“True fictions”: Subjectivity and intertextuality in the writings of Sylvia Leith-Ross

Abstract

This article examines the writings of the anthropologist Sylvia Leith-Ross, who worked and travelled in Nigeria from the early 1900s to the 1960s. Her key anthropological study, African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1939) has been analysed by anthropologists and scholars of white women’s colonial history. However, no one has yet attempted to investigate her other writings, such as her field memoirs, African Conversation Piece (1944) and Beyond the Niger (1951). Critics who have discussed African Women have tended to compare Leith-Ross’s ethnography to contemporary studies and have criticized her imperialist tone. While I do not dispute that her writings are deeply problematic, this article analyses Leith-Ross’s work from a different perspective; one which attends to the stylistics of her writing. Drawing on previous work on the “literary” aspects of ethnographic writing by Clifford and Marcus et al., I illustrate the ways in which Leith-Ross blurs the boundaries between autobiography, travel writing, and ethnography in an attempt to formulate a more reflexive style of ethnography. By doing so, I argue that she challenged traditional anthropological methods and pushed the boundaries of convention. However, Leith-Ross’s later texts are imbued with a sense of “imperialist nostalgia” as she begins to lament the modernizing effects of colonialism and the move towards independence in Nigeria. The progressive potential of the challenges she makes to traditional anthropological methodologies is blunted by this shift. Nevertheless, this article calls for a reappraisal of Leith-Ross’s writings and suggests that her work reveals much about the developments that were occurring in anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the shifting relationship between Nigeria and Britain at a pivotal moment in colonial history.

In her major anthropological work, African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1939), Sylvia Leith-Ross grapples with the question of whether the conventional practices of western anthropology could legitimately claim to produce “objective”, cohesive, and comprehensive studies of the cultures of the world. She concludes that “it is better to admit the human factor at once than to pretend to a complete absence of personal bias” (1965/1939: 40). ¹ She goes on to describe her family background, including the fact that her father and brother had long been connected to colonial Nigeria. By doing so, Leith-Ross underlines her own unreliability as an objective observer and gestures towards the ambiguities and tensions which permeate her ethnographic writing. African Women blurs the boundaries between scientific anthropology, autobiography, and travelogue. Leith-Ross’s authorial voice is self-consciously subjective and the text is peppered with personal, anecdotal observations and metaphorical language. While she admits that her work is “unacademic” (354), stating that her study is based more on “experience of the native than scientific training” (44), in her conclusion she writes:

The subjective outlook has one point in its favour: it does not much matter whether it is truth or fancy that it views, a lie can be as illuminating as the truth, for the form of a lie can sometimes give away more secrets than the truth. (355)

Leith-Ross asserts that she has tried to be as accurate as possible in her presentation of the “daily life of Ibo women” (44), so it is clear that she does not believe that her observations are untrue. Nevertheless, the “form” in which Leith-Ross’s observations are packaged is that of an ethnographic text, the best of which, as James Clifford states, are “true fictions” — “systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them in ways their authors cannot fully control” (1986: 7). With Clifford’s assertion in mind, this article will examine Leith-Ross’s academic study African Women, and her field diaries African Conversation Piece (1944), and Beyond the Niger (1971/1951). Although numerous anthropologists have commented on African Women, no one has yet surveyed Leith-Ross’s other writings in context. This article aims to reinstate Sylvia Leith-Ross as a significant figure of women’s anthropology and the history of British colonialism and seeks to provide a more nuanced critical engagement with her writing than has previously been undertaken, viewing her writings as literary texts as well as anthropology.

Sylvia Leith-Ross’s personal investment in Britain’s colonial project is reflected in the imperialist tone which permeates her writing. Before receiving the Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 1934, which enabled her to carry out her research on Igbo women in Owerri Province, she had already travelled to Nigeria many times. She first arrived there in 1907 with her husband Arthur Leith-Ross, who was the chief transport officer in the northern protectorate of Zungeru. He died in 1908 and Leith-Ross returned home, but she came back to Nigeria frequently and was recruited into the Colonial Education Service, becoming its first female Superintendent of Education. During the Second World War, Leith-Ross worked for the Political and Economic Research Organization, which published and distributed pro-Allied propaganda and monitored Nigeria’s Vichy-ruled neighbours. In the late 1950s, as Nigeria moved closer towards independence, Leith-Ross embarked on her final project to collect pottery samples for a museum in Jos. She set up an impressive exhibition and published her final book, Nigerian Pottery, in 1970. In 1966, she was awarded an MBE for her ethnographic work. Leith-Ross died at the age of 95 in London in February, 1980.

