of it, it was to the two million people in his country that he came, at the request of his friend who now, as prime minister, had invited him. From his days at Jamaica College he had developed two strong loyalties one to Jamaica, the other to the Manley family. Norman Washington Manley's wide intellectual interests and mastery of legal practice had provided, in some respects, a role model for young Smith. Edna Manley's artistic talent and her deep appreciation of his own poetic soul had enlivened his emotional development. The boys, Douglas and Michael, the former

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nearer to him in age but except during holidays away at Munro College; the latter a couple of years his junior but more in his company at JC or Drumblair, were his friends - Michael Manley perhaps his closest. Not surprisingly, therefore, in the crucial years when Alexander Bustamante and Norman Washington Manley came into political rivalry with the founding of the People's National Party (PNP) by Manley and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) by Bustamante, it was to the former that MG gave his support. Indeed he later said that as a schoolboy he had helped when Norman Manley was composing the first manifesto of the PNP. But his poetic challenge to shape the future was addressed to Jamaica, and though he favoured the Peoples's National Party he never became a member of it. Michael Manley on the other hand had now become the leader of the People's National Party and Prime Minister of Jamaica. As such, his concern for the welfare of all Jamaicans was unavoidably tempered by his concern to maintain the political strength of the PNP and so to ensure the continuance of his party in power. During the 1970s the political tribalism which divided the nation into rival and hostile political - party - adherents of the PN P an the JLP was already well developed, and this further undermined the ability of the leader of either political party to act primarily in consideration of the welfare of the population as a whole. M.G. Smith had never enjoyed wide popular recognition of his talents. His poetry, with very small exception, was unknown; his later achievements and international reputation in the field of social anthropology were recognized and understood only by a few. The lack of general public recognition and acclaim in no way disconcerted him. He remained throughout his life satisfied in awareness of his competences and, though happy to have his successes recognized, he never sought the limelight. Michael Manley could not have avoided the limelight. A son of famous parents, an outstanding labour leader, and now leader of the PNP and prime minister, he had from childhood been in the public eye. Moreover, more extrovert than his friend, wearing all the social graces, a charismatic, articulate man who could with equal ease hold the attention of an academic gathering or rouse excitement in a Cross Roads crowd, Michael Manley had grown accustomed to public admiration. 106

Douglas Hall These two men, so different in many respects, were nonetheless bound by ties of friendship, by the respect which each had for the abilities of the other, and by a common desire to create healthier and happier social and economic conditions of life for all Jamaicans. But Michael Manley, the politician, was subject to local political pressures, to the effects of his efforts as prime minister to win international recognition and understanding of his country's aims and problems, and to the weakness of an Achilles' heel - a tendency to mistake adulation for honest approval. M.G. Smith had come home because he wanted to help his friend the prime minister and his country. Michael Manley wanted Smith's assistance in maintaining the governance of the PNP which, in 1975, they both thought desirable for the benefit of all Jamaicans. Continuance of their collaboration would very largely depend on the survival of that mutually held opinion. Smith's responsibilities as special adviser fell under three general headings: the submission of opinions and recommendations on specific matters as requested by the prime minister; comments on various papers and reports which he received from nearly all the ministries; and the monitoring of performance in activating the Government's social and economic development projects, especially in rural areas. Between 1975 and September 1977, when his two-year contract ended, his involvement in the first two gradually declined while increasing emphasis was placed on the third. During his service Smith presented proposals, opinions, or comments on nearly every important matter of government policy and business: land reform, rural development, land lease and land settlement, pioneer farms, pricing policies for agricultural products, forestry, the Agricultural Marketing Board, the Milk Marketing Board, the Banana Board; crime and national security, the formation of a national guard, disaster relief, ministerial reorganization, local government reform, civil service reform, statutory bodies, financial administration, trade unionism, industrial relations, the cooperative movement; manufacturing industry, the bauxite industry; the Social Development Commission and Jamaica Welfare; hospital ward organization, drug addiction; folk music research, and many other subjects. In short, his presence was felt in nearly every corner of the government's offices. In some of those corners resentment grew. 107

A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 There were those who, accustomed to a dawdling performance of their duties, were irritated by Professor Smith's habit of demanding that work at hand be done at once rather than regarded as something waiting to be done. There were some who questioned the qualification of a Professor of Anthropology, however distinguished, to pontificate on every subject. There were those, like his friend Douglas Manley (who was then a minister and member of Cabinet) who, in full appreciation of MG's superb intelligence, realized that his "perfectly symmetrical intellectual solutions to problems" were not always practicable in view of financial, political, or even logistical realities. And there were some, such as the far left-wing members of the Government and the PNP, who resented his involvement because he was not of their company either on the Marxist left or as a member of the party. Mike Smith's responses to the various challenges were predictable. With no concern for popularity, cafeteria expressions of grievance against the whiplash tongue of the newly-arrived taskmaster left him unmoved, as long as the work got done. When asked to provide an answer to some problem, no matter what the subject, Smith would collect the available data, turn his searchlight mind on it all, and then, with characteristic comment: "It's all very simple, really", produce an ideal solution. Should the practicability of it be questioned, that would be the concern of the practitioners. He would listen, but he would maintain the essential validity of his proposal. It would be unfortunate if it were unworkable and if some other less perfect scheme, not of his contrivance, would have to be adopted. When, for instance, Philip Sherlock retired from the vice-chancellorship of the UWI in 1969, Smith was asked if he would allow his name to be put forward for the post. Smith replied that if the Council had received and approved the document he had prepared for the Council at Philip Sherlock's request, and if he would be allowed to act on it, he would accept nomination. As it happened, he could not be assured on any point, and he therefore refused. He was never much disturbed by complaining chatter, or by reluctance to accept his advice; but even in his schooldays he had responded roughly and offensively to attacks on his personal convictions and philosophical position. Not a 'socialist' in Marxist ideological terms, but moved by his own firmly 108

Douglas Hall democratic and egalitarian principles, M.G. Smith was not opposed to some of the socioeconomic views of the PNP leftists; but he was highly critical of their excessive pursuit of Cuban aid and example. He did not, for instance, oppose the formation of a Jamaican National Guard; but he was totally opposed to any suggestion that it should be trained by Cuban officers in the use of Russian weapons; and when he became convinced that the Marxist leftists were also zealous in manipulation of his friend, Michael Manley, he was angered. During 1976, in recognition of his success in getting people to work, and in preparation for the pending national elections, the prime minister asked Smith to expedite important government projects being undertaken, especially in the rural areas. These included improved water supply, electrification, roads in hinterland farming areas, and much else. Under his direction, a small unit was set up in Jamaica House with instructions to follow and push performance in every undertaking. Smith responded with his usual enthusiasm for work. He and his team earned the displeasure of many higher ranking civil servants. They resented the driving demands of the professorial taskmaster who, without experience or formal training in the business of their ministries, came in his 'high and mighty fashion' to force the ranks to labour. The team, however, received acknowledgement of their achievement. One of the prime minister's closest advisers, O.K. Melhado, a businessman who had come to public service, remarked of the performance: I think the PNP won the election in 1976 largely because of the work encouraged by Mike Smith and his unit. That much more than the 'socialist' urgings of the PNP far left, brought the support of the electorate. It blew the budget, it forced the devaluation of the Jamaican dollar in 1977, but as a result of M.G.'s work a lot of rural infrastructure was in. There was no great public acknowledgement. M.G. would have resented it, not from any surfeit of modesty, but because he believed that his role as an intellectual was to listen and advise and, as far as possible, remain behind the scenes. Publicity, he thought, might lead people to assume, quite wrongly in his case, that he sought recognition in order to contend with the politicians for public approval and support. Because he showed no political aspirations, 109

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 and shunned publicity, there was no overt political conflict with the PNP leftists following his success. Nonetheless, the people's response to it in the 1976 elections was by no means unnoticed. The financial consequences of Smith's work have no bearing here. He had, with his usual frightening energy, carried out an assignment which would bring benefit to people in their communities. Following his return to power at the end of 1976, Michael Manley asked M.G. Smith to take on fuller monitoring activities in place of his advisory role. Smith agreed. In a reorganization of the Cabinet, however, Dr D.K. Duncan, General Secretary of the PNP and leading member of the PNP far left, was appointed Minister of National Mobilization. He soon announced that his ministry would henceforth monitor all government projects, including an Emergency Production Plan put forward by the left-wing of the PNP. The prime minister, notwithstanding his previous request to Smith, apparently concurred. Thus, much government activity in the field would be removed from Smith's sharp scrutiny, and his influence on the shaping of government's policies and the performance of those entrusted to carry them out, would be diminished.

THE DREAM BEGINS TO FADE It now seemed, to many of those in the public and private sectors who had until then supported him, that Michael Manley had submitted to the leftists. In the government offices, Smith's 'interferences', though disliked by many, had never been regarded as politically threatening or dangerous. His withdrawal, and the subsequent monitoring by the Ministry of National Mobilization was, by many civil servants, regarded with alarm. The general public, increasingly suspicious of the political designs of the leftists, began to examine their loyalty to a prime minister who seemingly would not or could not control them. Even in the party membership those on the far right, in complete misunderstanding, dubbed Michael Manley 'communist'. Moderates, with fingers crossed, tried to hold their faith. By pushing the Cuban connection, the PNP leftists demeaned Manley's 110

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genuine respect for Fidel Castro; they encouraged him in public pronouncements which, on deeper private reflection, he probably regretted, and they seized every opportunity to impair his relationship with M.G. Smith. In the prime minister's councils Smith was a talented, close, and influential friend, without the cloak of party membership, and most certainly not be relied upon to support the party in all or any circumstances. Smith, as O.K. Melhado and others remarked: " . . . no matter who he was dealing with, told you exactly what he thought". His bluntness may have at times bruised the prime minister's ego; but certainly his total inability to pay homage to the cloth of authority, his lack of ready deference to others in ministerial or other high position, and his frank appraisal of their aims and proposals, often earned their strong disapproval. Michael Manley's behaviour in these trying circumstances was conditioned by his friendship with Smith; his reluctance to rid himself and the PNP of those he considered to be hardworking idealistic colleagues; and by political dilemma. In order to keep the PNP in power he had to try to maintain solidarity of purpose within his Cabinet and in the higher echelons of the party membership; and at the same time to hold that wide popularity which he alone in the PNP enjoyed. To achieve both aims was, in the existing circumstances, impossible. Therefore when he lost the confidence of the right wing and the moderates in the PNP and beyond, he became open to persuasion that the masses looked to 'socialism' for salvation, and that his popularity with the wider electorate would be cemented by broadside attacks on local and foreign 'capitalists'. This, sadly, marked the fading of opportunity to build the new democratic socialist Jamaica which both Smith and Manley had set out to create, and which the former had so clearly described in 1970 as a country " . . . prosperous, united, democratic (i.e. enjoying its present legal and political freedoms), egalitarian, developing and peaceful, a land of equal opportunity for all of equal skill and capacities, and a land in which all have opportunities to achieve such capacities and skills..." The policies of the newly created Ministry of National Mobilization seemed little moved by such objectives, and from early 1977 Mike Smith watched with increasing unhappiness. There had, however, been occasions of

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 relaxation and enjoyment. During the 1970s he several times saw members of his family in Jamaica. In those years all the family had renewed contact with the island. Mary had visited to be with Mike when opportunity allowed. On leaving school in 1972 David their second son, had spent some time at Knox College on a 'Do it Yourself programme. MG always regretted that his schooling at JC had been entirely academic, and he tried to ensure that his three sons should be prepared for the world of work. When, in the fifties the family had moved from campus to Retirement Crescent they met Mr Richards, a skilled carpenter, who would become a lifelong friend. While Mr Richards "kept an eye on the white ants and replaced the rotten wood" the boys were encouraged to look on. Back in residence at Mona in 1960, in another wooden house Mr Richards followed and Mike Smith asked him to teach the boys carpentry: . . . he did this by showing them how to make a play house. It was made properly from boards, and had a shingle roof, proper windows and a door. He was wonderful with children and they loved him and the house they made with him. As a result of all this, Mr Richards became a family friend. He loved 'Brother Mike', and has been in touch with us all ever since. Whenever in Jamaica, MG never failed to visit Mr Richards in his house in western Kingston; and David Smith, who later became a consultant engineer at Houston, Texas, still says that engineers and architects should have a craft training of some sort to give them "a practical feel for material". In mid 1972 Peter, the youngest son, had also briefly visited and in mid 1977 when he was at art school in London, he came back to help Edna Manley who was then making a huge clay copy of her 'Negro Aroused' to be cast for the United Nations building in New York. She watched him at work. Peter . . . is such an intelligent and sensitive young man, and he works like a tiger. He's like his father - and he can't stand frustration - so when the clay runs out or is too wet to use and we have to hold up, it looks like the end of the world to him, and then things straighten out again and he's happy and tearing along . . . 112

