ABSTRACT
My first visit to the United States began, oddly enough, on the Pacific Coast. My temporary appointment at Northwestern had brought in its train several invitations to lecture at other U.S. universities, among them a pressing one from Jim Coleman, the founding director of the African Studies Center at the University of California, to visit the campuses at UCLA and Berkeley. It fitted best to do this on my way to Evanston, where Caroline and Sarah would join me later. And so, on March 17, 1962, having circled on foot a still-frozen Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, I caught the midday plane to Los Angeles. From one side of the world to the other it happened to be a perfectly clear day, and it gave me the best visual geography lesson of my life. The icy mountains of Labrador glistened in the sun. On the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes the winter ice was just breaking up into long floes; only Lake Michigan was clear. The prairies were still under snow all the way across to the Rockies, beyond which the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon threw up their vivid colours of rusty orange and cobalt blue. At last we were flying low over Los Angeles, an apparently endless tropical suburb, its streets exactly criss-crossed, the houses tiled in brilliant colours, the unfenced gardens with their freshly watered grass and pale blue swimming pools. It was still only six o'clock, and waiting to meet me was Leonard Thompson, our host at Cape Town in 1958, now transplanted as one of the founders of African history in the United States.
