¹ Professionally, and in all their publications, neither ever used Christian or middle names, but simply initials, G.W.B. and L.S.B. (The second and third in each case were acquired family names, Brereton and Bazett being their mothers' maiden surnames.) Huntingford was known to colleagues, at least in later life in London University, as “Diccon.” Leakey was always Louis—pronounced “Lewis”—to family and associates.

² A.C. (later Sir Claud) Hollis, , The Nandi: Their Language and Folklore (Oxford, 1909)Google Scholar. Sixty years later Oxford University Press reprinted this book, with a new introduction by Huntingford, inter alia defending Hollis from certain unnamed “people who claim that the book is not accurate” (xi). This was returning a compliment, Sir Claud having in his old age provided a brief foreword for Huntingford's own book about the Nandi of 1953.

³ Nandi Work and Culture (London, 1950/1951)Google Scholar; The Nandi of Kenya: Tribal Control in a Pastoral Society (London, 1953)Google Scholar; The Southern Nilo-Hamites (London, 1953)Google Scholar. These are further discussed below.

⁴ Oliver, Roland (In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History [London, 1997], 59)Google Scholar, on being appointed lecturer in “the tribal history of East Africa” at SOAS in 1948, met Diccon Huntingford in the Africa Department. While recalling him as “an amateur ethnographer of the old diffusionist school,” Oliver appreciated the older scholar's experience of East Africa and the advice he offered on feasible openings for historical research.

⁵ Apparently the Rhodes Trust in Oxford, which supported Leakey during the two years of research, was unwilling in 1939 to subsidize the publication of the manuscript running to about 700,000 words (see Leakey's, autobiography, By the Evidence [New York, 1974], 109–10)Google Scholar; and then the outbreak of World War II frustrated further negotiations. Eventually the work was published posthumously in 1977 by Academic Press in three volumes as The Southern Kikuyu before 1903. As explained by Leakey's widow, Mary, in the Foreword (v), over the years “Louis steadfastly refused to abbreviate the manuscript and insisted that it should be published in toto or not at all.” But its existence was well-known in both anthropological and government circles; and during the Mau Mau crisis of the 1950s and the rapid transition to Kenya's independence early in the following decade, with enhanced interest in anthropology generally and the Kikuyu in particular, this manuscript acquired the aura of a hidden store of essential knowledge. Leakey himself alluded to it in his popular and political writing of the period (and certain scholars were privileged with access to parts of it). But, being unpublished, it was not subject to scrutiny or review, and it may be that Leakey was happier leaving it like that. See Berman, B.J. and Lonsdale, J.M., “Louis Leakey's Mau Mau: a Study in the Politics of Knowledge,” History and Anthropology 5(1991), 143–204, esp. 180CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and further discussion below.

⁶ As expressed by Chief Koinange in the foreword to the first part of Leakey's autobiography, White African (London, 1937)Google Scholar.

⁷ See Leakey's own account in White African, and Cole's, Sonia biography, Leakey's Luck (London, 1975), 57fGoogle Scholar, for the archeological expeditions of 1926-27 and 1928-29, almost entirely spent in the Nakuru-Elmenteita elevated section of the Rift Valley. Various other incidental allusions to the exploration and excavations are contained in his research volumes, The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (Cambridge, 1931)Google Scholar and The Stone Age Races of Kenya (Oxford, 1935)Google Scholar.

While content, student fashion, to camp in a disused pigsty, Leakey showed no inclination to “go native”—despite his assuming the role from the 1930s on of explaining the African view, and his anecdote about upsetting settler sensibilities by filling his water cans himself and carrying them to camp. Moreover, his Kikuyu study in the 1930s (as described below) was conducted at a distance, relying on selected informants, thus avoiding direct participation or personal involvement in rural life and society.

For comparison, Huntingford—as far as one can deduce—would have maintained settler standards quite meticulously. There is no indication that he communed socially with those Nandi (or Kony and Okiek) informants from whom he gained his ethnographic and linguistic data (although, in contrast to Leakey's Kikuyu study, his methods involved more direct observation and recording). In a revealing letter of 1931 to the School of Oriental Studies (later SOAS) in London University inquiring about available courses and the possibility of external study to save expense, Huntingford bemoans the lot of the white farmer struggling through the depression—still awaiting the “first proper coffee crop,” while barely recovered from the effects of drought followed by locusts. To cut costs he had had to lay off labor and—the ultimate indignity—”[m]y wife does the cooking.”

⁸ See Stone Age Cultures (Cambridge, 1931)Google Scholar, with the supporting appendices, by J.D. Solomon (a geologist attached to Leakey's team for a season) and C.E.P. Brooks (a British paleoclimatologist); also an earlier note by Leakey, and Solomon, in Nature 124(1929), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and a developed treatment in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in 1931, “East African Lakes” Geographical Journal 77(1931), 497–514CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Leakey was not the first to use pluvial terminology in East Africa and to consider correlations with European glacials. His thinking was influenced by E.J. Wayland, then Commissioner for Geology in Uganda, who visited Leakey's work in Elmenteita in 1927 and 1928. Moreover, foremost in his background reading was Gregory, J.W., The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa (London, 1921)Google Scholar, with its recognition of both faulting and ancient lacustrine deposits and shorelines. The validity of some of the East African evidence for pluvials was undermined about mid-century by independent studies, alongside theoretical considerations concerning global climate suggesting that, as a general rule, reverse correlations with high-latitude glacials would seem more plausible.

