OBITUARY
Jeff Guy (1940 – 2014)
The historian Jeff Guy died on December 15, at Heathrow
Airport, waiting to board a flight to return to his home in Durban. It was,
writes a friend, “a very Jeff way to go – struck down in the stride of life, no
doubt grumbling about long queues or poor service, but distracted by a new idea
or line of inquiry”.
He had been in England for a few weeks, where he gave a
lecture at a conference marking the bicentenary of the birth of Bishop John
Colenso. Several who saw him during the
trip have remarked on his evident zest for life and intellectual vigour.
Jefferson John Guy was born on June 13 1940. After schooling
in Pietermaritzburg, he roamed for four years: he worked on farms in Britain
and what was then Rhodesia, served as a sailor, and briefly as a soldier. In
1963 he registered at the University of Natal, where he fell in love with
history. Guy always paid credit to Colin Webb for igniting this passion.
After history honours
at Pietermaritzburg, Guy travelled to England. He approached Shula Marks and
became her first PhD student (“and one of the finest”, she says). His thesis
was reworked as The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand,
a ground-breaking study of the political and social consequences of an imperial
war. Guy had commenced on an engagement with the history of colonial Natal and
Zululand that occupied him for the rest of his life, at universities in Norway
and Lesotho, and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
There followed, in
1983, The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso. It explored his
turbulent relations with the Anglican church, and also his sympathy for the
Zulu kingdom. Colenso’s indignation at the British invasion was constrained by
his persistent belief in the ultimately benign nature of empire – a limitation
largely transcended by the bishop’s eldest daughter, Harriette. Guy’s The View
Across the River recounts how this knowledgeable, practical woman worked with
Zulu supporters of the exiled king, Cetshwayo, to bring him home and to staunch
the bleeding in what remained of his kingdom.
Then, marking the centenary of the Bambatha (or poll-tax)
Rebellion, Guy wrote two shorter books, The Maphumulo Uprising and Remembering
the Rebellion. It was not just that the rebels were subjected to ferocious and
vengeful military defeat: Guy’s contribution is a meticulous account of how the
colonial legal system was used – and abused – to exact the pounds of flesh
required to satisfy a jumpy settler community.
In 2013, Guy’s decades of research culminated in Theophilus
Shepstone and the Forging of Natal, a big book in every sense. At its core is a
magisterial reassessment of the “aloof, secretive, intelligent and devious”
official, challenging the orthodoxy that Shepstone was an architect of
segregation and apartheid. It outlines instead a complex, sinuous set of
practices trying to balance settler demands for land and labour with a
conservative, pragmatic paternalism designed to secure land for Africans in
Natal.
Two points are worth making about this corpus of work. First,
he remained a Marxian historian, but not in any doctrinaire or sectarian form.
Marxism, for Guy, was not about the repetition of received ideas; rather, he
believed, it yielded an “historically dynamic set of ideas which can be used to
track, organise and better understand the events, divisions and conflicts that
make up the modern world”, a set of ideas always open to criticism.
Second, he was an orthodox, even old-fashioned, craftsman of
his discipline. He hacked and hewed at the archival coalface, winnowed and
worked on his haul, and then fashioned his findings in characteristically
controlled, forceful prose. He once wrote of the essential social role of
academic historians as “guardians and propagators of informed, critical,
disinterested history”. That goal shaped all his work.
The historian will be remembered. But the individual will be
missed and mourned, wrenchingly. As with anyone a little larger than life,
Guy’s sudden death feels wrong, a breach of nature. He could be gruff, even
cantankerous; he was quickly angered. He worried, at times to exasperating
extent: so self-aware was he that he sometimes played up to these
characteristics, accentuating them for effect.
