The Bond Legacy

Let me begin with some words from George Bond about George Bond:

My concern has always been with inequality and with the relation of different peoples to concepts and practices of inequality (TC Media Center, 2001).

The models of social scientists [which] sometimes take on a stagnating involuting dimension … are primarily for the consumption of the fellow members of their own community … In contrast … the participant models … are constantly being tested and redefined by the dialectical confrontation between belief and action [and] by the necessity of adapting norms and values to the conditions of living. (Bond, 1971: 94–96)

In 1963, I confronted Zambian nationalism in a … striking form [when] meeting older Yombe men and women who knew of the late James Aggrey, the founder of Achimota College in Ghana. They had been students at Livingstonia mission in 1924, when Aggrey visited there as a member of the Phelps-Stokes Commission on African Education. During his visit, he had given his famous speech on Africa for the Africans, and they had remembered his words for thirty-nine years. Since Aggrey had worked with my grandfather at Livingston College in North Carolina, I knew of the speech, and its meaning was familiar to me. These older Yombe and I had connected in a fundamental way, one … very different from fragmented constructs of central African ‘tribes’ set out by colonial administrators. We were part of a broad social and intellectual field … British colonial officers had told me that the Yombe would not accept me, but I had arrived in Uyombe with the correct credentials. (Bond, 2000: 88)

George Clement Bond was born in 1936. As a child he lived in Tennessee, Alabama, Haiti, Liberia, and Afghanistan, and his early experiences remained important to him. In October 2013, in regards to a book concerning North Africa recommended by Roberto Alvarez, George emailed me:

I am reminded of the summers [my brother] Max and I spent in Tunisia; we lived in Carthage below the headquarters of the FLN, the army of the exterior. How wonderful it was to be young and how foolish it was not to engage more actively in the cultural transformations of the time and the historic moments of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. We lived close to Roman ruins. From our house in Sidi-Bou-Said beneath us the waters were calm and blue and above us the struggle was violent, marked by the red blood of men, and, ultimately, the ululations of desperate women who mourned the dead and wanted peace.

Growing up, George met accomplished scholars, artists, and diplomats in his home. He also recalled being thrown into the back of a police car at age 13, and being unable to buy a cup of coffee near the Capitol in Washington, DC. He attended high school in Kabul before beginning college at Boston University, then site of one of the two “first phase” U.S. African studies programs, and where his mentor was the anthropologist, Elizabeth Colson. His first African fieldwork in Sierra Leone in 1961, and then in Zambia in 1963–65, led to a 1962 London School of Economics M.A. and to a 1968 Ph.D. under supervisor, Lucy Mair.

I met George in fall 1968 at Columbia University and participated in his first seminar on Africa with fellow students, Nina Glick Schiller and Robert Launay. I have loved him since. We quickly became quasi-informants to each other: me to him about the Columbia department in which I had been an undergraduate and graduate student since 1963, and about the momentous campus events during the semester before he arrived; him to me about current British social anthropology, especially the Manchester fieldwork approaches of which he was an experienced practitioner and I an eager apprentice. I remember hearing George read what became his first ethnographic publication, “Kinship and conflict in a Yombe village” (Bond, 1972), at the New York Academy of Sciences. George’s wife Alison, my wife Lani, and Allen and Orna Johnson were in the audience. George shared his first office at Columbia with Allen, and their friendship resulted in a co-authored paper on kinship, friendship, and exchange (Johnson and Bond, 1974).

George’s major work concerned the Tumbuka-speaking Yombe people of Isoka District in Northeast Zambia. After his initial visit he returned in 1973, 1976, 1981, 1994, 1997, and 2002. His book The Politics of Change in a Zambian Community (Bond, 1976), and a score of masterly papers (Bond, 1972, 1974–75, 1975a, 1975b, 1978, 1979, 1982a, 1987a, 1987c, 1990, 1991, 1992, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Johnson and Bond, 1974) traced social and economic transformations forward over four decades, and back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This body of rich, detailed ethnography concerns myth, history, colonialism, political change and continuity, kinship, labor migration, entrepreneurship, agricultural development and underdevelopment, gender, and a complex ritual field of ancestor spirits, denominational and independent Christian churches, local and regional prophets, witchcraft, and diviners. Those familiar with George’s writings know that he was also a thoughtful critic of classic social theory, engaging with ideas of Malinowski, Durkheim, Weber, Maine, Mauss, Turner, Horton, Marx, Rude, Hobsbawm, Thompson, Collingwood, Ricoeur, and Gramsci.