Douglas Hall Peter accomplished the roughing out yesterday. It was a gamble sending for him - a bit of pure intuition because I didn't know him very well - and he has, after all, only done a year at art school. But he is an interesting person; I imagine very moody underneath, but he has a quick brain and an excellent combination of hand and eye. We had great amusement when I discovered he could throw dead straight, and with the violence of a person shying a ball wham!! Exactly where the bit of clay should go. Sadly, however, the clay copy never reached New York. While on the wharf in Kingston awaiting shipment it was destroyed by fire. Peter went back to school in Britain and is now a recognized sculptor living in Bristol. In March, Daniel, the eldest, visited with his friend Sarah Bracken, whom he would later marry. They spent some time at Nomdmi and returned to England sooner than they had hoped. In 1977, Daniel came back as marketing manager for the Agricultural Marketing Corporation (AMC). Towards the end of the year Sarah joined him and they were married on 24 June 1978. In 1979 Daniel left the AMC and they returned to England where he is now a marketing consultant. MG enjoyed the visits by his sons, the more so since they were now far beyond the age of disturbance of his work; but behind the company of his family the uncertainty of his future remained. The ascendancy of the PNP leftists became increasingly apparent in early 1977 and the Ministry of National Mobilization under D.K. Duncan attempted to impose ideological control. This lay at the centre of Mike's disagreement with the 'Marxists'. Smith clearly distinguished between the functions of a political party and a government. Party officials, he said, should be concerned to win everwidening support for the party and its proclaimed social and economic objectives. Government officials, politicians and civil servants, should be concerned to improve the lot of all persons, without reference to their political or other affiliations. Not himself a Marxist, Smith quarrelled less with what the PNP sought to achieve than with the manner in which the Marxist leftists sought to achieve it. In very simplistic terms it might be put this way: the Minister of National Mobilization and his adherents seemed to say: "Be an ideological Marxist socialist like us, or claim to be, and be counted

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 in, or else stay in the cold"; whereas Mike Smith would have said: "I count on all Jamaicans to work with the Government in the creation of a democratic socialist society." Late in 1976 he had received a letter of enquiry from the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. They wanted to recruit a senior political anthropologist. Mike replied indicating interest, but explaining that he was presently on contract as an advisor to the Government of Jamaica. He pointed out, however, that a general election was pending, and his position would be very largely dependent on its outcome. The PNP won the election and Smith continued in his post. As their sons had now left school for university and Mary's presence in London was no longer necessary, she resigned her part-time job with the Inner London Education Authority and early in 1977 began to prepare to join Mike in Jamaica. By March, however, Mike was waiting on political decisions. At the end of the month he wrote to Mary: I shall simply hold strain until Cabinet decides the matter [the implementation of the Emergency Production Plan] at which point, if I have nothing worthwhile to do here, I shall return to London and go my ways with you . . . My Jamaican contract expires October 1st and needs no renewal if there's no work for me here. . . . and there will be no nagging moral doubt at our end that we have done the right thing. Surely none, even our closest friends, can question the necessity of leaving if there is nothing significant that I can do here. I must ask you to defer your flight out until this situation is resolved; for, who knows, maybe I shall return to you, this time for good, rather than you coming here . . . I am naturally very, very disappointed at the turn of events since I was looking forward dearly to having you out here on a continuing basis; but you will see why we have to wait until we learn what Cabinet decides. Personally I expect that they will seek a compromise and try to fragment the monitoring function; but I neither wish to anticipate their solution nor to approach Michael again on this issue. I shall simply 114

Douglas Hall await their decision and then make my own, and let you and Michael know. Forgive this impersonal letter; but I wish you to understood clearly the structure of the problem that faces us here, so that you can carry on with your preparations methodically . . . knowing that whatever the outcome, we shall soon be together permanently, whether in London or here. The Cabinet after a long discussion approved a modified version of the Emergency Production Plan. The 'moderates' had tightened ranks in opposition to Minister Duncan whose aspirations and policies had in their view become increasingly unacceptable. Nonetheless, the outcome had not restored that measure of responsibility which would keep Mike Smith here. Even among the 'moderates' it was thought that as a non-member of the party he exerted too much influence. Although he always maintained a correct formality in his dealings with the prime minister he was Michael Manley's personal friend and trusted advisor outside of the Cabinet.

A THIRD UNHAPPY DEPARTURE Mary now came so that she could help M.G. wind up his various reports and discuss with him what they should do. On 25 March, he wrote personally to Michael Manley: I think I should let you know at once that various developments affecting me personally have led me to change my plans for the future. Firstly, the cost of maintaining two sons at University have gone up; the Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria, has asked Mary and me to spend six months there in the coming session, mainly in research and teaching; thirdly, Yale has evidently decided to offer me a post to be taken up in September 1978; and finally, my present contract expires on September 30th, 1977. Taking all these factors into account, I see no way in which I can renew the contract in its present form, and am therefore preparing to leave for Britain and Nigeria in September this year. Naturally, if you 115

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1971—1993 so wished, I would willingly continue to be available and to visit for brief spells, without any Government of Jamaica payments or retainer to me or any institution overseas . . . It has been a great joy and privilege to have worked with and for you and the country during the past years, and I am always ready to help in any way that you wish and I can. For two years Michael Smith had abandoned his academic career as an anthropologist. Now the basic question was whether he should go back to it and if so how? In July he put down his thoughts. If I am to do so, for very real financial and other reasons, then the best way of re-entering the field in good order is for me to go to Nigeria in October or November to undertake the planned fieldwork and writing there, and during and after this period, to try to bring myself up to date on my own work and on developments in the field that I shall be teaching at Yale. This includes completion of one book and a start on the revision of another for early publication, together with completion of the reports on my Nigerian fieldwork for Ahmadu Bello U. to publish. In addition, I shall have to prepare new courses to fit in with the programme at Yale. By the end of such a schedule, I should once again be on top of the subject and able to enter Yale with the confidence that I can meet their expectations, which include establishing their leadership across the States in certain branches of Anthropology. From my point of view this seems the appropriate thing for me to do at this time. It enables me, in the years that remain, to complete my intellectual contribution to this field with reasonable financial security and independence. It also enables me to help in Jamaica from an independent base at regular intervals and as wanted. He would leave Jamaica before the end of September 1977, and after six months in Nigeria, and a return to Jamaica for a few weeks in May-June 1978, he would have July and August to prepare for Yale at the beginning of September in that year. In mid October he wrote a long personal letter to Michael Manley. In it, he made quite clear his opinion of the basic problems facing the prime minister and the PNP. 116

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Objectively the economy has worsened steadily and at an accelerating rate over the past two years. The resulting unemployment, higher cost of living, diminishing revenues and credit, press on the public in various ways, and particularly on the poor. To arrest this deterioration and to pull the economy out of the trough, Government has stressed the need for increased production and for restraints on consumption, prices and incomes. To secure appropriate public support for this appeal, Government relies chiefly on the Party organization and on the Ministry of Mobilization. It has also tried to improve the performances of the public service and statutory bodies, but with little effect so far. Thus, for the improved production so urgently needed, Government has to rely on the people, motivated and led by the Party and the Ministry of Mobilization. Objectively, both the Party and the Ministry of Mobilization have fallen down on this assignment. In consequence, public effort to increase production and self-reliance is well below our initial expectations and current needs. The basic problems as I see them are: (1) Both party and the Ministry of Mobilization seem to address their appeals and programmes primarily, if not exclusively, to Party supporters, thus failing to involve a large proportion of the population. Certain programmes in other Ministries follow the same pattern with similar effects. (2) Divisions within the Party frustrate in advance the minimal desired effect, namely the adequate mobilization of the Party supporters behind Government's economic measures and production drive. Related, but at a different level, there is yet another problem: (3) The Party General Secretary and the Minister of Mobilization are one and the same; and rightly or wrongly, he is identified within and outside the Party with one of the competing factions. Accordingly, even within the Party public appeals and programmes emanating from both these sources are sometimes regarded as factional rather than as representative of agreed Party policy. At another level, I won117

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der seriously whether anyone can perform adequately in the present context as Party General Secretary and Minister of Mobilization at the same time, whoever that individual may be. I also wonder whether the ministry should not seek to mobilize the entire adult population behind government programmes, while the Party seeks to intensify the motivation of Party supporters. The existence of competing factions within the party, Smith continued, brought undesirable consequences. One such, already much evident, . . . is the progressive politicization of government programmes implemented through ministries whose political heads are ideologically committed and opposed. A second effect which is illustrated also by the preceding, is the often incompetent administration of such programmes where administration is placed a poor second to political promotion. Towards the end of his long and admonishing but friendly letter, M.G. Smith set out his own position. He began with reference to an earlier experience. In May 1975, in recognition of her talent and her love of art, the Government of China had invited Edna Manley to visit. Douglas Manley would travel with her and, wanting company while his mother as the official guest would be closely involved in tours and receptions, he had asked Mike Smith to join them. In China, Smith had spent much time talking, through interpreters, with officials and others and had been much impressed. He now put things in perspective. Edna and Doug will bear me out that I greatly admired China and its communes; but in the Jamaican context, I guess I rank as a moderate. There are at least two reasons for this: (1) I am convinced of the national administrative incapacity at this stage to coordinate the total economy and direct it from one centre. In short, the mixed economy may be the best we can achieve, given our management resources, even without considering national commitments to the two-party system and multiple unions. Accordingly, I probably err on the side of caution with regard to the transfer of resources and functions to the public sector, for administrative reasons.

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Douglas Hall (2) Wherever Utopia may be, the Nirvana for so many, to get there, this country, in the absence of a major revolution such as Cuba or China or Russia had, will have to move through intermediate phases, if indeed it can achieve these. To do this, the progressive political party has to carry the country with it, and the mass of our people are pragmatic individualists, not ideologists, nor puritans. Even the selfidentified puritans are often opportunistic individuals. At least, he remarked, even if the leaders of the PNP could not agree on ultimate objectives, it was absolutely essential that they should hold unqualified agreement on the intermediate phase and its components; and he believed that the prime minister, in a recent speech and in ministry papers had sought, with some success, to find that measure of consensus. In her diary entries in mid September 1977, Edna Manley had summarized the tale of the preceding months. Mike has been pretty mauled by D.K. and Co. He came with such high hopes and they blocked him at every turn - he's a bit of a tiger, and he fought back, and slowly had his effect. He is such a loyal person . . . But also If only Mike Smith had been less abrasive, less dogmatic, he could have had such influence - not on the left wing, they are too young to understand, but on the moderates. Anyway that is past history now. 16 September 1977 Had a supper for Mike and Mary who are leaving . . . it went wonderfully I think. I presented Mike with a large box of cigar cuttings from those darlings at Gore's factory. There's no pipe tobacco at the moment, and he has been suffering — to my surprise he was very touched. The night-blossoming Cereus bloomed, and all the women went home with a flower. Perhaps it healed some wounds, because the left wing had pretty well slaughtered Mike and made his very great contribution well nigh impossible . . . Oh they were rude to him alright, and simply cut him off at the root whenever they could. 119

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D SMITH 1921—1993 17 September 1977 Michael wrote Mike a wonderful letter of evaluation of the work he had achieved - naming each item - and he also had a long talk with Mary, thanking her and saying how much he would miss them . . . So M and M will leave with great sadness - but I am confident now that they will come back - and both of them will work and serve. Perhaps MG's letter served to strengthen an already growing recognition by the prime minister that the far left members of his Cabinet, and beyond, were by words and deeds blemishing those ideals of a just society which he and MG had hoped to foster. At a PNP conference in October, with the support of the prime minister, the 'moderates' prevailed. On the day of the Smiths' departure from Palisadoes Airport the Daily Gleaner reported the resignation of D.K. Duncan from the government; but he remained as General Secretary of the Party. He was followed by others in the ministry he had been appointed to create. But the damage to the public image of the PNP was by then irreparable. Before leaving, Mike Smith listed for the prime minister the various liaison assignments he had carried so that arrangements might be made to replace him. He had sat as an observer on the following eight standing committees of which the chairmen's names are given in parentheses: — The Council of Ministers (Prime Minister Michael Manley) — The Defence Board (David Coore) — The Economic Council (Howard Cooke) — The Public Utilities and Services Council (Tony Spaulding) — The Parliamentary Committee on National Security (Keble Munn) — The Land Reform Unit (Hugh Small) — The Working Committee on Bauxite Lands (Dr L. McLaren) He had also been involved with the Tax Reform Committee, the Home Guard and the Jamaica Defence Force, the Ministries of Agriculture and Housing, the Urban Farming Programme, and the National Registration Programme. He had been cataloguing Cabinet decisions in order to monitor 120

Douglas Hall their implementation, and he had been asked to evaluate the Emergency Production Plan. He had also been working with Rex Nettleford and Sam Clayton of the Mystic Revelation of Ras Tafari, and with other Ras Tafari groups. And there had been more. The list demonstrates the enormous trust and dependence of the prime minister on his friend. It also indicates the not entirely unreasonable grounds on which some individuals based their objections to Mike's too deep involvement. Opposition notwithstanding, he had in fact achieved a great deal. The 1970s were troubled years; but in them, despite the economic and other obstacles, much positive work had been done and there are many Jamaicans who in those dark years first began to see the light. Whatever the qualifications, the achievements reflected an underlying desire of both Michael Manley and M.G. Smith to build a happier democratic, egalitarian society in Jamaica. Until 1980 MG would several times return - called home to help, for he remained until then, when the PNP lost the general elections, an unpaid (expenses only) part-time advisor to Michael Manley. But even with the moderation with which he had written to the prime minister setting out his views, his continuing loyalty, and his constant willingness to serve, it is beyond doubt that when he left Jamaica in September 1977, M.G. Smith was once again a disappointed man.

