In January 1992, Frank Spencer wrote to me at the University of Cape Town to ask if I would contribute a paper to his upcoming Encyclopaedia of the History of Physical Anthropology. This was the start of a long correspondence and collaboration over three years, which resulted in an entry on South Africa for the encyclopaedia (Morris and Tobias 1997). What started as a simple request for a historical overview became a much more complicated process when Spencer realised that he had inadvertently asked both me and Phillip Tobias to contribute on the same topic separately. In a diplomatic masterpiece, Spencer managed to smooth ruffled feathers and to get the two of us to provide non-competing portions of the same entry: palaeoanthropology and primatology for Tobias, and human variation and skeletal biology for me. The two halves were then forged into one through Spencer's editorial expertise, but not without substantial friction, rooted in Tobias's desire to direct the way his own role would be seen in the history of physical anthropology in South Africa.

The central issue in the construction of the entry was my contention that Ronald Singer and Tobias had an equal role in the launch of the ‘new physical anthropology’ in South Africa, and that Tobias's break with typology was delayed and occurred after Singer's important Boskop paper in 1958. Spencer had to use his negotiating skills to find common ground. The final published version downplayed Singer's role to satisfy Tobias, but the debate between Tobias and me was not resolved. In a letter to Spencer, I noted, ‘I am also learning a great deal about PVT [Phillip Valentine Tobias] from our jousting. I didn't realise how defensive he is about his role in local anthropological history.’ The original pre-edit version of the paper was eventually published separately (Morris 2005b), but the friction over these issues continued. Tobias grudgingly supported my application for a Fulbright scholarship to the United States in 1995, but wrote to me with specific criticisms of the proposal with respect to the history of physical anthropology.