(Cambridge University Press)
Andrew MacDonald, Mail & Gaurdian
The late master Eric Hobsbawm, in his biography Interesting
Times, recalled his time as a young radical in the English fens in the 1930s
and described what he called Cambridge University's peculiar "principal of
unripe time": whatever somebody may propose and however good the proposal,
the time is inevitably not yet ripe. Thus it is that the last time Cambridge
University Press produced a general volume on South African history, pneumonic
plague took the lives of 350 South Africans.
That year, 1936, Davidson "DDT" Jabavu's
All-African Convention met in Bloemfontein to discuss Africans' diminishing
rights on a budget of just £100, barely enough to cover the costs of printing
the minutes.
Meanwhile, in Cape Town, torrential rain broke up a virulent
anti-Semitic crowd who had gathered to disrupt the arrival of 500 Jewish
refugees from Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. And near Pretoria, the Afrikaans
lawyer and opium eater Eugene Marais shot himself on a farm near Pelindaba,
where South Africa's first atomic bombs would later be developed.
In short, the new two-volume, 1 000-plus-page
Cambridge History of South Africa — a synthesis of recent advances in the
field, dazzling in parts — has been a long time coming. Several decades of
thinking and several years of planning and editing have produced rich,
ambitious tomes unlikely to be matched in scale for some time to come.
In the combustive world of South African historians, it's
fair to say that consensus has been a rare and unwanted thing. The 1936 work
had marked one moment in the ascendency of a so-called liberal school among
historians that dominated the middle years of South Africa's 20th century.
The 1920s was a decade of impoverishment, growing shanty
towns and disillusion. The liberal school formed as a small cohort of
anti-segregationist white scholars made the first attempts to integrate the
histories of Southern Africa's different "peoples" into a single
story, take a critical look at how race attitudes had emerged on the early
colonial frontiers and take seriously insights drawn from archaeology,
linguistics and anthropology.
Reaching its apogee with the 1969 Oxford History of South
Africa, the liberal school did much to improve so much of South African history
writing that had, until their intervention, been partisan, polemical,
regionalist, triumphalist, antiquarian or instrumental, or some combination
thereof.
Yet, for all that was innovative in recouping the histories
of the African precolonial past and the inequities of the socioeconomic
present, by the late 1960s the liberal school had come under sustained critique
from a new generation of scholars, drawing in part on Marxist writings and
dismissive of the possibilities of South Africa's liberal project once the guns
had silenced Sharpeville.
Unable to shake off accusations of paternalism, liberal
school histories of African societies were, in the final reckoning, footnotes
to the march of Western civilisation: thin, static and one-dimensional, in
which Africans could only respond to the prodding of settler initiatives, much
like the proverbial rat in the laboratory. Crucially, the liberal account of
the origins of South African racism, blaming it on retrograde Afrikaners of the
early 19th century, had failed to consider, and indeed sometimes obscured, the
role of modern capitalism in the creation of a sharply divided racial society.
From the 1970s, this so-called radical challenge produced a
riot of new works that turned fresh attention to South Africa's past, creating
sophisticated histories of the internal dynamics of Africa's preconquest
kingdoms and the early frontiers, influential studies "from below" of
African, Asian and European workers in South African towns and countryside, the
connections between class and race consciousness, and the inner workings of the
South African state.
Later, criticism within the broad church of radical history
produced several trenchant works on the politics of gender, the symbolic
importance of ideas rather than material factors in South Africans' lives and,
belatedly, cultural histories that pushed sources in increasingly expansive and
creative directions.
The editors of the new Cambridge History are rightly wary of
offering a "master narrative" of South African history and the
opening chapters of both volumes show an editorial deference to what is now the
common, but not unanimous, convention of studying what people have written
about events rather than the events themselves. Some readers may feel
short-changed, yet the rest of the two thick volumes stand as something of a
monument to victories of the revisionist school of social history.
