Introduction to History of South Africa (Historiography of South Africa)
Historiography is the study of the way history has been and is written the history of historical writing. When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians
Historiography is the study of history of history writing so the main “characters” in that story are historians and their texts
It is the art of producing and disseminating historical knowledge.
It embodied:
a) The writing of history; especially, the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic materials, and the synthesis of particulars into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods
b) The principles, theory and history of historical writing
The product of historical writing is a body of historical literature
More simply put
i. The history of how history has been written over the ages
ii. The history of the philosophies which have governed how historians have written history over the ages.
With special emphasis on the epistemology of historical proof and causation
- How do we know what we know?
- How does history happen?
Major sites of change in the writing of history
What moves history?
God, fate, environment, resources, politics, etc.
What makes historical change happen?
Is historical change overt (result of actions and predictable) or covert (ironic and unknowable)?
What is appropriate as a topic of research?
Who makes history?
Whose history “matters”?
What aspects of life are important to history?
These questions will be answered in the course of this module in reflection to South African history and historiography.
Some of the common questions of historiography are
a) Reliability of the sources used, in terms of authorship, credibility of the author, and the authenticity or corruption of the text
b) Historiographical tradition or framework. Every historian uses one (or more) historiographical traditions, for example imperialist, Marxist, or political history.
c) Moral issues, guilt assignment, and praise
d) Revisionism versus orthodox interpretations
e) Historical meta narratives
Historiography of South Africa
It is difficult to write the history of a society which has become as rigidly stratified as south African society. According to Oxford History of South Africa Volume I of 1969, "central theme of south African history is interaction between peoples of diverse origins, languages, technologies, ideologies and social systems, meeting on south African soil”
But due to the above fact, for centuries history of south Africa embodies point of view of one community.
These based on structures of the works and interpretations they give to events in the region primarily concerned with the achievements of white people in south Africa. Few experiences from inhabitants of south Africa dealt with.
Present day southern African society has developed from the interaction of two broad cultural streams, namely the indigenous African peoples and immigrant white groups.
The result has been that for centuries historical research has been conducted on the assumption that the indigenous African groups had no past worth studying, since their culture remained static.
All the attention of historians was accordingly focused on the activities of the immigrant and politically dominant white minorities in southern Africa.
Why these limitations of writing South Africa history?
i. The product of the social milieu in a plural society where communication between the different communities was restricted and the individual historian is conditioned by the assumptions and prejudices of his own community (whether religion or race or class or language or combination of factors)
ii. People were confined to certain barriers (colour)
iii. History written have perpetuated the language and race barrier. People of coloured or blacks had no opportunity for research and writing
iv. History writing in south Africa have a disciplinary focus that construing history in a narrow terms. Much work concerned with white people and politics. The ruling class would always strive to control the propagation and form of ideas i.e. production of knowledge is part of and parcel of the class struggle.
Five assumptions made in writing south African history
History of South Africa began with the discovery of the cape colony by the Portuguese and later Dutch. Archaeological findings have been ignored. This brevity of time lead to aspect of parochialism that history is packed over a few generations
It has been assumed that the traditional societies of Africa were static, no structural change
Physical type, language and economy are necessarily correlated.
Generations of south Africans have grown up believing that “Bushmen”, a distinct dwarf physical type were all hunters and spoke one or another form of Bushman language; that Hottentots were distinct physically all pastoralists and speak the Hottentots language; that Bantu speaking physically distinct and that combined cultivation with herding(mixed farming); and that whites remained quite distinct physically, language and manner of life.
But how could you differentiate Dama (negroid) who speak Nama (Hottentots)?
Khoisan are related groups, some speak bantu languages and some Caucasian
Each of the physical types formed a pure race which, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries had the exclusive occupation of a specific area and remained isolated from others. It is untrue to suggest that cultural groups were quite separate.
There were ancient intermingling of physical types and language groups following skeletal remains, blood groups and languages. The myth that white settlers occupied an “empty land” reflects the values of the ruling class to justify their superiority and not demographic fact.