⁹ The term Kalenjin, now used for this grouping of culturally- and linguistically-related people of the western highlands, was not known in the 1920s/1930s. Huntingford always called them the “Nandi group,” the Nandi themselves being roughly central (although the Kipsigis on their southern side would have been more numerous). Later he disapproved of academics adopting Kalenjin, for either the people or the language; in his view the term was simply invention for political purposes as Kenyan independence beck-oned.

¹⁰ This notion that anything remarkable or advanced in the African interior should be attributable to some outside or superior race vaguely identified as “Hamitic” was typical of settler imagination. But Huntingford also relied on his reading; a particular influence here appears to have been SirJohnston, Harry, The Opening Up of Africa (London, 1911, in the popular Home University Library series)Google Scholar, cited by Huntingford, , “Azanian Civilization of Kenya,” Antiquity 7(1933), 153–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Ibid. Although this was the first occasion on which Huntingford used the term “Azanian,” the gist of his conviction that the archeological hollows (both earthen and stone-enclosed) and other features of the Nandi and Uasin Gishu landscape had nothing to do with the Sirikwa of local memory, and must be the remains of a preceding and unrelated population of northern origin, had formed several years earlier. (See his “Local Archaeology in Kenya Colony,” Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society 6(1926), 3–26.Google Scholar) This issue will be discussed further in the second part of this paper.

¹² See note above. The second part of his autobiography, covering 1932-1951, was published posthumously as By the Evidence (New York, 1974)Google Scholar. Leakey's life is told not only in Cole's quasi-authorized biography, Leakey's Luck, but also by Virginia Morell in a family biography, Ancestral Passions (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. For a scientific assessment of his archeological and paleontological achievements, with a bibliography and reminiscences by a number of scholars, see Isaac, Glynn L. and McCown, Elizabeth R., eds., Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence (Menlo Park, 1976)Google Scholar.

¹³ The Huntingford collection in SOAS Library contains 81 files, some dating to his years on SOAS' staff (1948-66), others to his time in Nandi or nearby (1921-40), and wartime duties (1940-45 in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somali territory, with a brief assignment in Madagascar). Some of these papers are drafts for publications or lectures, or materials later incorporated in books and articles. There is also a personal file which reveals several details of his career. My thanks to David Anderson for pointing out this collection, and to the archivists at SOAS for their assistance.

¹⁴ After preparatory years at Winton House, Winchester, he took a scholarship at Radley College. In this he parted from a family tradition—established by Bishop George Isaac Huntingford (1748-1832) and maintained by his nephew (effectively his fosterson) and succeeding generations—of proceeding as scholars from Winchester College to New College, Oxford, and subsequently taking holy orders, some of them returning to Winchester as fellows. His father, Rev. Edward Wynn Huntingford (1860-1952), varied from this tradition only in being elected to a postmastership at Merton, instead of New College, in Oxford. The choice of Radley in North Berkshire for G.W.B. Huntingford's schooling may have been influenced by its being closer to home, his father holding, before and during World War I, a living in the Vale of the White Horse (and there may perhaps, in awarding scholarships, have been a preference for sons of Oxford diocesan clergy). The grounding in classics was extended at sixth form to comparative philology (mentioned in correspondence with SOAS). His learning was clearly bolstered by his father (remembered as “eruditissimus”), who had taught in prestigious schools between, and sometimes alongside, holding a succession of rural benefices, and had also spent a decade, mostly before marrying in 1899, as professor of Classics in an Anglican college in Toronto. I am indebted to the archivists at Winchester College and Merton and Exeter Colleges, Oxford, for their assistance. The outline of E.W. Huntingford's career is recorded in Crockford's Clerical Register annually until his death.

¹⁵ It is not clear why the Huntingfords, father and son, emigrated to Kenya when the one was sixty years old and the other nineteen, both lacking, it seems, any farming experience. The Kipkaren salient, in which the farm allocated to E.W. Huntingford was situated (after a brief initial stay on the Elgeyo border to the east), had just been excised from the north end of the Nandi “reserve” to accommodate the government's soldier-settler scheme after World War I (the cause of a running political grievance: see Huntingford, , Nandi Work and Culture, 79, 108–09Google Scholar; and Ross, W. McGregor, Kenya from Within [London, 1927], 80–82Google Scholar, for a scathing account of the government's handling of this scheme and caving in to settler pressure). That seems to have given rise to an assumption—probably a misapprehension, but one current in settler oral tradition till the 1960s—that Huntingford senior had served as chaplain to the troops during the War. Although he held no specific cure in Kenya (other than being licensed to officiate), he is said to have offered spiritual care, if thought needed, to the surrounding settler community, with a habit of arriving on horseback at neighbors' farm doors about lunchtime, thus earning himself the sobriquet “Rev. Hunting-Food.” It is difficult now to verify the accuracy of such memories, and it is possible that some confusion had occurred between the reputations of Huntingford father (Rev. E.W)—who returned to England in 1931—and son (the anthropologist G.W.B) who kept the farm until 1937. It seems that at least one other relative—on G.W.B.'s mother's side—was in Kenya in the 1920s: Capt. C.S. Brereton, who was headmaster of Narok School in the mid-1920s. He drew the young Huntingford's attention to an Early Stone Age handaxe found in that vicinity (Huntingford, , “Local Archaeology,” 23Google Scholar).