Of the new school of radical historians, two figures stand
out, both born around the time the first Cambridge History was published. They,
their ideas and their students form much of the intellectual ballast of the new
volumes. One is Stanley Trapido, a Krugersdorp athlete and occasional pit miner
who, in the late 1950s, changed focus after conversations with communist
activists at the University of Cape Town. Retreating to Britain after 1960, he
read widely — the history of New World slavery, Old World industrialisation and
working-class social history — and completed a doctorate at the University of
London.
Finding tenure in the staid intellectual atmosphere of 1970s
Oxford (where one don had only recently described African history as "the
unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners
of the globe"), Trapido soon became a magnet for young scholars eager to
find an intellectual rebuttal to apartheid "common sense".
Trapido's "kitchen table seminars" at his home
have since entered the lore of the South African historians' guild and without
it the scholarship on display in the Cambridge History would be much the
poorer. Trapido's own contribution is posthumous, rescued after his death in
2008.
The other is Shula Marks. That she became a historian of
South Africa at all owed much to historical chance. Marks was the South African
child of a family that had spent the turn of the century dodging the pogroms of
the Latvian and Lithuanian borderlands. An impoverished grandfather had come
good after winning a tender to supply the British Army, bivouacked at
Potchefstroom, with bread. Marks's father had to make do with travelling the
Karoo as a salesman, but married a progressive young woman who, on the surface
of things, might have seemed out of his league.
Marks's own early politics had been sharpened in the 1950s
at Habonim, the Cape Town socialist-Zionist youth movement. Like Trapido, she
was one of many talented emigrés to leave South Africa, reaching London in 1960
for a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She had planned
ultimately to shift to Israel, but the outbreak of the Six-Day War with Egypt
in 1967 marked a critical turning point for Marks as Israel morphed from a
haven of refuge into a state with colonial pretensions of its own. Israel's
loss was South Africa's gain.
Marks, while straddling the School of Oriental and African
Studies and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, helped to set up the now
famous Societies in Southern Africa seminar. Over several years it would
attract a committed group of cosmopolitan and political participants to take
seriously the study of the African past, making exciting use of new
archaeology, oral and written sources.
The seminar proceedings ultimately ran to some 20 volumes —
now happily in the process of digitisation — and Marks's own published work
would range widely. Best known for book-length studies on the 1906 Bambatha
Rebellion, bio-graphies of several ambiguous figures in black politics and the
history of nursing, a full list of her publications now fills seven closely
spaced pages. This kind of output is prolific enough, but she also supervised
more than 50 doctoral students. Their topics usually focused on the moment when
dynamic African polities collided with European settlers, marking the
beginnings of a series of uneasy, often messy entanglements whose subsequent
histories belie any of the easy moral lessons of the sort that successive
Nationalist governments in South Africa favoured. That tension lay at the heart
of the latest Cambridge History.
The Cambridge History therefore reflects the Angloworld
networks in which the revisionist school was, for many obvious reasons, forged.
The vast majority of the 28 contributors, almost all South Africans, have
studied, written or taught in a quadrangle bounded by Cape Town, Johannesburg,
London and Oxbridge. To readers already familiar with the work of these
historians there are relatively few surprises; authors have, not surprisingly,
stuck to their areas of expertise and, for the most part, recount arguments
available in published works elsewhere. But as a compendium of those ideas
these volumes are without rival and despite some inevitable grumbles in a work
of this scope — a by no means exhaustive bibliography to volume two is more
than 50 pages long — it surpasses, by some distance, several other good general
histories on the market.
Although written primarily as an introduction to scholars
and students in other fields, one of the many virtues of the chapters are an
almost uniform clarity of expression and structure, making it accessible to
general readers, teachers and, dare one say it, public servants.
The sombre covers, typical of the decades-old Cambridge
Histories series, are strangely reassuring; the no-nonsense chapter titles have
had no need of translated proverbs, contrived alliterations and needless jargon
— common in some quarters — to disguise the worth of their insights.