It is improper for the historian to be concerned with social structure and improper for the anthropologists to study all races in isolation
The deliberate exclusion of the witness of allied disciplines such as archaeology, social and physical anthropology, linguistics, inherent in this narrow disciplinary focus has not only deprived southern African historiography of all the insights and imagination that have enriched studies elsewhere on the continent but has contributed tremendously towards maintaining the one-sidedness of historical studies in the region and thereby subjected future generations of African scholars to what Professor Ranger has aptly termed ' the distortions produced by the tyranny of the evidence which is available to them' (Ranger, 1968.)
Even within the limited field of archival sources for evidence, there has been a disturbing selectivity in the use of source materials.
The problem of southern African historiography is predominantly a product of the political climate of the region.
Historiographical traditions of south Africa
Traditionally, historical writing on the history of South Africa has been divided into broad categories or historiographical schools, namely a British imperialist, a settler, an Afrikaner nationalist, a liberal, Africanist and a revisionist or radical school
These traditions did not all develop at the same time. Their appearance and histories must be situated concretely in the changing patterns of contradictions within the South African social formation
A. The British imperialist school
The major characteristic of imperial historiography has been its European orientation. J. Cappon (Britain’s title in South Africa, (1902); W. C. Holden(History of the Colony of Natal, South Africa, (1855); A. Wilmot and J. Chase(The History of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, (1869); Arthur Conan Doyle (The Great Boer War (1902) and William Greswell's Our South African Empire (1885), Sir Harry Johnston's British Central Africa (1897), Eric Walker's A History of Southern Africa (1928), John S. Galbraith's Reluctant Empire (1963)
All these writings and others alike in southern African history was an extension of European history, and especially as an aspect of the British Empire since 1783.
Imperial historians have essentially treated British imperialism in southern Africa as part of European international politics.
According to one of them, Arthur Percival Newton, 'The destinies of South Africa have been moulded within the British Empire, and their shape has been altered by forces that have affected the whole.
For causes of imperialism, the majority of them emphasize political developments in Europe and strategic concerns over the Cape sea route to India (e.g. Robinson and Gallagher, 1968).
The central theme of the British imperialist school was the expansion of the British Empire and the achievements and benefits of empire
These writers were apologists for the British takeover and rule of the Cape of Good Hope.
They concentrated on events after the first British occupation of the Cape in 1795, the activities of British governors, the coming to the Cape of British settlers and their activities in the eastern frontier districts, their struggle against the Xhosa on the eastern frontier, the fate of the British settlers in Natal, etc.
They took little notice of developments at the Cape during the Dutch East India Company period.
They detected signs among the Afrikaner Voortrekkers who departed on the Great Trek that these Boers in the interior were degenerating as far as their adherence to “civilization” was concerned.
Conditions in the interior were compared unfavourably with the level of “progress” and “civilization” in the British Colonies.
The British imperialist school shared a firm belief in the superiority of British rule and British values.
The basic assumption was that British institutions and ideals were superior to the South African versions and that the British presence in South Africa represented the spread of beneficial influences.
They also disapproved of the Boer republics that were established in the interior.
They explain the internal dynamics of southern African history primarily from the perspectives of settler colonialism, nationalism and prominent personalities such as Rhodes and Kruger (Miliin, 1933; Walker, 1934 and 1953; Lock art and Woodhouse, 1963; and Marlowe, 1972).
They treat missionaries as well meaning agents of British interests and the British Empire. John A. Hobson in The War in South Africa (1900), John Harris in The Cartered Millions: Rhodesia and the Challenge to the British Commonwealth (1920)
But, whether jingoists, Little Englanders or 'negrophilists', imperial historians generally have treated Africans as part of the environmental factors (land, sea, rivers, minerals) that have affected the development of the British Empire.