¹⁶ Kenya Land Commission: Evidence (Nairobi, 1934), 656–94 (Leakey)Google Scholar; 2029-60 (Huntingford).

¹⁷ These were published in Nairobi in the (technically unofficial) Peoples of Kenya series by the Church Missionary Society's Ndia Kuu Press. A further military assignment was the preparation (with a Major C.R.V. Bell) of a handbook, East African Background, for European officers and NCOs. Its intention was (1) “to give an outline of the essential features of East African tribal life, a knowledge of which is indispensable if one is to understand the African” and “to get the best out of” the troops under one's command. Those introductory remarks and a list of 222 tribes, all the way from British Somaliland to Northern Rhodesia, appear to be Bell's contribution, while Huntingford took on the more intellectually challenging sections, including historical background, “tribal organization” and other anthropological topics deemed relevant to winning the war.

¹⁸ Leakey, , Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London, 1952)Google Scholar, and idem., Defeating Mau Mau (London, 1954), the former incorporating a useful synopsis of the massive but still unpublished Kikuyu study written in 1939. During the Emergency he also produced a number of articles for British newspapers. Having already had published in London in 1936 a short book, Kenya: Contrasts and Problems, moralizing on social and political affairs, with critical comments on both the administration and the settlers for their failure to understand “native” behavior and grievances, Leakey felt particularly qualified for this role.

¹⁹ Huntingford, , The Southern Nilo-Hamites (London, 1953)Google Scholar; idem., The Northern Nilo-Hamites (London, 1953), and idem., The Galla of Ethiopia with The Kingdoms of Kafa and Janjero (London, 1955). The first of these covers essentially Kalenjin and Maasai (and a few random groups, defying neat classification, around the southern end of Maasailand in Tanzania). These volumes were compiled almost entirely from the existing literature, Huntingford's direct experience being virtually confined to Kalenjin.

²⁰ This careless attitude to anthropology in Kenya, and the local reputations of “authorities” who lacked training in modern theory and field methods, must be behind a barbed comment by the British social anthropologist of southern Sudan fame, E.E. Evans-Pritchard: “Anthropology in Kenya has been left to the initiative of individuals. Our knowledge of the peoples is not a good advertisement for scientific laissez-faire.” (introduction, Peristiany, J.G., The Social Institutions of the Kipsigis [London, 1939], xiiGoogle Scholar). This was after Evans-Pritchard's field season in Kenya in 1936, which was mostly spent in Luo country (see his “Luo Tribes and Clans,” Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 7[1949], 24–40Google Scholar) although, had the administration not thwarted his intentions, he would have worked among Maasai or Turkana to gain comparative materials on cattle-keeping societies and age-set organizations. That frustration may explain the sniping tone, but a further factor at the time he wrote would have been Leakey's embarking on the Kikuyu project without, in the opinion of certain social anthropologists in Britain, the requisite training for the job. Leakey was not entirely lacking experience of social-anthropological research, having previously published a study of Maasai living on or west of the Mau escarpment (“Some Notes on the Masai of Kenya Colony,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 60[1930], 183–209Google Scholar). That, like the Kikuyu work, was conducted by interview with selected informants; apparently it was a side activity while he was involved in his archeology at Elmenteita.

²¹ See especially Berman and Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey.”

²² Huntingford, , Nandi, ixGoogle Scholar; and see above on Huntingford's Nandi-English dictionary.

²³ As candidly stated in his “Miscellaneous Records Relating to the Nandi and Kony,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 57(1927), 417–61Google Scholar. Despite his youth and lack of academic qualifications, Huntingford was elected Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1926 and in 1928, during a visit to Britain, he addressed the Institute, his subject being “A Preliminary Survey of the Nandi-Speaking Tribes of Kenya Colony and the Uganda Protectorate” (paper in Huntingford collection, SOAS). This combines anthropological documentation, useful for its time, with ethnological platitudes: for instance, “[t]he Nandi and Kipsikis are the finest people between Nairobi and the Victoria Nyanza … They are incorrigible cattle-thieves, but otherwise … are fairly honest.” In 1932, when giving evidence and submitting memoranda to the Kenya Land Commission, Huntingford was styled “Local Correspondent for Kenya of the Royal Anthropological Institute” (KLCE, 2029)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Huntingford, Nandi, x, mentioned “many conversations” with Evans-Pritchard. Presumably they met during the latter's short season in western Kenya in 1936. Evans-Pritchard's understanding of Kalenjin social and political structure—set out in his article “The Political Organization of the Nandi-Speaking Peoples,” Africa 10(1940), 250-67Google Scholar—relied heavily on Huntingford's information (for providing a map inter alia) and was helped further by the complementary research then being undertaken on the Kipsigis by Evans-Pritchard's junior colleague, J.G. Peristiany, Social Institutions. Speculatively, it may have been through Evans-Pritchard's recommendation that Huntingford was admitted for his BSc studies at the former's Oxford college, Exeter.

