Post Doc Project Synopsis
History and Ideology in Apartheid South Africa:
Learning from Progressive, Intellectual Engagement
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Short abstract: This historiographical study seeks to reveal how leading intellectuals both took part in and tried to change the apartheid system. At the same time, it will expose the nature and genesis of the racially and socially divided South African society. This will necessitate the exploration of a wide range of scholarly contributions on the relation between race, class, and identity. Through a rethinking of the classical conflict between liberal and radical schools of thought in South African historiography, the project aims to produce new knowledge of the importance of history for politics, public opinion, and responsible agency, partly in the hope that this can further the understanding of the multicultural and politico-economic challenges that continue to confront South Africa and the region. My project sets itself the task to uncover the most important positions in the dispute between the historians, to explore the prerequisites and the course of this historical debate, and to clarify to which extent the paradigms have shown to be respectively converging or incompatible. The project is primarily focused on the scholarly contributions from historians and adjoining social scientists in the research debate. It poses these questions: To what extent have historians seen race prejudice or conflicting ethnic identities as the decisive factor in the institutionalisation and legalisation of racial discrimination? To what extent have they considered contradictory material interests, for instance those between labour and capital, as the crucial reason for segregation/apartheid? To what extent, how and by whom were historical research results from this debate used in the political struggle during apartheid? How did the historians relate to that kind of applied history? In what way have they justified their viewpoints and actions as historians? The question, if South African history writing was actually liberated with the fall of apartheid, also seems to be relevant. It is highly problematic that South African history writing to a great extent continues to reflect the priorities of the white minority. The pace of change and transformation of the history profession has been rather slow. Several of the mechanisms of exploitation uncovered by the academic debate have parallels to global apartheid issues of today, including new international divisions of labour, trans-border migrant work, and culturally repressive xenophobia. My approach is that it is fully possible to demarcate and analyse a central ideological clash between historians and simultaneously provide a broad and readable overall picture of the history debate. The research is expected to result in the publication of a volume of approximately 450 pages.Summary: Since the fall of apartheid in 1994, South Africa has moved through different phases, driven by the aspiration of
equal rights and better living conditions for all. While the official, idealist
conception of politics has evolved from “rainbowism” to “African renaissance”,
[1]
the economic recipe has developed from grassroots redistribution
to marked liberalism in the attempt to sustain economic dynamism.
[2]
With past experiences in mind, one
might expect to find a vivacious interest in historiography, but the study of
history in South Africa has in fact suffered periods of serious decline.
[3]
During segregation and apartheid, historical research was
used extensively to seek solutions on problems of contemporary importance. Most
of the great debates on South African history have had hidden agendas mirroring
vital problems of later days than the period presumably described: the creation
of the myth of the empty interior that legitimised colonial expansion; the
discussion of the frontier theory, outlining the self-identification of the
Boers on the isolated border – and establishing their guilt for later events;
the formulation by early liberals of “protective” segregation; the later
liberal critique of dysfunctional elements in the apartheid policy; together
with the construction of a working class tradition by radical historians, provide
illustrating examples of history used for ideological mobilisation.
[4]
On certain levels, the history of the apartheid epoch is
still being used for the purpose of nationbuilding under the ongoing transformation
process.
[5]
My research deals with patterns of use
and abuse of history during formation of class and group identity and national
unification in South Africa. The importance of history and historians in the
making of the South African society will be discussed from various angles. Through
a historiographical lens with a specific focus on the academic debate between
liberal and radical scholars, this project will reveal new aspects of the
historical development of the present South African democracy, partly in the
hope that this will further the understanding of the political, cultural, and
economic challenges that continue to confront it. The development of social and
ethnic barriers and prejudices in the South African society throughout the 20th century will be illuminated through an examination of divergent scholarly
opinions on segregation and apartheid.
This
project is dealing with ideological turning points, intellectual breakthroughs,
central academic personages, and fundamental institutions in the international world
of history writing. It pursuits intellectual history in the making.
The presentation of the problem The
broader objective of this research is to produce new knowledge of the
importance of history for politics and ideology through a rethinking of the
classical conflict between the liberal and radical schools of thought inside
South African historiography - and of the
interaction between these academic tendencies and society. I will do so mainly
by examining a wide range of the most important analyses made on relations
between race, class, and identity in South African history together with
analyses on developments in state power and in the sphere of production. In
other words, my intention is to bring improved focus on historical research in
the basic links between economics, politics, and ideology during South Africa’s
recent history.
Although the approach is eclectic, the
solution of the project will involve a more complete recording and
prioritisation of the history debate than seen before.
A more specific aim is to investigate,
which of the main historical-ideological schools that came closest to the
historical truth in its analyses. Even if I do not expect that a definite
answer to this question can be found, it provides an impetus to the search for
meaning in history.
This project is far away from any kind
of established, intellectual knowledge-power. Contrarily, it is grappling more
or less helplessly with apparently outdated concepts. One problem arising from
this research is, if the classical,
left-ideological insurgency has come to an end, or if it still has some potential.
[6]
It seems like the historical debate between left and right has just died out
without any real conclusion. Even then, issues from the debate keep cropping up
again and again.
[7]
Were those socialist notions, which
served as an ideological inspiration for many South African social scientists,
defeated once and for all at the end of the 20th century? Did
socialist solutions and explanations cease to function, because they were plain
wrong and unnatural; because the opposition was too strong; because they were
inadequately formulated; or because they belong to the future? Should we regard
the radical school’s historians as idealistic utopians, while the liberals were
the useful realists? If so, was the dispute unimportant? Did it promote or
undermine quality of research and professional values? Why can’t we just forget
the left’s agenda?
Is it possible, or even desirable, to
revitalise the dialectical, ideological dynamism of the great debate? Can it by
comparison against the post-apartheid situation be determined if the forms of
the history debate have become poorer - i.e. if changes in the practices of the
social sciences would be preferable? For instance, unconventional angles probably
need to be appreciated more than hitherto. The contributions that skilled
amateurs made to the history debate during apartheid helped provoke ruptures
and movements towards paradigm shifts. The connection between these
contributions, popular political activity, and historical research is still a
rather poorly researched field within historiography. This angle will be
included in my study, where it is significant for the main paradigmatic
conflict.
My research
will argue that history has not ended; that the Marxist discussions of the
1970s and '80s have a persistent, progressive significance; and that the
historic right-left debate has continued relevance. However, it is my
hypothesis that a wakeup call to mainstream academia has to come from outside the
academic world.
This project represents a further
development of research I started when writing my PhD, which was conferred by
the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen. Further background studies
conducted during a three-year stay as Danish Research Fellow at the Nordic
Africa Institute in Uppsala have resulted in unfinished manuscripts, which are
thorough and analytical, however somewhat ambiguous and vague. Earlier academic
evaluations of draft manuscripts have included some critical remarks, which
will be met through this rethinking of the project. This phase of the project
will both deepen and broaden the analysis and transform the research into a
relevant book manuscript ready for publication. The ambition is to give the
work real weight and significance in the ongoing discussion on the importance
of South African history writing.
[8]
This will require additional textual
analysis, extension of the field of study, plus some rewriting and analytical
elaboration of my earlier research.
My commitment to the project also
comprise an obligation to utilise the research results both in relation to
people and institutions in the new South Africa and in correlation with the
domestic debate in the Nordic countries about NGO-participation, transitionary
aid, and the continuing interest in the democratisation process in media, high
school teaching etc. The core of the research however, has no specific links to
my native country, Denmark, and I fail to see, why it should.
The dominating patterns of research in
contemporary history in South Africa reflect deep conflicts external to
academia. As a result of the unequal access to education, the historiographical
tradition is characterised by the absence of black historians, and the
education and communication of history on university level have been
distinguished by the English liberal tradition's long-standing predominance,
although this was challenged by Afrikanerdom during the creation of apartheid
and by left-radical tendencies during late apartheid.
Numerous attempts have been made to
isolate and characterise the basic elements in the specific South African
social order during the segregation and apartheid periods. Many of them on a
highly professional level. From the beginning of the 1970s, these attempts took
the shape of a scholarly discussion, whose participants, to a large extent,
split into two principal camps: the liberal school and the radical-revisionist
school.
[9]
Historians inside and outside South Africa have had a considerable
role in this academic debate, which, due to the emergence of diaspora milieus
of exiled researchers, quickly got a strongly international profile.
Both the conventional English-liberal
school and the radical school of historians have tried to reconstruct a
historical reality relevant to present problems. Both schools have used a
practice, where the past is comprehended in the light of the present and the
present is altered on the basis of historical knowledge. The ardent questions,
raised by the historians’ immediate situation, claimed for detection of
correlations in the past reality of history, and it is precisely this coherence
that has made the research debate around South Africa’s past so committed and
usable.
Roughly simplified, it has been the
liberal stance, that apartheid has injured the free potentialities of modern
capitalism in South Africa and has thereby limited both economic growth and political
freedom.
[10]
The bearing of the radical school is, basically, that the
racial system has been beneficial to the ruling class, the South African
capitalists, and that it operated with economic functionality and with
political rationality over a long period of time.
[11]
My project does not set itself the task
to fully solve this fundamental disagreement, but merely to find out how vital the debate was for the history
profession and the movement for democracy, uncover the most important positions in the argument between the
historians, explore the prerequisites and the course of this debate, and
clarify to which extent the paradigms have shown to be respectively converging
or incompatible. It is, however, my hope that the investigation will further
a wider insight in the nature of the apartheid society as such, since the
heritage of this system continues to set the agenda in many areas of South African
life.
The original working title of the
project was narrowed down to: The
Discussion about South Africa: a Survey of the Research Debate over Apartheid
History. This formulation of the problem does not, however, imply an
overspecialised angle focused exclusively on professional history writing. The
research discussion around South Africa's path of development is distinctly
interdisciplinary and represents some of the best examples on genuine
integration of arts and letters and social studies. Anthropologists,
development researchers, economists, sociologists, professional politicians,
theologians and political activists have participated in this academic debate
with equally great enthusiasm, and in practice, it is hardly possible to
isolate historians as having a certain, clearly defined role.
This has methodological implications.
Teaching students from all faculties at CAS, Copenhagen and working together
with a broad spectrum of Africa researchers at NAI, Uppsala has helped me
develop a cross-disciplinary approach to African Studies. In dealing with the
problem under research, however, the
strongest focus is on the scholarly contributions from historians and adjoining
social scientists and these contributions are treated mainly as historical
writings with due consideration to differences in their nature.
It is all too easy to dismiss an
outline like this as an unfocused, overarching meta-study containing insoluble
methodological problems. My approach is, on the other hand, that it is fully
possible to demarcate and analyse a central ideological clash between
historians and simultaneously provide a broad and readable overall picture of
the history debate. The
large bibliography build for this project in the form of my online research
databases testifies that this project will complement, not duplicate other research.
Variations in the historians’ more or
less intentional attitudes to the relation between class and race, between
economy and culture, have had fundamental importance to South African history
writing at least since the 1870s, but from the beginning of the 1970s and until
the mid-90s, the discussion about the substance of this relation became quite
central in the research debate, and several historians have considered this a
golden age of history writing.
[12]
My project poses these broad-spectrum
questions: what was it that made history
a master tool in the final struggle against apartheid? Why did South African
historians write as they did, what effects did their writings have, and how
does the history views of the 1970s and the 1980s differ from those of previous
and later periods?
Both in Eastern Europe and in the West,
the end of the cold war has opened for a revision of post World War II
historical writings, apparently to relieve history from its ideological
burdens,
[13]
and in much the same way, the time might have come for the
South Africans to take another look at the images and myths of their era of
repression in the new light that their liberation has turned out to be more of
a neo-liberal victory than the national democratic revolution that many had
expected. In neighbouring disciplines this process started years ago.
[14]
A possible
impact of the project as a corrective to existing writings might emerge from
the post-Cold War angle applied. Strangely enough,
little research has been done on the consequences of the disappearance of the
“communist threat” (here understood as the combination of proletarian
internationalism and national class struggle). My expectation is that the ways
of viewing progressive history – together with attitudes to the left-right
debate as such – have been influenced deeply by this change.
A closely related question is how
intellectual developments in the West did affect the struggle against apartheid
in South Africa? The decline of Marxist knowledge-power in South Africa cannot
be fully understood without grasping the political weakness of Western
university Marxism in the advanced capitalist countries. Moreover, a new
progressive, intellectual wave will hardly come about without developing an
understanding, locally and internationally, of what was lost with the end of
the moment of Western Marxism in South Africa. Even if the influence from
Soviet-Marxism on the ANC and other popular movements were studied by apartheid
ideologists and liberals, the question of why it left so few lasting imprints,
has not been answered. Were most of the radical-revisionists actually
progressive liberals taking a detour, using neo-Marxism as career instrument?
My project maps the profession: to what extent have historians seen race
prejudice or conflicting ethnic identities as the decisive factor in the
institutionalisation and legalisation of racial discrimination? To what extent have they considered
contradictory material interests, for instance those between labour and
capital, as the crucial reason for segregation/apartheid? To what extent, how and by whom were
historical research results from this debate used in the political struggle
during apartheid? How did the historians
relate to that kind of applied history? Did the close interaction between
academia and civil society influence their professional integrity? In what way
have they justified their viewpoints and actions as historians? These are
some of the questions that the project takes as its starting points.
The
investigation of the historians’ understandings of central issues such as the
relation between race, class, and nation will concentrate on their specific
writings, which will be contemplated as
objectively as possible and in the light of the historical age and scenery in
which they were created.