African Women is a long and detailed anthropological study, focusing on the everyday lives of Igbo women in Owerri, Lagos, and Port Harcourt in Southern Nigeria. To current anthropologists, African Women seems old-fashioned and imperialist. Its language is pejorative and any positive representations of Igbo women’s cultural practices tend to be negated by Leith-Ross’s Eurocentric perspective. Leith-Ross oscillates between admiration and condescension, respect and disdain, for Igbo people. Ifi Amadiume states that African Women “reads more like a diary, full of contradictory statements as a result of her racism” (1987: 13). For example, on the one hand, Leith-Ross argues that in the past Igbo culture had been “rich and vital” and its traditional crafts such as pottery deserve to be preserved (55); on the other hand, she states that there is an “almost complete lack of art or craft” (55) and Igbo people are “ready to enter the modern world” because they have “nothing of their own to lose” (68). Other readers have labelled Leith-Ross’s study amateur and unprofessional. In her brief analysis of Leith-Ross’s book, Helen Lacker criticizes it for its “total absence of analysis in the academic anthropological sense” (1973: 145). But Lacker’s critique elides the quite explicit challenges Leith-Ross makes to established anthropological methods. Similarly, Desiree Lewis categorizes Leith-Ross’s study as a “structural functionalist” text but spends no time analysing her writing style and the ways in which African Women does not fit neatly into that model of ethnography (2004: 2).

In contrast, rather than focusing on the value of Leith-Ross’s research for what she contributed (in problematic terms) towards the body of anthropological “knowledge” about Igbo women, this article analyses the “literary” aspects of her writings, reading them as “true fictions”, crafted, both consciously and unconsciously, against the backdrop of the political changes that were occurring in Britain’s relationship with Nigeria, and the intellectual shifts that were taking place in the human sciences in the 1930s and 1940s. Following Clifford, who highlighted the importance of “[confronting] the changing history, rhetoric and politics of established representational forms” (1986: 25), I will demonstrate the ways in which these cultural pressures affected Leith-Ross’s authorial position and the stylistics of her writing.

First, as Cheryl McEwan has argued, white women occupied an ambivalent position in relation to imperial discourses. They were “of the ‘centre’ but also of the ‘margins’; they [were] part of dominant discourses but simultaneously excluded from them” (2000: 176). White women struggled to write with authority on subjects like politics and colonial policy because contemporary gender norms restricted their access to the public sphere. Consequently, their writings are full of tensions and contradictions; they often accentuated their femininity and modesty while their activities highlighted their unconventionality. In the 1930s when Leith-Ross was working in Nigeria, women anthropologists were still uncommon. Leith-Ross had to negotiate gender discourses that undermined her legitimacy as a scientific researcher, and this imbues her writings with a sense of uncertainty and ambiguity. Sara Mills reads such tensions productively, suggesting that cultural constraints on women “enabl[ed] a form of writing whose contours both disclos[ed] the nature of the dominant discourses and constitute[ed] a critique from the margins” (1993: 23). Leith-Ross acknowledges the autobiographical, personal tone of her writings and by doing so implicitly and explicitly problematizes traditional anthropological methods which denied the subjective nature of scientific research. Inadvertently, her autobiographical tone and the literary devices she employs in her work, such as her use of travel tropes and metaphors of landscape, highlight the constructed, intertextual nature of ethnographic writings and the ways in which literary forms such as travel writing reverberate through these narratives.

My perspective here is influenced by the critical frameworks formulated by the “New Anthropology” of the 1980s, whose proponents included Talal Asad, Mary Louise Pratt, James Clifford, and George Marcus. These scholars focused on the constructed nature of anthropological “knowledge” by mapping the history of its development against the backdrop of European colonialism and by tracing the conventions, tropes, and rhetorical devices which recurred in ethnographic writing. By doing so they exposed the power structures that underpinned ethnographic practices and challenged the myth of scientific objectivity. In their seminal essay collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), James Clifford and George Marcus argued that “ethnography is from beginning to end enmeshed in writing” (Clifford, 1983: 120). Ethnographies are amalgamations of bits of information gathered in a variety of ways across a sometimes lengthy time period; interviews with informants are transcribed, and hastily scribbled, “first-hand” notes are collated and rewritten, often at a later date away from “the field” — a move which implies that while the world of the researcher moves forward in time, the community about which s/he is writing remains in stasis (Fabian, 2000). Prior to the 1960s, when it became more acceptable for anthropologists to write self-reflexively about methodologies and praxis, ethnographies were bound by the traditional conventions of the discipline, which dictated that anecdotal, personal reactions to the experience of fieldwork were included in the preface or appendices, leaving the main body of the text free for academic, detailed analysis: the “real thing” (Visweswaran, 1994: 21). Ethnographic writings are representations produced at a specific cultural moment by an individual author from a particular perspective and, as such, they constitute partial “acts of translation”, which elide, exclude, and emphasize certain elements of the communities they purport to reveal in totality. As Claire Chambers concludes, “[far] from being a transparent reflection of how other people live, then, ethnographic writing translates, selects, and fashions its subjects” (2006: 5).

In Writing Culture, rather than simply reducing the study of authorial voices to questions of style, Clifford et al. attended to the “literary processes” of ethnographic writing; the ways in which modes of expression, including metaphor and narrative devices, inflected the cultural phenomena they represented, as well as how they reflected the hierarchies and discourses of difference which undergirded anthropological practices (Clifford, 1986: 4). Many critics have since responded to Writing Culture. ² Some, such as Behar and Gordon (1995), and Restrepo and Escobar (2005) have taken issue with specific gaps in its theoretical paradigm and provided important critiques of the latent race/gender bias present in this early work. ³ Recent engagements with the questions raised by “New Anthropology” have turned their attention to the ways in which “indeterminate” texts such as Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land (1992) critique the discourses of Western ethnographic knowledge and challenge the boundaries of form and genre (Chambers, 2005). This article draws from this extensive critical field by highlighting the literary aspects and intertextual nature of Leith-Ross’s writings and by drawing attention to the historical and cultural context of its production.