²⁵ (Oxford, 1940), 16.

²⁶ Published in 1980 by the Hakluyt Society (which had previously produced documentary materials on Ethiopia edited by Huntingford with his Arabist colleague at SOAS, Charles Beckingham). See Beeston's, A.F.L. review in BSOAS 44(1981), 353–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, indicating that Huntingford's scholarship was not up to the standard normally expected of the Hakluyt series. The subsequent edition by Casson, Lionel, Periplus Marts Erythraei (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar, is generally considered more reliable for textual treatment and translation and more judicious for commentary.

²⁷ Despite Beckingham's note (xi) mentioning Huntingford's “intimate knowledge of the topography and ethnography of East Africa” (a phrase repeated on the blurb), it appears that Huntingford's career included only fleeting visits to the coast, in particular when traveling by sea from and to Britain. On his passage in 1938 he made sketches of landmarks around the Horn of Africa recorded in the Periplus (reproduced on 25, 27), an indication of his life-long scholarly interest in this and related texts.

²⁸ See Leakey, , White African, 310–11Google Scholar: “[t]he most ancient real ancestors of present-day man so far discovered,” referring in particular to the portion of lower jaw found in Kanam West gully. In Stone Age Races (London, 1935), 131Google Scholar, while finding reasons for distinguishing this fragmentary find as Homo kanamensis, that is, as a species slightly separate from H. sapiens, Leakey nonetheless insisted on regarding it “a true ancestor of modern man;” see below for further comment.

²⁹ Later, in his public lecturing Leakey liked to emphasize that from an early age he realized that the search for human origins and evolution in Africa demanded a lifetime's commitment to fieldwork, implying that for that reason he had not settled for an “armchair” academic position (in some unnamed university). His bitterness about his treatment by the British academic establishment came out occasionally: see Antiquity 41(1967), 228Google Scholar, reacting to Charles McBurney's rather patronizing review (ibid. 73-74) of Leakey, , Olduvai Gorge, 1951-61 (Cambridge, 1965)Google Scholar. While lauding the Leakeys' work as a credit to British science, McBurney insisted that “the efforts of two workers, however heroic … cannot possibly be adequate to the magnitude of the task ahead.” Leakey retorted that his citizenship was (at this time) no longer British but Kenyan, and that the Olduvai research had been supported largely by American funds.

³⁰ In answering a question following his Chatham House lecture in 1930 on “Colonial administration in Kenya from the native point of view” (in the series “Comparative Methods of Colonial Administration”), Leakey, while generally critical of settlers' politics and understanding, admitted (ibid., 24) that he was aware of “one or two who knew Nandi fairly well.” He may have been thinking here of Huntingford, and also perhaps of I.Q. Orchardson (actually associated with Kipsigis rather than Nandi), who had defied social conventions and had also prepared a dictionary and a general account of the Kipsigis. The latter was eventually published, after editing and abridgement by Matson, A.T., as The Kipsigis (Nairobi, 1961)Google Scholar. Leakey's lecture touched almost entirely on the Kikuyu.

³¹ See Oliver's, Roland recollection (In the Realms of Gold, 168)Google Scholar of a conversation in the 1950s with Sir Philip Mitchell—the most eminent of colonial servants, having been Chief Secretary in Tanganyika, Governor of Uganda and then of Kenya (after which he stayed on as a settler)—who imagined that “until about five hundred years ago East Africa had probably been uninhabited.” That this was not an unguarded aside on Mitchell's part is clear from his autobiography, African Afterthoughts (London, 1954), 18–19Google Scholar: “[b]etween the stone implements” of some 30,000 years ago—a vague allusion to some aspect of Leakey's discoveries—”and Dr. Livingstone there is nothing …. Nothing at all of African Africa: not a ruin, nor a tomb, nor an inscription; indeed not even a legend supporting anything resembling tribal history for more than a few generations.” He saw the “single case” of Great Zimbabwe as “a fort built by some colonising or exploring people,” and the East African coastal ruins as similarly foreign.

³² Huntingford, , “Azanian Civilization,” 163Google Scholar. In bringing African field archeology and ethnographic observations to attention in Britain (both in this article and in several notes in the same journal over the next two years), Huntingford seems to have been encouraged by the founder and editor of Antiquity, O.G.S. Crawford, who had himself some African experience in the Sudan some twenty years earlier and was always looking for analogies through time and space for illustrative effect: see Crawford, , Archaeology in the Field (London, 1953)Google Scholar.

³³ Huntingford, , “Azanian Civilization,” 153–65, esp. 162Google Scholar; idem., Nandi Work and Culture, 8; and comments in 1966 on my own research in that region.

