If she thought that her opponents would reply in the same fashion, she was quickly disabused. Instead of engaging with her arguments, they launched angry attacks on her. In particular, little though she had intended it, she was drawn into a personal conflict with one of the most influential members of the Africana Studies Department, Tony Martin. Professor Martin is a belligerent character who was never slow to raise the temperature. When Lefkowitz asked if she could speak after one of his lectures, for example, he described her request as “a very hostile onslaught”. He was also someone whom the Wellesley authorities had learnt to handle with care — in 1987 he had successfully sued them over a routine evaluation of his work — and Lefkowitz gives some pitiful examples of university officials caving in to his demands. Eventually she found herself facing a libel action from him over references she had made in an article to a notorious and highly charged incident in which he had clashed with a white woman student. The case dragged on for five years. It was a punishing experience, although in the end the courts found in Lefkowitz’s ­favour.

Meanwhile, with the publication of Not Out of Africa, the controversy spread further afield, and an already tense atmosphere became even harsher. Lefkowitz gives a gripping account of the confrontations she was involved in and the calumnies she endured.