Many critics have argued that anthropology was complicit with the colonial project (Mudimbe, 1988, 1994; Said, 1979/1995; Spivak, 1987; Trinh, 1989), but the relationship was not straightforward. Talal Asad and others have argued that while anthropology indirectly contributed towards maintaining colonial ideals, this was not always its primary function (Asad, 1973); indeed, ethnographies were rarely “simple [reflections] of colonial ideology” (Huggan, 1997). Moreover, Jack Goody has pointed out that many anthropologists of the early twentieth century were left-leaning anti-colonialists; for example, Jomo Kenyatta studied anthropology at LSE under Bronislaw Malinowski before he became the first president of Kenya (Goody, 1995: 9). Nevertheless, it was hoped that instruction in anthropology would enable administrators on the ground to govern the colonies more effectively (Kuklick, 1991: 202), and by the late 1920s, all potential colonial officers were required to complete a year-long course in colonial rule, which included anthropology.

In Nigeria in the 1920s and 1930s, tensions were increasing between the colonial authorities and local communities. One of the latter’s many grievances was Britain’s “native” taxation policies, which were commonly used in Britain’s colonies in the late nineteenth century as means of raising revenue. ⁴ The primary aim of taxation was to turn West Africa into a cash economy; taxes were to be paid in British currency and so men had to leave their homes and seek work in order to pay them. By imposing a tax system on local people, the colonial authorities could gain control over the local labour force. Taxation was an element of Lord Frederick Lugard’s model of “indirect rule”, which he had implemented in Northern Nigeria in 1900 when he became High Commissioner. Indirect rule meant that Britain governed through existing emirs, who retained their titles and were often given access to Treasury funds in exchange for pledging their loyalty to the Crown. When the north and south were amalgamated in 1914, Lugard implemented indirect rule across the country. However, the people in the south did not have the same social structures as the largely Islamic communities in the north, which the colonial administrators found easier to understand. In the south “native” administrators were appointed by the colonial government to oversee the implementation of colonial policies; for example, the enforcement of the controversial taxation programme. ⁵ However, these so-called “warrant chiefs” were not chosen by local people and often became corrupt and oppressive (Nzegwu, 1982; Perham, 1935).

Women became directly involved with the anti-tax movement in 1925 when licences were introduced for market women in Calabar. Women’s resistance to government interference in their traditional trading rights culminated in the “Igbo Women’s War”, known as the “Aba Riots” by the colonial administration, which took place in 1929. ⁶ The appointment of the warrant chiefs by the colonial administration ignored the democratic traditions of Igbo society and caused widespread resistance, particularly among women who were being robbed of their historic powers (Nzegwu, 1982). Igbo society was highly democratic and its cohesion was built on consensus. Although it was divided along gendered lines, women were consulted about decisions, particularly those pertaining to trade, which was considered a female domain (Green, 1964; Okonjo, 1976; Van Allen, 1976). News that women were about to be taxed sparked off a series of organized protests in which women exerted pressure on “native” officers via the traditional method known as “sitting on a man”, a punishment meted out to men who devalued women, which involved groups of women protesting loudly outside the perpetrator’s house, taunting him about his virility, or damaging his property. The colonial administration was not accustomed to this type of organized political protest by women and reacted aggressively, killing 50 women and injuring 50 more (Nzegwu, 1982; Van Allen, 1976). The Igbo were an amorphous people to the British colonial administration. Leith-Ross’s African Women and M.M. Green’s Igbo Village Affairs: Chiefly With Reference to the Village of Umueke Agbaja (1947) were part of a drive to acquire more knowledge about this important group of people in the hope of ruling them more effectively in the future. Despite the objections which have rightly been raised at Leith-Ross’s Eurocentric, colonialist perspective, African Women remains a significant early study of Igbo women not least because it was written at a pivotal moment in the history of Nigerian women’s politics.

But it is also important to situate Leith-Ross’s writings within the history of women’s anthropology. Her work can be seen as an early example of what Helen Callaway has described as “a submerged female tradition in “writing culture” (1992: 31). Women anthropologists drew on personal experiences, related daily feelings of achievement and frustration, and tended to highlight the processes of understanding within the main body of their texts rather than relegating them to a separate chapter or appendix (1992: 31). Because of their marginal status in the professional sciences, women tended to justify and legitimize their work far more self-consciously than male researchers. Women anthropologists were more likely to ask questions about their own positioning than men, because they were “more likely to be faced with a decision over which world” to enter (Visweswaran, 1994: 24). Consequently, in women’s anthropological texts, there was often a stronger autobiographical presence, and this is certainly true of Leith-Ross’s work. It was mainly women who wrote autobiographical fieldwork until the 1960s, but their writings can be seen as precursors to the experimental ethnography of male writers such as Paul Rabinow and Vincent Crapanzano. Thus, as Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon pointed out in Women Writing Culture (1995), it can be argued that women anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, Eleanor Smith Bowen, and Jean Briggs were at the forefront of experimental anthropological writing, producing texts that challenged anthropological methods and accepted modes of expression in radical ways.