If this project contributes in any
small way to a revival of the fundamental argument among historians about
social-racial discrimination as a decisive element in the political economy
and, as a consequence of that, in the creation of mentalities in South Africa,
it will have fulfilled its purpose.
The relevance of the problem From a definition of historiography as
the history of historical writing,
[15]
there is an obvious need for historiographical research in
South Africa. Despite of many short articles and chapters that touch on historiographical
matters, less than a handful of syntheses
in book length are available, and most of these are outdated and written
from a rather traditional liberal perspective.
[16]
Newer analyses have been narrow in scope or limited in
size.
[17]
Even after 30 years, many of the
provocative contributions, which opened the liberal-radical controversy, appear
persistently present due to their principled theoretical and methodological approach.
Yet, in the light of neo-liberal victories and post-structural interventions,
they seem unsatisfactory understood and communicated and call for new attempts
on historiographical syntheses.
From the beginning of the 1990s, the
South African history debate as such has been decreasing. Converging tendencies
can be traced and the classification of the historians into ideological boxes
is often doomed artificial and random. Some of the participants in the debate
even consider that the rightwing/leftwing controversy is no longer a controversy,
and that the discussion has rendered itself superfluous.
[18]
My hypothesis is,
on the contrary, that the ideological
debate is far from concluded, but will, in spite of inclinations to some
kind of new harmony, continue to stimulate dialectics and dynamics inside
South African historical research and encourage interaction with the surrounding
society.
[19]
In spite
of numerous partial attempts, the radical-revisionist school never presented a
complete, alternative synthesis of South African history. The closest to this
is perhaps still the introductory chapters in the three collective works
It is my assumption that the liberal-radical history debate,
which culminated in the late 1980s was on the whole very stimulating for both
productivity and quality in South African historical research, and thus I find it difficult to
accept that this discussion and the related interaction between academia and
society should just fade away in favour of some kind of more or less static
consensus in the area of basic approaches - or be substituted by purely intellectual
experiments isolated from broader progressive forces in society.
[25]
The
tendencies among historians to an individualised concern for more or less
exotic subjects also seem worrying to me.
[26]
Empathy and good insight into the
feelings and everyday needs of ordinary people should probably originate
directly from progressive political tendencies. Structural analyses do not and
should consequently be a priority for historians and other researchers who wish
to contribute to the democratic process.
Too much
recent historical writing addresses the history of relatively minor, peripheral
matters in a jargon-ridden way while more or less abandoning adherence to
causation. In South Africa, where they do not have the luxury of a large
historical profession, too few historians are now handling the big issues, such
as the underlying nature of apartheid and the importance of its structural heritage
for the transition from apartheid to a social democracy.
[27]
This project
is not a narrow case study, or an
exercise for the sake of an exercise, rather it is a broad discussion on the
role of history writing in the fostering of progressive, societal development,
and what is at stake here is, among other things, if Marxist inspirations,
given this background, still could have a role to play.
Of one
reason or another, important historical questions have been left aside lately.
Was the truth-value of the liberal project obvious already from the early
apartheid reforms of the 1970s - or did the democratic breakthrough succeed
only due to the militant revolution threat of popular movements?
Logically,
what at the present stage could be interpreted as the odd, common victory of
the freedom movement and the liberal forces ought, together with the assumed
ending of racial discrimination, bring political economy back to the forefront
in South African historical research, and simultaneously raise the need for the
positions to be summed up. Instead, the debate has just disappeared.
In the
last instance, a continued exploration of liberal and radical theories of
change, and of the discussion between their agents, also prior to 1994, is a
necessary prerequisite for deciding whether expectations to the outcome of
popular struggles have been fulfilled or not. From the perspective of the
radical intellectuals: did a revolution take place? It seems to be a difficult matter
to decide if those anti-apartheid activists, whose main motive power was social
indignation, fought in vain. Can historical studies help to measure that?
To
determine this problem in satisfactory detail, one would have to develop
methods, which could hold together surveys of popular, pre-1994 expectations
with post-apartheid, socio-economic developments and compare the results with
central theories and predictions of the liberal and radical traditions
respectively. Even if it is not the ambition of this book to reach such a level
of analysis, its attempt to combine a broad focus on political-historical
orientation of histories with deep exegesis of individual texts from these two
principal schools, may lay the ground for future studies of that kind.
Pre-understandings and premises Contemporary history
is always described from the author’s place in the present. From what position,
then, will my research strategy be implemented? Lately, it has become
fashionable among academics to start a paper heading or research question with
the word “beyond” (…post-colonialism, ...identity, ...gender, or whatever).
Probably to signal the forward-looking and knowledge-creating value of the
project. If topics including Marxism are taken up nowadays, they often come
with the phrase “revisiting”.
My
writing pays no consideration to fashion and I have been criticised for being
out of date from the start. A review of an edited book, which I initiated in
1987, postulated that South Africa was chosen as a subject because “it is the last place on earth where
dauntless trade union leaders fight monopoly capital the good old way”.
[28]
A review of another edited book published in 2007 stated that “with longing and some sense of desperation,
it harks back to the issues and debates of the 1970s”.
[29]
Both of these critiques are partly correct. I hope to support and renew the
agendas ridiculed in these reviews.
[30]
I doubt
very much that we are beyond the radical-liberal debate. This debate is a
reflection of some of the most basic societal divisions. And – despite great
developments in the areas of political representation and formal equality of
rights – class contrasts have not changed fundamentally in South Africa.
[31]
For that reason, issues from the left-right debate keep popping up all the time.
These problems diffuse into academia, even if Marxism today is typically used
in an indirect, muted way on narrowly limited subjects.
Most
often scientific research is done in an attempt to make new discoveries; to be
at the cutting edge of intellectual developments. In the case of my research,
it is also done because; I feel that, at this moment in time, my area of social
science research is not moving forward at all. On the contrary; we are
experiencing a backslash, and I am afraid that we are going to lose something
precious.
The general situation in South African academia, after
1994, has been a growing consensus between progressive liberals and soft
radicals.
[32]
Everything seems to show that many of the more open-minded, post-radical
historians are increasing their influence at the English-speaking universities
in co-operation with undogmatic, political liberals (declared economic liberalists
are still fairly rare in these circles) and it could be argued that the
influence of former radicals in practice are actually greater now than in their
celebrated heydays of the 1970s and ‘80s.
[33]
My research is, however, built on the assumption that
attempts to amalgamate liberal and radical points of departure, relating to the
relationship between racism and its social background, into broader and more
generally formulated statements within South African historiography will have a
difficult time getting very far. Racism always appears as part of a more
extensive complex of motives and views, and it will only be possible to agree
on a common view on, for instance, effects of socio-economic changes, if this
view is based on a somewhat concordant analysis of the relationship between racism
and underlying interests of the various sections of the population.
[34]
In the same manner, it is only possible to
find common views on the effects of economic growth on income distribution or
similar central factors, if based on coincident positions on the mechanisms
that determine the division of income and welfare in society. This in itself
presupposes a certain agreement on the role of the private sector, government
power, and ideology in the communal/societal process. The judgments of
historians in cases of existing or past reality depend to a certain degree on
their ideas of an alternative society. Despite a great deal of new thinking
focused on general values, ethics, gender, religion, culture and ecology, for
example, new visions will probably in the last instance still have to relate to
more or less clearly formulated liberal or socialist welfare-oriented
ideological models.
[35]
Any attempt to undo the nature of the liberal-radical controversy itself will
therefore run into some general problems.
[36]
Another
of my assumptions is that the disappearance of a concrete socialist
developmental model, as incomplete as it may have been, has made the radicals
less radical, and one can ascertain that, at the moment, the places and forums
where the more comprehensive and fundamental questions are left open and where
the debate has been centred on more specific historical problems, or pedagogical
and practical solutions, are, unfortunately, also the places where some kind of
research debate is developing despite a more beleaguered situation for history.
[37]
Early
post-apartheid efforts were seemingly aimed at using the past as a unifying
factor. However, concentrating on neutral symbolism seems to be the way the
South African government has chosen later.
[38]
One senses impatience
with history by a present-minded generation interested mostly in the market and
its utilitarian values.
The
majority of South Africans might have a past in which they can at least partly
identify, namely the fight against colonisation and the freedom struggle. That,
however, is not the past of most whites, and to have conflicting pasts is not
necessarily very productive for a common harmonious nation building. Social
protests were an important part of the liberation struggle,
[39]
but to stress that today would be to admit that the conflict is not over. As a
result, history is often seen as peripheral, and neutral national symbols are
favoured. More focus on historiography might keep the “pre-reconciliation
memory” alive, which could be seen as necessary in cases where reconciliation
is reduced to the right to forget conflicts without solving them. This project
will include post-apartheid writings of direct relevance to the liberal-radical
controversy as well as attempts to detect and counter ahistorical
“reconciliation history” and postrationalisations over the apartheid legacy.
[40]
A development that was predicted by some, but which
has not yet materialised, was the elevation of the freedom movements’
historiography, first and foremost the ANC’s, to honour and dignity. Many
expected that with the transfer of power to a majority government in 1994, a
new nationalist history writing would emerge, as had happened in other parts of
Africa with the decolonisation. If South Africa really was liberated from white
structural control and had been fully unchained from internal colonial, and
from external neo-colonial, domination, it would have been only natural, if a
bearing of African history writing, a new black consciousness, would have
matured and prevailed. However, after 10 years of democracy, there are only
week tendencies in this direction, and little is actually being written on the
development of South African historical writing. The transfer of political
power has not yet been matched by any new significant historiographical
development.
There could be a number of reasons for this. To
explain the absence of a new direction in South African historiography, radical
authors have pointed to the nature of the negotiated revolution.
[41]
Liberal authors have given a partly conflicting explanation: that South African
history was decolonised long before the political decolonisation of 1994.
[42]
I could suggest a couple of other reasons beside the obvious ones: the crisis
of socialism and ANC’s move to the right. First that almost no radical African
researchers have entered into the profession and so they hardly exist at the history
departments. Secondly, it also seems reasonable to presume that radical
liberatory history for instance became less relevant during the ANC-government’s
social demobilisation.
Therefore, the
question, if South African history writing was actually liberated with the fall
of apartheid, seems relevant to me.
Even for one who remains sceptical to “New
Africanism”,
[43]
it is highly problematic that South African history to a rather large extent
continues to reflect the world-view of the white minority. The pace of change
and transformation of the history profession has actually been rather slow.
[44]
This causes pain to the majority of black people and makes it less easy for
South Africa to fulfil its role as an African country.
I have dealt with the present situation
for the history profession in the new South Africa elsewhere,
[45]
and even if this situation will have some influence on the
priorities, the project’s main analyses
will concentrate on the writings of the 1970s and 1980s. This does not mean
that the project will be merely antiquarian. Most South African history
writings of importance, including the few book-size historiographical analyses
made until now, contain more or less implicit political agendas. However, the
genuine, ideologically committed, research debate is having a hard time at the
moment.
[46]
Hopefully, aspects of my research, dealing with the writing
of anti-apartheid histories, will be used to keep the ideals of the freedom
struggle alive during the neo-liberal scenery of today.
[47]
The
severe social contrasts which South Africa will have to face in the years to
come makes it, as I see it, difficult to believe that a paradigmatic harmony
between essentially different ideologies would endure for long.
[48]
The discussion about South Africa’s controversial past
and its significance for the choices of the new South Africa will quite
certainly arise again and resemble earlier controversies between liberal and
radical historians. The fundamental disagreements between historians will
reverberate throughout the academic universe when the social realities recall
them once again. The way in which opinion-forming scholars have
involved themselves in the left-right debate could continue to be a source of
inspiration for as long as social dispute inside nation states has not become
obsolete. This project
was designed to support Danish, South African, and international research equally,
and for that matter, it could be viewed as a continuation of the international
solidarity that bloomed during late apartheid.
The
official attempts to bring about the definitive liquidation of racial
discrimination could once more place political economy in the
centre of South African historical research.
[49]
The relationship over time between economic development
and the South African state's social and race-related policies has potentially
a future as a cardinal area of interest for historians, who accentuate interchange
between past and present. To what extent
is the history debate on the connections between apartheid and capitalism
relevant for the elaboration of strategies for economic growth and distribution
of wealth in the post-apartheid situation? The ability of the free market
economy to give rise to improved social conditions across colour lines will
most likely prove decisive to its future forms in South Africa within a
reasonably short space of time.
[50]
On top of that comes the general global
significance of the subject. Despite much research, the fundamental question
remains open: was apartheid organised mainly around race or class? Around
culture or economy? Or, in other words, can it be decided, if ethnic/cultural
or if social relations are the most important for identity creation and for the
discrimination of others? To find out more about why skin colour, more than
social inequality, for most of the time seems to have been, and once again
seems to be, the most significant consideration in social studies on South
Africa, continues to be an important aspect of my research.
The investigation outlined in this
synopsis falls a bit outside prevailing trends in Danish historical research,
and not just because of a generally small interest in non-European topics among
at least Danish historians (one often gets the impression that historical
research needs to have direct relevance to national issues, which seems
somewhat provincial to me in the present era of globalisation). The triumph of
liberalism has apparently lead to an acceptance of "the fall of the
models" among historians, not least within social history. Some aversion
against political economy, broad social science analyses, in fact any kind of
structuralist-oriented historical research, seems to have spread among
scholars.
