Colin Turnbull

World War II brought a stint in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve after which he was awarded a two year grant in the Department of Indian Religion and Philosophy, Banaras Hindu University, India, from which he graduated with a master's degree in Indian Religion and Philosophy. In 1951, after his graduation from Banaras, he traveled to the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo with Newton Beal, an Ohio schoolteacher he'd meet in India. Turnbull and Beal first studied the BaMbuti pygmies during this time, though that was not the complete goal of the trip. An odd job Turnbull picked up while in Africa at this time was working for the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel. Spiegel hired Turnbull to assist in the construction and transportation of a boat needed for his film. This boat was The African Queen, which was used for the film of the same title. After his first trip to Africa, Turnbull traveled to Yellowknife in the northwest territories of Canada, where he worked as a geologist and gold miner for approximately a year, before he went back to school to obtain another degree. Upon returning to Oxford in 1954, he began specializing in the anthropology of Africa. Turnbull remained in Oxford for two years before another field trip to Africa, finally focusing on the then-Belgian Congo and Uganda. After years of fieldwork, he finally achieved his anthropology doctorate from Oxford in 1964.