As I pointed out above, women often adopted shifting authorial positions which are contradictory and difficult to pin down. Leith-Ross’s negotiation of dominant gender discourses illustrates this tendency. Initially, Leith-Ross claims that her gender is an advantage because it allows her to get closer to the minutiae of the community and she can sit around “as little noticed as possible, among the babies and the cooking pots” (83), listening to the concerns of the women from their own lips, whilst observing their daily activities. Leith-Ross’s focus on the domestic lives of women reinforces the notion that her work was amateur and not concerned with politics. This is further emphasized in the foreword written by the former Governor General of Nigeria, Lord Lugard, who distinguishes Leith-Ross’s study from those which focus on the “complex politico-religious tribal organisation” of the Igbo people, saying that her concern is the “daily life” of Igbo women (5). This view is supported by Leith-Ross who is characteristically modest in her acknowledgements and recommends other works which readers might find more comprehensive. However, despite her claim that “no sort of politics come into my sphere of work” (283), elsewhere in African Women she states that women must have a key role in the future development of Nigeria because “their cooperation will be as valuable as their enmity would be dangerous” (20). She maintains that Nigerian women should be trained for careers in education, nursing, and the prison system; they should continue to run the markets but should also be allowed to settle the “water rates”, control “building regulations”, and be given the “executive power” and “funds” to purchase materials and hire labour (350). Leith-Ross believes that Britain should support women’s participation in local and regional governance or risk further resistance. Such statements hardly support Leith-Ross’s claim that she is uninterested in politics.

In addition, Leith-Ross’s relationships with her informants and interpreters are complex and ambiguous. She says that Igbo people had no understanding of the concept of knowledge for its own sake and could not comprehend why she would want to study them (44). When she suggests that Africans would make better anthropologists of their own people because they understood the language and the culture, her interviewees respond with shock: “But we would never dare go into the houses and talk to people as you do! If a black man tried to, they would kill him!” (281). This retort suggests that the Igbo people actually found her presumptuous and intrusive but because of the social position she occupied by virtue of her race they did not feel able to refuse her admission into their homes and their lives. On the early pages of African Women, Leith-Ross says that the local Igbo women accepted her readily, explaining that “having neither souls to save nor taxes to collect, I could move easily among the people and their problems” (45). However, while in Nguru, she contradicts this, saying that local people were reluctant to speak to her. In Nguru, the punishments meted out by the British administration in the aftermath of the Igbo Women’s War were still a raw memory and she was viewed with suspicion by the women there (Bush, 1999: 68). Leith-Ross writes, “the very neutrality of my position was a stumbling block: neither missionary nor trader, I must be government” (177). Leith-Ross was marked out as different; as occupying a privileged and powerful position because of her association with the colonial administration.

Leith-Ross employs several translators to assist her with her research; an Igbo Christian convert, Mary Anderson, a young woman called Salome Njemanze, and briefly, a West African trader, whom she refers to as “B”. Although she acknowledges that using these interpreters distances her from her subjects, she states that Igbo people were quite used to talking through third parties when they addressed chiefs and perhaps might feel more comfortable speaking to her through another person. She does not discuss the power relationship this practice implies for her own research, but does provide some commentary on her personal relationships with the women who worked for her. Leith-Ross describes how Mary introduced her to her family and friends in her local community, which allowed her an insight into Igbo village life. In the evening, they would sit and go through the notes of the day’s research together with Mary “explaining and supplementing”. Salome was much younger and less experienced than Mary, but Leith-Ross explains that she made friends easily with the local girls who were “less defensive than the adults” (48). It is clear that Leith-Ross’s relationship with these two women was key to her gaining the confidence of the subjects she investigated.

However, Leith-Ross states that she was never sure how “reliable” they were as interpreters. Because she could not speak the language she “had to leave the wording of a difficult question to [Mary]” and often had to divert from a line of enquiry when Mary felt it was best to do so (48). She explains that although she was certain there was no “wilful” misinterpretation, in one incident, her interpreter used the word “meeting” in an interview to mean women’s “councils”. Because the colonial officials who investigated the Igbo Women’s War used to describe women’s organizations as “meetings”, the women Leith-Ross is interviewing become angry and frightened. She writes, “I changed the subject directly but suspicion was not allayed” (177). M.M. Green records similar difficulties in her study Igbo Village Affairs, saying that taking notes with a pencil and paper invariably made local people “jumpy” because of their experience with census takers and tax collectors. Green states, “that my coming boded no good was a subject of general agreement” (1947/1964: xvi). Researchers like Leith-Ross and Green were never in complete command of the “material” they investigated. Leith-Ross’s questions to the women were translated through the interpreters she used and those words were adapted to suit the circumstances in which the women were speaking. Furthermore, previous contact with colonial administrators had given them cause to be wary.

