Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Obituaries
Those of us who have worked in the Cameroon Grassfields, as well as many scholars from Cameroon, owe a huge debt to Sally Chilver, who has recently died just a month short of her 100th birthday.
Born a little inconveniently in Turkey the day before the First World War broke out, Sally Graves spent her early years following her father, Phillip Perceval Graves, between England, Greece and Turkey. He was then a foreign correspondent for The Times; notably he exposed the anti-Semitic tract the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a plagiarized copy of a pamphlet on quite a different topic. Through him she came into contact with a variety of key contemporary figures, including T. E. Lawrence and Tommy Hodgkin, the radical African historian. Reading history at Somerville, Oxford, she became, in her own words, 'a fairly typical left-wing groupie of the early thirties', temporarily converted to Marxism and supported the Jarrow hunger marches. Following graduation, she spent the winter of 1935 travelling alone by bus and sometimes on foot through the Middle East, passing through Jerusalem, via the Lebanon to Damascus, and returning to Cairo. Back in England she found herself in the august company of luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, Isaiah Berlin and Robert Graves, her paternal uncle. She married Richard Chilver, a classics scholar, in 1937.
In her mid-twenties, Sally Chilver first came into contact with the French Cameroons when she was recruited to a new section of the War Cabinet Office dealing with the strategic overview of trade with the overseas territories of France and Belgium. In 1947 she joined the Colonial Office and, in time, became temporary principal and secretary of the Colonial Science Research Council, which brought her into contact with a number of the founding ancestors of British anthropology, including E. E. Evans-Pritchard, C. Daryll Forde, Raymond Firth and Audrey Richards, as well as with their ideas. She first encountered Phyllis Kaberry, who was to become her close friend and collaborator, in 1951 when she assisted in preparing Women of the Grassfields for publication. Around this time she also met Ruth Landes, who introduced her to American anthropology. In 1957 Sally moved to the Institute of Colonial...