Imperial historians have explained both imperial and settler interference in, and invasion of, African societies (e.g. the Zulu, Ndebele, Bemba and Ngoni) by placing strong emphasis on 'tribal' warefare, slave trade and 'savagery'
British expansion is, therefore, treated as either preventive annexation from fear that an area (e.g. Natal or Central Africa) would be acquired by a potential European enemy (Portuguese, Germans or Afrikaners) and used against the British; or as humanitarian intervention and 'pacification‘ from fear that the Africans and or Boers would engage in warfare to the detriment of themselves and the British.
Reached the peak of its productive life and influence during and immediately after the South African War of 1899-1902.
Therefore, in summary they argue that
Africans had no history on their own
No achievement , progress
History of Europeans in Africa constituted African history
No civilization, no history
Colonialism is positive that with colonization Africa came to see the light and darkness is not a subject matter of history
B. The Settler school and tradition
This tradition had its roots in the British settler colonies of the Cape and Natal.
Its broad position differed little from colonialist and imperial history except in so far as it celebrated the achievements of British settlers rather than of the British imperial connection.
Denigrating the role played by both Africans and Afrikaners in the history of the area.
Examples
George McCall Theal: In 1871 he published South Africa as it is and in 1874 A compendium of South African history and geography.
In his writing he extended the idea of the Cape alliance between English and Afrikaner northwards across the Orange and Vaal Rivers, developing the theme of the formation of a new white South African society, ruled by whites of both Anglo Saxon and Dutch heritage.
Theal did not see a role for blacks in his white South Africa, except as a source of labour.
To him the coloured races of South Africa were “fickle barbarians, prone to robbery and unscrupulous in shedding blood”.
The history of South Africa was the history of the whites and their efforts to open up and bring civilization and Christianity to a wild untamed country.
Blacks were part of the background, while the British philanthropic missionaries who took up the cause of black peoples were the enemies of the whites
Next to Theal, the best known historian of the settler school was the British-born George Edward Cory. Between 1910 and 1939 six volumes of The Rise of South Africa were published.
Cory’s work was very much a history of the eastern districts of the Cape, with the British settlers at the centre.
Like Theal, he saw the history he described from the point of view of the white colonists and he was critical of missionaries who had “interfered” in South African affairs.
He was not particularly sympathetic towards blacks
Another writer Frank R. Cana, whose South Africa from the Great Trek to the Union was published in 1909.
As with most settler history, scant attention is given to the indigenous African populations.
They are hardly noticed at all in this history, which is the history of how whites resolved their differences to establish a white dominated Union of South Africa
Advocated the building or formation of a new white south Africa society ruled by both Anglo Dutch races
South African societies were seen as labourers, they had no role to play in the history of South Africa
The history of south Africa was the history of the whites and efforts to open up and bring civilization and Christianity to wild untamed country.
C. The Afrikaner nationalist school
The authors of Afrikaner national or republican historiography wrote in Dutch or Afrikaans.
Their work reflected an anti-British imperialist trend which tries to authenticize the alleged superiority and dominance of the Afrikaner volk in all social and economic aspects against the blacks and coloured whose presence is regarded at best irrelevant and destructive.
The 19th century struggle between Boer and Briton became a master narrative.
The Afrikaner interpreted his history as a bitter struggle for self-preservation and fulfillment in the face of the hostile forces of nature and the indigenous peoples that he found in the country.
The British were seen as oppressors and opponents, as sympathizers with blacks in their struggle against the Boers.
Afrikaner historiography has emphasized the hardships endured by the frontier farmers which they blamed on British policies of pacifying the Xhosa tribes.
The Great Trek and the Second Anglo Boer War (1890s) were the main focal points in the construction of the Afrikaner’s historical image.
South Africa should not be seen as an extension of Britain and consequently the Boer republics, rather than the British colonies of the Cape and Natal, were prominent in these writings.
The Afrikaners’ heroes were Voortrekker leaders such as Piet Retief, Hendrik Potgieter and Andries Pretorius.
Blacks only featured when they clashed in military conflicts with the Boers or when they were protected or armed by the British, or benefited from their presence.