In addition, Igbo women remain obscured in Leith-Ross’s texts because they never “speak” for themselves. Despite her undoubtedly genuine desire to do so, Leith-Ross admits that she never got “near to [them] as individuals” (233). The women are rarely mentioned by name, and the only “actual” words that are transcribed at length in her study come from men; one of which is a transcript of an interview and one of which is a written account. In the rest of the study, as was common anthropological practice, individual women are referred to as “A”, “B”, “C”, and as “informants”; “reliable” and otherwise. In this way, the women’s “authentic” voices are rendered opaque by impersonal, generalized pronouns and the interpretations of their translators. The tendency towards homogenization that occurs as a result of this type of mediation is amplified by Leith-Ross’s use of photographs. The photos in the study are of individuals bearing the captions “childhood”, “girlhood”, or “Owerri Types”. Moreover, as Ifi Amadiume points out, by calling her book African Women, Leith-Ross conflates the diverse cultures of the African continent into a single, homogenous group (1987: 13).

Nevertheless, Leith-Ross appears alert to the drawbacks of these essentialist moves. In African Women she argues that “there is no typical portrait one can draw and then say: ‘this is an Ibo’”, and asks “how much less then can one say […] ‘African women do this’ or ‘the women of Africa that’?” (20). Despite the weaknesses of her methodology, Leith-Ross explicitly questions the tendency of anthropology to utilize instrumental rationality by forcing what is diverse and changeable into a rigid, prescribed “system”. She argues eloquently that:

It would almost seem as if we had to get rid of all western concepts of what makes, vitalises and keeps together a community and try instead to accept the possibility that there may be form in formlessness, structure in the very lack of structure. We tend to solidify what is solution, to tabulate what is constantly shifting, to give recognisable names to a system of thought and government which we are as yet incapable of grasping. (68)

Here Leith-Ross suggests that traditional anthropology’s analytical tools are inadequate because they use inappropriate discourses and rely on pre-existing, incompatible models. Leith-Ross implies that anthropology needs a new discourse; one which allows for the fluid, amorphous nature of Igbo communities.

Leith-Ross was proposing a more self-reflexive approach at a time when such ideas were emerging but not yet fully accepted. During the 1920s and 1930s, ethnography was undergoing an “introspective turn”. As George Marcus and Michael Fischer explain, this paradigmatic shift was driven by the “atmosphere of uncertainty”, which surrounded the “nature of major trends of change and the ability of existing social theories to grasp it holistically”. Twentieth-century anthropology, they write, began to “re-examine [previously] taken-for-granted assumptions” about Western superiority, and in doing so began to disrupt common sense notions of what the “development” of civilization meant (1986: 1). “Interpretative anthropology” developed in response to this shift and began to focus more on the research process itself and its implications for the relationship between the observer and the observed (Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 27). Leith-Ross’s writings appear to reflect these shifts. For example, in her conclusion to African Women, Leith-Ross explains that on re-reading her research notes she was “troubled” to find that the “subjective [had] obscured the objective” and that it was difficult to analyse or quote even “one set of facts […] so little [had] they been dissected or tabulated” (354). Nevertheless, she states:

I make no apology for the absence of any recognizable pattern or laid-down laws: the more one studies native life, […] the more does one see that custom is not constant, that behaviour is not according to set patterns, that stimuli do not call for the same response. (355)

The ways in which Leith-Ross’s analysis struggles to be definitive, her acknowledgement of the ultimate unknowability of the “other”, and the fact that African Women is marked by contradictions and moments of uncertainty, echo the criteria that Kamala Visweswaran outlines for experimental anthropology, where “‘pursuit of the other’ becomes problematic, not taken for granted”. Visweswaran describes these writings as “marked by disaffections, ruptures, and incomprehensions. Scepticism, and perhaps a respect for the integrity of difference, replaces the ethnographic goal of total understanding and representation” (1994: 20). However, although these elements exist in African Women, they are undeveloped and rest uneasily alongside Leith-Ross’s goal of producing a legitimate anthropological study. Consequently, I would not argue that African Women is self-consciously experimental. What I am suggesting is that, although Leith-Ross tends to universalize Igbo women and depict diverse individuals as “archetypes” in the ways I have described, she does not do so unquestioningly.

In her follow-up field memoir, African Conversation Piece, Leith-Ross attempts to work through some of the methodological dilemmas raised in African Women. The title of African Conversation Piece suggests that Leith-Ross desired a dialogic, more reciprocal approach to the understanding of African cultures. Leith-Ross’s “I-witnessing” authorial voice places her at the centre of her narrative and she goes into far greater detail about her experiences as a researcher and educationalist. ⁷ She explains her purposes and her methodology confidently and employs a first person narrative voice throughout. In this text, Leith-Ross is more explicit about what she finds problematic about established anthropological techniques which demand an “objective” perspective.