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CHAPTER

SEVEN

The Man in Academe NIGERIAN INTERIM Added to the financial and other sacrifices he had made in order to come to Jamaica in 1975, Mike Smith faced the fact that in two years he had published nothing. As he said, he would now have to work his way back to the forefront of his academic field; but he had underestimated the scholastic reputation still accorded him. He had been approached by Ahmadu Bello and by Yale. He and Mary arrived in Nigeria in October 1977 and worked there for seven months with their base at Zaria. In the brief period in London between Jamaica and Nigeria, Mike had prepared the index for his book The Affairs of Daura, the first of his four Nigerian histories. It would later appear in 1978. In November, Mary wrote to Edna Manley about the new job: "We are most kindly treated by our department, and have a palatial office with two desks." Mike's was huge, seven feet by three, with cushioned armchair to match. Mary's was smaller. "The graduate students are well brought up Northerners and they come and bow to him and greet him in the morning; they also greet 122

Douglas Hall me but don't have to bow. Then they settle down and feel quite free to argue, but not rudely." They had also been allotted a brand new car and a driver. The food left much to be desired, but "Mike had bullied the cook into getting powdered chilli peppers for him ..."; all was well and they were soon to go into the field. In December Michael Manley summoned him. A 'state priority' telegram eventually reached them at Hadejia, in the far north-eastern corner of Kano State where (at the request of the Cabinet Secretary in Lagos) we were investigating the working of the new scheme of Local Government set up by the military about a year before. The telegram said: 'Urgent - you are needed here - telephone PM immediately', or words to that effect. Mike left me to continue the work with our three Nigerian graduate students, took the University car and driver and went to Kano, 50 miles away over a dry-season road: no phones working there. Then 100 miles south of Zaria to the University, where not even the Cabinet Secretary's brother could get through to Lagos, let alone Kingston. Since it appeared that there was some serious crisis in Jamaica, Mike sent Alhaji, the driver back to me at Hadejia and took a plane to London, where he contacted the PM through the High Commission and was asked to come to Kingston at once. The weekly plane from London to Kano arrived Saturdays, so Alhaji and I drove to Kano airport for two Saturdays running, since there was no way Mike could communicate with me to say when he would be back. On the second Saturday he arrived, and we resumed work at Hadejia. He was able to tell Mary that he had been summoned to work with Keble Munn, then Minister of National Security, on problems involving the Jamaica Defence Force and the police. Early in the previous October, Fidel Castro had visited Jamaica at the invitation of the prime minister. Edna Manley summarized her reactions to the event: So Castro came, conquered and departed. Quite a unique week [and] it has changed the picture in a hundred ways and left the opposition - and 123

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 by that I mean the forces of evil, at one level of intensity, and of conservatism on the other - with one weapon less with which to fight. The great bogey man, the monster, the devil, the evil man - and he comes with remarkable wisdom, with warmth, with charm, with commonsense. I have watched it fascinated. The two things that stand out in my mind - his meeting with the churchmen, and his understanding of the absolute havoc the young left group of anarchists can create. Nonetheless, the visits also had the effect of confirming the opposition of people in Jamaica, and abroad, who had been disturbed by the efforts of the Marxist oriented leftists in the PNP to intensify the Cuban connection. There had been much suspicion, and some supporting evidence, that there were plans to rid the country of the PNP regime. A pilot flying Michael Manley in a small aircraft had blacked out, and disaster averted only by the cool-headedness of the co-pilot. Dr D.K. Duncan, general secretary of the party, had been hospitalized and found to be suffering from slow poisoning with arsenic. The loyalty of some members of the army and the police to the Government was not beyond question. In all those circumstances Michael Manley had sent for the man in whose personal loyalty he had absolute confidence. And he would later do the same again when, in the second half of 1980, the general elections approached and matters of security once more raised concern. Early in January 1978, shortly after Mike's return to Nigeria, Mary wrote again to Edna Manley: Dearest Edna, We got 5 letters from you today! Can you imagine! 3 for Mike and 2 for me - one of mine was dated October 16th; but do not despair, it was written while Mike was with you, so must have been December 16!! (Mike says 'Edna never dates her letters' I say 'of course she does' Mike says 'Ha, ha you see?'). The correspondence between the Smiths and Edna Manley was frequent in the writing but erratic in delivery. Mary wrote from Minna, Niger State, in late March 1978, in reply to complaints from Edna Manley that she had no 124

Douglas Hall news of them. Mary replied, sorry that she had not written for some time, but "Mike has been writing regularly, so I hope that some time or other the postman will come struggling up to 'Regardless' with a sackful". In Zaria, the Smiths renewed contact with an old friend - Friedrich W. Schwerdtfeger. Born in Germany, he had been involved in the war on the Eastern front at age 12. Wounded by a Russian shell, his life had been saved by a Russian army doctor - a woman. After the war he studied engineering in East Berlin before escaping over the rooftops into West Berlin where he completed his studies in engineering and architecture. Then, work in Iran, India, East Africa, and a study of indigenous domestic architecture north and south of the Sahara, including Zaria. In 1977 he was Professor of Architecture at Ahmadu Bello University. He had first met Mike in 1969 when they both arrived at UCL - he then working towards a PhD in Anthropology and Mike as the new head of the department. Mike had helped: We all have had the experience of meeting people who in hindsight have played a pivotal role in our life. For me, one such person was Mike Smith. He taught me patiently the rudimentary knowledge of Social Anthropology, as well as how to avoid misleading simplification, false generalization and unsupported assumption, and made me think twice about accuracy before committing myself to paper. Professor Schwerdtfeger was delighted by the temporary reunion in 1977 — This gave us a rare opportunity to exchange views and ideas as well as to discuss the whereabouts and well-being of common friends and acquaintances. Mike had always had a very hearty appetite for news and information, and asked a lot of questions. He would listen patiently to my answers only interrupting me if he wanted more detailed information or if I had not answered his question to his full satisfaction. His sense of humour was delightful, and I vividly remember his broad smile when he recalled a funny event he and Mary had experienced during their earlier stay in northern Nigeria. It was obvious that both truly liked, respected and cared for the people they were studying, and were deeply devoted to their well-being. Mike and Mary worked at the Institute of Administration at ABU,

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 but went on long field trips only to return infrequently to their home base in Zaria. It was on such an occasion that we invited both to come to our house for a continental breakfast on a Sunday morning. It must have been quite a change for both of them, living for weeks off the land on a somewhat simple African diet. These were happy hours when we talked about our work and Mary chatted with Uwargida on women's affairs in the kitchen and while being shown around the garden. After Mike's retirement from Yale, Friedrich Schwerdtfeger would visit whenever he was on leave in London. After lunch we would stroll to one of the nearby parks overlooking London or one of the busy street markets where Caribbean, African and European traders offered their sometimes exotic goods. Mike liked the busy and noisy atmosphere of these street markets. Perhaps it reminded him of similar scenes in Jamaica. The seven-month appointment at Ahmadu Bello came to an end in May 1978. Mary noted: "MG went almost immediately to Jamaica and worked there until mid-July, calling at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, on the way back where he arranged with the Master of Trumbull College, a fellow-Jamaican, Michael Cooke, for us to lodge in the College, thus solving our Yale housing problem."

THE RETURN TO ACADEME Professor Wendel Bell (from UCLA) was now at Yale, and Mike and Mary also often met with two West Indians - Vaughn Lewis, a St Lucian, previously Secretary-General of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and now in political life in St Lucia, and Louis Lindsay, a Jamaican, now on the staff of the Department of Government, UWI (Mona). Mike had sometimes worked with Louis in Jamaica since 1977 when Louis Lindsay had been appointed Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government. Mike was busy preparing further publications on Nigeria and the Caribbean. His long advocacy of the theory of cultural pluralism now led him into a massive undertaking. He began an exhaustive world survey of all states 126

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from 1930 to 1950, and formed a computer database on their experience of internal collective violence, their economies, politics, government, societies, ethnic, linguistic and religious divisions. He proposed to present an analysis of the root causes of internal collective conflict throughout the world. Lack of funding for technical assistance needed to carry out the necessary sophisticated statistical analyses prevented completion of the work; though in his retirement he returned to it with the help of his sons David, a research engineer and computer specialist, and Daniel with expertise in sociological statistics for his market research work. Teaching duties at Yale were with postgraduate students. One of them was Andrew Apter, son of Professor David Apter who had been involved in the airport rush in Los Angeles many years before. Professor Andrew Apter, anthropologist in the University of Chicago was MG's last PhD student (Yale,'87), and had a very special relationship with him, aspects of which come through in the letters which he wrote me while I was in the field, in addition to personal memories when I visited him at home in New Haven and after retirement in London . . . let me reflect on those experiences, stories and memories which best capture the marvelous and enigmatic facets of his complex personality, his loyalties, his paranoias, and underneath it all his heart of gold. It had been the same with students elsewhere even if, as with John La Guerre of Trinidad, he was not directly involved in their academic supervision. Dr La Guerre, now Reader in the Department of Government at UWI (St Augustine), gave a West Indian student's view of the man. I remember that he was very concerned about me as a graduate student in London and went out of his way to invite me to seminars at University College where he and Professor Shils were doing something on 'Stratification'. MG was always concerned with oppression, but was a little disappointed when it appeared to him that the Caribbean intelligentsia seemed more concerned, not with oppression as such, but with the colour of that oppression. MG was never too busy for a colleague who needed advice, whether on academic or personal matters. I must 127

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 confess though that graduate students - white and black - did not trifle with him. He expected complete dedication to very high standards, a tendency which, alas, is on the decline almost everywhere. (I remember a lunch that we had at Ramesar's2 for him. Perhaps it was the spice or the salt and he had a mild angina attack. He asked for something, took it, and in a matter of seconds resumed as if nothing had gone wrong. Perhaps it was his military training.) Though Mike Smith was not unhappy at Yale, he was not at home. Mary observed that he ... was never socially at ease in England or America, particularly the former. Work always came before socializing. At Yale or London he would reply to invitations to lunch: "I don't eat lunch" -which must have surprised your normal academic; but it was true. We drank pints of early morning tea while at Yale, went swimming three mornings a week, and had breakfast when we got back. Then he went to the department or worked in his study at home until suppertime, after which he worked far into the night. He always firmly identified himself as 'a coloured West Indian' and, with notable individual exceptions, he profoundly distrusted the English middle classes and their American East Coast cousins . . . But when not in the West Indies or Africa, he tended to be happier in America than in England, especially in the 1960s in California. At UCLA the commitment to equality, whether between Jews and Gentiles, men and women, or black and white, felt genuine. Outside the university the situation was quite clear-cut: Blacks were second-class citizens; but in the 1960s efforts were being made to put things right, and one could respect that. But for Mike 'home' was Jamaica where he belonged, 'swimming in his own pond', as we used to say in the family. He became a different person, socially secure, relaxed, exuberant and humorous. Whether he was jammed into a Kingston bus listening to the chat, or prowling round a market talking to everyone, or handing out drinks on Edna's verandah, or even at gatherings he would never have attended in England or America - openings of art shows, plays, official functions even - he was relaxed and sure of himself. 128

Douglas Hall But in Jamaica, too, work came first and the geniality was not always evident. He had no time for idlers, procrastinators, those who subordinated truth to the advancement of personal ambition and, perhaps above all, for those who simply left their intellect unemployed. Less forgivably, he was often scathing in reply to those whose theories challenged his; but as Brian Moore, a student at the UWI (Mona) during Mike Smith's London tenure, and now Senior Lecturer in History there, put it in the Jamaica Historical Review in 1986, of whom else could it be said that "no study of Jamaican and Caribbean society, whether historical, sociological, or anthropological, can be undertaken without reference to the ideas and theories of M.G. Smith"? The harshness was not always intended. Louis Lindsay saw it this way: "MG was the superb intellectual in the sense that if you think you're making sense and he thinks you're not; he assumes that you want to make sense, and so he tries to help you. That, of course, very often met with a great deal of resistance." Sometimes it did not. When Louis Lindsay had arrived at Yale in 1980 to complete work for his PhD, he was very short of funds. Mike Smith, hearing of his plight, quickly set about to find some funding for him; and he did it in a very 'matter-of-fact' manner. It was something that he thought obviously needed to be done, and great expressions of gratitude were not expected - indeed might even have been considered offensive. About a year later, Louis Lindsay, needing larger and longer-term financial security, replied to the advertisement of a post at the University of Utah. Planning to spread its ministries into Third World countries, the Mormon Church had decided to recruit Blacks. Louis Lindsay was flown to Utah, feted, and offered appointment on very tempting terms. He returned to Yale excited by the offer. He, Vaughn Lewis, Mary and Mike used to meet, usually on a weekend evening, at the Smith's apartment, where they would chat and enjoy Mary's cooking - her home baked bread was a 'must'. Louis Lindsay told them of the very lucrative Utah offer and his intention to take it. MG asked a couple of questions, testing Louis' enthusiasm. Then he said: "Well you've obviously made up your mind, so there's no point discussing it further." And the topic was dropped. Next morning, Louis answered a knock on his door. It was Mike Smith 129