Many of these works portrayed the bitter struggle between the two Afrikaner republics and the British Empire between 1899 and 1902, the consequence of which was the loss of the independence of the former
History was presented in terms of a list of grievances against the British: it was a tale of suffering and struggle towards freedom, towards their own republican form of government.
History became at the same time a source of solace and an inspiration Afrikaners could take comfort from their persecuted past; they could draw strength from it
The conflict between black and white was interpreted as black on white aggression
Therefore the whites’ military actions were justified as a defence of Christian civilization against the forces of paganism
Therefore, the Afrikaner Historiography portrayed
The justification of Boers in South Africa e.g. According to Eric Low the Bantu began to trek from the North across Limpopo when Jan Riebeick landed the Table Bay in 1652. This means Boers occupy empty land
Racism and segregation. Boers are chosen race to civilize others!
Justification of Calvinist situation of dominancy i.e. the doctrine of John Calvin
Ideologically based on Apartheid since ascendancy of Nationalist party to power in 1948. Apartheid is upheld as the natural and inevitable ordering of south African society with deep historical and biblical roots
Political history was dominant and the history writing is descriptive rather than analytical.
The ruling class domination of the production and dissemination of knowledge. E.g. refer 1970s black consciousness that culminated in Soweto uprising!
Prominent figures
Historiographical works by J. H. Hofstede, S. J. du Toit , C. N. J. du Plessis and J. de V. Roos, W. J. Leyds, Gustav Preller, P. J. van der Merwe, G. D. Scholtz, F. A. van Jaarsveld
An outstanding feature in most of their works written by these historians is their Eurocentric approach and the prominent and central role played by the Afrikaners and white communities in the history of South Africa.
D. The Liberal Historiography
In South Africa the impetus to take a fresh look at the role of blacks in history was provided by rapid industrialization and the social and economic problems that attended it in the early twentieth century.
The gradual political awakening of blacks and the new situation of black poverty alongside and in competition with white poverty in the economically integrated urban communities, to which both white and black people had been drawn from the rural districts, became a major focus of attention among certain liberals concerned about black welfare.
This gave rise to another strain in South African historiography, which emerged in the 1920s and which became known as the liberal school.
The liberal historians were part of the wider community of liberal economists, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists who came into prominence between the two world wars, whose intellectual foundations were those of classical liberalism.
Anchored in the Bourgeois world outlook
Foremost among the liberal historians were W. M. Macmillan and his pupil, C. W. de Kiewiet.
They wrote at a time when many thinking people were concerned about the effects of urbanization and industrialization in South Africa. Macmillan wrote in the 1920s, in an age of depression, focusing attention on the emergence of the poor whites and the resurgence of Afrikaner nationalism after the Second Anglo-Boer war.
While Macmillan’s work was aimed at a South African audience, and white policymakers in particular, De Kiewiet in his principal work was looking at South Africa in the context of the British Empire at a time when the threat of Hitler to that empire loomed large.
Their work dealt with social and economic issues and gave greater prominence to the role of blacks in South African history.
What was new in their vision was their rejection of a “segregated” history and the placing of people of colour in the past as a factor of equal importance with whites.
It is multiracial history which handles the race issue by using a pluralist approach-each accorded equal weight in the historical record.
These liberal historians rejected racial discrimination and evinced a great concern for black welfare, but they did not actually study black societies themselves
The Cape Colour Question (London, 1927) was a study of the political and legal status of the indigenous Khoikhoi people.
In this work Macmillan also defended philanthropist missionaries, such as Dr. John Philip, against the charges that had been levelled against them by the likes of Theal and Cory
An Afrikaans speaking historian who was strongly influenced by Macmillan was J. S. Marais.
Like Macmillan, Marais came to the conclusion that the history of South Africa was the tale of race relations, contact between race groups of different civilizations and their gradual coming together into a single, although heterogenous, community.
In The Cape Coloured People 1652-1937, published in 1939, he saw race as the real problem in South African affairs.