[51]
Nevertheless, it seems to me that any historian must experiment
with models, if not of other reasons, then because even an isolated subset of
historical reality is too manifold to describe in full. Historical
understanding requires the course of events to bee placed in a structural
context. Accordingly, the decline in the use of structural theories actually
commits the historian to engage in the development of improved historical
models and ideal types.
Perhaps constructive historical models
can be created by merging methods and ideas from the history discipline and
development research. Some of the questions raised during work on this book
point in that direction. How close is the connection between societal
development level and authoritarian rule? Is economic growth created mainly
during periods with market liberalism or during periods with protectionism and
government economic involvement? Do the radical demands of popular movements
promote productivity and competitiveness through a dialectic process, or does
forced social stability promote growth at certain stages of development? Which
are the most important factors in the interplay between economic necessity and
political agency?
[52]
Under which conditions is a nation state respectively strengthened or weakened
by people-driven development? Are moral condemnations of alleged historical
crimes meaningless, and is one obliged to present alternative historical
development models, if one persists? These questions lie implicitly in the cross-disciplinary
and international South African historian’s debate, even though the responses
to some extent fall outside of the framework of this study.
Hypotheses It is part of my expectations to the
outcome of the study that:
·
Both of the main paradigms uncover
quite different aspects of the same reality – with equally great talent.
·
They are not coincident and do not
eliminate the need for each other's apartheid analyses.
·
They each claim their own form of
objectivity, but in reality, they indirectly serve opposing politico-economic
interests.
·
The analyses of the radical social
scientists played a more significant role for the abolition of apartheid than
the Liberals’ did.
The methodology A limited, selective, historical status
review of the development of the discipline of historical study in South
Africa, which is actually, what this project is, calls for further reflection
on general study methods and theories usable for this purpose. How does one
compare historical writings in a meaningful way and how can their - relative
and overall - importance be measured? When one attacks this kind of topic, typically styled and of
central interest to the discipline, one better have something original to say. Otherwise,
the risk is exhaustion of the problem, reporting trivial changes in previous
research. However, I intend to problematise what at the moment works as societal
“matters of course”. Furthermore, this kind of historical investigation is to
some degree about finding new ways interpreting known and unchangeable sources.
This
project will take the form of an examination of works from opposing “history movements”
or “trends in history writing,” mapping their characteristics through analyses
of their interpretations of a highly particular social development known as
segregation/apartheid. As I see it, this has not yet been done in a
consequent way.
Some of the importance of this project,
and some of my commitment to it, come from the interest in an overall
historical understanding of the politico-economic functionality and the complexity
of the fundamental constituents/determinants of the apartheid society. It has
been a key methodological problem to maintain this wide-ranging perspective
within a thorough, detailed study. That is one of the reasons, why the field
of interest has been approached from a historiographical angle from where
competing discourses and texts dealing with apartheid history can be compared.
[53]
There are several other reasons why a historiographical
approach could help one achieve a meaningful comprehension of the South African
situation. Most people’s understanding of most kinds of history comes by the
means of texts. By combining focused, in-depth text-analysis with a
multi-aspected, long-perspective, structural view, I have wanted to create an
understanding of the South African historical reality which is both broad and
deep.
This also implies that my opening search for perspectives,
necessary for historiographical differentiation, can not be narrowed down to
immediately applicable methods and angles, but has to consider larger,
overlapping, theory complexes. It has to be an open qualitative analysis:
explorative research aimed at developing suggestions, which to some extent can
be tested for generality through empirical text-studies.
[54]
All historical analysis proceeds -
implicitly or explicitly - from basic premises and assumptions about the
dialectic between human behaviour and society in the historical process.
[55]
Therefore, part of writing historiography is to extract
those assumptions and theories that have guided previous work. When doing this,
the author exposes himself to all kinds of discursive and epistemological
clashes and his daring analyses is frequently curtailed by warnings of dangers
like dogmatic totalisation,
[56]
blind essentialism,
[57]
and narrow reductionism.
[58]
And undeniable; being unaware of that kind of temptations
increases the threat of getting caught by a simplistic teleology describing the
gradual unfolding of history towards a selected, ultimate goal, imposing on the
past a too narrow sense of unavoidable continuity and coherence. An opposite
risk, however, lies in the self-protective, multicausal approach, avoiding all
theoretical commitment, throwing in a variety of explanations, and eventually
arriving at the “combination of factors” kind of conclusion - failing to weight
or prioritise causal explanations. Thus historiographical writing, analysing
the work of others, cannot be handled from a neutral stance and the claims of some
historians to be objective (if understood as neutral) are always a mere pretence.
[59]
The project deals with perceptions of
history that are based on divergent interests and ideological views. That
includes references to a great deal of differing academic concepts, but also,
that I myself will have to take a position on the investigated works and
notions of history. Accordingly, the resultant book will most likely present
itself as a relatively broad, debating analysis, rather than as a traditional,
narrow, impersonal university thesis. The
book will be written on the basis of proper, basic research and commonly
accepted functional principles of source-criticism.
[60]
It will include a representative selection of works from
the competing historical paradigms, suitable for illustrating the disputes
between them, and this material will be handled in a fair and comprehensive manner
through comparative analyses based on the conventional hermeneutic circle.
[61]
Rules of good scientific practice, including those
referring to triangulation and analytical induction, will be regarded.
[62]
It goes without saying that the aim is
to construct an accurate picture of the historical reality - in this case the
making of history - on the basis of facts. In dealing with historiography, this
is both harder and easier than in other kinds of history writing in the sense
that the subject could seem more “indirect”, not being so much “what really
happened” out there in the “societal historical reality”,
[63]
but rather what other historians have been writing about
that reality.
[64]
This implies that secondary literature often functions as
the historiographer’s primary sources.
In the cases where the investigation
comes close to philosophy of history, the question is also, how final research
results can be, since abstract philosophy does not show the same kind of progression
that more exact single-sciences can bring.
The comparative historian’s task and
potential contribution lies not so much in revealing new data, but rather in
establishing the interest and prima facie validity of overall arguments about
causal regularities across the various cases.
[65]
It means that most sources are rather easily accessible, and that it will often
be possible to discuss directly with the creators of those sources, but it also
indicates that conclusions can only with caution be drawn on the history of the
wider world, but should principally be on the historical texts analysed.
Fact-based elements are fewer in
historiography than in other historical research. What can actually be said about a piece of history writing
that is not an interpretation based on values? Exegesis and analysis dealing with
intention, use, and effects of texts must be hermeneutical and interpretative
even when the intention is to produce causal explanations. My project is, on the other hand, not exclusively
theoretical, since - beside scholarly texts - political recommendations and all
kinds of interdepartmental and extrovert activities of the historians - in
combination - constitute their role in society. A cross-disciplinary,
sociological approach that can be combined with historical source criticism
must be further developed, since the behaviour and interests of the history
writers are part of the exercise. Through
an extended historiographical analysis, I will tell a story of both the apartheid
society and the ways in which academics tried to change it.
Such an attempt to make a state of affairs of the writing of
South African history might make many traditional social scientists nervous,
and at least, it calls for some further reflections on possible research
methodologies. Periodisation, including how to analyse accounts of phases and
shifting forms of racism,
[66]
for instance, is just one of the obvious problems that
confront the historiographer with the question of how to grasp theoretically
and conceptualise the process of alteration inside the milieu of historical
research.
[67]
The
methodology that will be used for historiographical differentiation in this
project is not built on ready-made, exact termed criterions of identification
or a pre-defined list of research notions. Such an approach could be interpreted as intellectual laziness or as fear of
wrongness that could kill the creativity of writing.
[68]
In the eclectic process used, different
types of knowledge are integrated in order to create a more complex framework
for understanding the empirical reality; the rationale being that the
exceedance of individual disciplines and the integration of information across
boundaries are knowledge-productive. As the eclectic approach, however, cannot
involve all of the perspectives that are relevant to understanding an object in
its entirety and in all its externalities, there can be no expectation that the
eclectic approach will produce a perfect response. The expectation is rather to
demonstrate specific but complex relationships and connections between
phenomena of the empirical reality, present angles and contexts of
comprehension, take advantage of conceptual interdisciplinary, as well as
identify gaps in the existing knowledge. Despite some philosophical
reservations, methodological eclecticism is used in this study to combine and
integrate knowledge from different subject-areas and disciplines by way of
methods described as conceptual
interdisciplinarity.
[69]
The rationale is that an assembly of several theories will improve existing
theoretical understandings of the complexity of empirical relationships. An
eclectic approach is grounded on critical reflections and postmodernist dangers
are lurking in the corners of this methodology. Using it uncritically could
lead to the establishment of a lack of systematic explication of chosen
criteria; to a patchwork of unconnected theories unprincipled put together; it
could create illogical incoherence of data. The knowledge integrated when using
this methodology is often not new knowledge, in the sense of never thought
about before. It is based on already known forms of thought; therefore, results
could be unoriginal, not leading to new insights. It could be viewed as
unscientific and unsuitably to create comprehensive theories, for if one of the
arguments for working eclectic is that empirical phenomena are linked in
complex ways and that no perspective alone can explain a subject area totally,
well, then this could mean that there can never be created one perception that
includes all important perspectives. However, these weaknesses are outweighed
by the fact that the eclectic methodology is anti-reductive in its view of
knowledge creation. The strength of the approach is that it better uncovers
shortcomings and inadequacies in existing explanations. Since it looks at
science as an unfinished process, it is constantly striving to uncover
additional layers and dimensions.
In reality, it is difficult to locate
clear, internal, intentional, scientific guidelines, which could provide
precise distinctions between the schools of history, and in addition, it is
possible to detect many methodological and analytical problems, syntheses, and
even “guides for action” which stretches across paradigms.
[70]
Nonetheless, it is possible to identify
a number of intellectual streams partly with the help of concrete criteria laid
down for the occasion. This project will
attempt to isolate and investigate two major modern paradigms known as the
liberal school and the radical school plus a number of variants in South
African historical research. What makes it possible to distinguish by
reasonably clear dividing lines is to a considerable extent that the schools
also differ distinctly in the view on their own present and in their use of
history for external purposes. It has consequently been a point of departure
that in addition to textual analyses and sociological inquiries into the world
of academia, circumstances external to science must also be considered for the
distinction between paradigms. Furthermore, as I see it, a critical historian
does not need to be worried by this coherence between paradigms of history and
movements in the contemporary reality. A great deal of the most outstanding
history writing has been written out of a concurrent commitment. I have also found
that generalising, ahistorical, “neutral” systems theory and organisation
theory often produces inaccurate results in cases dealing with ideology.
[71]
It is my impression from teaching and supervising that many
students and young researchers commit themselves rather overspecialized and
schematic either to the established virtues of their particular discipline or
to new exciting trends such as discourse analyse, new cultural history,
post-colonialism, new realism, new historicism, the linguistic turn, variations
of post-feminism, post-constructuralism, thoughts on identity, power centred
theories etc. in their treatise exordium, only to forget the theoretical
integration in their actual investigation. Even if I always give my social science
students the secure advise to focus on a narrow subject, to choose a defined
theory, and to use the specific conceptions and terminology of the profession,
[72]
I am not going to follow that advise to the point myself.
As a historian, I distrust middle-level of abstraction theories, since they often
neither reveal the authors overall agenda, nor the real reasons for the
specific research results.
[73]
Within journalism, fixation errors, i.e. being locked too
tight to a particular angle, is regarded as a failure that reduces the quality
of an investigation. In contrast, narrow subject boundaries is often seen as a
necessity for scientific objectivity and most methodology course-books
recommend it. However, why should a narrowed focus necessarily be something
good in a study that does not aim to prove a natural science claim, but rather
seeks to illustrate social research development and influence in a broader
sense? At the most, I might be able to see it as a practical necessity. It is
of course unfortunate if the reader completely loses the thread, but going
astray, wandering from the point, pursuing detours and looking for digressions,
can be exciting and extremely relevant to a comprehensive understanding. Most
likely, it is simply my paranoia, but at several occasions, I have had the
feeling that the focus requirement has been politically motivated: a larger
coherent understanding has not been regarded as desirable.
Accuracy on theory and method is
however considered to be a virtue in scientific work that presumably should
make it possible to verify or falsify results,
[74]
and even if I regard this as something of an illusion, I
will demonstrate openness around the argumentation throughout the book.
[75]
The sad fact is however that deploying a stringent line of
theory and method does not automatically bring the historian closer to the full
historical truth (if defined as the particular way that things actually
happened), and when “what happened” was a prolonged, ideologically inflamed
discussion surrounding the profession of history, things gets even more
complicated.
The intellectuals’ defence against
demands of socialisation, whether such demands have been expressed by an
official authority or put forward by an alternative party, has often been the
traditional, apparently unproblematic argument for autonomy. In this discourse,
research is still viewed as ethically and politically neutral, a value-free,
objective practice that develops within its own rationale and logic.
[76]
My point of departure is that
historical research is never value-free.
[77]
My overall theoretical foundation is in classical
historical materialism.
[78]
This implies a preference for structuralist reasoning, a
high priority for causal explanations from a class or interest point of view
prioritised after relative importance, a dedication to the use of history for
the sake of social progress, and some scepticism towards both liberal
laissez-faire cynicism and humanistic idealism.
[79]
Since writers of history also have material interests, this
is not necessarily inconsistent with inspirations collected from modern (or
even postmodern) social constructivism.
[80]
Regardless of my sincere respect for
opponents in the discussion around the theme of research and for scientific
methods as such, there is no way to deny that this approach will affect my research
priorities. My investigation forms part of an ideological discussion on history
in which I have a position.