A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 who said "Good Morning", handed him a brown paper bag, and without further word departed. Louis opened the bag. It was a Mormon Bible. He read it. He did not go to Utah; nor was he offended. On those weekend gatherings the talk ranged widely and allowed a greater understanding of MG's opinions and behaviour. Sometimes it was about political theory and, not surprisingly, the works of Karl Marx and Max Weber, the former the guru of West Indian leftists, the latter beyond a doubt MG's mentor. Louis Lindsay explained: Whenever the discussion reached a point where we were at a cross-roads he would say, 'let me resolve this', and pull Weber from the bookshelf, turn to the exact page he wanted, and quote from it. What fascinated him about Weber was his belief that Weber understood the mainsprings that drive human behaviour, and in his view that has to be related to culture and attitudes and values . . . For example, he said that Weber's Protestantism thesis was a much more potent explanation of the development of capitalism than anything Marx ever wrote. He wasn't hostile to Marx, it was just that he thought Marx was inadequate because he focused so much attention on the material dimension and failed to recognize that that is a consequence of human behaviour rather than a mainspring of it. Mike's understanding of rural Nigerian and Caribbean communities seemed to reinforce his theoretical opinions. In Jamaica he had little faith in the unstable urban proletariat as agents of desirable change. He saw the patient, sturdy, self-reliance of the peasant as the source from which social revolution should be inspired, and he deplored action by the State which tended to sap that self-reliance rather than enhance it. In the United States he was unable to find a position in the current Black/White debate. He did not like what he saw as the uncertainty of Black Americans who, he thought, should make up their minds whether they wanted to be Americans, Africans, or anything else; and he thought that their uncertainty was derived from frustration of their attempts to achieve prominence in the American consumerist materialistic culture, the values of which they seemed to support. 130

Douglas Hall MG was himself a Creole or 'Jamaican White' which meant that like most others of that pigment he was in fact, as he always insisted, 'a coloured West Indian'. In one of his classes at Yale a black graduate student referred to him as 'a white man'. Smith flew into a rage before the class: "You have no right to call me a white person - he knows nothing at all about me, he knows nothing at all about race." Later, Louis Lindsay took him to task: I said to him 'but MG, you are a white man. I've always seen you as that.' And then we went into the usual discussion of race defined in terms of culture. When I suggested that Jamaican Blacks also had ambivalent attitudes and were in that respect not unlike the Americans, MG took profound exception. His model of the Jamaican was the peasant free-holder who, he declared, had no such ambivalent attitudes, and was an entirely different being from the urban-based drifting kind of American. And he could not, he emphasized, be put in the same sociocultural category as light-coloured Americans because they had completely different attitudes and values from his own. And indeed, Mike Smith throughout his life showed little interest in material possessions. He never bargained for a salary or a fee. He would either work out what he needed to maintain himself and family in comfortable but very ordinary style, or he would say 'Give me the going rate, whatever it is.' Perhaps in Jamaica his arrival in his small second-hand car, and his appearance - ruffled hair, tieless shirt, khaki pants, and sockless sandals seemed inappropriate in the eyes of more impressively equipped civil servants, politicians, and others. They might have judged him as somewhat 'infra dig', the more so, perhaps, if or when they discovered that he could quite happily lunch off some bread and a tin of sardines, preferably chopped fine with a good scotch-bonnet pepper. He wore his only suit only on very special occasions - such as the award of honours by Government or by University and then he was uncomfortable in the limelight in unusual attire. Most of Mike Smith's several visits to Jamaica while he was in Nigeria or at Yale were brief, and he usually stayed at 'Regardless', the Manley's home since the sale of Drumblair sometime before Norman Manley's death. His and Mary's association with Edna Manley remained strong. In her last years 131

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D SMITH 1921—1993 she suffered intermittent periods of illness and depression. One of the Smiths' concerns, at Yale, was to ensure that she received on time the medications she needed but could not get in Jamaica, then a land of scarcities. Early in 1984 she wrote asking Mike Smith his ideas on death. He replied: You asked what I believe about death and the aftermath. At death metabolism ceases, the organism ceases to function - becomes cold and inert and begins to decompose. Few, if any, dispute that, but there are many diverse opinions and beliefs about the fate of the soul. As you know, I believe it persists as an awareness of its surroundings and loved ones for an individually variable period before withdrawing finally into its own world of impersonal, universal awareness of all living things, all natural phenomena and processes. I do not believe in immortality, nor that individual souls retain their individuality or even the memory or idea of it for very long. But I do believe that for some indefinite period after its separation from the brain and the body, what we think of as the spirit or the soul retains its individual attachment and sensitivity until with time and experience here and elsewhere those ties lose their intensity and the spirit its individual centre so that it can dissolve into the universal being or process of life. Love always MikeM GS In August, Edna Manley started work on 'The Goat', a commissioned piece. She worked on it with vacillating energy and enthusiasm. In November it was ready for casting. MG wrote from Yale on the 26th: I hope all went well with the casting today and that no one cast the little goat in the curry . . . Better first to bronize the goat and then to 'tenderize' it with paw-paw before you pepperize some with chillies for me. But I do hope [they] don't cook the poor goat's goose. That would be so awful. I can only laugh at the thought of making a goose of the goat. . . Then about his current work: He was writing essays on race relations for three publications before turning to a final revision of his Essay on Pluralism in the Creole Caribbean. 132

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Just as well [he continued], something is happening in the area of research, writing and publication - as all else seems so barren here. But I have enjoyed studying about women in society - or societies - from the earliest times to the present and all over the world. Not only have I learnt a great deal of almost basic elementary facts, but this reading has given me new questions to ask, new data and new ideas. Edna Manley was always interested in news of Mike's current research and writing - but his publications were not her favourite literature. Sometimes when a new work appeared she would, after cursory examination, put it aside observing that Mike had written "another unreadable book".

THE MAN DIVIDED - A MELLOWING At the age of 86, Edna Manley died in the early morning of 10 February 1987. MG came to her funeral. As he had been captured by Norman Washington Manley's intellectual powers, wide reading, and capacity for work, so too had he been charmed by Edna Manley's artistic gifts and her great freedom of spirit. At Yale he confided in Louis Lindsay that"... he used to be a reasonably good poet, and that he stopped writing poetry because the effect on his psyche was so profound that sometimes after he had completed a piece he was incapable of doing anything else for a long time". He had been better than 'reasonably good'. In a review of his poetry in Public Opinion in July 1957, Derek Walcott,23 the St Lucian poet and playwright, though not uncritical, had referred to Smith as "one of the two important writers of recent Jamaican poetry" who was "neither read sufficiently nor reviewed thoroughly in our magazines." It had been the incalculable influences of Norman Washington and Edna Manley which drove the man divided between the calls of commitment to the rigours of a diamond hard intellectualism, and to the perhaps equal but very different ordeals of devotion to creative composition. Mike Smith had first left Jamaica in 1941 struggling with a determination that "never again" would he allow emotion to overcome him. But "sheerly upon the verge" he walked until Mary Felice Morrison steadied him. With 133

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 her he found anthropology, with her and anthropology he came to understand Nigerians and appreciate the deep strength of their cultures, and with her help he made his first impact on the world of scholarship. In Jamaica, anthropology was then an unfamiliar discipline, and the Jamaican intelligentsia, in largely unconcerned ignorance born of their predominantly Eurocentric interests, tended to write off 'Africans' as 'backward'. Not surprisingly, therefore, Dr M.G. Smith had returned with some anxiety. How would those who had known the Jamaican poet respond to the African anthropologist? And how would the Jamaican anthropologist deal with the highly charged emotions that would surely follow his renewal with the land and people he loved so much? But Mary Smith was there, and so too was the intellectual challenge to the young academic. Perhaps the apparent reluctance of those in authority at UCWI to secure his growing prowess made him apprehensive that, if he remained there, the still hardening armour of intellectualism could not yet shield him from emotional assault. In America, alien to them both, the pressures on emotion would be weaker. In one of the many obituaries which appeared when Mike Smith died, Philip Burnham, one of his colleagues at University College, London wrote of Mike and Mary: Together, they formed an enduring partnership that gained much from Mary's fundamental intellectual contribution. Mary also cheerfully coped with raising their family of three sons while actively participating in many of MG's field research projects, from the first in Northern Nigeria (1949-50) to the last in Grenada (1990). There was much behind those words: a deep affection unbetrayed, except to those who knew them well, by any outward signs of word or touch; a shared understanding of the way in which Mike's devotion to his work seemed sometimes to encroach on his devotion to his family; and an intellectual collaboration which, though recognized by others, was neither fully claimed by Mary nor fully acknowledged by Mike. Indeed those who depended on Mary for account would have heard little beyond this sort of anecdote: 134

Douglas Hall I remember 'Mike's accent' (and mine too) perplexing some Californians; he tried getting UCLA typists to transcribe his tapes of the Hausa histories, but finally gave up when numerous mistakes in the Kano one included a frequently mentioned source called 'The Carnal Chronicle'. From then on 'the one-woman army' (MFS) transcribed all his stuff. It was less trouble than trying to correct other people's versions. And Mike, on hearing that, would have smiled and probably not added more. Mary helped him plan his books, took charge of the boys when, as he sometimes did, Mike locked himself away in unsunned isolation, reciting into the dictaphone the 'stuff that Mary, with a critical eye, would type out. And when the proofs came back it was MFS who usually undertook the search for errors. Of their collaboration in the field no more need be said. When in 1986 the time came to leave Yale, Mike Smith once more felt the call to home. Because it was only since the appointment at Yale that he and Mary had found opportunity to save for his retirement, funds would be limited. They calculated that they would be better able to manage financially in England. Also, that was Mary's homeland and sons Daniel and Peter and their families were there. In Jamaica, on the other hand, by 1986, Mike had few remaining important personal connections. His brother Max and family, with whom he had never really got on,2 had migrated to Canada; an d cousin Jack and his family had long been there. Miss Kate, Hazel, and Leo, had left for the United States. Aunts 'May' and 'Lil', and Uncle Willie all had died, and so too had Edna Manley. Politically, the Jamaica Labour Party then formed the Government, and the People's National Party seemed to have relinquished those principles of democratic socialism which Norman Manley had espoused and M.G. Smith had followed. Perhaps, too, there was a concern that "swimming in his own pond" now he might go under in despair. He considered spending his retirement in Jamaica; but in 1986 he and Mary returned to England. Retirement meant simply that he would continue his research and writing but would be able to relax a little more in enjoyment of his wider interests classical music (now he added opera), poetry, the arts and sciences (especially astronomy, physics, cosmology) - and his library reflected all of that. In an 135

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 increasing enthusiasm for the electronic media he acquired the latest equipment and watched or taped for future reference television programmes reporting new discoveries and insights in science, wild-life and environmental documentaries, music, sport and much else. But still he worked long hours in his study, and was soon, with Mary, to make a brief return to fieldwork. For many years he had been associated with the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM)25 "established [in New York] in 1955 as an educational and scientific foundation with a special geographical focus on the Caribbean region". In 1988 MG undertook the direction of a comparative study of Education in the Caribbean sponsored by RISM with a grant from the Spencer Foundation. This brought him back to the Caribbean and to Jamaica from time to time, and in 1990 he and Mary would return to Grenada for two months, working on that assignment. In 1989 at Mona, the University of the West Indies conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa; and at St Augustine the Institute of Social and Economic Research held a conference to honour jointly M.G. Smith and Lloyd Braithwaite who, in the 1950s, had been his colleague in the ISER, Mona. Braithwaite, among others, had long been a critic of MG's theory of pluralism, and MG had sometimes replied ferociously. Lloyd Best, who had known them both since the early days, remembering the sharp tongue of the young MG, observed that he had changed: A distinct mellowing came later - after all the heights had been scaled . . . The occasion proved to be one of great fellowship and warmth. By then experience in the region had induced more convergence in the thinking. Stratification by economic class had been emerging as a special case of social (and ethnic) cleavage. More attention than hitherto was being given to Braithwaite's early caveat which he had later spelt out: that the presence of the East Indian migrant in Trinidad posed special problems for social order and therefore for any social theory invoking economic class. The 'mellowing' reflected more than the quiet self-confidence which may follow high distinction in one's field. In M.G. Smith it reflected also a healing of the conflict between intellect and emotion. He had deliberately embraced 136

Douglas Hall intellectualism and cooled the strong emotional elements of his psyche; and events which, because of his strong loyalties, he deeply and sorrowfully regretted had nonetheless aided him in that resolve. In October 1992, after unavoidable delays and much searching for the right place, Mike and Mary moved from London to a house in Glastonbury (where tradition tells us the legendary King Arthur of the Round Table died and was buried in the Abbey some fifteen hundred years ago); in the County of Somerset near the birthplace of John Davis, Mike's maternal greatgrandfather, and near Bristol, the port from which John Davis sailed about 1840 and Mike and Mary went in 1952. Mike was full of delight with the house and its surroundings. It was large enough for comfortable work and living, and to accommodate his library of some 4,500 books which he had begun to uncrate. Just beyond the front gate a country lane led up to a tor which legend associated with King Arthur and his Knights, and one could wander off on paths through rolling pastoral countryside. Lovely grounds surrounding the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey were just around the corner. He wanted his friends to come and share the pleasures of the place. But his enjoyment was brief. On Christmas Day 1992, he was suddenly taken ill and admitted to the Cardiac Unit, Bristol Royal Infirmary, where he died peacefully in his sleep on 5 January 1993. His body was cremated. Obituaries were many and widespread. The New York Times noted the passing of the man who was " . . . an authority on the structure of power and political systems". In Britain the Guardian remembered Michael Garfield Smith . . . a peerless anthropologist whose studies explained Caribbean and West African societies and whose personal wisdom illumined education and public affairs in the West Indies, the United States and Britain. In Jamaica a Gleaner editorial reminded us that A truly great Jamaican has gone . . . There are not many of our countrymen who have risen to the height of international recognition that this distinguished son of Jamaica has gained.