³⁴ Terracing, : “Azanian Civilization,” 161Google Scholar (noting reports from Tanganyika), with supplementary note in Antiquity 8(1934), 211Google Scholar (on the Elgeyo escarpment in western Kenya); irrigation: “Azanian Civilization,” 159-61. Writing just before rumors began circulating about Engaruka in the Tanzanian part of the Rift Valley, Huntingford was stretched to demonstrate archeological examples of irrigation works which could be attributed to the Azanians, citing merely some very unconvincing signs of old furrows or canals in Nandi: see also idem., “Local Archaeology,” 20.

³⁵ This insistence on seeing the Nandi as culturally a pastoral people (as expressed in his books of the 1950s noted above), regardless of their actual economy, had formed in his early days in the district. See his “Remarks upon the History of Nandi till 1850,” Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society ns 5(1927), 3–11Google Scholar, affirming (3) that the Nandi are “essentially a pastoral tribe,” but then tracing their settlement of the district which began, so he learned from his oral sources (5-6), with the wooded and broken country in the southwest, while avoiding for some time the grassland plateau to the north and east. The failure to recognize this seemingly obvious contradiction must be attributed in part to the contrasting emphases of the information he was collecting, the clan traditions pointing to areas of settlement (and clearance for cultivation), where-as his enquiries into the operation and terminology of the age-set system necessarily elicited a focus on cattle management, with protection of the herds and the pastures—as well as raiding to increase both.

³⁶ And, as the modern commentator would immediately note, unbalanced genderwise as well, Huntingford's account reflecting largely a male view of society—from the fixation on cattle to military organization based on age-sets, and also to the authority of (male) elders and prophets.

³⁷ In imagining these civilized Azanians arriving in the Kenya highlands with their skills in masonry, road construction, agricultural improvements, and engineering—for wells, irrigation canals, etc—and a few centuries later departing, leaving the same country to be possessed by backward tribes and revert to barbarism, Huntingford would have had in mind the Roman conquest, occupation, and eventual abandonment of Britain, as all that was generally narrated in English History teaching of his generation. Such a Roman imperial analogy (let alone its unarticulated resonance with British ideals of the time) would have been lost on Leakey, with his defective schooling (from a conventional British angle) and lack of historical sensibility. An anecdote told by Peter Shinnie in Robertshaw, P.T., A History of African Archaeology (London, 1990), 227Google Scholar, recalls Leakey's philistine reaction to an impressive Roman ruin which happened to stand by the route of an excursion from Algiers arranged for the Second Panafrican Prehistory Congress in 1952. As the founder of the Congress (having successfully convened the first in Nairobi in 1947), Leakey could not conceal his impatience with the dilettantism of participants' supposedly committed to the continent's prehistory—and perhaps his lack of empathy with the classical appreciation of many of his British and European colleagues.

³⁸ Also striking is the paucity of illustrations—or their schematic nature, the plans of homesteads reflecting norms or social ideals as much as specific examples measured on site—a further indication of where Leakey's heart did and did not belong in this Kikuyu undertaking. In the preface of Southern Kikuyu, xiii, he acknowledged this skimping of material culture (“little more than a catalogue”), claiming lack of time, and referring readers to “the excellent account” of W.S., and Routledge, K., With a Prehistoric People: the Akikuyu of British East Africa (London, 1910)Google Scholar. That is a rare acknowledgment in this three-volume work, otherwise remarkable for its virtual avoidance of referencing either to comparative or theoretical literature or to specific studies relating to Kenyan ethnography and recent history. See, however, Leakey, , By the Evidence, 77Google Scholar, alluding to the Routledges' book—“excellent in some respects, …. disappointing in many others”—and dismissing that of FrCagnolo, C., The Akikuyu: Their Customs, Traditions and Folklore (Nyeri, 1933)Google Scholar, as “one-sided and biased.”

³⁹ He and Mary did spend part of 1937 “in a small two-room hut … in the village of Kiamba,” but that was specially made available inside Senior Chief Koinange's own compound so that Leakey could be “in constant touch” with the “two senior advisers” appointed for the project: Leakey, , By the Evidence, 79Google Scholar. This underlines the nature of the exercise, which needed “official” approval from the elders of Kiambu district whom Koinange assembled, and was intended to produce their idea of an authoritative text. Leakey's job was essentially to record and organize the material: “I promised to make any alterations or additions [the elders] considered necessary for the sake of accuracy” (78). See further below.

⁴⁰ “See Southern Kikuyu, 51, mentioning some test excavation, but in a rather dismissive way. Leakey's suggested relationship of these “Gumba pits” in Kikuyu country to the supposed “neolithic pit dwellings” near Nakuru in the Rift Valley—Sirikwa hollows in fact—is based on both faulty ground observations and invalid archeological deductions (explained in the second part of this paper). For subsequent investigations of “Gumba pits” in the high forests above the Kikuyu settlement zone, see Taylor, D.R. Fraser, “The Gumba and ‘Gumba Pits’ of the Fort Hall District,” Azania 1(1966), 111–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The attention given by Leakey (and/or his informants) to land tenure and its historical background, including clearance of forest for cultivation and settlement and Kikuyu dealings with Dorobo forest dwellers for that purpose, was politically inspired, Kikuyu elders feeling that their arguments presented to the Kenya Land Commission a few years previously had been overridden: see Berman/Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey.”