An investigation of the debate over how best to
analyse history writings on the apartheid situation will be an integrated part
of this project. Some analysts have wished to place the
main perspectives on the South African history and economy within a common
analytical framework in order to examine their differences and similarities.
[81]
Since many of the works do not communicate or relate very
well to each other, I consider that to be a questionable approach.
In my
research, the reviewed works will not be scrutinised only from one single, more
or less unambiguous perspective, but rather from a long range of shifting
criteria tailored to meet the uniqueness of the works and authors evaluated,
such as their significance for the understanding of political history, their
civil society value, their importance for identity creation, their capacity to
explain key structures, their display of accurate knowledge on historical
events, their theoretical coherence, their literary qualities, the impact of
certain biases in the work, the way the works have been used by authorities,
etc.
On the middle level of abstraction,
through a diversified process, I will let me inspire by a rather arbitrary
selection of theories and methods derived from both theory of history,
[82]
textual analysis,
[83]
paradigm theory and knowledge sociology,
[84]
African studies methods,
[85]
identity studies,
[86]
fieldwork techniques,
[87]
political science,
[88]
economics and economic history,
[89]
social history,
[90]
cultural studies,
[91]
gender studies,
[92]
and historical anthropology.
[93]
Even if many would probably regard it
as quite fitting for this kind of investigation - which is dealing with
qualitative interpretations, constructions of meaning, and contents of notions
- discourse analysis,
[94]
other postmodernist inspirations,
[95]
social psychology,
[96]
and generational approaches,
[97]
will be used in an even more sceptical and reluctant way.
I find the linguistic prominence and
non-materialistic approach to facts and historical reality found in some parts
of discourse theory rather useless,
[98]
but I see the post-modem turn not so much contributing to the crisis in history
as reflecting that crisis.
[99]
Perhaps, the ambiguous expansion of discourse theory is due
to the fact that it is approached by both used-to-be structuralist Marxists,
who are reluctant to give up the primacy of “the social” and by conventional, liberally
disposed scholars, who restrict themselves to the text itself. Masked
ideological struggles therefore take place inside the theory.
Despite the reservations made above, I
agree partly in some postmodernist readings and accept that they have enriched
the universe of critical analysis. The referential focus on how texts relate to
each other; the will to deconstruct accepted discourses; the structural focus
on conventions on what can be said or not; the analytical focus on categories
used for text-understanding; the focus on from where the power to define what
can be seen as reality comes; the resemblance with the concept of ideology
(even if denied by Foucault); the focus on the social position of sources; the
awareness of processes of struggle between interpretations; the exposure of
tendency via comparative analysis; the translation between different meaning
systems; the questioning of the researcher’s objectivity; and the kind of
eclecticism that enables one to select elements from different perspectives and
theories and to discard others, are all analytical angles, I will make use of.
[100]
In some respects, I find Thomas Kuhn’s
concept of paradigms and paradigm shifts to be a more stable, logical, and
reliable tool than discourse analysis as a procedure for understanding the structure
of scientific revolutions, even if it appears less multidimensional.
[101]
Even though Thomas Kuhn, owing to his
internalist tendencies, may be viewed more as an idealist than a materialist,
Marxist-oriented researchers could also be inspired by his theory and feel
obliged to use critically selected portions of it to differentiate between
historiographical paradigms. This because Marxist historical theory does
unfortunately not give any clear, concrete suggestion for an explanatory
framework for differentiating between historical schools. In my own case, it is
done eclectically and due to a lack of a better solution. The fact that there
is no cohesive scientific development in Kuhn’s eyes, that objectivity is only
seen as an inner-theoretical property, plus the fact that Kuhn to a great
degree ignores the societal, social practice must create serious reservations
to a critical application of Kuhn’s concept apparatus.
Another theoretical inspiration has
been Habermas’s theory of communication; however I do not see it as a superior
tool for analysing ideological discussions.
[102]
His idea of equal communication, free of power-relations,
is attractive and seems ideal for establishing freedom of expression in academic
and public rooms, but has, unfortunately, little to do with real world
historical-ideological struggles.
Also Bourdieu’s work has been
considered in length, as it will appear from the manuscript’s theoretical
introduction, but in my interpretation, he’s venture ends up being muddled and
contradictory. Bourdieu’s project - a practical “transcendence” of the
objectivist/subjectivist antinomy - appears unconvincing to me.
[103]
The claim from some followers, that habitus enriches the
objectivist perspective by specifying a non-reductionist theory of agency, cannot
be fully sustained, I think.
Build-in, in Bourdieu’s posited attempt
to deal with the gap between the distanced researcher and the everyday
practices of the acting humans being scrutinised, is reserved a paternalistic position
for “homo academicus”. Even if this is
realised by Bourdieu as a central part of the problem, he himself establishes
his own superiority by way of a language-use that can only be characterised as
suppressive. Actually, he is totally absorbed in the secluded,
ultra-elitist, academic sphere, he is supposed to criticise.
[104]
Could it be that some intellectuals,
themselves constantly devoted to the use of text and language in settings of
relative, academic freedom, simply come to overestimate and generalise communication
as a societal factor and thereby gets a distorted overall picture?
Ideology must be regarded as a
fundamental problem in academic history writing, because intellectual history
has to do with meaning, its production, distribution, and consumption. When I
use the term ideology in this project, I mean systems of belief that usually
uphold sectional interests while appearing to always express general ones
(whereby, I, at least temporarily, choose to see Marxism as an ideology and
discount the Marxist claim that in the long run, the interests of the working
class will resemble the interests of all).
The
intellectual historian’s individual notion – no matter if conservative,
liberal, or Marxist - of her/his discipline has by tradition required that he
took on the role of arbiter as to what should be valued as a more or less
objective, realistic, or reliable representation of reality and of what had to
be identified as mainly “ideological”, and thereby untrustworthy. This essential problem remains. An easy, one-and-for-all
solution to distinguish between tendencies in history writing does not exist. The
professional reality that the historiographer has to cope with is that the
constant, often passionate, disagreements over interactions between politically
inspired visions and historical interpretation have not yet been persuasively
integrated into convincing, coherent, methodological reflections on the
handiwork of historians. Regardless of the present popularity of discourse
theory, there are only vague tendencies towards clarifying the connotations of “the politics of historical interpretation” as Hayden White calls this relation.
[105]
Some researchers, particularly those of
a northern European protestant inclination, including many scholars with social
democratic sympathies, have chosen to collect their theoretical inspiration
from Max Weber.
[106]
One of Weber’s demands to his central
analytical category, the ideal type, is that it should be “pure” and not
reflect contradictions. It seems to me problematic to separate the analytical
apparatus from reality in such a rigorous manner. This stands in opposition to
any historical reality and produces results that are purely academic. In real
life, some analyses come closer to reality than others do, and a prerequisite
for a realistic analysis is an open designation of the researcher’s own
relation to the political reality of the moment.
No doubt, Max Weber was among the great
contributors to Western sociology, which he supplied with convincing
hermeneutic instruments.
[107]
He has also given us some common-sense, thought-provoking
moderations of Marx’s theories and he began building a bridge between
focus-on-individual-factors and focus-on-structural-factors, but he is not an
obvious inspiration for third world studies.
Many liberal historical and
race-related analyses take their departure in some kind of social psychology.
For many Marxists (myself included), the exact determination of human agency in
history - the role of the individual – remains unsettled.
[108]
According to Norbert Elias, people gradually
became more conscientious, self-controlled, and civilised in their behaviour.
Their habitus changed from outer-controlled to inner-controlled driven by a
developing sense of “shame” and an urge to live up to society’s expectations.
[109]
Elias’s figurational sociology seeks not to reduce
processes into static elements, separating human actors from their actions. Its
practitioners are often inspired by the ideal that the usual barrier in
humanities between micro/psychological and macro/state is removed.
Consequently, much of the work done inside this approach has examined the
connection between changes in psychology and personhood, on the one hand, and
changes in macro social structures, on the other. The main weakness of his perspective
is the use of surface phenomenons and individual behaviour as the most
substantial parameters.
Modern social constructivism shows some
of the same weaknesses. Instead of assessing knowledge on its truth-value,
social constructivism turns to the pragmatic philosophy that assesses knowledge
only in relation to the actions that it enables. Hence, to make any claims to
explain how the world worked is tantamount to perpetuating a kind of
intellectual fraud. Relativism is really a problem here, and I simply fail to
see, why seeking the historical truth should necessarily reduce a critical view
on the creation or use of knowledge.
Some social constructivists claim a
link to what in recent years has become popular under the labels action
research and empowerment theory.
[110]
When such postulated democratic approaches
have been deployed as methods of research there has usually a great deal of
idealism entailed. The apparent logic of the concept is as follows: by way of
involving the subjects of research, we will not only get honest, subjective
results, we will also be helping people to understand themselves and their
social situation, and engage them in social progress at their own level. My
impression of this method is that the weight still tends to be on the
researcher’s career, in practice elevating conclusions above the head of the
subjects. All the same, in this project, I have sought to activate the treated
authors around the issues in play through surveys and discussions.
I am, after careful consideration of a whole range of spectacular theories, stuck with Marxian
materialism as the general, theoretical inspiration for my analysis.
This approach naturally leads to one of
my central assumptions/theses: that the decisive reasons for the divergences between
the main directions of history writing dealt with in this book are, in the last
instance, hidden in the depths of political economy. In other words, they
reflect social (and derived political and ideological) developments in society
in a relatively simple and direct way.
This starting point in classical,
historical materialism implies an endeavour towards clearly prioritised,
structural interpretations, which, hopefully, cannot be confused with
primitive, all-purpose explanations. I have viewed the diverging historical
schools within the South African context as expressions of “history ideologies”, which more or less openly reflect
interests, mindsets, and political trends within the surrounding, contemporary
society. The products of the historians are therefore appraised while keeping
in mind (a) the underlying, internal intellectual architecture, (b) the institutional
and disciplinary framework within which knowledge was produced, and (c)
external political influences.
My understanding of historical
materialism is built partly on G.A. Cohen’s interpretation of its key terms and
concepts.
[111]
One implication is that structures do not act. It is
impossible to understand how structures are reproduced except through human
action. Similarly, it is not possible to comprehend practices, except as they
are conditioned by structures, themselves the product of past practices. Thus,
the specification of bare structures is not enough. At the base of historical
materialism is a notion of human nature and of essential human needs as both
socially conditioned (and therefore different from epoch to epoch) and, in some
respects, universally the same.
[112]
The textual and behavioural analysis
needed requires an understanding of typical patterns of meaning, experience,
and practice; a better theoretical comprehension of human agency. It is unfortunately
in this area where Cohen and other modern Marxists become rather silent, and it
is here that the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, John Law, and others can offer
some complementary inspiration.
[113]
The relationship between subjectivity, tendency,
and bias seen more or less as opposites to objectivity, neutrality, and historical
truth is a fundamental issue in a study like this. Objectivity is a complex philosophical
notion and a history writer should try to define which aspects of this notion,
he intends to live up to, even if it means revealing a mix of insight and
insecurity. Studied neutrality, it must be stressed, has nothing to do with
objectivity and producing “balanced” accounts does not bring the researcher any
scientific certainty. Historical truth seldom rests in the exact middle of two
viewpoints. It would be illogical to expect that and such kind of history
writing is most often driven by a publisher’s market needs or by politicised
career considerations.
[114]
Paradoxically, when practising contemporary history, the
degree of objectivity is therefore depending on the author’s unrestrained
considerations on his subjective choices and engagement with the narrative.
Another problem for consideration in
such a study is the cross-disciplinary relationships between political science,
social science studies, anthropology, and history. Together with the deployment
of development theory. Several of the works analysed in project could easily be
seen as development research. No doubt, dependency and underdevelopment theories
were particularly appealing because they seemed to offer a total explanation,
couched in terms of cores and peripheries that reached from the international
capitalist system down to the smallest village. However, since my main effort is
to deconstruct and discuss written histories, the use of development research
per see will not be central.
Many of the reviewed works are about
the relationship between race and class. The meaning
and relative importance of identity, class, ethnicity, race, nation, religion,
and gender will therefore be an issue. After Foucault, Said, Orientalism, and
post-colonialism,
[115]
it is common knowledge that European portrayals of Africa have often been part
of constructing “the other”, where the exotic representations of “them” are
designed by Westerners to promote a positive image of themselves through
contrasting. Africa seems to have a special role here by being constructed as
the extreme opposite to the European model of progress. But this discussion
cannot be only about “difference” or “the others”. The hierarchical ranking of
groups means that it must mainly be about the criticism of different forms of power.
[116]
In this connection one must be aware of
African studies methods and their history. A wide-meshed periodisation of the history of African studies could look like this: from heady optimism; through internal
civil wars and coups d’états; to carefully-managed presidential transitions. An institutional development that in a strange way has mimicked African realities. A transition from an open-mindedness about the potential for
African states to deliver education and other public services, and a believe on
the ability of the social sciences to apprehend African realities, towards a
rather deflated sense of what African area studies can contribute with and
doubts on the extent to which the social sciences are capable of explaining
complex phenomena.