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D SMITH 1921—1993 And Mary Smith pronounced the modest epitaph We have a 'adopted' a young tree in the beautiful grounds of the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, close to our home, in Mike's memory, with the following inscription: TILIA CORDATA (SMALL LEAFED LIME) ADOPTED IN LOVING MEMORY OF MICHAEL GARFIELD SMITH PHD SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGIST JAMAICA (1921) -SOMERSET (1993) BY FAMILY AND FRIENDS

But all is not yet done. Mary Smith, 2 March 1995: "I'm expecting a visit from Andrew Apter, now professor at Chicago U., on March 10th. He was one of Mike's last three graduates at Yale, and did brilliant fieldwork among the Yoruba of Western Nigeria in the 1980s . . . He hopes to get a grant to study the 'Yoruba diaspora' in the New World . . . and I plan to go through our Grenada field-notes of 1953, where we described local 'Shango' cults and 'saraca', with photographs and records of ceremonies and songs. Mike never wrote this up (lack of time and, he always said, of expertise in comparative religion), but he got the tapes re-recorded . . . and sent one copy to the museum in Grenada, one to RISM in New York, and kept one here. This is what Andy and I are going to examine. 7 June 1995: I have been corresponding with Mrs Jefferson at UWI library and she has returned my catalogue marked to show which books she would like to have - c. 1,350 in all. I am glad that she wants almost all the African Anthropology collection and much Anthropology General. Also lots of History - Africa and the Caribbean. Also a lot of Sociology. Altogether a very worthwhile list which would please Mike greatly. He did want his beloved books to end up in Jamaica if possible (apart from the 'core library' of more general things that the boys have identified for us to keep).

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Mike's World Survey of Internal Collective Violence database is now being used by Cultural Survival at Harvard, and by a project on inter-ethnic violence at UCL . . . 31 August 1995'. I expect 2 visitors, Paul Lovejoy from Toronto re the publication of the Kano history, and a discussion of the other 2, Katsina and Sokoto; and Freddie Schwerdtfeger from Zaria on his annual visit. It's good to see old friends. The 'enduring partnership' goes on.

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NOTES

1 Gladstone Mills, Grist for the Mills (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1994), 31. 2 Ibid., 42-43. 3 Reginald Myrie Murray, "Ramblings" (n.p., n.d.) 4 This and some of M.G. Smith's poems quoted in the text were published in various editions of Public Opinion and Focus. Others are taken from unpublished and, in many cases, undated typescripts. 5 This and all other quotations of Edna Manley come from Edna Manley: the Diaries, ed. Rachel Manley (Kingston: Heinemann Publishers (Caribbean) Limited, 1989). 6 The historical background to this chapter is almost entirely based on Michael Crowder's The Story of Nigeria (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), esp. chap XV. 7 P. Sherlock and R. Nettleford, The University of the West Indies (Macmillan Caribbean, 1990), 3. 8 Ibid., 30. 9 UWI Archives, Documents relating to the Institute of Social and Economic Research, and the personal files of Dr M.G. Smith. 10 UWI Archives, "Documents" 11 Sherlock and Nettleford, The University of the West Indies, 45-46. 12 UWI Archives, Documents 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid.

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 16 Professor Robert Edgerton (UCLA) in a letter to Professor Edward Baugh (UWI, Mona) 19 June 1989. 17 Review by J.E.N. Sociology and Social Research (April 1963). 18 Trinidad and Tobago Review (Xmas 1989 & New Year 1990). 19 Sherlock and Nettleford, The University of the West Indies, 134. 20 UWI Archives, Documents. 21 Sherlock and Nettleford, The University of the West Indies, 135. 22 Esmond Ramesar was the UWI's Resident Tutor, Extra-Mural Department, in Trinidad and Tobago. 23 And a few weeks before he died, M.G. Smith paid tribute to Derek Walcott, recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. 24 Indeed, MG and Mary did not know that Max had died in Toronto, Canada, near the end of 1992 about two months before MG's death. 25 When M.G. Smith died the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) produced a memorial booklet: TESTAM ENT Life and Work of

M.G. SMITH 1921-19 93 Bibliography 1952-1992 and selections from the Work It included tributes from David Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus of Geography, University College London, and from Dr Murray Last, Reader in Anthropology, University College London. By permission of RISM and Dr Last, his tribute is reproduced here (Appendix II), as is M.G. Smith's Testament (Appendix I) and his list of publications (Appendix III).

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APPENDIX I

Testament 1945-6 BY M.G. SMITH

Published in Focus, 1956 Edited by Edna Manley

A day ends and a way ends and a world ends here A day ends and a way ends and a world ends here And yet so sure the peace So sure the peace A day ends and a way ends and a world ends here. In self-created blindness waits this earth And all the peoples lost and shelterless Stumbling amongst the ruins to the brink Of utmost ruin. And the world ends here. And yet so great the peace, this wind so sure So strong so full of vision that the faith

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 Loses in last awareness of the source The great pervading stillness of the root. O be this pure, O be this free from fault Of affectation or distrust or fraud O be this like a flute upon thy lips Prophetic Night to pour thy mighty hymn. Old women in the gardens weeding grass Old men along the quayside fly their rods The cinemas, the slums and palaces Declare and spawn the dozen deformed gods. The builder plies his trowel. Ages pass. The search receives the seeker. Time still nods. O be for all this night the birth of faith And light the road, and long the travelling. There is a limit to all human ways There is a limit to all human love And a great darkness in all human light Yet faith flows down the river, peace fills trees, And glory lights the morning when she comes All wet and radiant from the golden clouds And walks upon the mountains like a bride. For there is promise in all human pain There is morning in all human night And life and birth and beauty beyond death. We have constructed Time with fear and greed We have imprisoned Space with avarice And murdered Life, the Vision, with our Sloth We have constructed Time Constructed Time We have created Death in all our walks. In the beginning Dark and only dark A wind arose through all things great with light And swept their darkness into silver space And the wind breathed on all things till they shone. In the beginning Faith and only faith

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And the immersion of all things in One And the emergence of the One through all And the identity and immanence Like Sleep. In the beginning Most complete of all The conscious full awareness of the home The part's assumption in the living whole The harmony And harmony And breaking Light. O seas rush over seas rush over seas And mountains overtop the mountains of our days And winds that follow winds that follow winds And light that leads the light that leads our ways All to the darkness flowing flowing on Declare this moving ocean without praise The home of presence, the green luminous And universal Moment of all days. Shapes swim and sight and sound. The Self is lost. Hardly a sense remains of that great sea Whose waves in flux and reflux surge and swell Until the consciousness is filled with dark And all expanding, all one flowing through The twilit stillness, lost and immanent, In coil and recoil, suddenly received Upon the womb of Process, where the stars Flicker like candles blown about by winds Of utmost distance and shut out one by one. Now is my prayer heard Now is there light The whole of Space is conscious and vibrates With an abounding Power like green waves Ceaselessly lapping on the evening air When of a sudden stillness hums and glows Rapt with a miracle of beating wings And all the world is music, all is light.

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 Now is my prayer heard Now all is peace And so exceeding still and bright there walks Within this moment an eternal voice Calling and calling to a lonely dawn So evermore must light be terrible With ceaseless echoes of this joy or pain Or evermore be chosen night or day

This is the splendid sunlight of our birth This is the day in which we were conceived The light and islands of the home we left This is the mountain of the given grace And peace and nescience and the living touch Of a spontaneous presence flowing through The earth, the water, wind and light and trees This human village and these human ways This is the glory of such steep ascent From which we were begotten to beget Within the sea of vision bright new isles Beyond the midnight's conquest, this the light Into its stillness this our splendid Sun. O dance and let the glory be great Wing and distribute down this living day And through the quivering corridors of light All of the surging ocean, all the spray That from the darkness of contention passed Free, and forever free of doubt and care And all constructions that shut out the light And bind the power, breeding fear on fear. O dance, O sing, O glory be for all This sunlight splendid with the fulfilled prayer.

Weary with long and fruitless search we slept To wake at dawn with pain between the eyes Hearts that had known no peace and lips athirst

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For the lost vision Dumb parched black loneliness. Our spirits were like winter's trees without a leaf, Our bodies moved but knew not where nor why. This was the dawn of sorrow at the end Of the long night of woe we had invoked To shield and hide us and shut out the light And build about us cities full of fear. This world was our creation, we the gods And desolation knew no home but this And bitter was the winter dwelling in our hearts A time of grief A grim blind homeless time All waste All darkness Torn with doubt and shame A place no feet may visit Self-inclosed And filled with sorrows shivering in the cold. This was the well of dark we daily sunk Deeper and deeper, to descend at last Unto a meeting in the Dark with God Unto a terrible meeting in the Dark. Yet as we strove to build Death for this tomb And walls of blindness to shut out the dawn God saw And shook this splendid sunlight from his hair And smiled forgiveness in this perfect day.

Day of Resurrection Day of Birth Day of Forgiveness Springing, springing Day The sun is splendid in thee As a lord But life is bridal And she walks with God

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D SMITH 1921-1993 Day of the Blest Arrival Day of Peace Day of Assumption Soaring, soaring Day Beyond this streaming sunlight At the source A world of Presence opens Glory dwells. Day of the Promise Day fulfilled O soaring, soaring daylight Daylight stilled. Strong sunlight recalls my youth The warm land of my birth The fulfilment The days of unbroken sun. The sunlight was ceaseless with us It bathed and cupped all in light It soaked into the core of all things And came to the dark secret hearts To enter when all was unhidden. Because I opened my heart to the sun Knowing no better A world was born within me A vision of splendid light Light of a sense of freedom And complete identity Light of sense of union And communion in touch Fearless and sure and free light Without which Was no immediacy of being And no identifying touch. Strong sunlight washed the village And the hills And clothed my people in their purple robes And danced and rippled in the laughing limbs

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Douglas Hall And streamed and welled within them Darkly strong Streams that no sea could gather and give peace Days which no light could shut off from the sun Which was their wombhead of original birth And final consummation flowering Into a consaneity with light And splendid growing oneness with their source. Strong sunlight shows my youth It walks with dreams And all the village and the hills awake From lit and finished days to prophecy The dark and forward time when all is still And nothing known, but dark beyond the Sun And the increasing oneness with the Sun. But if my village and my hills remain From the broad sunlight of their birth cut off And from all consummation or the hope Of harmony and power which flows down From the identifying light Then there shall be Wells that are waterless And wasted wells And blindness searching to be healed in vain

And the election of a living death Far from identity like cut off hands Without the touch of source or light or self Or sense of oneness being in the whole.

Desire was Shadrach's furnace Worse than flames He sought to walk forever with the light Beyond all reach or sense of human woe. Desire was Meeshach's furnace Burning bright He sought to be immersed within the light

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 That moves and flows and dwells in all like suns. The world was burnt to ashes with the least Touch of his lusting for Communion. And Desire was the surging flame Abednego endured He had sewn the clothes with his own hand The flames he had woven himself The torment was all his creation And his nakedness defiled. O they all three cried in the furnace And they all three cried in the flame But God was their misconception And they could not behold him for shame. But in the fire dwelt a still clear light Older and brighter than the first of dawns That circled all in stillness, all in birth And inward flowing bright baptismal fire And all surrounding with a sea of peace And vesting all in glory, sure and free To spring spontaneous from light to light And move forever in desire with peace And walk in nakedness All radiant Or dwell with stillness in the midst of flames. This light these three were filled with And a power surpassing peace In their furnace was great contentment They endured in an inward light And the spirit of stillness dwelt in them And they shone, yes they shone, yes they shone like the sons of God.

