What Did Torday Discover in Africa?

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What did Torday discover in Africa? Introduction Almost by accident, I discovered Emil Torday. I may have heard the name, but it was during a class on the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804, in the course of rereading CLR James, that I suddenly became aware of the man's significance. In the first chapter of his masterpiece, The Black Jacobins, James writes about Central Africa before the invasion of the European as a territory of peace, crossed by traders traveling a thousand miles, from one side of the continent to the other: "See the works of Professor Emil Torday.” James tells the reader, “one of the greatest African scholars of his time, particularly a lecture delivered at Geneva in 1931 to a society for the Protection of Children in Africa." Basil Davidson, the progressive historian of Africa from the United Kingdom (albeit not necessarily the favorite of African scholars from Africa), wrote in The Possibility of African History:: "Some sixty years ago, in a clearing of the Congo forest a Hungarian in Belgian service sat making notes. For the time and place this Hungarian, Emil Torday, was an unusual sort of man, an unusual sort of European. What he wanted was neither rubber nor ivory nor conscript labor, but information about the past." (Davidson, webstories) The Polish-born anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, Torday’s more famous contemporary, described him at his death in 1931 as “one of the world’s foremost anthropologists … whose ability to reach the personal element in Africans and to gain their affection, as well as his sure grasp of theoretical problems placed him among the makers of modern ethnology…” (www.therai.org.uk). Then I ran across Torday’s name in the Nyugat, my favorite literary periodical, edited by my father in Hungary, at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, when Torday was hobbled but
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