[117]
After 1989, areas like
underdevelopment; anti-colonialism; pan-Africanism; popular international
solidarity; inequalities; class (workers and peasants); and the role of the
state have had less room inside African studies, while identities; pre-colonial
polities; ethnicity; diasporas; general poverty measurement; development aid;
good governance; trade and investment; health; African patriotism; regionalism;
localism; globalisation; and international migration, have become more popular
issues. One wonders whether Africanists have not thrown the baby out with the
bath water during this process. So much time have been spent embracing African
subjectivities (ethnic, gender, and youth identities) and connectivities
(migration, networks, and information technology) that some of the fundamentals
of political economy have been forgotten.
However, the conclusion of all these
theoretical elaborations is that I am not ready to restrict my methodology to
one logical set of rules. How does one actually know when discussions within
the humanities can be characterised as new research results?
The
main purpose of this research is not the operationalising or testing of one
specific theory by proving the validity of clearly defined variables, but
rather to create broad, reliable, and integrated multidisciplinary new knowledge
of how history has been used in South Africa.
Due to the dissimilarity of the sources
and their proveniences, and to the inductive nature of the project, it will be
necessary in this study to allow the source material together with the overall
aim of the project - more than predefined theories - to steer the
investigation. This is not an expression of methodological irresoluteness, but
more a result of a decision to use the theories and methods most relevant for
every single work and situation investigated. The texts and other sources analysed
will be chosen after their estimated importance for the history debate, partly
on the basis of my pre-knowledge after ten years of experience in this area of
research.
The
main investigation of the historians’ differing views on the relations between
race, class, economy, the political life, and the state will, however,
concentrate on their published works, which will be viewed considering the time
and story of their creation.
Many of the social scientists, I have studied do not
fit perfectly into the categories that I have constructed for them and in all
probability, many of them would prefer not to be pigeonholed like that, but
such kind of historiographical differentiation are made necessary by the whole
character of the study.
It is impossible not to lose some of the finer details
when distinguishing among scholars who are close to each other in view.
Unfortunately, that is a built-in methodological problem, when classification
of literature is made. Academic trends have to be identified according to their
use of ideas and concepts, and my principal method for creating an
understanding of the history debate is numerous discussions on suppositions,
agendas, importance, and limitations.
When placing and grading the text material, I have
used a method deduced from Dan O’Meara’s work.
[118]
This entails a general effort to identify subjects and research areas together
with archetypal authors according to their main focus on basic categories and
relationships (the ontological aspect); an exposure of unconcealed as well as
concealed explanatory models used under the concept/framework deployed in the
writings (the epistemological aspect); and a disclosure of the political and
research policy connotations of the analysed texts (the normative aspect).
[119]
In my study, O’Meara’s method mostly serves as an
abstract tool of orientation, however. I agree in characterising the texts
according to specified criteria, but even if O’Meara’s criteria are both original
and functional, the six broad tendencies in which he divides the pro-democratic
literature on the apartheid state into seems inadequate and arbitrary. The
level of abstraction is unclear and the selection feels unessential. Several
just as important tendencies could have been added, and even if the selection
model may still work for sociology, it will not work for historiography.
My attention on individual authors in this large body
of literature will shift rather unsystematically with piecemeal syntheses and
sub-conclusions. The source material was chosen to explain a particular
academic conflict and most of the treated texts and their authors will be
placed inside the currents and undertows of the liberal-radical discussion.
Some researchers have regarded other societal trends
as equally important for their analyses. Nationalism, for instance, are sometimes considered just as central for
politics as liberalism and Marxism.
[120]
Basic characteristica indicates that the demarcation used in this project is
more essential, even if considered antiquated by some. No Marxist tradition
exists inside the liberal school and no liberalists favour consequent, Marxist
historiography, but there are Africanists, feminists, localists, postmodernists,
and different kinds of nationalists inside both of the main directions. Obviously,
this is not a coincidental detail. It reflects that, in the last instance,
capitalist and socialist conceptions of the ideal society are incompatible and
antagonistic. The fact that the main battle in practical politics for the time
being seems to be fought between conservative liberalists and reformist social
democrats does not change this, but only raise the question of how to
characterise reformism. In addition, for the period here described, the
contrasts created by the cold war setting were in the centre, and at the same
time reformist views were relatively rare in South Africa.
Furthermore, from a current (or presentist, why not)
perspective; even if the prevailing, post-apartheid solution has consisted of centre-right,
social democratic inspirations combined with tamed African nationalism, this
has just shown that both these conceptions works comfortably inside the
capitalist social formation (and, incidentally, also that they have been unable
provide any solution of South Africa’s most fundamental social problems).
Other scholars have seen religion as the foundation
for personal conviction and thereby for political action.
[121]
Since the majority of ANC followers probably always were true believers, this
is not a trivial issue. In addition, religious approaches appear more and more
potent as socialism grows weaker.
[122]
In the period in question, however, political grassroots and trade union
activities were in the forefront compared to church involvement in politics.
I will
use argument analysis intensively (the practice of breaking down an argument
through extraction of elements in structure; claim; instance/evidence;
patterns; authority; relevance; acceptability; sufficiency, etc.).
[123]
Another
tool in the box is framing analysis; a multi-disciplinary, social science
research method used to analyse how people understand situations and
activities.
[124]
Frame analysis has strings to the concept of social constructivism and is
sometimes used together with post-colonial discourse analysis for understanding
social movements. It will only be used infrequently, for instance, when
focusing on how institutions and publishing houses inevitably selects and structures
information within specific value-determined frameworks.
Some
consideration will be laid on the authors’ treatment of what I consider key
elements in the history debate such
as:
·
Rationalities of growth, economic
dysfunctions, and redistributive models.
·
Correlations between class relations,
race attitudes, gender, and culture.
·
Processes of industrialisation,
proletarianisation, and urbanisation held together with criteria for social
success.
·
Rural processes, including transitions
from pre-capitalist to modern agriculture, land distribution and migration.
·
Their identification of other
essential, underlying societal factors, including ethnicity, identity and the
creation of mentalities.
·
Statutory regulations reflecting white,
political domination and open, official racial segregation in institutions,
laws and procedures.
·
The background of protest and the
shifting forms of popular social and political expression.
·
Use of principal theories of history
and of historical and social science methods.
·
Intellectual and practical pressure
from academic structures, apartheid society, and movements.
Plus a great deal of other textual and
conceptual elements which should not be classified or generalised prematurely.
(Chapter
1.3 in the present draft manuscript elaborates in depth on theory and
methodology over more than 100 pages and can be found on my website in
full-text: http://www.jakobsgaardstolten.dk/ | Book Manuscripts | Monograph on
South African history writing. This document will require user name “visitor”
and password "laia”). Be aware
that it is still a draft.
The source material When I view the concrete works of South
African historians, considering the prerequisites set by the surrounding
society they lived in when they wrote, it far from means that I view the source
material they used as having no significance for the work processes of the
researchers.
[125]
I believe, however, that the manner, in which the historians understand not
just their science, but also their broader surroundings, is decisive for what
is produced owing to the historian’s encounter with his/her sources. The
sources as such - even though often selected from a limited supply and out of a
subjective bias (incomplete in their creation and survival, and tendentious in
themselves) - naturally set some type of framework for what can come from the
research process. But interest seldom lies (and yes, I am aware that this
resembles liberalist cynicism), which once again leave us with the
politico-economic and ideological analysis as the most important.
Principal reference works which fully
cover the topic of the project do not exist, although
dedicated scholars have published some excellent bibliographic reference works.
[126]
It has been necessary to create a broad basis for research from a large number
different sources and contributions to the research debate. The scholarly
debate constitutes in itself a large, but nevertheless limited source material.
As a foundation for the research project, a database with more than 5600 partly
annotated references to history and social science studies on South African issues
has been built. Approximately 650 of the
most substantial contributions to the research debate on apartheid history have
so far been scrutinised in the course of the investigation. They include
dissertations, unpublished university working papers, conference papers,
personal, organisational, and university archive records, government documents,
research reports, interviews, journal articles, book chapters, source
collections, monographs, debates on internet fora, films, and several other
types of sources. The literature has been obtained over several years from a
wide range of international research libraries, archives, document collections,
university centres, government departments, organisations/NGOs, and personal
contacts. Interviewing authors will be part of the package. The material is so comprehensive that it is impossible to give a full picture
here.
As a supplement to the reading of texts
and sociological analysis, I will carry out a limited interview survey among
concerned researchers. I want to get an overview of current opinions from two
focus groups: authors involved in the historical debate analysed and fellow
researchers with a present engagement in South African historiography. Normal e-survey methods will be
used.
[127]
(A
temporary list of literature with library/archive signatures can be found on my
website: http://www.jakobsgaardstolten.dk/ | Book Manuscripts | Monograph on
South African history writing. Follow the link from the list of Contents to the
chapter: List of applied literature).
(Specific
searches on selected sub-items are also possible through my website: |
Databases, Queries | My online databases / blogs | LitSA).
The organisation of the resultant book The format and structure of the draft manuscript is so far quite
straightforward, even if the final book form has not been laid down at the
present stage. Following a theoretical introductory chapter, important liberal
and radical history writings are separately examined through Chapters 2 and 3,
which are divided into partly chronological, partly thematic subsections. In
order to create a historical point of departure, the history of the main
paradigms prior to respectively 1965 and 1970 are examined in the first of
these subsections, followed by an investigation of more, and hitherto neglected,
texts. The last subsections of Chapters 2 and 3 will attempt to construct
partial conclusions on the positions of the respective schools on the South
African society over time. Chapter 4 analyses some of the major thematic issues
in the dispute between the two principal paradigms. So far, six subsections
and a concluding section will provide syntheses on the positions, the weaknesses,
dilemmas, and potentials of the schools. Since the approach of the work is partly
thematic – dealing, for instance, with diverting views on gender history,
workers history, solidarity history, oral history etc. - several subsections
contain conclusions, which will not necessarily be summarised in the closing
chapter.
To connect the academic debate with the
broader historical reality, pilot studies have included a chronological
appendix on university structures, preliminary socio-economic studies, followed
by other facts-related appendices containing surveys of event-chronology and
race legislation, definitions, vocabulary, and concepts/notions employed. These
will not necessarily be part of the book, but might appear in the form of
articles. These studies can be read from a CD together with the Danish version
of the draft manuscript and they have also provided material for my online databases.
Hypotheses and contents The liberal school of history writing will
be portrayed in the first main section of the book: Chapter 2. From the
beginning of the 20th century, the liberals built their expectations
for a colour-blind future on the economic evolution. According to my readings
so far, heir logic was as follows: the growth of the manufacturing industry would
create a need for skilled manpower. The limited size of the white workforce would
necessitate training of a larger part of the black workers. The existing migrant
labour system was not able to fulfil this requirement, and a growing part of
Africans were bound to be permitted permanent settlement in the cities. To
secure the efficiency and stability of this labour force, they would also have to
be given some education, a certain level of social security and possibly even
political rights. The new manufacturing industry would then blossom in an expanding
domestic market and this would call for all South Africans to be admitted and
integrated into the society, not just as manufacturers, but also as consumers.
Accordingly, South Africa would work itself out of racism's obsolete patterns
within a comparatively short space of time. Most liberal historians believed
that apartheid was an economically dysfunctional product of outdated ethnic and
ideological factors: race prejudice coupled with derailed Calvinism and Afrikaner
nationalism. Even if economic determinism often supplied political history, social
struggle out of class interests rarely entered into liberal causal explanations.
[128]
The radical critique of racial capitalism
will be dealt with in the second main section: Chapter 3. In the view of this
school, the high economic growth rates, which characterised South Africa during
long periods of the 20th century, occurred simultaneously and in
close connection with a rigorous and all-embracing implementation of the
segregation policy - straight from a perfection of petty apartheid in its most humiliating appearances, such as
separated buses and public toilets - to grand
apartheid's bantustan policy and the forced removal of more than three
million people to segregated settlements.
On this background, a new generation of
younger exiled academics unfolded in opposition to the pragmatic liberal
tradition. They developed an explanatory model for the identifiable agreement between
the exclusionist racial system and the high level of economic vitality. The
radical school saw apartheid as rational social engineering with the purpose
of blocking black social advancement. By keeping the educational level for
blacks low, by deterring them from pursuing their interests on the labour
market, and by precluding them from the accumulation of capital, the system
was able to consolidate the recruitment, distribution, and reproduction of
inexpensive manpower. The foundation of white South Africa’s economic
prosperity was precisely the migrant, cheap labour system with its mechanisms
of overexploitation. The racist system and economic growth depended on and
supported each other. They were not incompatible components. On the contrary:
they were inseparable and reinforced one another interdependently. Race
oppression was a condition for rapid growth, and white economic prosperity
simultaneously strengthened white political supremacy. By taking advantage of
reserves/bantustans and neighbouring countries, capital exploited the
pre-capitalist societies in southern Africa through a kind of internal
colonialism.
[129]
The third and largest part of the
project - Chapter 4 in the book - will analyse central aspects of the
discussion between the two principal schools, including the liberal counter
criticism opposing the radicals;
[130]
the radical claim of having a superior explanatory model;
[131]
the argument around the relationship between capitalism
and apartheid;
[132]
and between race and class;
[133]
the debate over the nature of the state;
[134]
the application of the theory of colonialism of a special
kind;
[135]
the internal radical-revisionist disagreements over structuralism
and reductionism;
[136]
and several other debates.
Additional analytical development of
the project/manuscript will probably concentrate on a new section, not yet fully
drafted. The importance and prospects of the ideological clash between liberals
and radicals will be reinterpreted in the light of the victory of the South
African freedom struggle and the almost simultaneous defeat of socialism.