A well of living wonder is the Lord A song of burning words A womb of light The spirit of the stillness and the source The Way

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Douglas Hall The Presence The Power in all life. In miracles of stillness we approach Lonely this terrible and splendid way A well of living wonder is the Lord A song of burning words The womb of Light. Nothing Not even the love of a woman Must be more than desire for the Lord. Nothing Not life Nor delight Nor laughter Not love. There is no true thing without the Lord For the Lord is all love in the stillness And the vision of the source. And the Lord is all life in the way. This poem is the world about you Revealed by night and day This is the structure of the world within you And the vision of the source. So only let these words be accurate to show What stillness dwells the light in Though none can remember all Or what way the Lord appears in Though to speak is to leave the way Then for the rest let this forever be The poem of the unimportant words. For there can be no absence There is no hope of absence To be is to be aware of the Lord. There is a going towards and a departure There is no standing still And the arrival in vision of darkness Is a creation of self, by will

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 And the presence is forever with us In ceaseless revelations confronting Terrible to those who loathe the light and crucify Themselves But most radiant To those who sought in love and waited long. To come near into the light and be fulfilled Strip from the spirit all its social coils And all the misconceptions and desires of self And cease the Will and let the Stillness be So deep, so vast, so true it knows no time Nor is it swayed by space or circumstance But like a silent great abiding stream Moves to the vision beyond dark or light. This spirit of the stillness is the Lord And unto this there is no thing beyond. But this, the Stillness of the Utmost Light, Fills with its truth the spirit stripped of self And shews a lonely traveller to dawn The horrible diversions, dreams and strife Heaped on his knowledge of the Light, to waste And blind and overcome his spirit with the Dark. This is the great unalterable Truth Of living, and the Light past life or death, This is the Fact beyond all circumstance. And the way to be stilled is by prayer Which is the stripping down Alone, alone in the Sureness Where only spirit moves And all the Greed and Fear and Darkness of the Self Is gone And all the sloth and lusts have ceased to be And everything is essence No beginning or end The radiance returning Renewal in the Source.

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Douglas Hall When we have cleansed ourselves There is stillness And the arrival in an utmost light The arrival of the Light is a process beyond us But the cleansing is all our own And this is the way to the Stillness The way by which we are clean: Withdrawal and aloneness from all things Withdrawal from the coils of self Withdrawal at last from the spirit Attention and love of the Stillness. And surpassing humility Attention and love unasking And the arrival of Light. In a moment In a place Eternal Beyond space In the spirit's survival at source There is a sea of Light Assumption The presence throughout us Free And a radiance And a power Glory And surpassing harmony And unto this bright suspense like a sea The less identity dissolves in light. O great to praise O glory glory be O Source and Way and Stillness Home of peace Abiding is thy power and thy gifts Love and delight and sureness Joy and faith And patience to discern and light to see

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 What springs of stillness in activity May be the womb or harvest or the way. And first and last for this committed light Of presence in these hands to love and know The harmony that moves in touch, O glory be Unto the Lord, and glory, glory be Unto the coming of the Lord in light. Reproduced by courtesy of the Research Institute for the Sudy of Man

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A Tribute by

Dr Murray Last (Reader in Anthropology, University College London)

M.G. SMITH 1921-1993 When M.G. Smith died on 5 January this year (as reported in A. T., February 1993) he had just started revising three monographs for publication. He had finished some further fieldwork in Grenada in 1990, and in 1991 had published Pluralism, Politics and Ideology in the Creole Caribbean. Now it was time to turn to his other main field - Northern Nigerian political structures and their history. These two research domains of his - Northern Nigeria Hausaland and the Caribbean - he had always kept working at over a period of 45 years, though he rarely interwove the two analytically (his comparison 155

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 of slavery in Jamaica and in pre-colonial Muslim Hausaland, written and published in Jamaica, was exceptional). Indeed colleagues abroad have remarked to me that they had not thought of the two Smiths - the Caribbean Smith of The Plural Society of the British West Indies and the Hausa Smith of Government in Zazzau - as the same man. Given the other Smiths who have worked in the Caribbean (R.T.) and Northern Nigeria (H.F.C. or Abdullahi Smith), a certain confusion is perhaps forgivable. I am emphasizing the regional dimension of M.G. Smith's work since it is, I think, in that context that his books and articles will be read and quoted, being set as classical texts to argue with or develop new ideas from. This is not to say that in his writing theory takes second place to ethnography. But if field data are the bricks of a durable ethnography, then M.G. Smith was indefatigable in ensuring those bricks were the best available. Indeed the rigour of his fieldwork technique was legendary. Informants, on occasions, had to swear on the Holy Qur'an that they were telling the truth. Others were checked and rechecked on their consistency - whether it was in the details of their annual income and expenditure or their genealogical connections; and his interviews could take a long time. This was not bullying - though I have heard informants comment much later on their experience — but a formidable concern for the truth and for accuracy. The subject, he felt, was simply too serious for sloppiness - and, by and large, people agreed and started to share his quest for precision. That quest for precision and the utter seriousness of anthropological enquiry, as unfashionable then as it is now, sprang I think from two important sources. First growing up as a Jamaican in the colonial world and then working in colonized communities, he recognized that the key, as a colonial subject, to confronting that colonial culture lay in the methods of law and lawyers. You won the day by being better briefed, by having your case more tightly argued and by carefully cross-examining your opponents' data. M.G. Smith seldom ducked overt conflict. Not for nothing was his initial choice of career the law. He brought an advocate's sharpness to ethnography. The second source of his seriousness was his strong distaste for the flippant, self-deprecating styles of middle class, metropolitan British anthropologists, who identified socially with the colonial administrators if not always with the 156

Douglas Hall colonial project. In Northern Nigeria, where the Muslim emirates were staffed by Fulani and British who together cosily enjoyed an aristocrat's dominance over the peasantry, M.G. Smith found the collusion and the exploitation, even in the booming 1950s, particularly offensive. He was not to be won over, as so many were, by the myths of benevolence, by the appeals to consensus. Hausaland, like the Caribbean, was to M.G. Smith essentially a plural society in which ethnic identities and their history play an important role. Both places were heavily affected by the experience of slavery, however differently implemented. Though no one would think of the Huasa emirates as distinct 'islands', the differences between them presented a similar opportunity for structural comparison. As in the Caribbean, his perspective on the Hausa, deepened by the existence of documents and palace bureaucracies, covered a period of at least 150 years, and compared the structures created by the jihad both with those that preceded them and with those that followed under colonial rule. Although Zaria ('Zazzau) was the first of these comparisons, he researched and wrote four more: Daura (published in 1978), Kano, Katsina and Sokoto; these last three are due to be shortly published, because of his death now largely unrevised since they were rewritten in the early 1970s. As historical studies, they contain extensive interview material from the late 1950s and early 1960s, from elderly informants who have long since died. As sources they are invaluable to historians. Although histories of these emirates have already been written by Nigerian and other scholars, M.G. Smith's severely critical approach to the politics and motivations of the whole 'Sokoto Caliphate' culture offers not just interesting oral data but a fresh interpretation of what has tended to become for many a 'golden dream'. I think his lack of sympathy for the real piety of Muslim students leaves his account drily political; it emphasizes the deviousness at the expense of the dreams - but then have not the dreams been well aired of late? His Caribbean work is still controversial. A central argument is that the component groups in West Indian society, defined locally by colour, essentially formed separate coherent cultures - and were held together within the Caribbean whole through the domination of one of these groups - usually 157

A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 the 'white' one, in alliance with the 'coloured'. He argued that there was not the normative consensus shared by all groups that would permit Caribbean culture to be analysed as a single cultural system. He was accused by other scholars of reifying a local sense of difference into a theory, even an ideology - but he refused to fudge in favour of a sugary social solidarity, the crucial divisions he could recognize as a 'native' (as he styled himself); nor would he agree to transform the reality of ethnicity and race into the discourse of class and class struggle. Indeed in the last telephone conversation we had a few weeks before he died, he spoke of how the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia and elsewhere surely confirmed his stance over the central importance of ethnicity in political analysis. Despite his preoccupation in recent years with constructing a systematic, global account of the roots of conflict, for most people M.G. Smith's name will be linked to 'corporation theory' and his vigorous elaboration of ideas associated with Sir Henry Maine and Max Weber. Just as in his development of J.S. Furnivall's concept of the 'plural society', so in taking up the rather woolly but widely used concepts of corporateness and 'corporate group', M.G. Smith sought to turn corporate analysis into a method through which the specific characteristics of social units within a society could be tabulated and compared systematically, over time and space. Given the current lack of interest among anthropologists in political theory and structural analysis, M.G. Smith's fundamental contribution to tidying up this area of anthropological usage is not widely read, though I understand from political scientists that his incisive discussion of the various kinds of corporate groups and what corporateness might entail remains important for them, though more so perhaps in the USA than here. Anthropologists' work seems to fall into one of two kinds. The first, anthropology-for-export, has resulted in making anthropological ideas and ways of seeing become commonplace well beyond the anthropology seminar room. These are our 'big ideas' that other disciplines pounce upon and use. Without the wide sale of such work, anthropology would have remained a small cult. But there is the other kind of anthropology - the monograph, the scholarly article — whose long-term contribution lies either within the discipline or in the libraries of the countries whence the monograph's data 158

Douglas Hall derive. M.G. Smith's work is of this second kind - but with a slight difference: he was not writing simply as an academic but as a scholar of the Third World committed to telling the truth, sharply and irrefutably. Anthropology Today (Royal Anthropological Institute, London) Vol. 9, no. 3, June 1993

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Publications

1952 "A study of Hausa domestic economy in Northern Zaria". Africa 22 (4): 333-47. 1953a "Secondary marriage in Northern Nigeria". Africa 23 (4): 296-325. (Wellcome Medal Prize Essay). Reprinted in Kinship and Marriage, edited by Paul Bohannan and John Middleton, 109-30. New York: Natural History Museum Press, 1968. 1953b The Social Organization and Economy ofKagoro. London: Colonial Social Science Research Council. 110pp. Reissued by the Department of Sociology, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, as Occasional Paper no. 2, 1975. 1953c The Social Structure of the Northern Kadara. London: Colonial Social Science Research Council. 64pp. Reissued by the Department of Sociology, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, as Occasional Paper no. 1, 1973. 1953d "Some aspects of social structure in the British Caribbean about 1820". Social and Economic Studies 1 (4): 55-79. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 92-115. 1954a "Slavery and emancipation in two societies". Social and Economic Studies 3 (3-4): 239-90. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 116-61. 1954b "Introduction" and "Notes". In Baba of Kara: a Woman of the Muslim Hausa, by Mary F. Smith, 11-34, 257-90. London: Faber & Faber. USA: Praeger, 1964. Reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

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Douglas Hall 1955a The Economy ofHausa Communities ofZaria: a Report to the Colonial Social Science Research Council. London: H.M.S.O. for the Colonial Office. 261pp. (Colonial research studies, no. 16). Reprint, Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1961. 1955b^4 Framework for Caribbean Studies. Kingston, Jamaica: Extra Mural Dept., Univ. College of the West Indies. 70pp. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 18-74. Partially reprinted as "Afro-American research: a critique". In West Indian Perspectives: Work and Family Life, edited by Lambros Comitas and David Lowenthal, 273-84. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. 1956a "Community organisation in rural Jamaica". Social and Economic Studies 5 (3): 295-312. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 176-95. 1956b "On segmentary lineage systems". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 86 (2): 39-80. (Curie Bequest Prize Essay). Reprinted in Corporations and Society (1974b), 13-70. 1956c A Report on Labour Supply in Rural Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printer. 167pp. Partially reprinted as "Patterns of rural labour". In West Indian Perspectives: Work and Family Life, edited by Lambros Comitas and David Lowenthal. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. 1956d "The transformation of land rights by transmission in Carriacou". Social and Economic Studies 5 (2): 103-38. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 221-61. 1957a "The African heritage in the Caribbean". In Caribbean Studies: a Symposium, edited by Vera Rubin, 34-46. Kingston, Jamaica: University College of the West Indies in association with the Research and Training Program for the Study of Man in the Tropics, Columbia University. Reprint (monograph no. 34 of the American Ethnological Society), University of Washington Press, 1960. 1957b "Cooperation in Hausa society". Information (International Social Science Council), no. 11: 1-20. 1957c "Dark Puritan: the life and work of Norman Paul". Caribbean Quarterly 5 (1): 34-47; 5 (2): 85-98 (1958); 5 (4): 284-91 (1959); 6 (1): 48-59 (1960). 1957d "Ethnic and cultural pluralism in the British Caribbean". In Pluralisme Ethnique et Culturel dans les Societes Intertropicales/Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism in Intertropical Communities, 439-47. Brussels: Institute of Differing Civilizations. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 10-17. 1957e "Family patterns in rural Jamaica". The Welfare Reporter (Kingston, Jamaica) 16 (3): 24-25, 28. 1957f "The social functions and meaning ofHausa praise-singing". Africa 27 (1): 26-45. Reprinted in Ibadan, no. 21 (October 1965): 81-92; and Peoples and Cultures of Africa, edited by Elliott P. Skinner. New York: Natural History Press, 1973. 1957g (with G.J. Kruijer) A Sociological Manual far Extension Workers in the Caribbean. (Caribbean affairs series) Kingston, Jamaica: Extra-Mural Dept., University College of the West Indies. 255pp.

