Linen Hall Library

A Ugandan in UlsterAuthor(s): Brian GrahamSource: The Linen Hall Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 10-11Published by: Linen Hall LibraryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20534056 .

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?A Ugandan

Bryan Langlands, Professor of Geography at the University of Ulster, died in the crash of the Boeing airliner onto the M1 at Kegworth. In this brief article Brian Graham assesses his

career.

Bryan Wooleston Langlands, Profes sor of Geography at the University of

Ulster, was one victim of the crash of BD092 at Kegworth, Leicestershire, on 8th January 1989. Born in 1928 at

Eastbourne, he graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952. Much of his subsequent career was

spent at Makerere University in

Kampala, Uganda, where he rose from Assistant Lectureship in 1953 to the Chair of Geography and Headship of the Department in 1968. Between

1972-75, he was also Dean of the Fac

ulty of Arts. Expelled from Uganda in

1976, Bryan Langlands was appointed to the Ulster Polytechnic as Director of Studies and Head of Department of the newly-formed School of Environ

mental Sciences in 1977. Subse

quently a member of the Polytech nic's professoriate, in 1978 he was awarded an O.B.E. for services to

higher education overseas. In more

recent years, following the amalga mation of the Ulster Polytechnic and New University of Ulster, he was

Professor of Geography in the merged institution.

Bryan Langlands re

garded himself as a scholar rather than an academic,

he was a genuinely learned man who

developed a specific and personal v iew of his discipline, a philosophy which reflected and supported his own life

experiences. In so far as one can

discern, this constituted his only ide

ology and it is the key to the unity of his work. Ostensibly, this appears eclectic, suffused by dilettantism; he was sufficiently aware of this to de vote his inaugural lecture at Makerere to refuting the accusation. The coher

ence emerges from the belief that Ge

ography should be the study of man

land environmental relationships and that a unity for the discipline is to be found in the application of ecological principles. He admitted to an early over-emphasis on land, derived from his training at L.S.E. and a corre

sponding distrust of humanists. Later, however, prompted by observation of the rich diversity of human responses to the varied opportunities of land, climate, history and society to be found in Uganda, he was drawn to a far more

anthropogeographical stance. At one

point, he quoted approvingly H.J. Fleurets axiom that 'geography, his

tory and anthropology are a trilogy, to be broken only with severe loss of truth'. Fleure, of course, was a semi

nal influence on Estyn Evans, founder of the Department of Geography at

Queen's University. And while Bryan Langlands

' ideas were - as he ac

knowledged-/?^^ within the wider world of contemporary Geography -a

discipline which he described as fissi

parous in its ever-increasing tendency to self-destruct from over-specialisa tion - they are familiar and acceptable enough to anyone taught in Evans'

department, a lineage which has had considerable influence on Irish geog

raphy. To Bryan Langlands, the functions

of Geography were synthesis and clas sification and he regretted the reduc

ing emphasis on these activities within the discipline. Again, however, syn thesis at least can still be seen as a

fundamental raison d'?tre in for in stance the study of the historical geog

raphy of Ireland. I have always felt that Bryan Langlands underestimated the sympathy which his ideas would have engendered in the world of Irish

geography if he had cared to voice

PAGE 10 Linen Hall Review

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them more publicly. But sadly, the coincidence of his philosophy with the enduring tradition of Fleure and

Evans was the closest, academically, that he was ever to come to Ireland.

Synthesis and classification within a structure of man-land relationships remain the key to his work. He wrote

widely on many aspects of Geogra

phy, most notably on demographic, medical and ecological matters. His

interest in studying fluctuations in the distribution of tsetse flies together with their associated illnesses, as a response to climactic change and density of

human population, demonstrates per

fectly the synthetic and integrating role which he envisaged for Geogra

phy. He was obsessed with patterns but distrusted process, objecting for

example to the historical geographer explaining distributions of relict land

scape features by resource to societal

organisation. The vogue for structu

ralism in contemporary Geography did not appeal to him. Conversely, it was these interests in pattern which

led him to see merit in positivistic spatial analysis. Much of his work

was published in the Makerere De

partment of Geography Series of Oc casional Papers and-in the Uganda

Journal, both of which he edited for substantial periods. As he remarked,

Uganda was the focus of his world and the UK the end of the earth; thus he

published relatively little outside

Uganda. Two pieces of work demonstrate

the application of his ideas, in particu lar that respect for synthesis, pattern

and classification. The first was

Uganda in Maps, an immensely complex project which ran eventually to 1000 pages and 100 plates of illus trations. The 'abortive masterpiece'

-

as the author, without irony, described

it - was never published commer

cially although some 200 sets were

duplicated and bound. The project symbolises his perception of the role of the Geographer as synoptic savant.