The ability of new trends and theories around
the history profession and related disciplines to relieve/replace former
ideologically informed theories will be tested. Post-structuralism;
[137]
localism;
[138]
identity history and ethnicity;
[139]
oral history;
[140]
history of religion;
[141]
health history;
[142]
reconciliation history;
[143]
Africanism/Black Consciousness;
[144]
and governmental nation building history,
[145]
etc. will be considered and their importance and relation
to earlier writings will be analysed. From where did they come? Are they
superior to the stereotypes of the great debate? Are they genuine advances, offering
better historical insight? The movement towards a new pervasive hegemony of
converging trends in South African historical research will be criticised.
[146]
Finally, some general conclusions will
be drawn on the positions of the schools (even if the overall method used will
be more ideographic than nomothetic). Research during the last 20 years shows
that the relation between economics and racial system was, neither so simple,
nor as static over time, as the early radical historians imagined. However, my
research so far also indicates that the liberal viewpoint - that economic
growth always has been hampered by race segregation - may be regarded as
disproved by the highly-qualified research of the radical historians. Segregation
probably assisted economic development in the early phases of
industrialisation, when a compounded, unskilled, and only partly proletarianised
work force were socialised for wage labour.
The negotiated settlement of 1990-94, together
with later developments, undeniably can be interpreted as if the liberal
argumentation in the long run has proved itself as the historical truth and that
consideration for economic growth ultimately forced the South African elite to
end white racial hegemony. On the other hand: for many years, in spite of
economic growth, the system did not bring better living conditions to the African
majority of the population. Also; black political protest, the end of the Cold
War, and international solidarity and sanctions might have been the most
important reasons for the turn to
democracy. This aspect of the liberal-radical debate remains unconcluded. On
top of this comes that economic growth after post-apartheid economic
liberalisation actually has been far from impressive, so that there are now
more poor and unemployed in South Africa than ever before.
[147]
Possible additions and corrections to the draft manuscript In its present shape, the draft manuscript contains a range
of problems. The effort to create overview and coherence by accentuating the long
lines of the main tendencies in history writing must be harmonised with the
simultaneous attempt to work with concentrated, empirical text analyses.
Too little emphasis has been placed on
historical analyses on social everyday life, including narratives of actual living
and work conditions. The role of individuals in history and history creation is
not considered seriously enough. Histories of mentality and culture, as well as
works on reserve/bantustan/rural conditions, have only been dealt with
sporadically.
Relevant, adjoining fields of study have
been left out or rather unfairly treated. This applies to early African writing
of histories; gender studies; Afrikanerdom; the discussion of the definition of
fascism in relation to certain periods; the debate on oral history and local
urban history; history of solidarity; ecological history, and a number of other
fields of history writing.
The prioritising of themes is
occasionally somewhat unsystematic and I have not yet fully managed to come “on
top" of the treated material (and the whole range of theories surrounding
it), which in itself therefore has controlled the research design even more
than expected. The relationship between real-history and historiography must be
further clarified in the book and a clearer thematic must be worked in, binding
topics such as rural problems, proletarianisation, legislation and cultural
ideology together over the chapters.
Furthermore, a general rethinking of
the material is required to open up for topical overarching questions relating
to the future of “the great narrative”, theorisation of history as such, and
the continued importance of social history correctives to the triumphal
progress of neo-liberalism. Particularly new civilisation critics,
postmodernism, and history of mentality must be analysed as well as the development
prospects of radical history during a changed world order, which hardly holds a
realisable socialist alternative. The backdrop for the present perspective of a
new historiographical hegemony, which embodies a merger of progressive liberal
and soft post-radical points of views, must be analysed further.
As a supervisor, I tell my students not
to use jargon, and to be clear and straightforward. Very often, this is
probably bad advice. Academics are easily impressed, and an abstract and
complex writing style will usually give better assessments, even if substance
is imperceptible.
[148]
All the same, I will aim here at a democratic and inclusive way of writing.
(The
present manuscripts amounting to more than 350 pages can be found on my
website: http://www.jakobsgaardstolten.dk/ | Book Manuscripts | Monograph on
South African history writing. This document will require user name “visitor”
and password "laia” to open).
Status and work programme My engagement with South African history is partly
motivated by prolonged work within international solidarity. The contact with
the popular movements – especially the Nordic AAMs - has been a steady motive
power for the project. The victories of the liberation struggle and the international
anti-apartheid forces were a persistent encouragement in the early stages. The
participation in research seminars, conferences, research stays, and my stay as
research fellow at the Nordic Africa Institute, as well as my own NAI-project conference,
have contributed decisively to the qualitative development of the project.
[149]
During the last years, I have built the
foundation for a further development of the project and I am convinced that it
will be possible to make an in-dept, readable publication, which will
contribute qualitatively to the discussion on South Africa’s past and future
both in the Nordic countries, in South Africa, and in the international
research community.
Of various reasons, the first
manuscripts were written in Danish and it might therefore be published in this
language too. However, the idea is to publish the results first in English both
in full shape and in the form of articles. The English version will probably be
published by The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala.
The project will be affiliated to the Centre
of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, as arranged with the Head of Centre.
It will be fitted into the research- and teaching programme of the host
institution and the library of the centre will benefit from the bibliographic
elements of the project. It is expected that the book can be available, fully
worked through and ready for publication during 2021.
(This document contains little more
than 85.000 characters, with spaces, without notes).
[1]
Nelson Mandela,
Closing Address by President Nelson Mandela, Debate on State of the Nation
Address, Cape Town, 15 February 1996; Bundy, Colin, “New Nation, New History?
Constructing the past in post-apartheid South Africa” in Conference Book
Publication: Hans Erik Stolten (ed.), History-Making
and Present Day Politics. The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa,
NAI, 2007.
[2]
A development
from socialist ideals to neo-liberal practice, it has been argued by
[3]
Kader Asmal
(then Minister of Education) “Making hope and history rhyme” in Gurney,
Christabel (ed.), The Anti-Apartheid
Movement: A 40-year Perspective, Conference Report, London,
[4]
Beinart, William and Dubow,
Saul, “The historiography of segregation and apartheid” in Beinart / Dubow
(eds.), Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth
Century South Africa, New York, Routledge, 1995.
[5]
M. Legassick and G. Minkley,
“Current Trends in the production of South African history”, Alternation, International Journal for the
study of Southern African Literature and Languages, Vol. 5/1, 1998.
[6]
For general international debates
on this theme see Francis Fukuyama, The
end of History and the Last Man, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1992; Francis
Fukuyama, “Jeg fik ret: Demokratiet sejrer” (“I was right: Democracy
prevails”), interview in Danish newspaper Politiken,
12 March 2011; Noberto Bobbio, Left
and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, University of
Chicago Press, 1997 (org. title:
Destra e sinistra); Gayil
Talshir, “The phoenix of ideology”, Critical Review of International Social
and Political Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 107–124, June 2005.
[7]
Hans Erik
Stolten, article in Danish, ”Universitetsmarxister, græsrodspopulister og
intellektuelle realister i Sydafrikas nationaldemokratiske revolution” in Kontur - Tidsskrift for Kulturstudier,
Aarhus Universitet, 2009.
[8]
As in
a recent example: Chana Teeger, and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, “Controlling for
Consensus: Commemorating Apartheid in South Africa”, Symbolic Interaction, 30,1, pp. 57-78, 2007.
[9]
For a classical
liberal work see Wilson, Monica / Thompson, Leonard M. (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa,
Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969-71. For a classical radical work see Johnstone,
F. R., Class, Race and Gold. A Study of
Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa, London, Kegan
Paul, 1976.
[10]
Horwitz, Ralph, The Political Economy of South Africa,
London, 1967; Lipton, Merle, Capitalism
and Apartheid. South Africa, 1910 - 1984, London, Gower/Temple Smith,
1985/86.
[11]
Cell, Jack W., The Highest Stage of White Supremacy,
Cambridge University Press, London, 1982; Lundahl, Mats, Apartheid in theory and practice: An economic analysis, Boulder,
Westview Press, 1992, pp. 155-160.
[12]
Norman
Etherington, “Postmodernism and South African History”, Southern African Review
of Books, Vol. 44, 1996.
[13]
In the case of Denmark for
instance: Steen Andersen, Danmark i det
tyske storrum. Dansk økonomisk tilpasning til Tysklands nyordning af Europa,
Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2003; Dansk Institut for Internationale Studier, Danmark under den kolde krig, København,
DIIS, 2005.
[14]
Friedman, Steven, “South
Africa's reluctant transition”, Journal
of Democracy, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 56-69, 1993; Ginsburg, David, “The
Democratisation of South Africa: Transition Theory Tested”, Transformation, Critical Perspectives on
Southern Africa, No. 29, pp. 74-102, University of Natal, Durban, Dept. of
Economic History, 1996.
[15]
Or simply “the
writing of history”. Tosh, John (ed.), Historians
on History: an Anthology, Pearson Education, Harlow, Longman, 2000.
[16]
Saunders,
Christopher C., The making of the South
African past: major historians on race and class, Cape Town: David Philip,
1988; Smith, Kenneth Wyndham, The
Changing Past: trends in South African historical writing, Johannesburg,
Southern Book Publishers, 1988.
[17]
Drew, Allison.
(ed.), South Africa's Radical Tradition,
A Documentary History, UCT Press, 1996-97; Glaser, Daryl, Politics and Society in South Africa: a
critical introduction, SAGE Publications, 2001; Maylam, Paul, South Africa’s racial past the history and
historiography of racism, segregation, and apartheid, Aldershot, Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2001;
[18]
Howard, David
R., “Paradigms Gained? A
Critique of Theories and Explanations of Democratic Transition in South Africa”
in Howard, David R. and Aletta J. Noval (eds.), South Africa in Transition: New Theoretical Perspectives, pp.
182-215, London, Macmillan, 1998.
[19]
Mark Poster, Cultural
History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 38, 59; Jean Comaroff, “The End of History
Again? Pursuing the Past in the Postcolony”, Lecture 29 March 2004, Koninklijke
Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, Gent.
[20]
Marks, Shula
and Anthony Atmore (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South
Africa, Longman, 1980/85; Marks, Shula and Richard Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation
and Social Change in South Africa. African class formation, culture and
consciousness 1870-1930,
England, Longman, 1982/85; Marks, Shula and Stanley Trapido, The Politics of
Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, London,
Longman, 1988.
[21]
For instance Rob Sieborger et
al., Turning Points in History,
Textbook series commissioned by SA Department of Education,
[22]
Walker, Eric A., A History of South Africa, London,
Longmans, Green and Co., 1928; Davenport, T.R.H., South Africa. A Modern History, London, Macmillan, 1978.
[23]
Bundy, Colin,
“New Nation, New History? Constructing the past in post-apartheid South Africa”
in Conference Book Publication: Hans Erik Stolten (ed.), History-Making and Present Day Politics. The Meaning of Collective
Memory in South Africa, NAI, 2007.
[24]
Harriet Deacon,
Sephai Mngqolo, and Sandra Prosalendis, “Protecting our cultural capital: a
research plan for the heritage sector”, Occational
Paper, 4, Democracy & Governance research Programme, Human Sciences
Research Council, 2003; Albert Grundlingh, “Some Trends in South African
Academic History: Changing Contexts and Challenges” in Shamil Jeppie, (ed.), Toward New Histories for South Africa: On
the Place of the Past in our Present, pp. 196-215, Juta, 2004; Saleem
Badat, “Return to critical scholarship”, Mail
& Gaurdian Online, 15 April 2008.
[25]
Blade Nzimande,
“Articulation and disarticulation between progressive intellectuals: The state
and progressive mass and worker organizations: A case for ‘Public Sociology?’,
Speech at the Congress of the American Sociological Association, 15 August
2004.
[26]
Burns,
Catherine, “A useable past: the search for ‘history in chords’”, in Conference
Book Publication: Hans Erik Stolten (ed.), History-Making
and Present Day Politics. The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa,
NAI, 2007.
[27]
Some South African
historians are aware of this: Saunders, Christopher, “Four decades of South
African Academic Historical Writing: A personal perspective”, in Hans Erik
Stolten (ed.), History-Making and Present
Day Politics. The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, NAI, 2007;
[28]
Preben
Kaarsholm’s review in the Danish newspaper Information of Thea Christiansen et al., Arbejdernes
Skjold. Arbejderkamp og apartheid i Sydafrika
1900-60,
København, Kom.S. Historie, 1987. My translation.
[29]
Leslie Witz,
“Review of Hans Erik Stolten, ed. History Making and Present Day Politics: The
Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa”, African Studies Review, Volume 51, Number 3, December 2008, pp.
186-188
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/african_studies_review/v051/51.3.witz.html,
November 2009).
[30]
Fortunately,
not all reviews of my work have been unpleasant reading. A selection can be
found on my website: http://www.jakobsgaardstolten.dk | Book Manuscripts.
[31]
Franco Barchiesi, “The Debate on the Basic Income
Grant in South Africa: Social Citizenship, Wage Labour and the Reconstruction
of Working-Class solitics”, paper from conference: Engaging Silences and Unresolved
Issues in the Political Economy of South Africa, Tenth Anniversary Colloquium
21-23 September 2006, Monkey Valley, Western Cape.
[32]
Some seems to
have spotted this tendency long before 1994: Lonsdale, John, “From colony to
industrial state: South African historiography as seen from England”, Social
Dynamics, 9, 1, 1983, p. 71; Bozzoli, Belinda, Intellectuals, Audiences and
Histories: South African Experiences 1978-1988, Radical History Review, No.
46/7, pp. 237-263, 1990.
