Our families had been interconnected in the old days in South Africa, and we would always visit him when we went to London. He had lived in the same hotel room since 1948; he moved to the corridor below just before he died.
The hotel had been a place for gentleman scholars which changed over time into a glitzy West-End joint, but there was one corridor where these elderly people lived. His world became more and more contracted but he kept in contact through various networks that spanned the entire Southern African anthropological world; everybody who was anybody went on pilgrimage to see him. We always went with a bottle in hand: he drank whisky throughout the day and night. He would relay the gossip of what was going on in the Diaspora and then you would tell him about what you and your students were doing.
He was an almost militant theoretical empiricist (to quote Leach on Malinowski) but he was also a very interesting person because there were certain orthodoxies (over-rigid structural models, for instance) that he had rejected early on. This was connected to the salience, and style of his photography; for him, photography was at one level just another extension of the empirical eye, but at the same time it was an unblinking gaze; he was very suspicious of people who were eager to create models which were based on exclusion; very suspicious of the overly systemic structural functionalist notions of tradition. In his writing and photography the world of the surrounding colonial labour market, for instance, the impact of depression-era Southern Africa on local peoples always bled in. The empiricism was a form of critical watch on what he saw as flights of theoretical fancy.
Along with that went an openness to the idea that rural African societies were hybridizing, dialectically entailed worlds; that you had to understand the impact of processes like migrant labour, that Africans were writing letters from the mines, and were operating with new genres, and were entailed in complicated ways with colonialism. There was an eye for small detail; he would keep the stock records of colonial traders so that when we ourselves went back and tried to trace the life of the commodity as one of the vectors of the colonization of life worlds among the Tswana, Schapera had kept all of these documents. Which colour blanket was sent to Bechuanaland, which were bought, and which stock was rejected; what styles did women not like to buy; he had an instinct for significant detail. There was a kind of material groundedness about the way he saw the world: you looked at what people did and there you found the concepts you needed to explain their actions, and you never closed your gaze prematurely because of an a-priori sense of the limits of your field.
The most poignant moment in our relationship was in dealing with his photographs: he was always in love with these pictures; in a way, the pictures spoke more clearly than he could. He was a very shy man; his father had committed suicide when he was quite young, and he had had a very strange and unrequited personal emotional history; so he was always more of an observer. We felt he was like a kind of Lewis Carroll figure who looked in, and was more comfortable with women and children in the field; it was not voyeuristic, just easier for him to relate directly to them. Also, he had been locked out of those kinds of intimacies as a child, and the pictures said more than he could about his affect. There was a tenderness in the pictures that he was never able to express directly; he was always gruff; he kept the picture as his life shrank in scope. He gave away most of his books, everything but the pictures. At Christmas or New Year he would send you a photograph, usually connected to what work you were doing, but he gave them out slowly and sparingly as though he were giving himself; he wanted to have these pictures published in a collection, and he started talking to an editor in Germany about this project. That editor got in touch with us, at Schapera’s suggestion, and asked if we could write an introduction. There were many problems getting the copyright for the various photographs which he had lodged in various places, so that the German publication fell through. We picked up the project. Schapera was then in his mid-nineties, but he so much wanted this book to come out; before we finally settled the copyright matter we wrote the essay, in Derbyshire in England, where we spend a lot of our time. We took a certain liberty because we wrote about photography and empiricism, but we also wrote about him and what we thought the camera told us about him that he had not said about himself. We sent it to him with some trepidation, but he wrote back to say that we had shown him something about himself and his work that he’d never fully understood, and that we had “made an old man very happy.” Sadly, he died before we finally got all the permissions together but the book did come out.