Seminar Series: Interview with Dr. Judith Byfield

This week, the Department of History at Queen’s University welcomes Dr. Judith Byfield of Cornell University for the latest addition to our 2023-24 Seminar Series. Building on the work of scholars in media studies, history and anthropology, Byfield’s lecture, “Happy Accidents: Serendipity and the Historian’s Craft,” argues that instances of serendipity in the course of historical research are the outcome of scholars’ training and the social universe in which they work. In advance of her talk, Dr. Byfield sat down with Queen’s History to discuss the role of serendipity in her own career and how the kinds of social histories she’s most interested in writing are today shaping the field of African history.

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I’m going to ask you about your really intriguing lecture topic in a minute, but first, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the paths by which you arrived at this place in your career? For those unfamiliar with Judi Byfield, whereabouts did you grow up and how did you come to be interested in twentieth-century Nigerian history?

Yeah, it was one of these circuitous things. I actually was born in Jamaica and then my family moved to the United States when I was ten, so I did the bulk of my growing up here in the U.S. When I went away to college at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, my first-year writing seminar happened to be African Art History and that was the first course I had taken on Africa. I really, really enjoyed it!

I also really enjoyed teaching and I was planning on teaching elementary school. In my undergraduate years, I came to work with a fifth-grade teacher in Language Arts, which was what my license was going to be in, and out of that I created a program for myself in African/African American Studies. At that time, you couldn’t major in African American Studies, but Dartmouth had the option of creating your own major, so that was what I pursued.

In that, a lot of my courses were humanities-related: art history, African American history, English courses and music. I took just one course in history and when I was planning on teaching elementary school all of that made sense, but it was in the midst of my teacher training that I decided I did not want to do that and that I would go to grad school and focus on Africa instead. Actually, I remember thinking to myself, I’ve only taken one history course and there’s lots more I can cover there, so I’ll apply to go into history—certainly not what I advise students today!

The long and short of it is that I ended up in grad school really clueless, knowing that I liked intellectual work but not sure that this was the right place for me. I did take a year off after my first year because I was just so exhausted on account of the fact that I was starting from scratch.

My second year after undergrad, I ended up working at the Margaret Sanger Center in New York City, where I was Program Coordinator where I helped organize a seminar series. That was really, really good experience, but it also helped me figure out that grad school was the right place for me, so I ended up going back.

Gradually, I came to appreciate that this was a process. Grad school was the right thing, working on Africa was the right thing; I ended up choosing to work on Nigeria, in part, because the literature professor I had studied with had had me read a lot of Chinua Achebe, and so Nigeria was really the only African country I knew anything about when I started grad school, even if it was just from a literary perspective.

And so, despite my cluelessness when I started, all of those things that had initially interested me in Africa really became very important and helped me come to the realization that history was the right place. I had to overcome the steep learning curve, yes, but once I got some of the basics down, I started to appreciate that all of the interdisciplinary work I had done as an undergrad helped me develop the topic that became my dissertation.

 

That’s so interesting. What did the dissertation end up being about?

Well, initially, I went over to Nigeria for my field work planning to write about the women’s tax revolt in Abeokuta in 1947-48, but one of the questions I first had to answer was “Why did the women fell that they couldn’t afford the colonial government’s tax increase?” Therefore, I needed to get a sense about what their economic history and it turned out that one of the major industries in the town, especially for working women, was the tie-dying industry.

My original proposal had just one chapter laying the economic foundations of the revolt, but as I was doing the bulk of the research in ‘88, I came to realize that there was so much more to the story of the tie-dying industry. For instance, the women working in this industry had had a conflict with the same king in 1936 and used some of the same tactics then as they would in 1947, all of which meant that if I really wanted to write on the tax revolt, I was going to have to spend more than a year in Nigeria getting acquainted with all the information I found there. It eventually dawned on me that with all of this material, what was supposed to be just one chapter could in fact become the entire dissertation and subsequently, my first book.

The funny part in all of this is that the book that came out in 2021, A Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Post-War Nigeria, is really about what was the original dissertation topic, but fortunately, I first figured out that I needed to know a lot more before I could really write on that topic. I’m just so glad that I came to that realization and made the switch to carving out just a piece of that original proposal for the dissertation.

 

Can I ask you, then, about the byline of your upcoming talk, “Serendipity and the Historian’s Craft”? Without giving too much away, what do you mean by serendipity—something which historians don’t seem to talk much about—and how you see this as being intimately tied up in your research?

Honestly, I think it’s just a reflection of that circuitous path I mentioned before.

I am so impressed when I meet students who come into college knowing that they want to be a history major, to write the honours thesis, to go to grad school. For me, it was a much more meandering path filled with happy accidents; one which ultimately took me off the course of becoming an elementary school teacher despite doing everything that I was supposed to do to become one.

