Abstract
In 1932, Oxford graduate Thomas L. Hodgkin leaves for Palestine with the prospect of an apprenticeship in the provisional British government of Palestine. Within a year, after travelling the region, he takes up the position in what at the time was a British mandate. The Middle East had been divided by victorious powers France and Britain after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the Great War. Thomas wrote over 100 letters home to family and friends over the next 4 years, spontaneously and continuously capturing a region and a person undergoing change. A history and biography of the now After his three years in Palestine during the 1930s, Thomas 10 years later in life developed an extensive interest in Africa, in particular Ghana, where he travelled and worked during the 1940s and 1950s. This period also produced letters and diaries, and two collections of letters and diaries were published in 1986 and 2000. In 2007, a biography of Thomas’ life came out. Thomas was an entertaining writer and radical thinker, growing increasingly pessimistic over imperialism from the 1930s on. He befriended Ghana’s Nkrumah in 1951, as Michaux did in New York in another track/chapter. His granddaughter, Kate Hodgkin, taught on my MA in East London in the late 1990s.
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Notes
- 1.
A chapter for a forthcoming anthology, titled Islands of Extreme Exclusion (edited by Hamre and Villadsen), is not included in this collection. It concerns the prison diaries and letters of two Indian-South African political prisoners during Apartheid, Fatima Meer and Ahmed Kathrada.
- 2.
The end of the World War I saw the now former Ottoman Empire concede territories of what in the West has been called ‘The Middle East’ to the victorious powers of France and Britain. The Mandate for Palestine concerned the territories of Palestine and Transjordan to be administrated by Britain, while France was given the mandates of Syria and Lebanon. ‘Mandates’ were supposed to work as a temporary form of trusteeship until local inhabitants had organised a government and an independent state could be born. The process proved more difficult in practice.
- 3.
Thomas’ granddaughter, Kate Hodgkin, reminds me, when reading this chapter that Thomas might have been referring to an old Scottish ballad: ‘Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, / With the old Moon in her arms; /And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! /We shall have a deadly storm’ (Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43973/dejection-an-ode.
- 4.
Thomas has often been referred to as a ‘Marxist’ historian, a reductive labelling. He was also a member of the Communist party in his early years, until 1949.
- 5.
I had accidentally found the book of letters from Palestine in a second-hand Charing Cross Rd London bookshop during my MA years in London in 1997 where I had developed interest in Israel-Palestine. As mentioned, the granddaughter of Thomas, Kate Hodgkin, was teaching on my MA in cultural studies: history and theory. Not sure if she mentioned Thomas after I had found the book or before. I began writing about Thomas quickly after finishing the MA, in Danish. Some of it appeared in the Swedish Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap in 2006, with an emphasis on Hodgkin’s letters from Palestine. I had left out his engagement with Africa at that point. I paused Hodgkin there in 2007 and worked on other individuals and journeys. Some 12 years later, I dusted it off after the book idea was formulated around 2017. Thomas’ granddaughter is still very active. I am happy to see her pics on FB ‘Unpacking Her Library’.
- 6.
My writing on Thomas concentrates on his own letters (and to a minor extent Wolfer’s biography), not his academic scholarship. Thomas’ academic scholarship deserves another chapter or book on its own. He pioneered the study of African institutions and the rise of nationalism on the continent and studies of precolonial Nigeria. He paid strong attention to African voices and parts of Africa way beyond British colonial interest. From the mid-1950s and onwards he was often invited to lecture around the world. He published Nationalism in Colonial Africa in 1956, Nigerian Perspectives in 1960, African Political Parties in 1961. Between 1962 and 1965 he headed Institute of African Studies at University of Ghana. In later years he changed his attention to Vietnam. His final book was Vietnam: The Revolutionary Path from 1981.
- 7.
In the 1950s there were more limited options for having photos developed—and it was expensive. Thomas concentrated on the letters and used them to the fullest to have as many words included in the airmail post prize. ‘He writes right up to the margins and corners of every page’, Kate his granddaughter noted to me (personal correspondence, Dec 2022).
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Hansen, A.H. (2023). A8 Letters from Palestine and Africa. In: Mix Tape Memories. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40463-4_8
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