Sylvia Leith-Ross

Sylvia Hope Leith-Ross, MBE (née Ruxton) (30 September 1884 – 12 February 1980) was an English anthropologist and writer who worked primarily in Nigeria.

Sylvia Leith-Ross MBE
A picture taken when she was married
Born	Sylvia Hope Ruxton (1884-09-30)30 September 1884 London
Died	12 February 1980(1980-02-12) (aged 95) Holland Park, London
Occupation	Anthropologist
Spouse	Arthur Leith-Ross ​ ​ (m. 1907; died 1908)​

Early life

Sylvia Hope Ruxton was born in London, the daughter of Admiral William Fitzherbert Ruxton and Sylvia Howland Grinnell Ruxton. Her father was an admiral in the Royal Navy; her mother was American-born, the daughter of Henry Grinnell and the sister of Henry Walton Grinnell. Sylvia and her mother moved to Paris in 1896, where she attended school. Sylvia's memoir, Cocks in the Dawn (1944), recalls this time as the beginning of her lifelong attachment to France.^[1]

Career

In 1907, as a new bride, she moved to Zungeru in Nigeria, where her husband, Arthur Leith-Ross, was the chief transport officer for the British protectorate. She returned to Nigeria in 1910 as a widow, to stay with her brother and his wife Geneviève. The two women published a cookbook, West African Cookery (1908),^[2] which was popular with young European men new to Nigeria and unfamiliar with either cookery or West African produce.^[1] In 1921, she published Fulani Grammar, a basic guide to the Fulani language with some translated folktales.^[3][4]

In the 1920s her brother was based in Lagos; Sylvia Leith-Ross was appointed as "Lady Superintendent of Education" in 1925.^[5] She helped to establish Queen's College, Lagos, a girls' boarding school, and founded a girls' school in Kano.^[6] In 1931 she was sent back to England to recover her health. When she returned again, she used a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to conduct anthropological studies among the women of eastern Nigeria, following the Women's War; this work resulted in the book African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1939).^[7][8]

During World War I, Sylvia Leith-Ross, using her fluency in French, volunteered in military hospitals under the supervision of the French Red Cross. That work led to a job at a clinic in London from 1920 to 1925. She also worked at military hospitals during the Spanish Civil War and early in World War II. She was in Nigeria for the rest of the second World War, in part to provide intelligence on the French colonies to the Political and Economic Research Organization.^[1] Two more books, African Conversation Piece (1944, a travel diary) and Beyond the Niger (1951) were written during this time.^[9][10][11]

Late in life, she spent a decade (1956 to 1966) collecting pottery and interviewing pottery makers in Nigeria. Her last book published in her lifetime, Nigerian Pottery (1970), records her findings in photographs and text, as a catalogue to an exhibit she organised at the Jos Museum.^[12]

Personal life

Sylvia Ruxton married Arthur Leith-Ross, a Canadian officer who served in Northern Nigeria with Upton Fitzherbert Ruxton, Sylvia's brother. Sylvia was widowed at 24, when Arthur died from blackwater fever. She died in Holland Park, London in 1980, aged 95.^[1] One more book, her autobiography titled Stepping Stones: Memoirs of Colonial Nigeria, 1907–1960, was published after her death, in 1983.^[13]

References

1. Helen Callaway, "Ross, Sylvia Hope Leith" in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 23 September 2004.
2. Sylvia Leith-Ross and Geneviève Buxton, West African Cookery (informally published at Zunguru, 1908).
3. Sylvia Leith-Ross, Fulani Grammar (Secretariat Stationary Store, 1921).
4. W. A. C., review of Fulani Grammar, in Journal of the African Society 21(1922): 249–252.
5. Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Springer 1986): 112. ISBN 9781349183074
6. Barbara Bush, Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919–1945 (Routledge 2002): 92. ISBN 9781134722440
7. W. E. H., review of Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Women in Journal of the Royal African Society 38(151)(April 1939): 300–302.
8. Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (AMS Press, 1939).
9. Lucy Watson, "'True Fictions': Subjectivity and Intertextuality in the Writings of Sylvia Leith-Ross" Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48(3)(September 2013): 331–347. doi:10.1177/0021989413487359
10. Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Converation Piece (Hutchinson & Company Limited, 1944).
11. Sylvia Leith-Ross, Beyond the Niger (Lutterworth Press 1951).
12. Sylvia Leith-Ross, Nigerian Pottery: A Catalogue (Ibadan University Press for the Dept. of Antiquities, 1970).
13. Kristin Mann, review of Sylvia Leith-Ross, Stepping Stones: Memoirs of Colonial Nigeria, 1907–1960, in International Journal of African Historical Studies 19(1)(1986): 136–138. doi:10.2307/218714