443pp., b/w & colour illus., maps, hardback, d.w., Cape Town, 2016

The biography of Monica Wilson née Hunter (1908-1982). Born to missionary parents in Lovedale in the Eastern Cape, she gained a doctorate in anthropology from Cambridge in 1934. She married Godfrey Wilson in 1935, and they undertook fieldwork with the Nyakyusa in Tanzania between 1935 and 1938. Godfrey Wilson committed suicide in 1944. Monica taught at the University College of Fort Hare from 1944 to 1946 and at Rhodes University from 1947 to 1951. She was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town from 1952 until she retired in 1973.

"This book is a treasure - an intimate, illuminating portrait of two extraordinary human beings, written with grace, with respectfulness and with sympathetic curiosity. Monica and Godfrey's marriage illuminates with unusual clarity the relationship between the intellectual and the erotic life and speaks vividly to the connections between thinking, loving and being alive." Jonny Steinberg, author of "The Number", "Midlands" and "Three-Letter Plague"

"This is a rich and illuminating intellectual biography of one of Southern Africa's most important twentieth-century social anthropologists, but it is much more besides. Morrow's meticulous research and sensitive account reveals the wider political tensions inherent in apartheid-era social science research, and the personal consequences of intellectual positions." Professor Megan Vaughan

Seán Morrow is Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Fort Hare and a professional editor.

THE FIRES BENEATH, the life of Monica Wilson, South African anthropologist

: Morrow (S.)

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