Against the background of the process of decolonization in Africa in the 1960s, the two volume Oxford History of South Africa, edited by Leonard Thompson and Monica Wilson, appeared in 1969 and 1971 represented the summation of liberal thinking about South Africa at the end of the 1960s, and was a major landmark in South African historiography.
For Nigel Worden the “conquest” of the land of the indigenous peoples by white colonists provides the essential background to the history of modern South Africa, while Leonard Thompson accuses the “white invaders” for “encroaching” upon the lands of the Khoisan and black peoples that would eventually lead to their “conquest” and “subjugation” to white rule
In summary, this school portrayed
Multi-racial school of thought
Racism and economic development as contradictory phenomena
Economic development per se is beneficial to all parties involved and racism eventually will recede in the face of capitalist development
Group mix in the market place settlers are buyers of the labour power
The survival of capitalist development in south Africa need peaceful co-existence the greater prominence to the role of blacks in south Africa and rejected segregated history and placed people of colour in an integrated past as a factor of equal importance with whites
But who determine the rule of the game or rather the relations of production on the basis of which people interact? Who controls means of production? Who appropriate the surpluses produced? These questions are not tackled by liberal writers!
E. Africanist historiography
This school of thought comprised of Blacks writing about African history. It is sub divided into two sub categories
i. African liberal tradition
Comparatively, African liberal historiography is the one that has changed the most from the first through the third periods.
The historiography of the first period was essentially an African version of the missionary tradition.
The authors were Christian intellectuals, educated in mission schools and dependent on missionary printing presses.
Few of these black writers had received much or indeed any formal training in history as a discipline.
The missionary tradition of black historiography is a Christian liberal-humanistic approach to the past.
The early writers of these histories were the products of missionary schools.
Their writings are politically moderate, exhibit racial tolerance and are very much in line with Cape liberal thought.
This work dispelled for all time the myth that South African history began when the Portuguese seafarers rounded the Cape in 1487, it demonstrated that Africans had indeed had a history before the coming of the white man.
It thus pushed back the frontiers of South African history by going beyond the founding dates of more traditional histories.
They wrote largely for their fellow blacks to give them a sense of identity, so that they would know who they were and where they came from, in the hope that they would be inspired to “collect and record the history of their people”.
Examples of such writers are S. T. Plaatje, S. M. Molema, J. H. Soga and D. D. T. Jabavu.
They were first and foremost preachers and teachers, psychologically alienated from their African culture and thus from themselves.
For example, John Tengo Jabavu (1859-1921), the famous founder-editor of Imvo Zabantsundu, was a devout Methodist, Tiyo Soga (1829-71) was the first African minister to be ordained (United Presbyterian) in the United Kingdom, and Walter B . Rubusana (1858-1916), the first African member of the Cape Provincial Council, was a Congregationalist minister.
They accepted colonialism as a matter of life, admired the white man for his power, wealth and technology, and accepted the supposed cultural inferiority of the black race
They shared the universalism and utopianism of the missionaries, and, within the colonial system, they wanted to elevate Africans to 'civilized Christiadom', through Christianity, education and industrial schools.
But, unlike the missionaries, they also were influenced by Booker T. Washington's doctrine of black economic self determination and by the Pan Africanism of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
They founded fraternal organizations(e.g. John Dube's Zulu Christian Industrial School and Natal Bantu Business League), newspapers and musical groups patterned after the 'Tuskegee model'.
When writing, they seemingly were motivated by intellectualism, religiousness, and not by African historical consciousness.
Generally, their historiography vascillated between elitism and mass action, hope and despair, moderation and militancy.
They saw themselves as the most knowledgeable of African history, culture and interests. Jabavu pronounced that 'it takes a native to know a native
They did not even investigate causes of colonialism itself, African resistance, separatism and Ethiopianism.
Their dependency on missionary presses, their reformist, liberal, Christian orientation and their elitist political ideology prevented the development of truly African historical consciousness.
Like their predecessors of the first period, missionaries and white liberals, they still looked up to Christianity, education, industrial skills and humanistic goodwill for African development.