She begins by explaining why the experience of producing African Women made her want to write another book. She states that in African Women, she had attempted to answer some of the questions concerning Igbo women raised by the Igbo Women’s War: the dramatic rise and subsequent fall in palm oil prices, the spread of Christianity, and the implementation of colonial education policies. Still, she felt that much had been “left undone” and she was determined to “work on a definite plan” to “follow up each separate subject to the end [and] to distinguish and classify and dissect” her results (1944: 8). The verbs used here echo the traditional ethnographic project to provide detailed and “complete” pictures of other cultures in an objective and scientific manner. However, Leith-Ross quickly explains that her practice must be somewhat different this time. In her preface, she asks whether it might be possible “to find some other way of entering the life of a strange race”:

Would it be possible to make the experiment of sitting still, asking no questions save those that would arise in any normal conversation, ascertaining no facts, computing no statistics, seeking to prove no argument or draw any conclusion? Could I remain inactive, and, reversing roles, play the part of the listener rather than that of the questioner? Could I give up all thought of seeking or observing, denude myself of all the orthodox principles of research, and, merged with the surrounding life, deliberately make a method of lack of method, by merely being receptive? (1944: 8)

Like the ideal functionalist anthropologist, Leith-Ross wishes to enter an almost “mystical communication” with the community she is observing in order to reach an understanding of their culture (Kuklick, 1991: 190). In this extract, Leith-Ross’s ideal researcher is a passive figure, able to absorb their surroundings without influencing the behaviour of their “subjects”. Leith-Ross’s desire to be “inactive” and to “reverse” the roles of researcher and subject suggests that she is uncomfortable with the implied hierarchy between the observer and the observed. Furthermore, she gestures towards the tantalizing possibility that she may be able to reverse the scientific gaze and, in so doing, challenge the dichotomous relationship which always leaves her on the outside looking in. The image of “denuding” suggests that research methods which require her to play an active “seeking”, “questioning” role function as a stifling cloak of which she must divest herself if she is to enter a truly “receptive” state.

Furthermore, Leith-Ross writes that she cannot bring herself to pick up a “staid notebook and pencil and go and work out kindreds, or division of labour, or rotation of crops”, noting “with horror” that she has collected hardly any “facts”. Nevertheless, she states that she “can’t help it” and “[does] not want to help it”, declaring that she is “seeing Onitsha in my own way, and it is the only way in which I can see it” (1944: 55). Here Leith-Ross emphasizes her subjectivity and acknowledges her partiality, becoming entangled with what Clifford Geertz has argued is one of the central discourse problems of anthropology: “how to get an I-witnessing author into a they-picturing story” (1988: 84). Geertz contends that “to commit oneself to an essentially biographical conception of Being There [sic] […] is to commit oneself to a confessional approach to text-building” (1988: 84), one which self-consciously reveals the constructed nature of ethnographic knowledge. Such writings run the risk of conveying a “sense of the uncertain [and] the inauthentic” (1988: 90) by exposing the taken-for-granted assumptions that lend anthropological “knowledge” its legitimacy as constructs and rhetorical conventions.

So far I have argued that Leith-Ross’s authorial “I” creates incongruities and tensions in her writings that reflect her engagement with the discourses of gender and traditional anthropological methods. In the final part of this article I will show how these ambiguities alert the reader to the intertextuality of her texts, which further challenges the notion of objectivity in ethnographic writing. Although, as Clifford asserts, an ethnography “is usually distinct from a novel or a travel account” (1986: 6), echoes of anthropology’s antecedents — natural history and travel writing, for example — can be traced in its own discursive practices (Pratt, 1986: 27). Travel writers drew on established literary traditions, for instance, European “quest” sagas such as The Odyssey and chivalric tales such as the Arthurian legends, to engage their readers. In so doing, they made the foreign landscape seem familiar but also helped to consolidate the image of the traveller/explorer as “hero”. In the nineteenth century, travel and exploration played a crucial role in “knowledge gathering”, both for the advancement of science in intellectual terms and for the development of trade and the imperialist project (Pratt, 1992). The writings produced by explorers and amateur naturalists during the expansion of the British Empire contributed towards the growing body of “Orientalist” writing that Edward Said has shown constituted a “considerable dimension of modern political–intellectual culture”, reproducing images of foreign people and places in a manner which tended to shore up notions of Western superiority and claims to power (Said, 1995: 10). As Marcus and Fischer have argued, like travel writing, the “main narrative motif [of ethnography] was the discovery by the writer of a people and places unknown to the reader”, hence the inclusion of “arrival scenes”, anecdotes of cultural misunderstandings and heavily descriptive passages, which proved the author’s legitimacy (Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 24; Geertz, 1988: 79). However, these highly constructed texts denied the presence of “literary” devices and motifs by simultaneously promoting notions of “scientific” objectivity. As Paul Rabinow explains, “an experiential ‘I was there’ element establish[ed] the unique authority of the anthropologist; its suppression in the text establish[ed] the anthropologist’s scientific authority” (1986: 244).

African Conversation Piece and Beyond the Niger are field memoirs and, as such, are less bounded by the conventions of academic anthropology than African Women. Leith-Ross’s creative use of figurative language is more marked in these texts, where metaphors of landscape and water are particularly striking. West Africa was figured differently from other parts of the continent. The east, south, and parts of central Africa were considered suitable for white settlement because of the relatively temperate climate, but the writings of famous nineteenth-century explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley and Richard Burton represented West Africa as the “white man’s grave”; a dangerous and disease-ridden region full of violent “natives”. ⁸ This continued well into the twentieth century. For example, Graham Greene wrote that West Africa evoked a specific “quality of darkness, of the inexplicable” in the mind of the traveller (1950: 9). Sylvia Leith-Ross admitted that West Africa had a “dark reputation”, largely because one fifth of the European population died or were “invalided home” every year (1983: 37).