Among his Yombe papers is one George graciously contributed to a volume I edited, Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (Bond, 1990). Here he tells how and why, on the occasion of Chief Edwall Wowo’s installation, two Yombe royal clan members inscribed their genealogical emendations in a copy of George’s Politics of Change book, with instructions to enter them in the next edition. Early in 2014, there was another chapter to this story that George shared with me. He had recently received the January 10, 2014 High Court for Zambia ruling of Mrs Justice PCM Ngulube concerning the 2012 installation of Chief Muyombe. A challenge from three Uyombe royal clan members to this installation as illegitimate was sustained, largely on the evidence of George’s book The Politics of Change, which Mrs Justice Ngulube cited copiously in her 23-page ruling. George was delighted and proud, and told me that: “this means we have entered into the reality we study,” but that this was inevitable, and had already happened long ago, anyway.

During the later 1980s, as the HIV/AIDS crisis was gathering in Africa, George and his colleague and friend, Joan Vincent, conducted short-term fieldwork in Uganda. They co-authored several papers about local and international HIV/AIDS responses and the social context of the disease’s expanding frontier (Bond and Vincent, 1997a, 1997b, 2002). They also organized a conference at Columbia, where George was Director of the Institute of African Studies, a post he held for 11 years, and co-edited, with John Kreniske and Ida Susser, a resulting volume Aids in Africa and the Caribbean (Bond et al., 1997).

This AIDS volume is one of six books and two special journal issues George edited or co-edited. They reflect a wide-ranging vision of emergent social and intellectual issues, largely focused on Africa, and include: African Christianity, co-edited with Walton Johnson and Sheila Walker, and dedicated to Arthur Fauset (Bond et al., 1979); Social Stratification and Education In Africa (Bond, 1982b); The Social Construction of the Past, co-edited with Angela Gilliam and taking broad survey of the politics of knowledge (Bond and Gilliam, 1994); Witchcraft Dialogues: Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges, co-edited with Diane Ceikawy (Bond and Ceikawy, 2001); Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories, a multi-disciplinary window into “second phase” African Studies, co-edited with Nigel Gibson (Bond and Gibson, 2002); Globalization and Africa (Bond, 2003); and The Languages of Africa and the Diaspora: Educating for Language Awareness, co-edited with Jo Anne Kleifgen and bearing a back-cover endorsement from Noam Chomsky (Kleifgen and Bond, 2009). Editing essay collections is time-consuming, and here George more than paid collegial dues. In all, these volumes feature the work of 81 contributors, including appearances in 2 each by George’s long-term friends, William Shack, Walton Johnson, Joan Vincent, and Leith Mullings.

George undertook another editing project in the 1990s that I only learned about in 2014. He was series editor of The Heritage Library of African Peoples, a set of 56 impressively illustrated children’s books “for ages 9 and up” published by the Rosen Publishing Group. I enjoyed reading E. Ofori Akyea’s (1998) informative Ewe volume, concerning an area of West Africa with which I have some direct familiarity.

George told me there had been some criticism that the series continued the representation of Africa in “ethnic group” terms, but I think he remained pleased with his effort and the greater good rather than harm it might bring to young readers. His series introduction makes clear how he saw the importance of Africa, its people, and their cultural traditions in global history—past, colonial, present—and conveys his overall hope for how they might think about Africa:

There is every reason for us to know something about Africa and to understand its past and the way of life of its peoples. Africa is a rich continent that has for centuries provided the world with art, culture, labor, wealth, and natural resources. It has vast mineral deposits, fossil fuels, and commercial crops.