Their significance, however, lies in their vast amount of contemporary scholarly documentation of the inner workings and effects of settler colonialism, which provides an invaluable historical insight
They favoured the qualified franchise and equal rights for all “civilized” men.
The histories they wrote were black centred, but they accepted the world as it was, viewing it with “white liberal eyes”.
They adopted a far more positive attitude towards the role of Britain in South Africa, seeing this influence as beneficial to blacks, protecting them against the racism of the Afrikaner.
ii. African nationalist historiography
This is not the youngest of the various nationalist traditions.
Its roots probably go back into 19th century, but it is by far the least productive.
The reasons is that it was suppressed and few escaped from Africa in order to be engaged in its systematic production and most engaged in the physical organization of the struggle rather in waging battle at the level of scholarship.
The environment for the educated elite does not enable potential writers within that region to develop the requisite tools for scholarly debate against evils of bourgeois scholarship
The history is anti imperialist, anti settler but also avoids the question of the social differentiation of the African community
The emerging African intellectuals within this school were submerged, exiled and sometime detained without trial and long time imprisonment
Books written in this perspectives were restricted to be used, oral tradition denied and production and dissemination of knowledge were narrowed.
It is trapped in an ethnic problematic
F. Revisionist or radical historiography
The roots of this tradition lay in the growing black resistance to the South African government. With the coming to power of the Nationalist Party in 1948 black resistance increased and signs of Marxist influences were more in evidence.
This tendency was preceded by the emergence of white English-speaking members of the Communist Party of South Africa who began to write anti-capitalist histories about black suppression and racial discrimination.
They included writers such as Bill Andrews, R. K. Cope and Eddie Roux. Roux’s work was followed by H. J. and R. E. Simons’s study, Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950, first published in 1969 which told the story of the past from a point of view of black resistance to white power and policy, and analysed in class terms the reasons for the unsuccessful attempts to overthrow capitalist domination.
The revisionist school represented a radical reinterpretation of the South African past and was initiated by white English speaking emigres from South Africa at British universities who began to take a stand against the liberal school.
They became frustrated with the Afrikaner political hegemony in South Africa and the consequent non achievement of any form of decolonization such as was happening in the rest of Africa
They therefore took to historical research in order to explain this phenomenon on the basis of Marxist historic materialism.
South African history had to be traced back to its roots and re-presented as a class struggle in a class ridden society created by international and South African capitalism.
Capitalism was closely linked to imperialism with its strategy of colonialism or black subjugation.
In its turn colonialism was responsible for transforming a politically and economically independent pre capitalist black populations into wage labourers in a proletarianised urban community.
Most radical historians saw black South Africans as the only true inhabitants and inheritors of the land.
Whites, who are associated with capitalism, fill only a small space on the stage of history: they were the colonisers, exploiters and oppressors.
For the radical revisionists South African history should thus be rewritten de novo, from the point of view of those “colonised” (by capitalism), the black working class.
The revisionist were influenced by the works of British leftist historians such as E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, and by the theoretical interpretations of anti colonial Marxists and structuralists such as Eugene Genovese, Louis Althusser, Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas.
The revisionists opted for an activist approach towards history that was aimed at revolutionary change in South Africa. Blacks were to be “liberated” and eventually brought to power
The leading figures of the new historiographical trend were initially perhaps Martin Legassick, Stanley Trapido, Frederick Johnstone, Shula Marks, Dan O’Meara, Charles van Onselen.
The radical revisionists believed theory to be essential in the formulation of historical questions.
According to Saunders, their materialist approach helped to make the decade of the 1970s a “golden age” for the production of historical knowledge of South Africa.
In the 1980s the situation in South Africa was characterized by repeated waves of widespread popular protests and by state attempts to suppress them.
At the same time the economy moved into a real crisis. This situation affected the choice of subject matter researched by progressive historians, so that new themes were brought into focus.
For example, the process of proletarianisation, the social effects of industrialization, the organizing and culture of the black working class, the strengths and flaws of the popular movements, the development of political consciousness among blacks, the forgotten struggles in rural areas and other local forms of freedom struggle became popular fields of research.