The West African landscape was figured as dark and primal, harbouring myriad dangers for the unwary traveller (McEwan, 1996; Youngs, 1994). But it was also lush and unspoilt. Although rural Africa was described as primitive and barbaric, it also represented a pre-colonial, pre-modern Eden, the loss of which was mourned by colonial “old hands” like Leith-Ross as modernization began to spread. Hence, Leith-Ross’s later writings are inflected with a kind of “imperialist nostalgia”; a phenomenon which, as Renato Rosaldo has argued, “revolves around a paradox [;] someone deliberately alters a form of life and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to his or her intervention” (1989: 108). Ironically, it is the modernity that British colonialism brought to West Africa in the form of capitalism, infrastructure, and education that Leith-Ross laments. In response she romanticizes the African bush, expressing her discomfort with the rapid changes that were occurring in Nigeria as the country moved closer towards independence. She recalls the “heroic” explorers and colonial administrators of the past who persevered and flourished in the challenging environment of early colonial Nigeria in order to shore up notions of British resilience and bravery and mitigate the fact that Britain’s influence in Africa was on the wane.

In African Conversation Piece, Leith-Ross alludes to the long tradition of travel writing, saying that the stories she was told by her father and brothers “made [her] see the waterways and forests, mangrove swamps and scrub-covered hills” of West Africa (1944: 32). She says of the famous explorers Mungo Park and Mary Kingsley, “I owe so great a debt to them that I can never repay it, but at least I can remember them” (1944: 32). The intertextuality of African Conversation Piece is reiterated in the preface by Leith-Ross’s colleague, Hanns Vischer, who claims that he went to West Africa after being “inspired” by Mary Kingsley and states that readers of Leith-Ross’s book “will find the following pages strangely reminiscent of that famous writer and traveller, who, in her day, revealed Africa to those who wanted to see” (1944: 6). ⁹ For Vischer, Leith-Ross’s writing makes the forest, rivers, and villages “her very own”, and he writes that readers will find the region is brought so close that they will feel like they have visited the “Ardennes or the Abbruzzi” and not “the mysterious, tropical forest on the lower Niger” (1944: 6). The juxtaposition of the “exotic” and the familiar Vischer produces here is indicative of the ways in which Africa was contrasted with Europe and figured as the “Dark Continent” in colonial literature.

Travel motifs can also be found in Beyond the Niger. In this text Leith-Ross is less generous towards Nigerians and more nostalgic about British colonialism, perhaps reflecting her own insecurity as Britain’s power in the region was being challenged more forcefully. Sections of Beyond the Niger read like a travelogue in which Leith-Ross emphasizes her courage, her physicality, and her independence, travelling with local guides and without mention of European companions. She recounts stories of “ju-ju” (1971/1951: 73), “leopards”, and “evil spirits” (1971/1951: 78) lurking in the African bush and finds the sense of “childish importance” she feels when travelling turns to “humility” as she recalls the archetypal nineteenth-century explorer, who journeyed in “even greater discomfort” and in “far greater danger” than she (1971/1951: 80). Leith-Ross relishes in her travel adventures and recounts her brushes with danger enthusiastically. For instance, when attempting to visit a waterfall in the middle of some dense forest, Leith-Ross highlights her ability to negotiate the treacherous landscape. She writes:

Terrified at the thought of being left behind, alone in the gloom with those snaky roots and twisted trunks and that strange distant murmur, I boldly sat down and slid. Occasionally I hit up hard against a tree or got caught on the edge of a rock, but on the whole it was successful, and with a last rush I landed on flat ground and saw before me, beautiful beyond imagination, a silver waterfall pour into a jet-black pool. (1971/1951: 69)

Here, the dark and mysterious terrain evokes a sense of foreboding, but the waterfall Leith-Ross encounters is described as being truly whole and self-confident in its own identity. Leith-Ross writes: “It was complete in itself, and knew itself, so that one could hear it singing: I am a waterfall! I am a waterfall!” (1971/1951: 69). The self-assured wholeness of the waterfall contrasts with the insecurity white colonials like Leith-Ross felt post-Second World War.

Water is an important symbol of stability in Leith-Ross’s writings and it is the benchmark against which she measures change. The River Niger is a constant presence in her texts and represents an underlying structure which ties her memories of Africa together. For Leith-Ross, the Niger is “both a riddle and an explanation […] so old that one thinks of it always existing in a space before the earth existed, and yet its waters pour always new” (1944: 40). Leith-Ross recalls travelling up the River Niger in a slow-moving steamboat when she first arrived in Nigeria. She suggests that this mode of transport gave her time to absorb the nature of her surroundings (1944: 12). She writes that travellers who journeyed slowly up-river towards their destinations rather than travelling in cars or trains were more likely to see that Nigeria was “highly diversified geographically and equally differentiated ethnographically”. This “was a valuable education that a swift-moving plane [could not] impart” (Leith-Ross, 1983: 42). According to Leith-Ross, travellers who came to Nigeria in the early twentieth century gained a far deeper understanding of Africa and its people than the colonialists of the 1950s because they had time to learn the “first letters, so to speak, of the African alphabet” (1944: 12). What she perceives as a more profound connection to Africa was reached through patience and the opportunities for observation that slow-motion transport provided.