But because I had this really wonderful advisor who was understanding and supportive when I went to him and said, “I don’t think I want to teach fifth grade anymore, I think I want to go to grad school,” I was able to avoid those dreaded conversations about the fact that I had very little preparation in the field. I mean, I’m telling you, I was really, really clueless! But this man choose to let me work through it—he didn’t tell me whether he thought it was a good idea or a bad idea—he just signed on to the idea of me going to grad school.

Where he did intervene was when it came to me saying that I wanted to do a Master’s in African Studies. We were having these conversations in 1979 and he told me “Those programs are new and if you decide you want to teach at a university, you’ll be better off going into one of the more traditional departments and then focusing on Africa instead.” And I took that advice, much to my benefit.

Then, when I got to grad school, the person I ended up working with did not work on Nigeria. She was actually of scholar of East Africa and had written her first book on German missionaries in Tanganyika, but she did labour history and she did women’s history. And once again, when I explained this epiphany, I had had in Nigeria, that now I was going to write on the tie-dying industry, she too was like “Okay… This is not going to be easy, but here are some of the places I think you can look for the sort of information you’re going to need to gather in all of this.” So, along the way, I just kept encountering these people who were very supportive of very unformed ideas, and for me that was part of the serendipity: there was nothing about this course that was planned.

 

How do the people who you’ve met during your research overseas fit into this story? Do you feel like travel-based research, this exciting opportunity for graduate students and professional scholars alike, is an under-utilized avenue of formation? Do we perhaps need to reconceive of our work overseas as helping form a “social universe?”

You know, I delve into some of this in greater depth in the talk. Now, I have to admit that I came up with this topic and the title before I had done any work and afterwards was like, “Uh oh, I said I’m going to talk about serendipity: what is serendipity?!” (laughs)

So, I started doing research around who’s been writing about it, what are they writing around it, and I have been pleasantly surprised to find that there’s quite a body of research around serendipity. Scientists talk about it a lot, but there are some historians, anthropologists, people in communications studies who do so as well—I’ve actually been really surprised by the range of fields that these people who are writing about serendipity are in.

Part of what I am doing in the talk, then, is linking the conversation around communities and how that social universe you mentioned is important to our scholarship. I look at it in several different communities, including the community of scholars I met when I went to Nigeria; first in ‘85 when I was there for three months and then in ‘88 when I was there for eleven. Some of the same people were there both times and just the advice they gave me, the people they introduced me to, and the generosity they showed me…

You know, I would go to the archives and then I would go to the office of someone like Jacob (J.F.) Ade Ajayi and say, “This is what I’m finding there,” and he and others would immediately recognize what I was working with and give me this whole story behind it. And so, I benefitted immensely from this intellectual community that just happened to be there at this time when the shift from that generation which had studied in the U.K. in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s and been so foundational to the Ibadan school was starting to transition into retirement. But they were just so willing to allow me to chew up hours of their time!

And then there’s some of the people that I met outside of the university. I mean, part of the reason I was allowed to be in Nigeria for so long was because this local family literally adopted me and refused to take money from me at a time when I was counting every kobo. A fellow student at Columbia had written this family on my behalf before I left New York and said, “Judi’s coming over, look out for her.” Sure enough, I show up on her doorstep one day and, after driving me around and helping me look for a place to stay, the mom puts her foot down and says, “No! I can’t let you live in those conditions! You’re just going to have to stay here.” Hey, fine by me!

 

Lastly, I want to ask you about the Martin A. Klein Prize which you received from the American Historical Association for The Great Upheaval. I found it particularly interesting when looking into this award that the first nine recipients of the prize, which recognizes “the most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English during the previous year,” were not people of colour, and that it wasn’t until 2018 that a female scholar of colour received it. Your win in 2022, however, capped off a stretch where a person of colour won the prize for six straight years, suggesting that maybe now the tide has turned when it comes to recognizing the work scholars of colour are doing in African history. How have you seen these sorts of changes in the field take place over the years?

You know, I hadn’t even thought about how the demographics of all of this was shaking out, but I think in some ways it may reflect how African history—not just in terms of the people in field, but also the approaches to doing African history—has changed over time as well. I think there may be something to the fact that recipients like Kenda Mutongi in 2018 have been able to produce really rich social histories despite working in topics where, to some extent, the written sources are fairly limited. As a group, we’ve had to be very creative about how we get at some of the ideas we’re trying to develop in our works; so, I think to some extent, we now have another generation of African scholars and especially African women scholars who are being trained to develop these works that far more people are willing to read and recognize as being really important scholarship.

One of the things which I think exists with all of these sorts of prize committees (and I have been on several over the years) is that there are several things which committee members look for. And if committee members are sharing the same vocabulary, then they may not necessarily be open to scholarship that’s doing things in a very different way. So I think as the field itself has become more diversified, that’s being reflected in the composition of the committees, which in turn contributes to both the change in recipient demographics and the works they themselves are composing and their approaches.

Dr. Byfield’s latest book, referenced at various points throughout this interview, is A Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Post-War Nigeria, published in 2021 through Ohio University Press. It received the 2022 Martin A. Klein Prize from the American Historical Association.

(Interview edited for clarity and concision)