Map-lovers will delight in numerous excellent depictions of
the regional changes, but perhaps be disappointed to find no index to them.
Number crunchers will be similarly pleased to find an extensive statistical
appendix of 20th-century population data with an explanatory chapter by a
demographer.
Handsomely produced and edited to exacting standards, the
publishers have released affordable paperback editions of both volumes in
sub-Saharan Africa, at about R200 and R300 respectively (the hard covers, by
contrast, each cost in excess of R2 000).
As a sign of its worth, it has already been uploaded to obscure Russian
websites, about which comrades will hopefully feel well satisfied.
The editors pre-empt charges of the glaring paucity of
contributions from black scholars. Only the most parochial would begrudge the
quality of the work on this score and one can hardly doubt the politics of the
contributors, but in a country in which the faculties of few, if any, history
departments are even close to representing local demographics the question is
well worth putting.
In an extended meditation on the many different strands of
South African history writing that opens the first volume, the editors note
that the colonial origins of modern history departments resulted, over the 20th
century, in the "almost complete exile of black historians".
Pre-1994 restrictions and post-1994 market opportunities
have compounded the problem and account for the relatively small number of
black history postgraduates. Certainly, a career in history is still not always
the most attractive option and one might have expected the editors to go further
here.
The well-known conditions in which historians have been
working in South Africa have caused one recent authoritative commentator to
note that if the academy flourishes "it is despite, rather than because
of, the institutional circumstances" in which South African historians
find themselves.
High administrative workloads, uneven support for research,
wavering ethical standards, the increasing corporatisation of universities and
misguided management interference all give good reason for some to want to jump
the historians' ship, or not board it all.
Although there is much overlap between volumes, for
practical reasons they must split. The editors chose 1885, the moment when the
region that would eventually become South Africa unambiguously came under the
political and economic domination of the British and the Boer republics,
setting in motion continuities that would last until the 1990s and beyond.
In saying that South Africa was merely "a geographical
expression" — a point taken up by Saul Dubow, who shows in his
substantial intellectual history how "there was nothing self-evident about
South Africa or South Africans" — there is a hint that we will learn much
more about the regions beyond the borders of the current republic.
The first volume succeeds much better at this than the
second in which, bafflingly, Namibia, Zimbab-we, Swaziland and Botswana each
merit only a single reference in the index. The omission is conspicuous,
because the editors are eager to recall the region's fluidities.
Also omitted are contributions made by South African
historians to transnational or global history. Besides the historical sociology
of why and how people move, several questions could be asked about the effect
of world events (anything from the American Revolution to the Cold War) on
South Africa (and vice versa), comparative government, the circulation of
anti-colonial literatures, global labour solidarities and polyglot underworlds.
In all these cases South Africa has been a major vector and although the themes
are briefly alluded to in individual chapters, a dedicated discussion would
have further enriched the intellectual stew on offer.
There are many ways to read the 23 chapters and it is
impossible here to provide anything other than a crude summary for the general
reader.
Perhaps the enduring theme of Southern African history is
that of mobility — geographical, economic and social — followed by attempts to
restrict, channel and/or encourage it. Both the elite and ordinary people have had
to find original ways of coming to terms with this evolving and ever-present
tension during the past 2000 years.
In volume one, two chapters on archaeology draw attention to
renewed collaborations between historians and archaeologists, now driven by government
funding initiatives. Together they demonstrate the wide variety of interacting
social groups in pre-conquest Southern Africa of the past two millennia —
hunter-gatherers, herders, farmers and traders.
Scholars debate the timing and nature of these
relationships, but generally agree that the diversity of environmental contexts
and any given group's relationship to trade and migration routes shaped their
contours. Evidence suggests that an economic revolution began among
hunter-gatherer society in the early centuries of the first millennium, during
which a "package" of cereal agriculture, iron technology, livestock
and pottery arrived from Angola and East Africa, probably brought by people
speaking an ancestral form of chiShona.