[33]
Legassick,
Martin (interviewed by Alex Lichtenstein), “The Past and Present of Marxist
Historiography in South Africa”, Radical
History Review, Issue 82, pp.lll—l30, 2002.
[34]
Ticktin,
Hillel, “The politics of race: Discrimination in South Africa”, Critique, A Journal of Socialist Theory,
London, Pluto Press, 1991; Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (eds.), Critical race theory: the cutting edge,
Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1999; Magnusson, Karl, Justifying Oppression. Perceptions of Race
in South Africa between 1910 and 1961, Avhandling, Historiska
institutionen, Göteborgs universitet, 2001; Simon Clarke, Social theory, psychoanalysis and racism, Macmillan, 2003.
[35]
Nicoli Nattrass
and
[36]
Noberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The
Significance of a Political Distinction, University
of Chicago Press, 1997 (org. title: Destra e
sinistra).
[37]
Nico Cloete and
Ian Bunting, Higher Education
Transformation, Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET), Cape
Town, 2000.
[38]
Kiguwa, S.N.W., “National
Reconciliation and Nation Building: Reflections on the
[39]
Marks, Shula
and Trapido, Stanley (eds.), “Social History of Resistance in South Africa”,
special issue of Journal of Southern African studies, Vol. 18, No. 1,
Oxford University Press, 1992.
[40]
In my view, for
example; Norman Etherington, The Great
Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815-1854, London and New
York, Pearson Longman, 2001; Louw, P. Eric, The
Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Apartheid, Westport Conn., Praeger, 2004.
[41]
M. Legassick and G. Minkley,
“Current Trends in the production of South African history”, Alternation: International Journal for the
study of Southern African Literature and Languages, 5, 1, 1998.
[42]
Saunders, Christopher, “History
Writing and Apartheid: Some Threads”, in Prah, Kwesi Kwaa, Knowledge in Black and White. The Impact of Apartheid on the Production
and Reproduction of Knowledge, Cape Town, Centre for Advanced Studies of
African Society (CASAS), 1999 (Referring to the wave of liberal Africanism
spearheaded by Oxford History around 1970).
[43]
Mbeki, Thabo, Africa Define Yourself, Cape Town,
Tafelberg, 2002.
[44]
Asmal Kader and James Wilmot, Spirit of the Nation, Reflections on South
Africa’s Educational Ethos, NAE, HSRC and The Department of Education,
2002; “History and Archaeology Report”, updated version, Ministry of Education,
2002, http://education.pwv.gov.za; Jonathan Jansen, “The state of higher
education in South Africa: From massification to mergers”, in Adam Habib, John
Daniel and Roger Southall (eds.), State
of the Nation, HSRC Press, 2003.
[45]
Hans Erik Stolten, “History writing and history education in
post-apartheid South Africa”, in Disseminating
and Using Research Results from the South, Report no. 3, 2004, Edited by
Greta Bjørk Gudmundsdottir, Institute for Educational Research, University of
Oslo. Also on the web:
http://www.netreed.uio.no/articles/Papers_final/Stolten.pdf.
[46]
For interpretations of the
relationship between objectivity, neutrality, partiality, and truth which have
inspired me, see for example: Kristensen, Marianne / Bloch-Poulsen, Jørgen, I mødet er sandheden - en videnskabsteoretisk
debatbog om engageret objektivitet, Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 1997;
Schaff, Adam, Historie og Sandhed,
Historievidenskab, No. 9, Grenå,
[47]
There is
nothing haphazardly in this statement. On the presence of politics in history
writing see, for example, Marks, Shula, “’Half-ally, half-untouchable at the
same time': Britain and South Africa since 1959”, in Christabel (ed.), The
Anti-Apartheid Movement: A 40-year Perspective, Conference Report: South
Africa House, London, 25-26 June 1999, London,
[48]
Gorm Gunnarsen,
Patrick Mac Manus,
[49]
Prah, Kwesi
Kwaa & Ahmed, Abdel Ghaffar Mohammed (Eds.), Africa in Transformation: Political and Economic Transformation and
Socio-Political Responses in Africa, Organization for Social Science
Research in Eastern and Southern Africa, OSSREA, 2000; Teresa Barnes, Centre
for the Study of Higher Education University of the Western Cape in a debate
20-07-2005 on web-based H-SA-HIGHER-EDUCATION.
[50]
My teaching at
[51]
Evans, Richard
J., In Defence of History, London,
Granta, 1997. (Version used: Till historiens försvar, Stockholm: SNS, 2000);
Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of
Class in History. What’s Left of the Social? Ann Arbor, University of
Michigan Press, 2007.
[52]
Thomas Piketty highlighted the timeliness of this
issue in his Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture held October 3 2015.
[53]
My general
approach to the art of project formulation will emerge clearly from this
PP-presentation: http://www.jakobsgaardstolten.dk/
| Teaching Notes | Notes on study techniques.
[54] Philipp Mayring, Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken, Beltz, 2008; Alain Fayolle, Paula Kyrö, Tõnis Mets and Urve Venesaar (eds.), Conceptual Richness and Methodological Diversity in Entrepreneurship Research, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013, pp. 296-301.
[55]
As explicitly theorised in Talcott Parsons, The Evolution of Societies, Prentice
Hall Foundations of Modern Sociology Series, Englewood Cliffs, 1977 (also by
the same author: Societies, 1966 and The System of Modern Societies, compiled
by Jackson Toby, 1971).
[56]
The concept of “totalisation” is often connected, by
non-Marxists, with concepts like “grand narrative”. It is regarded by many as
oppressive, as when, for example, it is connected with Lukács’ concept of the
proletariat as the “universal subject of history” or with Sartre’s concept of
the Communist Party as a “practico-inert” totalisation of History. See Georg
Lukács, “The Standpoint of the Proletariat” from History and Class Consciousness, 1923; Jean-Paul Sartre, “The
Intelligibility of History: Totalisation without a Totaliser” from Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1960.
The concept should not be confused with the ideological construct “totalitarianism”
as described in Barbara Goodwin, Using
political ideas, Chichester, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2007, p. 177.
[57]
Essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind
of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any
entity of that kind must have. In Platonic idealism, an essence of forms or
ideas is permanent and unalterable.
[58]
Reductionism is usually related to a certain
perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, phenomena can be
explained completely in terms of other, more fundamental phenomena.
[59]
For a warning on this, see Paul Maylam, South Africa’s Racial Past the History and
Historiography of Racism, Segregation, and Apartheid, Research in migration
and ethnic relations series, Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001, p. 2.
[60]
Widely accepted
interpretations of these principles can be read in: Thurén, Torsten, Källkritik, Almqvist & Wiksell,
1997; Helge Paludan in Mordhorst, Mads and Nielsen, Carsten Tage, Fortidens spor, nutidens øjne: kildebegrebet
til debat, Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 2001, p. 76; Drew, Allison, “'1922
and all that': Facts and The Writing of South African Political History” in
Hans Erik Stolten (ed.), History-Making
and Present Day Politics. The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa,
NAI, 2007.
[61]
Olden-Jørgensen, Sebastian, Til kilderne! Introduktion til historisk kildekritik, Gads Forlag, 1994/2001, p. 28.
[62]
Martin W. Bauer
and G.Gaskell, Qualitative Researching
with text, image and sound. A practical handbook, Sage Publications, 2000,
chp. 19.
[63]
Dilthey,
Wilhelm, Kritik der Historischen Vernunft. From Meaning in history: W. Dilthey’s thoughts on
history and society, H. P. Rickman (ed.), London, George Allen & Unwin,
1961.
[64]
Kozicki, Henry (ed.), Developments in Modern Historiography,
London, Macmillan Press, 1993.
[65]
Skocpol, Theda, States and social revolutions: a
comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China, Cambridge University
Press, 1979, p. xiv.
[66]
Janet E. Helms
(ed.), “Black and white racial identity: theory, research, and practice”, Contributions in Afro-American and African
studies, Vol. 129, New York, Greenwood Press, 1990.
[67]
Davies, Robert
H., Kaplan, Morris, and O'Meara, “Class Struggle and the Periodisation of the
State in South Africa”, Review of African
Political Economy, No. 7, 1976; Appleby, Joyce, Hunt, Lynn, et al., Telling the Truth About History, W.W.
Norton & Company Ltd, 1995; Koselleck, Reinhart, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts,
Cultural Memory in the Present, Stanford University Press, 2002.
[68]
Roland Barthes quoted in Flemming Svith (red.), At opdage verden: research - fra akademikere
til journalister, Århus, Ajour, 2007, pp. 40.
[69] L. Salter and A. Hearn, Outside the lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research, McGill Queen’s Press, Montreal, 1996, p. 9
[70]
Bozzoli,
Belinda and Delius, Peter, “Radical History and South African Society”, Radical History Review, 46/7, pp. 14-45, 1990.
[71]
Georg Kneer and
Armin Nassehi, Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer
Systeme: eine Einführung, München, Fink, 1993; Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes
(eds.), Autopoietic organization theory:
drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s social systems perspective, Oslo, 2003.
[72]
Booth Wayne C.,
Wayne C., Colomb, Gregory G, Williams, Joseph M., The Craft of Research, The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
[73]
Editorial, “History and Theory”
in History Workshop Journal, 6, 1978;
Black, Jeremy and Donald D. MacRaild, Studying
History, Second Ed., New York, Palgrave, 2000.
[74]
Popper, Karl R., Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of
Scientific Knowledge, London, Routledge, 1972; Bo Jacobsen, Hvad er god forskning – psykologiske og
sociologiske perspektiver, Kbh., Hans Reitzel, 2001.
[75]
Toulmin, Stephen E., The Uses of Argument, Updated ed., Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
[76]
Norvick, Peter, That noble dream: the ‘objectivity question’
and the American historical profession, Cambridge University Press, 1988;
Dahl, Ottar, “Om ‘sannhet’ i historien”, Historisk
Tidsskrift, Vol. 3, pp. 365-73, 1999.
[77]
Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid,
Philosophy and Postcoloniality Series, Durham and London, Duke University
Press, 2002; Vincent L., “Whats love got to do with it? The effect of affect in
the academy”, Politikon, South African
Journal of Political Studies, Vol. 31,1, 2004, pp. 105-115.
[78]
Marx / Engels / Lenin, On Historical Materialism. A Collection,
Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1972; Engelberg, Ernst / Küttler, Wolfgang
(herausg.), Probleme der
geschichtswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis, Akademie Verlag, Berlin,
[79]
Wolpe, H., “The Liberation
Struggle and Research”, Review of African
Political Economy, Vol. 32, 1985
[80]
Collin, Finn, Social Reality, The Problems of Philosophy,
London, Routledge, 1997; “What Do We Owe Postmodernism?”, Review on H-Net by Cynthia Kros 7 June 2005 of
Willie Thompson, Postmodernism and History, Theory and History Series, New
York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
[81]
Dollery, B. E., “Capital, Labour
and State: a General Equilibrium perspective on Liberal and Revisionist
Approaches to South African Political Economy,” The South African Journal of Economics, Vol. 57, No. 2, 1989.
[82]
Manniche, Jens Chr., Den radikale historikertradition: Studier i
dansk historievidenskabs forudsætninger og normer, Aarhus, Jysk selskab for
historie, nr. 38, 1981; Steinmetz, George (ed.), The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its
Epistemological Others, Politics, History and Culture, Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005.
[83]
J Hawthorn, Jeremy, Cunning passages: new historicism, cultural
materialism and Marxism in the contemporary literary debate, Interrogating
texts, London, Arnold,1996; Jan Ifversen, “Tekster er kilder og kilder er
tekster - kildekritik og historisk tekstanalyse”, in Mordhorst, Mads and
Nielsen, Carsten Tage, Fortidens spor,
nutidens øjne: kildebegrebet til debat, Frederiksberg, Roskilde
Universitetsforlag, 2001; Clark, Elizabeth A., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2004; Klaus Kjøller, Tekst for viderekomne: tekstproduktion og
sproglig rådgivning, Samfundslitteratur, 2004.
[84]
Kuhn, Thomas, The structure of Scientific Revolutions,
University of Chicago Press, 1962; White, Hayden, “The Politics of History”, in White, Hayden: The Content of the Form,
pp. 58-82, Baltimore/London, 1986; Bourdieu, Pierre, Homo Academicus, Symposion - det lilla forlaget, 1996 (Swedish
edition).
[85]
Zell, Hans M. and Cecilie
Lomer, The African Studies Companion. A
Ressource Guide and Directory, Second ed., Hans Zell Publ., 2003; Toyin
Falola and Christian Jennings, (eds.), Sources
and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed, Rochester
Studies in African History and the Diaspora, University of Rochester Press,
2003.
[86]
Calhoun, Craig, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1994; Hamilton, Carolyn, “Historiography and the Politics of
Identity in South Africa”, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town,
1997; Reddy, Thiven, Hegemony and
Resistance: Contesting Identities in South Africa, Race and Representation,
Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000.
[87]
Ewald, Janet, “Foxes in the
Field: an Essay on a Historical Methodology”, African Studies Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, African Studies
Association, Atlanta, 1987; Jan Vansina, “Fieldwork in History”, in Adenaike,
Carolyn Keynes and Jan Vansina (eds.), In
Pursuit of History: Fieldwork in Africa, pp. 127-140, Social History of Africa,
Heinemann, 1996.