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 1957h Review. Alur Society, by Aidan Southall, and Bantu Bureaucracy, by Lloyd Pallets. Social and Economic Studies 6 (1): 86-90. 1957i Review. Britain and the U.S.A. in the Caribbean, by Mary Proudfoot. Caribbean Quarterly 5(1): 61-62. 1957] Review. Developments Towards Self-Government in the Caribbean. Man 57: article 70. 1957k Review. Education and Social Change in Tropical Areas, by Margaret Read. Man 57: article 47. 19571 "The political past and future". Review of Oriental Despotism, by Karl Wittfogel. Social and Economic Studies 6 (4): 572-76. 1958 "The British Caribbean". In New Horizons in the Caribbean. Geneva: World Alliance ofYMCAs, 12-23. 1959a "The Hausa system of social status". Africa 29 (3): 239-52. 1959b Comment on "On the relation between plantations and 'Creole cultures'", by Richard N. Adams. In Plantation Systems of the New World: Papers and Discussion Summaries of the Seminar Held in San Juan, Puerto Rico (Social science monographs, no. 7). Washington, DC: Pan-American Union. 81-82. 1960a "Education and occupational choice in rural Jamaica". Social and Economic Studies 9 (3): 332-54. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 196-220. Partially reprinted in West Indian Perspectives: Consequences of Class and Color, edited by David Lowenthal and Lambros Comitas, 191-97. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. 1960b Government in Zazzau, 1800-1950. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. 371pp. (Amaury Talbot Book Prize). Reprinted in 1964 and 1970. 1960c "Kagoro political development". Human Organization 19 (3): 137-49. 1960d "Social and cultural pluralism". In Social and Cultural Pluralism in the Caribbean, edited by Vera Rubin, 763-85. New York: New York Academy of Sciences (Annals 83, art. 5). Reprinted in Africa: Social Problems of Change and Conflict, edited by Pierre van den Berghe. San Francisco: Chandler, 1965, 58-76; and The Plural Society in the British West Indies (\965c), 75-91. 1960e (with R. Augier and R.M. Nettleford) The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University College of the West Indies. 54pp. Reprinted in 1968, and in Caribbean Quarterly 13, no. 3 (September 1967): 3-29 and 13, no. 4 (December 1967): 3-14. 1960f Review. Africa: Its Peoples and their Culture History, by G.P. Murdock. Social and

Economic Studies 9 (2): 256-57.

196la "Field histories among the Hausa". Journal of African History 2 (1): 87-101. 196lb "Kebbi and Hausa stratification". British Journal of Sociology 12 (1): 52-64. 196lc "Kinship and household in Carriacou". Social and Economic Studies 10 (4): 455-77. 196ld "The plural framework of Jamaican society". British Journal of Sociology 12 (3): 162

Douglas Hall 249-62. Reprinted in West Indian Perspectives: Slaves, Free Men, Citizens, edited by Lambros Comitas and David Lowenthal, 174-93. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973; The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 162-75; and Race and Social Difference, edited by P.W. Baxter. London: Penguin, 1973. 196le "West Indian culture". Caribbean Quarterly 7 (3): 112-19. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 1-9. 196 If Comment on "The classification of double descent systems", by Jack Goody. Current Anthropology 2 (1): 19-20. 1961g Review. The Drum and the Hoe, by Harold Courlander. Social and Economic Studies 10 (2): 232-33. 1961h Review. Geschichte von Zamfara, Sokoto-Provinz, Nordnigeria, by Kurt Kreiger. Journal of African History 2(1): 154-56. 196li Review. Windward Children: a Study in Human Ecology of the Three Dutch Windward Islands in the Caribbean, by John Y. Keur and Dorothy L. Keur. Social and Economic Studies 10 (2): 233-35. 1962a "Exchange and marketing among the Hausa". In Markets in Africa, edited by Paul Bohannan and G. Dalton, 299-334. Evanston, 111: Northwestern University Press. Reprint, American Museum of Natural History Press, 1965, 130-79. 1962b "History and social anthropology". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 92 (1): 73-85. 1962c Kinship and Community in Carriacou (Caribbean series, no. 5). New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 347pp. 1962d "Short-range prospects in the British Caribbean". Social and Economic Studies 11 (4): 392-408. Reprinted in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965c), 304-21. Partially reprinted in Readings in Government and Politics of the West Indies, compiled by A. W. Singham et al. Kingston, Jamaica: n.p., n.d., 390-98. 1962e West Indian Family Stucture (American Ethnological Society monographs, no. 36). Seattle: University of Washington Press. 311pp. 1963a "Aimless, wandering, adolescent groups". In The Adolescent in the Changing Caribbean: Proceedings of the 3rd Caribbean Conference for Mental Health. Jamaica, University College of the West Indies, 4-11 April 1961, 78-79, 84. 1963b Dark Puritan. Kingston, Jamaica: Dept. of Extra-Mural Studies, University of the West Indies. 139pp. 1964a "The beginnings of Hausa society" In The Historian in Tropical Africa, edited by Jan Vansina, Raymond Mauny and L.V. Thomas, 339-57. London: Oxford University Press. 1964b "Historical and cultural conditions of political corruption among the Hausa". Comparative Studies in Society and History 6 (2): 164-94. 1965a "Hausa inheritance and succession". In Studies in the Laws of Succession in Nigeria, edited by J.D.M. Derrett, 230-81. London: Oxford University Press. 1965b "The Hausa of Northern Nigeria". In Peoples of Africa, edited by James L. Gibbs, Jr.,

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993 121-55. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1965c The Plural Society in the British West Indies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 359pp. Reprinted in 1974. 1965d "The sociological framework of law". In African Law: Adaptation and Development, edited by Hilda Kuper and Leo Kuper, 24-48, 245-47. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Reprinted in Corporations and Society (1974b), 101-31. 1965e Stratification in Grenada. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 271pp. 1965f "Structure and crisis in Grenada, 1950-1954". In The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1956c), 262-303. Partially reprinted in Readings in Government and Politics of the West Indies, complied by A. W. Singham et al., 19-26. Kingston, Jamaica: n.p., n.d. 1966a "The communication of new techniques and ideas: some cultural and psychological factors". In Social Research and Rural Life in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean Region, edited by Egbert de Vries, 121-30. Paris, UNESCO. 1966b, "The jihad of Shehu dan Fodio: some problems". In Islam in Tropical Africa, edited by I. M. Lewis. London: Oxford University Press. 1966c "Pre-industrial stratification systems". In Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development, edited by Neil Smelser and Seymour Lipset, 91-105. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Reprinted in Corporations and Society (1974b), 133-63. 1966d "A structural approach to comparative politics". In Varieties of Political Theory, edited by David Easton, 118-28. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Reprinted in Corporations and Society (1974b),91-1051966e "Introduction". In My Mother Who Fathered Me, by Edith Clarke. 2d ed. London: George Allen & Unwin. Reprinted as "A survey of West Indian family studies". In West Indian Perspectives: Work and Family Life, edited by Lambros Comitas and David Lowenthal, 365-408. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. 1967a "A Hausa kingdom: Maradi under Dan Beskore, 1854-1875". In West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Daryll Forde and Phyllis Kaberry, 93-122. London: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in 1971 and 1976. 1967b "Foreword". In Cultural Pluralism and Nationalist Politics in British Guiana, by Leo A. Despres, vii-xxi. Chicago: Rand-McNally. 1967c Review. The Emirates of Northern Nigeria, by S.J. Hogben and A.H.M. Kirk-Greene. Africa 37 (2): 229-30. 1968a "Anthropological studies of politics". In Perspectives in the Study of Politics, edited by Malcolm S. Parsons, 102-23. Chicago: Rand-McNally. Reprinted in Corporations and Society (\974b), 71-89. 1968b "Political organization". In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. 12, edited by David Sills, 193-202. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. 1968c Review. The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations: a Contribution to the Sociology of Segmented Societies, by H. Hoetink. Race 10 (1): 133-36.

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Douglas Hall 1969a "Differentiation and the segmentary principle in two societies". In Man in Africa, edited by M. Douglas and Phyllis Kaberry, 151-73. London: Tavistock Publications. 1969b "Idda and secondary marriage among the Northern Kadara". In Ideas and Procedures in African Customary Law, edited by Max Gluckman, 210-22. London: Oxford University Press. 1969c "Institutional and political conditions of pluralism". In Pluralism in Africa (1969f), 27-65. Reprinted in Corporations and Society (1974b), 205-39. 1969d "Pluralism in precolonial African societies". In Pluralism in Africa (1969f), 91-151. 1969e "Some developments in the analytic framework of pluralism". In Pluralism in Africa (1969f),4l5-58. 1969f (ed. with Leo Kuper) Pluralism in Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 546pp. Reprinted in 1972. 1969g "Foreword". In Hausa Tales and Traditions. Vol. 1, by Neil Skinner. London: Frank Cass. 1969h "Foreword". In Man in Africa, edited by M. Douglas and Phyllis Kaberry, xv-xxvi. London: Tavistock Publications. Reprint, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1971. 1969i Review. The Fulani Empire ofSokoto, by HAS. Johnston. Africa 29 (1): 78-79. 197la "A note on truth, fact and tradition in Carriacou". Caribbean Quarterly 17 (3-4): 128-38. 1971b Review. Patterns of Dominance, by Phillip Mason. Journal of Commonwealth Studies 9 (2): 170-72. 1972 "Complexity, size and urbanization". In Man, Settlement and Urbanism, edited by Peter Ucko, Ruth Tringham and G.W. Dimbleby, 467-574. London: George Duckworth. Reprint, Andover, MA: Warner Modular Publications reprint series (no. 185), 1973. 8pp. 1974a "The comparative study of complex societies". In Corporations and Society (1974b), 241-70. 1974b Corporations and Society: the Social Anthropology of Collective Action. London: George Duckworth. 383pp. Reprint, Aldine, 1975. 1974c "Race and stratification in the Caribbean". In Corporations and Society (1974b), 271-346. 1974d "A structural approach to the study of political change". In Corporations and Society (1974b), 165-204. 1978a The Affairs ofDaura. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. 532pp. 1978b "Conditions of change in social stratification". In Evolution of Social Systems, edited by J. Friedman and M.J. Rowlands, 29-48. London: George Duckworth. 1979a "Pr6logo: el estudio antropol6gico de la polftica". In Antropoldgica Politica, edited by Jose* R. Llobera, 7-15. Barcelona: Editoria Anagrama.

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A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 1979b Review. Origins of the State: the Anthropology of Political Revolution, edited by Ronald Cohen and Elman Service. Man, n.s. 14 (3): 568-69. 1980a "After secondary marriage, what?" Ethnology 19 (3): 265-77. 1980b Review. The Craft of Social Anthropology, edited by A.L. Epstein. American Scientist 68: 704. 198 la "Forestry programs in tropical countries". In Tropical Forests: Utilization and Conservation, edited by Francois Mergen, 143-53. New Haven: Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. 1981b Local Government at Hadejia, 1977. Zaria, Nigeria: Department of Local Government Studies, Institute of Administration, Ahmadu Bello University. 76pp. 198 Ic (with M. Tuker and A.Y. Aliyu) Development and Organisation of the Fulani Chiefdom ofKaura Namoda, 1809-1903. Zaria, Nigeria: Institute of Administration, Ahmadu Bello University and Gaskiya Corp. 41pp. 198 Id "Foreword". In Urban Housing in Africa, by Friedrich W. Schwerdtfeger. London: John Wiley & Sons. 1982a "Cosmology, practice and social organisation among the Kadara and Kagoro". Ethnology 21 (1): 1-20. 1982b "Ethnicity and ethnic groups in America: the view from Harvard". Ethnic and Racial Studies 5 (1): 1-22. 1982c "Issues of fundamental social science theory in the Caribbean". In Social Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean. 1: The English-Speaking Caribbean and Suriname: Social Science Needs and Priorities, 4-9. Paris, UNESCO. 1982d "The study of needs and provisions for social assistance". Social and Economic Studies 31 (3): 37-57. 1983a "Robotham's ideology and pluralism: a reply". Social and Economic Studies 32 (2): 103-39. 1983b "The role of basic needs and provisions in planning and development". Canadian Journal of Native Studies 3 (2): 341-60. 1983c Review ("Ethnicity and sociobiology"). The Ethnic Phenomenon, by Pierre van den Berghe. American Ethnologist 10 (2): 364-67. 1984a Culture, Race and Class in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica: Dept. of Extra-Mural Studies, University of the West Indies. 139pp. Reprinted in 1990. 1984b "The Kano chronicle as history". In Studies in History ofKano, edited by Bawuro M. Barkindo, 31-58. Kano, Nigeria: Heinemann and Department of History, Bayero University. 1984c "The nature and variety of plural units". In The Prospects for Plural Societies: Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society 1982, edited by David Maybury-Lewis, 146-86. Washington DC: American Ethnological Society. 1984d "Some future directions for social research in the Commonwealth Caribbean". Social and Economic Studies 33 (2): 123-55.

