A Visit to Kings College, Cambridge

What a legacy I've received from my university friend Archie Mafeje! And it wasn't just his political mentoring I'm talking about.

I visited him twice in the 1960's at King's College, while he was studying there for his PhD. More than 50 years later, even though I'd invited myself, I was treated like an honored guest - all because of the photograph I have of him, which I'd scanned and sent to the University at the request of Tamsin Starr. She contacted me on behalf of The Black Cantabs Research Society, who wanted to have a photo exhibition of black graduates from Cambridge to counteract the mass of portraiture around the university, which is largely of white men and monarchs.

I was given my own personal guided tour by her, mischievously photographed on various illustrious senatorial thrones, interviewed for almost 2 hours by an academic in the Department of Social Anthropology and finally invited to High Table as the guest of the interviewer, who is a Fellow of the College.
It was an extraordinary day.




     

The Fellow who offered to host me was Dr Perveez Mody - a petite Indian woman who does research into love marriages in India. Even before I met her, when we were corresponding, I knew we would get on well. Why? Because she understood immediately that my big question about dining at High Table was sartorial. What was I going to wear? I was not going to spend days trying on dresses when I never wear them. Did I have to pack an extra pair of shoes? She reassured me - it was just before Easter so it would not be formal. Whew!

A Photograph of Archie

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My first post on this blog in 2011 was about an exhibition that Andrew Banks mounted of Archie Mafeje's university life in Cape Town. Because the article had photographs of him, I have been contacted ever since by people wanting to use them. This one below is hanging up at the Department of Social Anthropology at Kings College Cambridge!

Last year 3 different people wanted pictures. Some were even prepared to pay for them.

But I didn't take the photograph! I wonder if someone could tell me whom it might have been? There were pavement photographers in the city who took pictures of people walking - mostly in Adderley Street - although I think this one from 1961 of Archie with Welsh Makanda, was taken in Darling Street.  The photographer would give you a ticket and you could collect the pictures some days later after they were developed. You were not obligated to buy them.

Archie and I used to meet together between the stacks of Jagger library - the main campus library. There were not many places that a black man and a white woman could meet in those years! On one occasion I noticed he had one of those tickets. (I had perhaps a half-dozen street pictures of myself at that time that I had collected.)