[88]
Peter Vale, Larry A. Swatu,
Bertil Odén, and Tiomothy M. Shaw (eds.), Theory, Change and Southern Africa’s
Future, International Political Economy Series, 2001; Janet M. and Jones,
Bradford S., Timing and Political Change:
Event History Modeling in Political Science, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2003.
[89]
[90]
Shula Marks, “Towards a Peoples
History of South Africa”, in Hobsbawm (ed.), Journal of History, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1974; William Beinart and JoAnn
McGregor, (eds.), Social History and
African Environments, Ohio University Press, 2003.
[91]
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition,
Cambridge University Press, 1983; Mamdani, Mahmood, Beyond Rights-Talk and Culture-Talk, David Philip, 2000; Rüsen,
Jörn (ed.), Western historical thinking:
an intercultural debate, Making sense of history, New York, Berghahn Books,
2002.
[92]
Morrell, Robert (ed.), Changing Men in Southern Africa,
Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal press, 2001; Kevane, Michael, Women and development in Africa: how gender works, Boulder,
Colorado, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004.
[93]
Fredrik Barth, Ethnic groups and boundaries: the social
organization of culture difference, Bergen, Universitetsforlaget, 1969;
Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People
Without History, Berkeley,
[94]
Aletta J. Norval, Deconstructing apartheid discourse,
London, Verso, 1996; Ian Parker, Ann Levett, Amanda Kottler og Erica Burman,
“On discourse, power, culture and change”, in Ann Levett, Amanda Kottler, Erica
Burman, and Ian Parker (eds.), Culture,
Power and Difference: Discourse Analysis in South Africa, University of
Cape Town Press, 1997; Achim Landwehr, Geschichte
des Sagbaren: Einführung in die historische Diskursanalyse, Historische
Einführungen, 8, Tübingen, Edition diskord, 2001; André Sonnichsen, ”Unmaking
‘the people’: the restructuring of political space in post-apartheid South
Africa”, Paper from conference, Eighth Essex Graduate Conference in Political
Theory: Multitude, People, Resistance, 2007.
[95]
See critiques in Clifton C.
Crais, “South Africa and the Pitfalls of Postmodernism”, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 31, 1994; Maylam, Paul,
“Dead Horses, the Baby, and the Bathwater: ‘Post-theory’ and the historians
practice”, South African Historical Society, Paper presented at the Biennial
Conference UWC 11-14/7, Bellville, 1999; Willie Thompson, Postmodernism and History, Theory and History Series, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
[96]
Peter Lambley, The Psychology of Apartheid, London,
Secker og Warburg, 1980; Bornman, Elirea, “Self-image and Ethnic Identification
in South Africa”, Journal of Social
Psychology, Vol. 139, No. 4, p. 411-425, 1999.
[97]
Irmline Veit-Brause, “Paradigms,
Schools, Traditions conceptualizing Shifts and Changes in the History of
Historiography”, Storia Della
Storiografia, Vol. 17, 1990.
[98]
I have to admit
that I look upon an archetypical postmodernist statement as Foucault, Michel,
“On the ways of writing history”, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology:
Essential Works of Foucault, volume 2, James D. Faubion (Ed.) , Part Two,
pp. 279 – 296 , Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1967/98, as something between
Nostradamus's quatrains and Voelven’s prophecies. His methodology in this
“interview” is amateurish.
[99]
Wulf
Kansteiner, "Searching for an Audience: The Historical Profession in the Media
Age - A Comment on Arthur Marwick and Hayden White", Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 31, 1996; A Danish example:
Dyrberg, T.B., Hansen, A.D., Torfing, J. (red.), Diskursteorien på arbejde, Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 2000.
[100]
Even if I most often disagree with them, there is a
lot to be learned from postmodernist South African writers such as Aletta J.
Norval, Thiven Reddy, Ann Levett, Robert Turrell, and Mark Sanders. Also see Foucault,
Michel, “Return to History” in J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault,
Vol. 2, pp. 419 – 433, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1998/1967. An educational Danish example:
Katrin Hjort (red.), Diskurs. Analyser af
tekst og kontekst, Frederiksberg, Samfundslitteratur, 1997, pp. 7-18.
[101]
Thomas Kuhn, The
structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Used version: Thomas Kuhn, Videnskabens
revolutioner, København, Fremad, 1973, pp. 183, 189, 192.
[102]
Steven Best,
The Politics of Historical Vision: Marx, Foucault, Habermas, The Guilford
Press, 1995, p. 145.
[103]
Pierre
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice,
Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 233 (Originally 1972).
[104]
Bourdieu, Sketch
for a Self-Analysis, op. cit., p. 10, 107.
[105]
Hayden White, The
Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation,
Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, ch. 3, “The Politics of
Historical Interpretation”, p. 58.
[106]
Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: an
Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, Cambridge
University Press, 1972; Michael Löwy, “Weber against Marx? The Polemic with
Historical Materialism in The Protestant Ethic”, Science & Society, An Independent Journal of Marxism, Vol. 53,
No. 1, pp. 72-84, New York, Guilford Publ., 1989.
[107]
Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie,
5. Auflage,
Tübingen, Johannes Winckelmann, 1980 (first published 1921/1922/1956).
[108]
Even if many
Marxist have written on the subject with great determination from the very
beginning, as for instance, G. V. Plekhanov, “On the Role of Personality in
History” in Georgi Plekhanov, Selected
Philosophical Works, Volume 2, pp. 283-315, Moscow, Progress Publishers,
1976 (also in 1956, first published in 1907, also in Plekhanov’s book Twenty Years and in an earlier pamphlet,
I think); Lucien Sève, Marxisme et
théorie de la personnalité, Paris, Éditions sociales, 3. éd., 1974 (first
edition 1969).
[109]
Norbert Elias, Über den Proces der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische
und Psykogenetische Untersuchungen, 1-2, Bern, A. Francke AG, 1969 (first
published in Switzerland in 1939 while he was in exile in France, English
version, The Civilizing Process,
1995).
[110]
Yvonna S.
Lincoln, “Engaging Sympathies: Relationships between Action Research
and Social Constructivism” in P. Reason and H. Bradbury (eds.), Handbook of Action Research, Participatory
Inquiry and Practice, Sage Publications, 2005 (first published 2001) p.
124.
[111]
G.A. Cohen was
professor of social and political theory and fellow of All Souls, Oxford
University. For an introduction to Cohen’s framework, see “Forces and Relations
of Production” in John Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 11-22.
[112]
Donald L.
Donham, op. cit., p. 55.
[113]
See also,
Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and
Contradiction in Social Analysis, Berkeley, University of California Press,
1979.
[114]
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Warheit und
Methode. Grundzüge einer Philosophischen Hermeneutik, 1960. English version
used: Truth and method, London,
Continuum, 2004, p. 271.
[115]
Edward Said, Orientalism: western conceptions of the
Orient, London, Penguin Books, 1995 (originally 1978): “My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political
doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West”.
See also M.E. Baaz, “Introduction – African identity and the postcolonial” in
Maria Eriksson Baaz and Mai Palmberg (eds.), Same and Other. Negotiating African Identity in Cultural Production,
Uppsala, NAI, 2001; Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism:
theory, practice or process?, Polity Press and Blackwell Publishers,
2000.
[116]
Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa,
Cambridge University Press, 1995; Daryl Glaser, Politics and Society in South Africa: a critical introduction, SAGE
Publications, 2001.
[117]
Paul
Nugent, “Engaging Africa: Past, Present and Future”, keynote speech at the
25-years jubilee at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen,
February 2010, unpublished. For a more comprehensive periodisation of
post-colonial Africa, see Frederick Cooper, Africa
since 1940: The past of the present, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
[118]
For more on this method, see Dan
O'Meara, “Theoretical Appendix” in Forty
lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party,
1948-1994, Ravan Press and Ohio University Press, 1996, p. 426.
[119]
In
this connection, ontological means the understanding of different ways of
being, thereby creating systems of classification; epistemological stands for
the concern with the criteria by which knowledge can be established and so with
truth, falsehood and proof; normative here means the values expressed by the authors.
Some historians (Ottar Dahl for instance) seem to think that “appraisive
tellings” (in contrast to cognitive values), can only be used isolated as a
source to the author’s view. I
do not fully share this opinion.
[120]
Merle Lipton, Liberals, Marxists, and
Nationalists: Competing Interpretations of South African History, Palgrave,
Macmillan, 2007; André Sonnichsen, “Unmaking ‘the people’: the restructuring of
political space in post-apartheid South Africa”, Paper from conference, Eighth
Essex Graduate Conference in Political Theory: Multitude, People, Resistance,
2007.
[121]
Marianne Cornevin, Apartheid: Power and
Historical Falsification, Unesco, Paris, 1980; James Leatt, Theo Kneifel,
and Klaus Nürnberger (eds.), Contending
Ideologies in South Africa, Cape Town, David Philip, 1986; Charles
Villa-Vicencio, A Theology of
Reconstruction: Nationbuilding and Human Rights, Cambridge Studies in
Ideology and Religion, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
[122]
Consequently, a number of works on this issue have appeared, for example, John
W. de Gruchy, Christianity and Democracy.
A Theology for a Just World Order, Cape Town, David Philip, 1995; Norman
Etherington, “Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern
Africa”, Journal of Southern African
Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Jun., 1996), pp. 201-219; Rune Forsbeck, ‘Gör ni då inte åtskillnad...?’ Kyrkorna och
södra Afrika 1960–1994, Stockholm, Nielsen and Norén förlag, 2007 (On the
role of the Swedish Church in the anti-apartheid struggle).
[123]
Peter Phelan and Peter Reynolds, Argument
and evidence: critical analysis for the social sciences, London, Routledge,
1996.
[124]
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of
Experience, Northeastern University Press Edition, 1986 (first printed
1974); Paul D’Angelo and Jim A. Kuypers (eds.), Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives,
New Youk, Routledge, 2010.
[125]
For an introduction in Danish,
see Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, Til
kilderne! Introduktion til historisk kildekritik, Gads Forlag, 1994/2001,
p. 28.
[126] For instance Karis, Carter, and Gerhart (eds.), From Protest to Challenge. A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882-1964, Vol. 1-4, Standford University, 1972 – 77; Peter Limb, The ANC and Black Workers in South Africa 1912-1992: An Annotated Bibliography, London, Hans Zell Publishers, 1993.
[127]
Matthias
Schonlau, Ronald D. Fricker Jr., and Marc N. Elliott, Conducting Research Surveys via E-Mail and the Web, Santa Monica,
Rand, 2002; Don A. Dillman, Mail and
Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method, New York, John Wiley &
Sons, 2nd ed., 2007 update.
[128]
A classical
example is Houghton, Hobart D., The South
African Economy, Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1964.
[129]
Could be exemplified by
Johnstone, F. R., “Most Painful to Our Hearts: South Africa through the eyes of
the New School,” Canadian Journal of
African Studies, Vol. 16/1, 1982.
[130]
Wright, Harrison M., The Burden
of the Present. Liberal-radical controversy over Southern African history, Cape
Town: David Philip, 1977.
[131]
O'Meara, Dan, Class,
Capital and Ideology in Development of Afrikaner Nationalism., Ph. D.,
University of Sussex, 1979.
[132]
Lipton, Merle, “Capitalism and Apartheid” in
Lonsdale, J. (ed.), South Africa in
Question, London, 1988.
[133]
Johnstone, F.
R.: “White Prosperity and White
Supremacy in South Africa Today”, African
Affairs, 69/275, 1970.
[134]
Greenberg,
Stanley B., Race and State in Capitalist
Development: comparative perspectives, Yale University Press, New Haven,
1980.
[135]
Wolpe, Harold, Race, Class and the Apartheid State,
Paris, Unesco, 1988.
[136]
Deacon, Roger A., “Hegemoni,
Essentialism and Radical History in South Africa”, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 24, 1991.
[137]
Norval, Aletta J., “Social
Ambiguity and the Crisis of Apartheid”, in Laclau, Ernesto (ed.), The Making of Political Identities,
London: Verso, 1994.
[138]
Vivian Bickford-Smith,
Elizabeth Van Heyningen and Nigel Worden, Cape
Town in the 20th Century, 1999.
[139]
Gerhard Maré, Brothers Born of Warrior Blood. Politics
and Ethnicity in South Africa,
Ravan, 1992.
[140]
Paul la Hausse,
“Oral history and South African Historians”, in Radical History Review, Vol. 46/7, 1990.
[141]
Norman Etherington, “Recent
Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa”, Journal of Southern African Studies,
Vol. 22, No. 2, 1996.
[142]
Packard, Randall M., White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and
the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1989.
[143]
Anthony Holiday, “Forgiving and
forgetting: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, Nuttall, Sarah and Carli
Coetzee (eds.), Negotiating the Past: The
Making of Memory in South Africa, Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1998.
[144]
Ralph A.
Austen, “'Africanist' Historiography and its Critics: can there be an
autonomous African History?” in Toyin Falola (ed.), African historiography. Essays in honour of Jacob Ade
Ajayi, Harlow:
Longman, 1993.
[145]
Rob Sieborger et al., Turning Points in History, Textbook
series commissioned by SA Department of Education,
[146]
Christopher Saunders,
“Radical History - the Wits Workshop Version – Reviewed”, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 24, 1991.
[147]
Sampie Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652
- 2002, University of Natal Press, 2002.
[148]
As
shown in experiments, where deliberately meaningless contributions have been
submitted to, and published by, learned, peer-reviewed journals. This kind of
irony has even lead to the coding of computer programs, which automatically can
generate impressive, but hollow, sentence formulations in business and academic
lingo (e.g. http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html).
[149]
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