Lesson learnt from proletariat view
This school fall under proletariat tradition of thinking trying to move beyond the kind of history which have described to produce historiography rooted in materialistic problematic and stresses the theme of class rather than of ethnicity.
The central theme is the development of capitalist relations in south Africa and the analysis attempts to reveal the patterns of class contradictions which flow from the development
The aim is to understand contemporary social reality in order to make an informed political intervention designed to transform it.
It is multi-racial tradition
What further do they critiques the liberals?
Liberal scholars’ pre occupation with timeless ethnic categories such as race and colour rather than going into the analysis of such scientific categories as class or mode of production. To radicalist the best approach is the one that includes analysis of all those categories
Liberal failures to address themselves to the changes that have taken place in the character of racism over the centuries
Historiographical and research trends and tendencies beyond the 1990s
Historians hold diverse views on research trends and the general direction of academic history in post apartheid South Africa.
For Albert Grundlingh the academic history profession reached its high point during the 1980s. It was a period when the History Department at the University of South Africa, for instance, could boast a staff of 35 historians; today (2004) is it half this figure. Other South African universities remained stayed stagnant in the 1990s.
Post -1990 Historiographies and researches
According to Grundlingh, the growth during the 1980s can be seen as quite artificial, as so much depended on apartheid: structurally, in terms of a lack of open-ended career opportunities for black people, and ideologically, as an issue that by force of circumstance informed much of academic debate and historical writing.
The rapid legal and political demise of the apartheid regime had a remarkable effect on the discourses of South African history in general, and on revisionist historians in particular.
Jeff Peires commented on “unmistakable signs of crisis and collapse” in the radical historiography on South Africa.
For many practitioners of South African history it seemed inescapable by the mid-1990s that there must be a “new history” to complement the “new South Africa”; the question was, what sort of new history?
Stolten correctly observes that the transfer of power that took place in 1994 has not yet been matched by any significant new historiographical development and that the study of history has lost much of its excitement and appeal in South Africa in the years since 1996
One reason for this sense of crisis, according to Tim Nuttall and John Wright, was the sudden evaporation, in the course of the dramatic political changes of the early 1990s, of the moral and epistemological certainties of the apartheid era.
South African historians were in one way or another to a greater or lesser degree, caught up in the deep and narrow groove of “struggle history”.
The degree to which they became involved in fighting political battles on the terrain of their discipline meant that when the political climate suddenly began to change, as happened from 1990 onwards, many of them, on the right and the left alike, were left without clear academic agendas
To explain the absence of a new direction in South African historiography in the 1990s, Martin Legassick and Gary Minkley point to the nature of the negotiated political revolution
The transfer of power in South Africa was different from the decolonization of tropical Africa thirty years before in that it was the result of a set of negotiations within the country between the ruling white minority and the ANC, which accepted a liberal democratic constitution and at least in the middle long term agreed to work within a capitalist framework.
Radical liberatory history became less relevant due to the actual demobilization of social struggle.
According to Saunders, the historiographical equivalent to the dramatic political change of 1994 had already taken place decades earlier and he suggests that South African history was decolonized long before the political decolonization of 1994
One of the most serious weaknesses in the present state of South African historiography is that even well into a decade of epoch-making changes since 1994, a generally authoritative history of South Africa with a distinctly Africanist point of view has yet to appear.
Apart from some outstanding examples, dealt with above, in general the historiographical tradition in South Africa is marked by the almost total absence of black history writers.
Specialist literature written by black historians does not take up much space on the shelves of the university libraries. An important reason for this situation is that few black historians have been able to obtain, and retain, academic positions. Some of the best black historians are lost to the government and the private sectors.
Thus, up to now the construction of the master narrative of the history of South Africa has been dominated by white English speaking males
More challenging than grappling with a nationalist “African voice” in the future is the issue of dealing with South Africa’s history in the context of Africa.
