Life Before Somerville: Professor Fareda Banda, 1989

Life before Somerville

Professor Fareda Banda is Professor of Law at SOAS. After two degrees at the University of Zimbabawe, she came to Somerville in 1989 to do a DPhil in Socio-Legal Studies (on access to justice for women) and she returned to Oxford as a post-doctoral research fellow. Fareda joined SOAS in 1996, teaching English family law, human rights for women, and Law and Society in Africa. She loves teaching and has taught in many universities across the world. Fareda sits on several academic boards. She has been commissioned to produce reports for agencies including the United Nations, the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ), the Ministry of Justice, and Minority Rights Group. Fareda believes strongly in the importance of working with civil society organisations, including Sisters for Change and Human Rights Watch. She writes on women’s rights, family law, and more recently law and literature; her latest books are Women’s Rights and Religious Law: Domestic and International Perspectives, coedited with Lisa Fishbayn Joffe (Routledge, June 2020) and African Migration, Human Rights and Literature (Bloomsbury, due December 2020). Her greatest joy is her family, including her two daughters Azera and Shamiso.

Last summer, I visited Somerville to sit on the lawn to allow me to say goodbye to my former headmistress, Dorothy Twiss, who had been at Somerville during the war. I am from Zimbabwe and Mrs Twiss was our formidable headmistress at Arundel School in Harare. It was a girls’ school that I joined aged 12 from a ‘Coloured and Asian’ primary school named after Lord Louis Mountbatten. I am a child of apartheid and we were the ‘cusp’ generation – entering secondary school just as political change was underway. It was an exciting and politically fraught time which Mrs Twiss navigated with her customary calm good sense and determination to succeed. It was she who recommended that I apply to Somerville to do my DPhil after I was awarded a Beit Fellowship to undertake doctoral research (along with the current Fellow and Professor in Medicine, Matthew Wood).

Coming to Somerville was like being at Arundel but without having to wear the muddy brown skirts, nurses’ Clarks shoes with fawn socks and off-turquoise blouse. I realised that Mrs Twiss had modelled some of the architecture on Somerville at Arundel (motto: ‘Grace and knowledge’ – I have not attempted the Latin for fear that Mrs Twiss, who taught me the subject and suffered greatly doing so, might be disturbed); it was painted pastel pink with archways much like the ones leading to the quad from the Lodge. Mealtimes also began and ended with grace in Latin. I went to Somerville chapel simply so that I could belt out hymns from 100 Hymns. The late Nan Dunbar must have been watching me for a few weeks after I arrived; she asked how it was that I seemed so at home at Evensong. I told her that was what six years in a girls’ boarding school run by the formidable Mrs Twiss could do for you.

PROFESSOR FAREDA BANDA

Mrs Twiss retired soon after I left. I often visited her on my return trips to Harare and found her still doughty, looser and funnier and overrun by dogs. She lived with her loving daughter Stephanie with whom she returned to live in Lincoln in the North of England for the last few years of her life. Her death, on 1 July 2019, came as a body blow. We thought she would live for ever. Some of ‘her old girls’ were able to attend her memorial service held in Lincoln on the 3rd of August. Our instructions were to sing lustily – which we did. All our old favourites were in the order of service, "Lord of All Hopefulness" and 'Thine be the Glory" with that rousing chorus.

We learned things about Mrs Twiss that none of us had known – that she had 'Bletchley' connections for example. She had mentioned the late Principal Daphne Park with warmth and friendship. I now have a better understanding of how far back they went. Although it is many, many decades since secondary school, I continue to see Mrs Twiss's influence in my life. She taught us 'feminist' thought before it was ‘a thing’. (I now teach human rights of women). She would no doubt have balked at being described as a feminist, but she was a pioneer of her time. She taught 'her girls' that we could do anything that we set our minds to; she demanded high standards and expected excellence.

I wanted to honour her memory and feel sad that we never got the opportunity to revisit Somerville together. A few days after her memorial service, I came to Somerville and sat on a bench facing the quad and wept in remembrance of an extraordinary woman who changed my life. I miss her still, as I am sure, does her family.

FAREDA BANDA