Leith-Ross juxtaposes images of the grand, meandering Niger with symbols of modern life in order to illustrate her discomfort with the shifting economic, social, and political circumstances of twentieth-century Nigeria. For example, in African Conversation Piece, she mentions a native traffic policeman struggling to control the chaos of the Nigerian roads: “When the tangle of lorries, cycles, carriers and palm-oil barrels became too close, he turned back and gazed, abstracted and oblivious, Niger-wards” (1944: 12). She implies that as he drowns amongst the symbols of modernity — motorized transport, and the production and movement of export goods — the policeman longs to return to an older, simpler, and slower pace of life in rural Africa, symbolized by the River Niger. Ironically, the image of the river “rolling along” returns in Beyond the Niger, but this time in a song played on Leith-Ross’s own symbol of modernity and the globalized movement of cultural products: the gramophone. The song she plays for the villagers gathered around is, of course, “Ol’ Man River”.

For Leith-Ross, Africa’s past is located in the rural landscape. In all her writings Leith-Ross expresses concern that Igbo people were losing their connection to the land and consequently their “traditional” lifestyles. In an interview Chinua Achebe conducted in Lagos in the 1960s Sylvia Leith-Ross apparently asked him “but where is my beloved bush?” Achebe describes her tone as “self-mocking” and “gentle”, calling her “at worst […] a starry-eyed conservationist” (2000: 18). But in her memoirs Stepping Stones, written in the 1960s and published posthumously in 1983, Leith-Ross’s anguish at the erosion of African traditions is rather more problematic than Achebe suggests. In this text, Leith-Ross attempts to work through the paradox her “imperialist nostalgia” creates by shifting the blame from colonialism to Nigerian nationalism. In her later writings, nationalist desires for independence are figured through images of accelerated time, which portray ambitious Africans as careless and foolhardy. Leith-Ross says, “from one day to another, they wanted [independence] at once, the next day, that very evening” (1983: 119) and would not be told that “the pace was too fast” (1983: 143). Portrayals of Africans rushing forward thoughtlessly, embracing Europeanness, and greedily “gobbling” up modernity instead of eating it “slowly, prudently, and in proper sequence” (1944: 31) are contrasted with images of “unspoilt” Africans such as Leith-Ross’s servant, Johnson-O. In contrast to the “have your cake and eat it” mentality (1983: 136) of the rising African intelligentsia, Johnson-O is a comfort to Leith-Ross because he has “never eaten of our food” (1944: 32). Drawing once again on the connection between the rural and a stable, unchanging past, she says that there is something “tree-like about him. His roots go so deep into the soil that nothing can move him” (1944: 32). The ways in which Leith-Ross connects pre-colonial Africa with the rural, and decries the effects of modernity and urbanization, rehearse images of Africa as a “timeless” place which only entered “history” at the start of Britain’s colonial project. In doing so she elides Nigeria’s own history before Europeans arrived.

Leith-Ross argues that by introducing capitalism and the concept of individual desire along with it, colonialists themselves “taught [Nigerians] to consider the future” (1983: 119). However, for Leith-Ross, the educated Nigerians emerging from the colonial education system lack the maturity to pursue their desire for independence prudently. In her later writings, established images of Africans as “childlike” re-emerge and she describes how colonialists found themselves “walking a tightrope” between “fatherly benevolence” and “an exaggerated confidence in the people’s adulthood” (1983: 136). In the end it seems as if Leith-Ross yearns to return to an early colonial Nigeria where everyone knew their place in society. Faced with increased pressure from Nigerians to leave their country, Leith-Ross’s writings romanticize the African bush and emphasize the “simplicity” of traditional lifestyles. Moreover, her texts recall nineteenth-century travel narratives and recapitulate images of Britain’s “heroic” colonial past. Together, these moves re-establish British administrators as culturally and morally superior to the emergent Nigerian leaders, and thus seek to justify old colonial hierarchies.

Leith-Ross’s engagements with the methodological dilemmas emerging in anthropology during the “introspective turn”, coupled with her ambivalent position as a female researcher, create an ambiguous and shifting authorial voice in her writings, which draws attention to the constructed nature of ethnographic writing. This is potentially progressive because it signals her discomfort with established anthropological practices and pre-empts more confident moves made by experimental ethnographers in the 1960s and 1970s. However, Leith-Ross’s later writings are inflected with a nostalgic tone which laments the changes occurring in Nigerian society as the country moved closer towards independence, and she begins to fall back on the same imperialist ideologies her methodological questions appear to challenge. Ultimately, Leith-Ross’s writings are highly problematic for contemporary anthropologists alert to Eurocentric and imperialist discourses. Nevertheless, I have demonstrated here that Leith-Ross’s writings constitute a significant body of work that reveals much about Britain’s relationship with Nigeria at a pivotal moment in colonial history, as well as about the developments that were taking place in the field of anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century.