The question of South Africa’s “exceptionalism” on the continent has the potential to draw historians into a wider frame and therefore the question of the South African past in relation to the rest of Africa remains.
Radical revisionist school never presented a complete alternative synthesis of South African history.
It is still too early to think of a comprehensive national alternative synthesis as there are still too many un-researched lacunae in historical research. At the present, therefore, South African historiography appears to be a rather eclectic enterprise.
However, a few particular research foci have manifested themselves since the 1990s
An outstanding research focus, which seems to be growing stronger and becoming more popular, is gender studies.
Quite a few studies have appeared on the role and place of women in colonial society and on gender discrimination under apartheid.
A lot of attention is also being devoted to gender and sexuality, family and missionary work.
In conjunction with gender studies articles on masculinity and homosexuality have also appeared.
Louis Grundlingh has explored public attitudes and responses to HIV/AIDS
A new, highly ceremonial form of political history has begun to emerge in South Africa and concentrates on the promotion of the redemptive value of memory and of personal testimony, on the on hand and on the identification and dedication of new, inclusive, national monuments, on the other.
Thus heritage forms part of a “socially responsible past”. In this regard, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1996, was investigated by historians such as Nico Combrink and D. Thelen as an example of the first aspect of the new public history. As examples of the second, studies on Robben Island, the Khoisan heritage and Afrikaner monuments have appeared.
The role of national monuments, museums and cultural festivals and their public image were reexamined by historians in order to deconstruct the myths surrounding them and to recontextualize them against the background of rapid social and political change in South Africa.
Even the environmental heritage constitutes a part of the postcolonial debate and approach towards heritage
Other new approaches include studies on minority identities such as the Khoisan, the Coloured people and Afrikaner ex-patriots, 110 and on sports and politics.
Historians have also focused on historical analyses of emerging “soft” industries such as leisure and tourism.
Vivian Bickford Smith explored leisure and social identities as pastime in colonial society.
Jim Davidson explains how tourism was used to economically revitalize a rural South African town that was marginalized as a result of changing economic and demographic determinants, while Albert Grundlingh analyses Afrikaner working class gambling habits and the cultural politics that influenced the dog racing industry in the 1930s and 1940s
A growing number of historians have begun to focus attention on environmental and ecological history and have contributed to the increasing corpus of studies in this field of historical research.
Studies were published on environmental politics and on water scarcity, dewatering and sinkholes, and the commodification of water.
Other studies published on environmental and ecological history include a broad variety of topics such as Western Cape rock paintings, horses in colonial society, the history of hunting, agriculture and conservation, veterinary diseases, the prickly pear industry of the Eastern Cape, ornithology, dogs and wildlife conservation.
Lastly, Gary Baines has opened an important new trend in South African historiography by exploring the cultural memory of white male military conscripts who served during the South African border war from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Hopefully this will stimulate more research into this aspect of South African history that has hitherto largely been neglected.
As far as ongoing research projects are concerned, it seems if studies on cultural, politics, masculine identities, heritage and memory, medical history, oral history, environmental history and post colonial and post nationalist historiographies are still popular among historians
Conclusion
The ideological liberation of the 1990s unleashed a tremendous variety of thought and approaches to South African historiography, but there is still no clearly defined direction.
Stolten suggests that perhaps the immediate future for South African historical research lies in a symbiotic hegemony consisting of all progressive streams from liberal Africanism and radical, social history to ANC informed strategic thinking
Although the pursuit of research into “traditional” political, economic and social themes still continues the increasing attention to topics such as heritage identities, tourism and leisure and environmental issues represents a marked shift away from the foci of the revisionist phase
As such it is a welcome development and is clear proof that South African historians are no longer subconsciously harnessed to respond academically to the political challenges of the apartheid era.
Indeed, Grundlingh argues that, while South Africa moves further into a post-apartheid future and the current present becomes the past, contemporary South African history may incrementally acquire a semblance of normality as it edges towards a more inclusive narrative of events which, despite possible different emphases, will at least pertain to all groups as fully fledged South African citizens
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