⁴¹ The choice of 1903, in preference to the round date of 1900, which would correlate closely enough with the establishment of British rule, is presumably explained by 1903 being the year of Louis Leakey's birth at Kabete. The wording of the title, of course, may not have been his own in the late 1930s, but that of his posthumous editors and publishers who handled the manuscript in the 1970s.

⁴² This is not to overlook problematic aspects of handling and interpreting this class of evidence, discussed by Henige, David, The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar, and by myself in “The Antecedents of the Interlacustrine Kingdoms,” JAH 34(1993), 33–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ For instance, Lang'at, S.C., “Some Aspects of Kipsigis History before 1914” in McIntosh, B.G., ed., Ngano (Nairobi. 1969), 73–93Google Scholar, offering a chronology of Kipsigis generation-sets back to the mid-sixteenth century, by assuming three complete cycles of seven names and twenty-one years per set. I have discussed these issues in The Archaeology of the Western Highlands of Kenya (Nairobi, 1973), 10–11Google Scholar; and “The Kalenjin” in Ogot, B.A., ed., Kenya before 1900 (Nairobi, 1976), 21–52Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Huntingford, , “Miscellaneous Records,” 423Google Scholar; idem., Nandi, 2, 9, 151—and 152 on Kakipoch's grave and its tending. In KLCE, 2037, Huntingford put Kakipoch's arrival in Nandi more precisely at ca. 1608.

⁴⁵ E.g., Baumann, H., Thurnwald, R. and Westermann, D., Völkerkunde von Afrika (Essen, 1940)Google Scholar; Murdock, G.P., Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History (New York, 1959)Google Scholar. Murdock (ibid., 40) expressed his antipathy for what he saw as a specifically anti-historical prejudice among British social anthropologists, naming in particular Radcliffe-Brown, who had taught Huntingford.

⁴⁶ Huntingford, , “The Distribution of Certain Culture Elements in East Africa,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 91(1961), 251–95Google Scholar; idem., “The Peopling of the Interior of East Africa,” in History of East Africa, ed. R. Oliver and G. Mathew (Oxford, 1963), 1:58f; idem., “The Hagiolithic Cultures of East Africa,” Eastern Anthropologist 3(1950), 119-33. The three volumes that Huntingford compiled for the International African Institute's Ethnographic Survey of Africa-The Southern Nilo-Hamites (London, 1953)Google Scholar, The Northern Nilo-Hamites (London, 1953)Google Scholar, and The Galla of Ethiopia with The Kingdoms of Kafa and Janjero (London, 1955)Google Scholar—all contain a section headed “History,” as dictated by the series' format, but in each case they are brief and perfunctory. Despite a definite sense in Huntingford's mind of the depth of the cultures, peoples, and broader groupings he was describing, he resisted any temptation to sally into the speculative realm of culture-history or to suggest any sort of cultural or linguistic chronology. He certainly thought about the origin of supposed Hamitic elements—age-set systems, among other traits—in Kalenjin, Maasai, and other “Nilo-Hamitic” cultures, and seems to have imagined a considerable, if unfathomable, time depth for these. Thus he did not see a direct legacy of the Azanians whom he created from his archeological recording,.despite their also being Hamitic in his imagination. Such a reconstruction might have looked neat but would have assumed uncomfortably recent contact: for the areas he knew best Huntingford was happier keeping his ethnology and archeology separately compartmentalized. From a modern perspective one would point out that his insistence that the Azanians occupied vast tracts of Kenya and northern Tanzania from the late first to mid-second millennium CE makes it difficult to locate proto-Kalenjin, or more generally early Nilo-Hamites (Plains and Highland Nilotes by later classification), in both time and space.

⁴⁷ Leakey, , By the Evidence, 78Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ For the background and methodology of this Kikuyu study and the role of Chief Koinange see Berman/Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey,” esp. 171f; also Clark, Carolyn M., “Louis Leakey as an Ethnographer,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 23(1989), 380–98Google Scholar; and Droz, Yvan, Migrations kikuyus: des pratiques sociales à l'imaginaire (Neuchâtel, 1999), chapter 2Google Scholar. While Leakey was involved in this assignment, Jomo Kenyatta's shorter and contrasting account of Kikuyu life and society was published as Facing Mount Kenya (London, 1938)Google Scholar. As Berman and Lonsdale explain, Kenyatta was emerging as a junior political rival to Koinange; moreover, in London he was encouraged academically by the eminent social anthropologist, Bronislav Malinowski, who was critical of Leakey's training and methodology for undertaking his Kikuyu project. Kenyatta's book, while relying on native knowledge—“Anthropology begins at home,” as Malinowski hailed it (ibid., vii)—is, like Leakey's, hardly a research study in the normal sense, and its representation of the Kikuyu is, for all its differing emphases and its interesting presentation of political and land issues, arguably no less ahistorical and sentimental.