Between the 11th and 14th centuries, the arrival of isiNtu
speakers from East Africa also complicated the landscape, so that we have
several interacting layers of people. A study of the spaces in which they lived
suggests a clear privileging of men and cattle. These small, decentralised
societies with pronounced and conservative gender divisions existed alongside
the great states of the Limpopo valley, notably Mapungubwe, whose wealthy but
deeply stratified society was dependent on its profitable connections with the
great Indian Ocean trading world.
The close proximities between the variety of people made for
intellectual and political cultures that valued mobility, shifting alliances
and identities — what the editors term, slightly anachronistically, as
"inclusive citizenship".
For Paul Landau, in a stimulating closing chapter that takes
seriously the languages and philosophies of the pre-conquest period, the
emergence of similar totems, words, spatial forms, systems of loyalty, fealty
and authority and rituals across the region suggest a widely connected social
system by the 18th century.
The colonial project was an attempt to freeze this world and
rule it in the interests of profit and world economy. Beginning with the
importation of Asian slaves, the integration of most Africans into early
"globalisation" was deeply traumatic. As Robert Ross and Martin
Legassick detail in a powerful chapter that barely conceals its dismay, the
Khoisan were reduced to serfs in the Dutch Cape and during British military
expansion from 1806 the Xhosa ecology was systematically and deliberately
destroyed.
The concept of "extermination" made its first
appearance on the subcontinent. Amid the "frontier wars", settlers
linked Christianity and civilisation and vigorously defended both against
"savages" by transforming a legal system built on equality into an
instrument of violent coercion.
Importantly, there also emerged a taxonomic imperative,
drawn out in several chapters. Writers, intellectuals, administrators and
explorers drew maps, gave the region's inhabitants names they did not ask for,
introduced new concepts of time, new kinds of clothing, manners and censuses
that imposed surnames and birth dates, so that it was not merely Africans'
independence that was imperilled, but an entire world view.
But colonial expansion was not so simple, as each writer of
these chapters well demonstrates. Colonialism was a fitful, uneven process,
dependent on topography, disease environments, settlement densities and the
capacities of local power brokers.
For Ross, race was not the primary category of social life
in Dutch Cape Town. Racial ideology took even longer to evolve on the
frontiers, where authority was similarly not always linked with race. A
recurrent theme in several chapters is the Africanisation, or "reverse
colonisation" of Boers in the interior, because they shared with their
African neighbours similar husbandry practices, wore similar clothing, ate
similar food, developed similar ways of government and fought and raided in
similar ways, often in alliances with one another.
Norman Etherington, Patrick Harries and Bernard Mbenga
consider how the need to defer rebellion and win supporters frequently
interrupted British rule. This led to the elaboration, in Natal especially, of
indirect rule and the "accommodation of patriarchs" that made
possible some mutually beneficial compromises between coloniser and colonised.
Amid these lapses and uncertainties in colonial South
Africa, Africans found ways to reconstitute their societies. John Wright, in a
chapter that recounts the demise of a Shakacentric theory of the Mfecane, shows
the durability of African social systems and that colonialism's primary effect
was to change the nature of, rather than to destroy, their foundations. Trading
and raiding economies emanating from both coasts caused African chiefdoms to
engage in defensive centralisation or exploit open areas. In turn, this
promoted the building of a state and new kinds of ideologies to legitimate
leaders, of whom Shaka was but one.
The long-standing politics of decentralised alliances
persisted with complex relationships managed through cattle, land and tribute.
Many kingdoms remained powerful enough to launch military resistance or to
force the peace. Amid these developments, a humanitarian and missionary
movement, powerful for a time, provided avenues of escape for some Africans,
who often converted on their own terms and domesticated the faith.
Small, creolised elites emerged. These groups could exploit
land and market opportunities and from this emerged the first stirrings of a
distinctly modern politics for the 20th century.