But perhaps most important is the fact that fossil evidence indicates that human beings originated in Africa. The earliest traces of human beings and their tools are almost two million years old. Their descendants have migrated throughout the world. To be human is to be of African descent.

The experiences of the peoples who stayed in Africa are as rich and diverse as those who established themselves elsewhere. This series of books describes their environment, their modes of subsistence, their relationships, and their customs and beliefs. The books present the variety of languages, histories, cultures, and religions that are to be found on the African continent. They demonstrate the historical linkages between African peoples and the way contemporary Africa has been affected by European colonial rule.

Africa is large, complex, and diverse. It encompasses an area of more than 11,700,000 square miles. The United States, Europe, and India could fit easily into it. The sheer size is an indication of the continent’s great variety in geography, terrain, climate, flora, fauna, peoples, languages, and cultures.

Much of contemporary Africa has been shaped by European colonial rule, industrialization, urbanization, and the demands of a world economic system. For more than seventy years, large regions of Africa were ruled by Great Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. African peoples from various ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds were brought together to form colonial states.

For decades Africans struggled to gain their independence. It was not until after World War II that the colonial territories became independent African states. Today, almost all of Africa is ruled by Africans. Large numbers of Africans live in modern cities. Rural Africa is also being transformed, and yet its people still engage in many of their customs and beliefs.

Contemporary circumstances and natural events have not always been kind to ordinary Africans. Today, however, new popular social movements and technological innovations pose great promise for future development. (Bond, 1998: 6–7)

In 2001, George Bond was appointed the William F. Russell Professor of Anthropology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he had been a faculty member since being recruited by colleague and friend, Lambros Comitas, in 1974. He chaired the TC Department of International and Transcultural Studies, and headed the Center for African Education. Over the years, he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center; received U.S. Department of Education, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Maryknoll grants; delivered the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Distinguished Keynote Address; was elected President of the American Anthropological Association Section for Africanist Anthropology; served on the editorial boards of American Ethnologist and American Anthropologist; and taught and lectured at numerous universities in the U.S. and Africa. From 1995, he was a Member of the International African Institute Council, and served five years as chair.

For several years, George was at work on two projects reflecting his own long duree as scholar and participant in social worlds enveloping those we study and us, a distinction he did not embrace. Both efforts were seriously impeded by the health issues he faced following his 2002 fieldwork in Zambia. The first was to be a capstone Yombe volume, glimpses of which may be discerned in his articles and book chapters. “They’re back to what Audrey Richards saw in the 1930s,” he told me in 2009, alluding to the rise and fall of hybrid maize production, and the contemporary “bleak” situation of malnutrition, hunger, and “sinking into poverty” he wrote about following his last Zambia visit (Bond, 2002: 8).

The second project, long brewing, was a social portrait of the African American “coterie of itinerant scholars, social critics, and political activists,” as he put it, who were Rosenwald Fund fellows during the 1920s and 1930s, many of whom George knew personally. Like the mission-trained Zambian elite George focused on from the Uyombe perspective, this Black American intelligentsia had a far-reaching national impact. I heard bits of this project in conversations with George across the years. The portion we have in print is a remarkable interview with anthropologist, St. Clair Drake, whom George first met in 1954, published in American Ethnologist in 1988 (Bond, 1988). This is a vital document for understanding the history and roles of anthropology, and anyone who has not read it really should.

I close with one last Bond quotation, from George’s Society for Applied Anthropology keynote address, and as relevant today as when written in 1986—a fateful year in which, perhaps not for the better, anthropology shifted direction from what George hoped might follow, and after which, he often said, “we lost two decades.”

The conflicting ideals … confronting anthropology should not … destroy [it] as one of the primary idioms for expressing cross-cultural responsibility and commitment, especially when we are increasingly turning to the study of western peoples and the peoples we have studied in the past are becoming very much like us … Most of us fall in the ranks of the powerless and are the recipients of policies made by others. There are issues to be debated, opinions to be tested, and new ones to be formulated through practice. Here is the promise of a vibrant anthropology. (Bond, 1987b: 16)

I am glad George chose to conclude with the word “vibrant.” It is a word with which I would like to remember him.