⁴⁹ That did not prevent him, as someone who “knew Africa,” from attempting occasionally to explain individual archeological features (or objects excavated by himself or his wife Mary) through ethnographic analogy, by invoking the example of some tribe or other, or more vaguely guessing about “native custom.” See, for example, M.D., and Leakey, L.S.B., Excavations at the Njoro River Cave (Oxford, 1950), 76Google Scholar; also Louis' mistaken analogy, which he foisted on Mary, between “hut-circles” and “pits” (i.e., Sirikwa hollows) near Nakuru and the sunken, rectangular, earthen-roofed houses of the Iraqw in northern Tanganyika: cf Leakey, , Stone Age Cultures, 201Google Scholar; and Leakey, M.D., “Report on the Excavations at Hyrax Hill, 1937-1938,” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 30(1945), 365–67, 372, pl. XXXIGoogle Scholar (further discussed in the second part of this paper).

⁵⁰ For a summary statement in a collection of lectures see his Stone Age Africa (Oxford, 1936), 174Google Scholar, noting “Bushman affinities” of the Late Stone Age shell-mound people of the shores of Lake Victoria; and “a physical type which is almost European” for the “Neolithic” Gumban cultures of the Rift Valley. See ibid., 172-74, on the tall and generally non-negroid physical type represented by Late Stone Age skeletons recovered from Gamble's Cave and elsewhere; also Njoro River Cave, 41-71, for measurements and cephalic indices of skulls from that site, and ibid., 72-73, for comparisons with other archeological and modern samples. Generally, however, Leakey preferred to avoid direct discussion of modern connections. Nevertheless, his descriptions of the excavated skulls and skeletons served in the succeeding decades to bolster ideas of the prevalence of former Hamitic (and “proto-Hamitic”) populations in East Africa: see in particular Cole, Sonia, The Prehistory of East Africa (London, 1954), 96fGoogle Scholar, and her rather less confident treatment in the revised and expanded edition (New York, 1963), esp. 266f, 332f. Later Hiernaux, Jean, The People of Africa (London, 1974, being part of a world series under Cole's editorship), esp. 62, 126, 140Google Scholar, noted broad comparisons between Leakey's Rift Valley archeological specimens and an existing physical type labeled “elongated Africans,” comprising Tutsi, Masai, Galla, etc

⁵¹ Note, however, his Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (London, 1936)Google Scholar, in which, writing for a general readership, he did feel it necessary (31-33) to try explaining his Neolithic population—which he was now describing as “agriculturalist,” presumably because of stone grinding equipment found—and the gulf which he imagined between that and the present inhabitants of Kenya. Anticipating the question of skin color, he insisted “there is no native race in Kenya to-day to which they can be compared,” with the further evasive suggestion that the “present-day tribes” are probably “an intermingling of the Stone Age agriculturalist with an invading Negro stock,” the latter perhaps originating in the Sudan. This vague line has something in common with the overview in Seligman's, C.G.Races of Africa (London, 1930)Google Scholar. But a stronger influence on his approach to physical anthropology—including classification of races and cephalic indices, as well as definitions of “negro” and “negroid” and acceptance of an Hamitic factor in East Africa—was clearly that of his Cambridge tutor, Haddon, A.C.: see The Races of Man and Their Distribution (2d ed.: Cambridge, 1924)Google Scholar. Another important British influence on methods of examining skulls, features to be measured, and identification of types and races was that of Sir Arthur Keith, the most eminent physical anthropologist of the day, although Keith was not persuaded by Leakey's categorical “non-negroid” evaluation of the bulk of his Rift Valley finds. (See Morell, , Ancestral Passions, 50–52.Google Scholar)

At the same time Leakey suggested a connection between his Neolithic in Kenya and the Iraqw people of northern Tanzania. This suggestion may have partly arisen from noting the unusual language of the Iraqw—classified as Hamitic, or in modern parlance Southern Cushitic—but was largely based on observations during his expedition of 1935 to the Engaruka “ruins” which, so he guessed, constituted an abandoned Iraqw site, and bolstered by mistaken comparisons of both grinding equipment and supposed settlement features between Hyrax Hill in the Kenya Rift Valley and Engaruka. He seemed to regard the latter site as a late (Iron Age) derivative of (what he considered) “Neolithic” occupation at Hyrax Hill. These ideas clearly influenced Louis' recommending Hyrax Hill to Mary as a site worthy of excavation in 1937/38, while he was occupied with his Kikuyu study: see note above.

⁵² This is the gist of his first book, The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (Cambridge, 1931)Google Scholar, followed by The Stone Age Races of Kenya (Oxford, 1935)Google Scholar, the latter in particular betraying the author's anxiety to publish promptly his human skeletal discoveries and interpretations. The cultural evolutionary emphasis is further illustrated in Olduvai Gorge: a Report on the Evolution of the Hand-axe Culture (Cambridge, 1951)Google Scholar. Leakey was not necessarily consistent theoretically, and was apt to contradict his line when complications were pointed out. See his Stone Age Africa, 185-89, suggesting parallel cultural evolution in parts of Africa, western Asia, and Europe during the later periods of the Stone Age to accommodate his description and dating of the advanced paleolithic materials (with blade technology represented at Gamble's Cave, discussed in the second part of this paper) which he had been calling Aurignacian after a famous typesite in France. This problem, and the question of parallel traditions, were foreseen in Stone Age Cultures, being perhaps pressed on Leakey by his supervisors, but the issue was not squarely addressed there.