The rules of engagement thus set, the second volume
describes how the mineral discoveries after the 1870s upped the stakes. The
discoveries meant expanding production in town and countryside and white
landlords and labours began to tighten their grip on the spoils.
Economic divisions soon began to sharpen ethnic identities.
Trapido offers a deft take on the alliances between the imperial state, settler
ambitions and capitalist enclaves in the lead-up to the South African War. The
war's legacy, covered by Marks, included the creation of most of South Africa's
modern state institutions, the consolidation of its modern political boundaries
and the entrenchment of African and Asian exclusion as part of the cultivation
of a white "South Africanism", the clearest expression yet that the
region was to be a "white man's country".
A clutch of chapters on economic history by Bill Freund,
Phil Bonner and Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass detail the massive — and
episodically violent — intervention by successive governments. This was done in
the manner of a "development state" simultaneously to uplift and
protect white citizens and suppress African subjects, setting South Africa on
path dependencies with which policymakers still grapple.
Economic growth was sometimes explosive in the early decades
of the century, but dependence on minerals made for highly uneven development.
The result was frequent stagnation in the agricultural economy and several
waves of urbanisation. Unhealthy slums, often multiracial, mushroomed across
South Africa, the details of which are covered in Bonner's truly magisterial
chapter. Increased militancy from both white and black workers undercut
economic growth plans.
In this world, people acquired livelihoods in a variety of
ways. For Marks, the rapid changes presented opportunities for ordinary people
to create ambiguous "multistranded" identities that looked both
forward and backward.
African politics of the 1930s and 1940s had "some insurgent
spirit" but amounted more, for Bonner, to a "local collective
self-assertion" under an array of charismatic leaders, sometimes with
religious overtones, than it did to a coherent national project.
Many people sought out distraction rather than formulate
explicit political programmes, in marabi, sport and other forms of cultural
expression that segregationist planners thought of as subversive. A brief
shopping list of rather less controversial high culture is offered later in the
volume.
Apartheid was a reaction to these developments, because it
sought to renew the project of assuring white, and for a time specifically
Afrikaner, political supremacy and economic prosperity. Those who have lived
through apartheid will be familiar with its major aspects: Kafkaesque
bureaucracy, the fixation with space and race and its pronounced interference
in the regulation of family and sex.
Deborah Posel recounts her widely cited work on its
fractures and fissures: how personnel shortages, the inability to truly prevent
the "intimacy of strangers" and consequent multiethnic alliances,
friendships and solidarities rendered Pretoria's "blustering
dogmatism" confused and contradictory at the local level.
Amid these crevices, popular responses to apartheid were
forged. Anne Kelk Mager and Maanda Mulaudzi cover the wide variety of
associations, informal networks, burial societies, prayer groups and stokvels
that made up day-to-day responses to new pressures, but remain sceptical of
romantic struggle narratives.
Popular politics were riven with internal tensions,
ideological conflicts and were largely squashed by banishments, relocations,
moments of complicity and corruption, and often retreated in the face of the
heavy demands of mere existence under apartheid.
As Tom Lodge details in a long chapter with the richest
primary-source material, a new kind of struggle consciousness only emerged in
1973 with a series of working-class strikes. Lodge goes on to evaluate the
convergences between the Black Consciousness movement, the United Democratic
Front and Umkhonto weSizwe in the 1980s, finding that armed struggle never
seriously challenged the apartheid state and never won unanimous support even
from within the movement.
For its part, the apartheid state was under fiscal pressure
and faced a lack of sufficient popular white support as well as internal
divisions, all of which led to the abandonment of military strategy and, by the
late 1980s, stalemate.
Lodge concludes by touching on a coincidence of factors that
allowed for a negotiated transition, ending the history in 1994 and leaving it
to a new generation of scholars to take up the challenge of identifying
contrasts and continuities with the post-apartheid period. One hopes the wait
will require rather less patience.