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Douglas Hall 1984e Comment on "Culture and ideology in the English-speaking Caribbean," by Diane Austin. American Ethnologist 11 (1): 183-85. 1985a "Pluralisme, violence et 1'etat moderne: une typologie". In L'Etat au Pluriel, edited by All Kazancigil, 208-28. Paris: Econ6mica/UNESCO. 1985b "Race and ethnic relations as matters of rational choice". Ethnic and Racial Studies 8 (4): 484-99. 1985c Review. Culture History and African Anthropology: a Century of Research in Germany and Austria, by Jurgen Zwernemann. Ethnos 50 (2): 153-54. 1986a "Pluralism, race and ethnicity in selected African countries". In Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations, edited by John Rex and Philip Mason, 187-225. Cambridge University Press. 1986b "Pluralism, violence and the modern state". In The State in Global Perspective, edited by Ali Kazancigil, 183-203. London: Cower/UNESCO. 1986c Review. Ethnic Groups and the State, edited by Paul Brass. Ethnic and Racial Studies 9 (1): 114-15. 1987a "Pluralism: comment on an ideological analysis". Social and Economic Studies 36 (4): 157-91. 1987b "Some problems with minority concepts, and a solution". Ethnic and Racial Studies 10 (4): 341-62. 1987c Review. Race and Ethnicity, by John Rex. Ethnic and Racial Studies 10 (1): 128-30. 1989 Poverty in Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies. 167pp. 1990a (with Mary F. Smith) "Kyanship & kinship among the Tarok". Africa 60 (2): 242-69. 1990b Review ("The full truth at last"). In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-1786, by Douglas Hall. Times Literary Supplement no. 4 (545), 11 May 1990: 489. 1990c Review. Kinship dr Class in the West Indies: a Genealogical Study of Jamaica dr Guyana, by Raymond T Smith. American Anthropologist 92 (1): 237-38. 199 la "Pluralism and social stratification". In Social and Occupational Stratification in Contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, edited by Selwyn Ryan, 3-35. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies. 1991b Pluralism, Politics and Ideology in the Creole Caribbean (Vera Rubin Caribbean series, no. 1). New York: Research Institute for the Study of Man. 80pp. 1991c "The RISM-Spencer study of education and society in the Caribbean". Education and Society in the Commonwealth Caribbean, edited by Errol Miller, 7-14. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, with the assistance of the Research Institute for the Study of Man, New York. 1992 "Hilda Kuper: obituary". The Guardian, 4 May 1992, 27.

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A Man D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921-1993 Unpublished Manuscripts 1957 Politics and Society in Jamaica. 70pp. 1961 Race and Society in Jamaica. 40pp. 1965 The Two Katsinas. Incomplete, unrevised. c. 800pp. 1965 The State ofSokoto. Incomplete, unrevised. c. 1000pp. 1972 Government in Kano, 1350-1950 A.D. Unrevised. c. 1000pp. 1975 Jamaica's Social Service, 1974-5. c. 120pp. 1985 Race, Ethnicity and Pluralism in Social Thought and Theory. 120pp. 1986 Lectures on Political Anthropology. 1987 Social Discrimination: Its Nature, Conditions and Varieties. 120pp. 1988-9 (with Mary F. Smith) Notes and Queries on the Tarok of Plateau State, Nigeria. Unrevised. c. 350pp. 1990 The Study of Social Structure. 1992a "Education, and social change in Grenada". In Education and Society in the Creole Caribbean (1992b). 1992b (ed. with Lambros Comitas) Education and Society in the Creole Caribbean (1992b). 1992c "Introduction" and "Conclusion". In Education and Society in the Creole Caribbean (1992b).28,67pp.

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INDEX

Cooke, Michael 126 Cowper, William 4-5 Cumper, G.E. 74

African Studies Center, UCLA 74 Apter, Andrew 127 Apter, Professor David 84 Augier, Roy 76

Davis, Elizabeth 3 Davis, John 3, 137 Drumblairll,12, 13, 131 Duncan, O.K. 110, 113, 115, 120, 124 Dunkerly, Sylvia 51

BabaofKaro45,49, 62 Barback, Professor R. H. 73 Baugh, Professor Edward viii Bell, Professor Wendell 79; Smith anecdote 84-85, 126 Best, Lloyd 78-79, 136 Braithwaite, Lloyd 56, 57, 74, 136 Bukuru 46, 49 Burnham, Philip 134 Bustamante, Alexander 106

Edwards, D.T. 74 Errar, Granville 51 Faculty of Social Sciences, proposed 71 Fagaci Mohammadu (Giwa District Head) 33, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41,46-47 Fairclough, O.T. 58, 64 Fatika Village 37, 46 Fisher, Lillian ('Lil') 4, 57, 135 Forde, Professor Daryll 24, 26, 46, 49, 50,

Campbell, George 14 Campbell, Lucille 3; death of 4 Carberry, H.D. 8, 14, 24 Castro, Fidel 111, 123 Chambers, Hugo 7, 56 Chief Mallam Gwamma, 49-50 Clarke, Edith 58-59 Clayton, Sam 121 Coleman, Professor James 74, 76, 84 Committee of Senate, development proposals of 71

52,87 Giwa District and Village 32, 33, 35-36; completion of work in 47-48; difficulties encountered 40-42; household consumption in 40-41, 45-46

169

Index Goveia, Elsa 56 Grave, Dr W.W. 59, 64, 73 Gregory, Cathrin ('Kate') 3, 4, 11, 58, 65-66, 135 Grenada and Carriacou, 59, 63-65

135; conversations with MG and Mary Smith 87-88; on Mike Smith 119-120 Manley, Michael viii, 7-8, 10-11, 24, 61, 64, 91; becomes prime minister 94; invites Smith to Jamaica 99, 105-107, 110-111,115-116, 121,124 Manley, Norman Washington 5, 9, 11, 52, 64, 67-68, 76; death of 87, 88, 133 Manley, Rachel viii, 58 Mclntyre, Sir Alister viii Melhado, O.K. 109, 111 Mills, Gladstone 5-6 Mohammed, Ali, and others 98-99 Mona51-52 Monroe, A.R. 2 Moodie, Garth 7 Moore, Brian 129 Morrison, Mary 18-20, 23-24; at LSE 2425, 133-134; see also Smith, Mary F. Murray, Reginald 5, 6-7

Hoetink, Harmannus: on Smith's concept of pluralism 67 Muggins, Dudley 52, 55, 56, 64-65, 70; proposal for a Faculty of Social Sciences 71-72, 74, 77 Ingram, Kenneth 8-9, 14, 24 Innes, Dr 38, 39, 49 Institute of Social and Economic Research: establishment of 52; visitors' report on 70, 64-65 Jamaica College 5 Kadara 49 Kaduna 38 Kagoro 49-50 King, E.H.J. 8

Nettleford, Rex 76, 81, 121 Nigeria: historical background and Smith's arrival in 28-32 Nomdmi 13, 113

La Guerre, John 127 Last, Murray 155-159 Lewis, W. Arthur: appointment to UCWI 73-74, 76, 77, 79, 80 Lewis, Vaughan 126, 129 Lindsay, Louis 126, 129-131, 133 Local festivals 4-45

Parry, J.H. 72-73 Paul, Norman 65 Political tribalism 106 Pringle, K.R. 8, 12-13 Ras Tafari, report on 76 Reid, Victor 14 Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) 136, 142 Richards, Mr, family carpenter 112

MacGaffey, Wyatt: on M.G. Smith 83-84 Maigana (government farm) 39-40 Mailer, Nora 56 Mais, Roger 14 Makarfi District 49 Manley, Carmen 60, 61, 64 Manley, Douglas viii, 7, 12, 24, 105, 108, 118 Manley, Edna 11, 13-14, 57-58, 60-62, 64,75-76,87-88,94-95,105, 112-113, 118; on Castro's visit 123-124, 124-125, 128, 131-133,

Saunders, Keith 18, 22-23 Schwerdtfeger, Friedrich 125-126 Sherlock, Phillip 51, 52; acting Vice Chancellor 80-81, 108; on development proposals 71-72 Slader, York 10 Smith, C.G. 3, 4, 58

170

Index 135-136; return to Nigeria 72-73, 74, 76; on rural labour in Jamaica 67-70; at school 4-11; Senior Research Fellow 70; summons to Jamaica 123-124; tribute to 155-159; at UCL 23-26; at UCLA 82-87; at Yale 126-128 Smith, Mary F. 24-25, 26-27, emotional pressures 59-60, 103-104, 112, 114-115,122-123,124-125,126, 128,129, 134-135, 137,138-139; on life in Nigeria 38-39; on Nigeria and Jamaica 52-53; see also Morrison, Mary Smith, Mary Jane ('May') 3, 12, 54, 135 Smith, Peter Edmund 71, 73, 112-113, 135 Smith, Raymond T. 56, 57, 67, 70 Smith, William 3 Smith, William John 3, 135 Speirs, Brian viii Springer, Hugh 55

Smith, C.J. (Max) 3, 4, 11, 54-56, 135 Smith, Daniel Kagoro 50, 53, 58, 61, 64,

86,113,135 Smith, David William 65, 112 Smith, Hazel ('B') 11, 58, 66, 135 Smith, Jack 12, 22 Smith, Leo ii, 5 8, 66, 13 5 Smith, M.G.: on his abandonment of poetry 133; academic performance 78-79; at Ahmadu Bello 122-126; Andrew Apter on 127; arrival in Jamaica 54-56; association with RISM 136; birth of 4; in Canadian Army 16-23; childhood 4; on crime in Jamaica 100-102; death of 1; departure from Jamaica 15-16, 120-121; departure from UCWI 77-78; on development proposals 71-72; diary en route to Jamaica 53-54; disagreement with PNP Marxists 113-115; early scholarship 11; emotional relief 62-63; his family in Jamaica 112-113; Friedrich Schwerdtfeger on 125-126; interest in poetry 8-10; invitation to return to Mona 80-81; invited to UCLA 76; John La Guerre on 127-128; leaves UCL 102-104; letter to Michael Manley 116-119; Louis Lindsay on 129-131; the man divided 133-134; and Mary Smith 134-135; the mellowing of the man divided 136-137; and his ideas on death 132; and Michael Manley 105-107; at McGill 17; obituaries 137-138; part-time adviser to the prime minister 94-100; performance as special adviser 107-110; planning for the future 115-116; on the plural society 66-67; poems of 20-21; on political parties in Jamaica 91-94; preparing for Nigeria 26-27, 52; Professor of Anthropology UCL 87-91; retirement from Yale

Taylor, Dr Thomas 52, 59 Testament27, 143-154 Thome, Alfred 70 University College London 23, 88, 104 University College of the West Indies: development proposals 70-71; opening of51-52 University of the West Indies: founded 80, 136 Valentine, Alfred 54 Walcott, Derek 133, 142 Wooming, Elsa 57

Zaria City 31-32, 38,43,44

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F U R T H E R A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

My indebtedness to those listed below who wrote to me or allowed me interviews recalling their relationships with M.G. Smith is obvious and I am grateful. Because I have been reluctant to burden the account with footnotes, the sources of passages quoted or information used (such as unpublished diaries, papers, and family or other correspondence) have been, I hope, sufficiently indicated in the text; and I remember with particular gratitude the helpful interviews accorded me by MG's academic colleagues at University College London and, with special reference to chapter 7, Dr Louis Lindsay. My thanks to all. Prof Andrew Apter - University of Chicago Prof Wendell Bell -Yale University Prof Don Brown - University of California, Santa Barbara Mr Lloyd Bryan - Jamaica College Dr Philip Burnham - University College London Dr Lambros Comitas - RISM, New York Mrs Hazel Edmunds - Florida, USA Mr Kenneth Ingram - St Andrew, Jamaica Dr John LaGuerre - UWI, St Augustine Dr Murray Last - University College London 173

A M a n D i v i d e d : M I C H A E L G A R F I E L D S M I T H 1921—1993

Dr Louis Lindsay - UWI, Mona Prof Emeritus David Lowenthal - University College London Prof Wyatt MacGaffey - Haverford College, Penn. USA Mr O.K. Melhado - St Andrew, Jamaica Prof MJ. Rowlands - University College London Mr Keith Saunders - North Carolina, USA Prof Freidrich Schwerdtfeger - Ahmadu Bello Univ., Nigeria Sir Philip Sherlock - St Andrew, Jamaica

174