- Header
- M D W Jeffreys
- Also known as
-
M D W Jeffreys
-
primary name: Jeffreys, Mervyn David Waldegrave
- Details
- individual; anthropologist; British; Male
- Life dates
- 1890-1975
- Biography
- Anthropologist and colonial administrator. M.A. from Oxford and Ph.D. from the University of London. For thirty years served in the British Colonial Civil Service in Eastern Nigeria and Cameroons, and did extensive anthropological fieldwork. After WWII moved to South Africa and taught at Witwatersrand University. Published over 400 articles in specialist journals including 'Africa', 'Man', Folklore' and the 'Journal of the Royal African Society'.
1915: Joined Nigerian colonial service
1919: Assistant District Officer, Eket
1926: District Officer Ikot Ekpene
1932: based in Itu in Calabar
1940: District Officer, Bamenda, Cameroons
He formed many ethnographic collections in southern Nigeria, some of which he gave to the British Museum (see Af1932,1206.1 to 48, material he had excavated in Arochukwu) and to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. He collected for the Wellcome collection between 1926 and 1938 (the last cases arriving in 1939), sending nearly 200 cases of material to London which he had collected among the Igbo and Ibibio in Nigeria, and (according to Larson) the Bamenda in the Cameroons. He was not paid for this, but had the costs of acquisition and shipping refunded to him. He also provided some 3,000 photographs. When the Wellcome collection was dispersed, the material was divided between the BM and the Hearst Museum at the UCLA in California.
- Bibliography
- Frances Larson, 'An infinity of things, how Sir Henry Wellcome collected the world', OUP 2009, pp.221-3 (for dealings with Wellcome)
See Ethdoc 337
(published)
'Some notes on the Ekoi' in JRAI 69 1939, pp.95-108.
'A Quartzite Arrow-head', in South Afr. Archaeol. Bull. 17 (65), p.20 (March 1962)