The whole exercise represented a con

centration of scholarship ', resulting in

'a portrait of a middle-ranking Third World country at its moment of maxi

mum economic diversity'. However,

the apogee of Bryan Langlands' phi losophy is to be found in the Bibli

ographia Ugandensis, a work of Sis

yphean proportions which occupied him from the early 1970s and which his death has left uncompleted but

close to publication. Sustained by his beliefs in synthesis, patterns and clas

sification, he admitted to a mania for

bibiography, recounting in amaze

ment his discovery that many librari ans took a national bibliography to be a collection of references to work

published in a country. To Bryan Langlands, it was self-evident that

such a work should be a collection ona country, the citations drawn from

wherever in the world they were

printed. Thus the Bibliography - and

there could be no better memorial to his career- will contain almost 30,000

references on every aspect of Uganda from circa 1860 to the present day.

During the 1970s, Uganda fell

apart. Bryan Langlands described the onset of

' Aminitis ', a condition marked

by a sequence of crises of conscience.

The recurring question was why one

should struggle on trying to resist a sinister form of government which

was eroding the national spirit. The

answer which he offered was the re

spect to be gained from acts of resis

tance, from being simultaneously a

'national hero' and 'campus liability'.

(There are echoes here of his period at the Ulster Polytechnic and the Uni

versity of Ulster when he was in

volved in many conflicts with the

authorities, often sadly without gain

ing that compensation of respect.) In

Uganda, he took part in a series of re

sistances before meeting Amin in

person and indeed acting as his geo

graphical advisor on boundary dis

putes with Kenya. It is doubtful that

many geographers would relish quite such an applied role to their disci

pline. After chairing a Judicial En

quiry into the death of a Makerere student in 1976, Bryan Langlands was

precipitately ordered out of Uganda. He believed that Amin himself was not responsible and bore him no per sonal animus. Indeed he argued that

Amin got a worse press than he de

served, admitting that some would re

gard this as making him an apologist for the regime.

In one sense, it is clear that Bryan

Langlands saw himself as an exile from Uganda in Ulster; it is a word

which he himself used. He did build an entirely new social world in Belfast and took a lively interest in local af fairs in which he could see many analogies with his Ugandan experi ences. Not all of these were as obvi

ous as ethnic plurality, rural settle

ment forms being one example. But

he never published anything to do with Ireland despite

- ironically

- the

acceptability of his geographical ide

ology here, something which would not have been the case in Britain. He wrote that

' I have seldom ever thought

back to my Uganda days since being in Belfast' but though he only rarely talked about those days, I doubt the

validity of this statement. Re-united with his marvellous library and col lection of African maps, he worked on the Bibliographia Ugandensis to the exclusion of any other substantive task.

Academically if not socially, he re mained an exile until his death, a

geographer expelled from the space and place he considered his own. His

position is described -

phenomenol

ogically as he would have pointed out for it was a philosophy he had tinkered with but certainly suspected

- in

quotation from Albert Camus' The

Plague: 4 And one must not forget those for

whom ... the sadness of separation was amplified by the fact that, travel

lers surprised by the plague and re

tained in the city, they found them selves removed ... from the person

they could not rejoin and from their

country. In the general exile, they were the most exiled for ...

they were

attached to a space, and threw them

selves without cease against the walls

which separated their contaminated

refuge from their lost country ...

conjuring up with all their might, pictures of a land where a special play of light, two or three hills, a favourite tree, composed for them a world that

nothing could replace.'

At this point in time the first volume

of Langlands' Bibliography of

Uganda, the author index, has been

completed to typeset camera stage. This volume contains circa 30,000 entries. Bryan Langlands had almost

completed the work of cross

referencing the index when he died

and his notes and files are currently being prepared with a view to

publication within the next two years.

Enquiries about circulation and

distribution, or about any other matters concerning the Bibliography to December Publications, 157

University Street, Belfast.

Spring 1989 PAGE II

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