⁵³ Leakey's approach to the Stone Age and to the nomenclature for its stages and variants was more obviously Eurocentric than that of Wayland, who was recording materials in Uganda and around Lake Victoria in the 1920s (including the Sangoan and Magosian type-sites). It was more markedly out-of-line with the independent system being pioneered in South Africa and developed by John Goodwin, with the assistance of C. van Riet Lowe and encouragement from Miles Burkitt in Cambridge, who was mentor to both Goodwin and Leakey. The essential formulation and scientific acceptance of the South African scheme—built around a broad sequence of Earlier, Middle and Later Stone Age instead of European Paleolithic divisions—occurred in the late 1920s, that is, during the very years when Leakey was deep into his first fieldwork and, being largely out of academic contact, deciding for himself the attributions and classification of his finds. Apparently Leakey did not appreciate the scope of this intellectual divergence until his visit to South Africa in 1929 and return to Cambridge to present his work. While not acknowledging the dilemma openly, he endeavored to solve it by rather unsystematically slotting—in Stone Age Cultures of Kenya of 1931—certain distinctive South African cultural categories (notably Stillbay and Wilton) into his essentially European scheme. Similarly when Leakey did plump for a local name, it was always for insertion into the same scheme (for instance, Elmenteitan, which, alongside the distinct Kenya Wilton, he placed within the Mesolithic category). In his subsequent publications, moreover, while duly noting Goodwin's South African schema for comparison, he did not espouse it philosophically in the way that other archeologists began doing for central and eastern parts of Africa. This will be discussed further in part 2 of this paper.

⁵⁴ Not until later in his career did Leakey show any interest in the Taung fossil skull, the first Australopithecine found in South Africa in 1924, which was studied and publicized by the anatomist Raymond Dart in Johannesburg. In scientific circles Dart acquired a reputation as a local maverick and tended to be shunned. The change in attitude was signaled at the First Panafrican Congess of Prehistory, which Leakey organized in Nairobi in 1947, where the accumulating Australopithecine evidence from South Africa was presented and its mainstream significance for human evolution pressed by Wilfred Le Gros Clark, professor of Anatomy in Oxford. (See Cole, , Leakey's Luck, 151f.Google Scholar, and Leakey, , By the Evidence, 201Google Scholar; also ibid., 22 for an interesting hindsight remark.) Then in 1948, with the Leakeys' unearthing on Rusinga island in Lake Victoria the much older Proconsul skull (in the Dryopithecine group) and, in 1959/60, of early human and near-human fossils from the lowest levels at Olduvai (the ultra-robust Austrolopithecine, originally called Zinjanthropus, and Homo habilis, regarded as the maker of the earliest stone tools), and their dating to nearly two-million years, a much clearer case emerged for the evolution of the line leading to humanity from the Miocene to the Pleistocene in Africa. In this way the increasing number of Australopithecine fossil specimens, found in southern as well as eastern Africa, began to fall into a context.

⁵⁵ For Gamble's Cave and skeletal finds excavated there see Leakey, , White African, 223–25Google Scholar, as well as idem., Stone Age Cultures, 91f. For Kanam see ibid., 131; idem., Adam's Ancestors (London, 1934), 2. Many years later, Tobias, Phillip V. (“A Re-Examination of the Kanam Mandible,” Actes du IV^e Congrès Panafricain de Préhistoire [Léopoldville, 1959], 1:341–60Google Scholar) confirmed its likely antiquity against critics who had suspected an error in recording its stratigraphic position, but disputed the supposed modern anatomical characteristics. See also Leakey, , White African, 311Google Scholar, on visiting Rusinga island in 1932 to examine Miocene beds which he felt had the potential of yielding an “early sub-human ancestor of man”—a prediction fulfilled some fifteen years later by the discovery of the Proconsul skull.

⁵⁶ See SirKeith, Arthur, The Antiquity of Man (rev. ed., London, 1925), esp. 514Google Scholar, on Eoanthropus dawsoni (Piltdown Man) which “beyond question represents the earliest specimen of true humanity yet discovered;” cf. Leakey, , Adam's Ancestors, 219–21Google Scholar, and idem., By the Evidence, 22-24. Influenced by Piltdown, Leakey was hoping to find examples of essentially modern Homo (H. sapiens or something close to it) in a very ancient situation (Middle, if not Lower, Pleistocene). This was a false trail—as the subsequent fossil discoveries in Africa, including his own, demonstrated.

⁵⁷ See Leakey, , Adam's Ancestors, 46Google Scholar: “[s]tudy of the cultures of early man from all over the world [reveals] the constancy of the tool types which characterize different cultural stages, in spite of the great variety of kinds of stone employed, showing that material is a very subsidiary factor in Stone Age technique.” In a “completely rewritten” edition (London, 1953), 30, Leakey was more emphatic on this point, refuting the contrary opinions of certain unnamed prehistorians.

⁵⁸ His dogmatic defence of this view must relate in part to his assigning, during his first bout of fieldwork, the abundant obsidian blades and other tools—and associated skeletons—in the lower deposits of Gamble's Cave to the Aurignacian, even though he seemed later to modify his stand on that supposed relationship (and accepted the alternative term Kenya Capsian, after a North African site, for this industry, implying not quite so great an age).