Читать книгу Hermann Giliomee: Historian - Hermann Giliomee - Страница 13

Prof. HB Thom had been rector of the US when I enrolled as a first-year student in 1956. In 1967, his shadow still hung over the History Department which he had headed from 1937 to 1954. His writings were not the “volksgeskiedenis” Gustav Preller had produced at the beginning of the century, but a form of academic historiography with a clear nationalist agenda. Among the documents preserved in Thom’s private papers is a letter from a student who thanked him because his classes had transformed him from a “louwarm” (lukewarm) to a “vuurwarm” (red-hot) Afrikaner.29

Thom was the “history man” par excellence of the Afrikaner nationalists of the 1940s and 1950s. In speeches and articles during this era, he called on historians to be faithful to the demands of their discipline. They had to research the facts thoroughly and at the same time approach Afrikaner history in a way that would serve the spiritual welfare of the volk.

For Thom, the light that Afrikaner historians cast on the past had to help the Afrikaners understand their political challenges. The key feature was the momentous struggle the Afrikaners had waged for a large part of their history to maintain their belief that they could develop within their own community, in spite of unsympathetic governments and great isolation. In so doing, they had developed a sense of self-worth.

Another aspect was racial policy. According to Thom, a study of the past would show how deeply the principle of racial segregation was rooted in the Afrikaner past, and how persistently the Voortrekkers had advocated an “auth­entically Afrikaans” policy of “differentiation”. In his biography of the Voortrekker leader Gert Maritz he wrote of “the brave generation of unforgettable Afrikaners who … with their primitive muzzle-loading rifles freed the greater part of South Africa from barbarism and conquered it for white civilisation”.30

From the late 1940s Thom had been involved in the planning of the first complete academic history of the country, viewed through the lens of Afrikaner nationalism. The two-volume work of more than 1 400 pages appeared in 1955 under the title Geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika (History of South Africa). Two of the three editors and several of the 23 contributors had a connection with Stellenbosch, and specifically with the History Department. At the start of my first year of study, students were told that those who intended to major in history had to buy the two volumes.

While the work was presented as the first scientific history in Afrikaans, the past was still seen as a battle between “civilisation” and “barbarism”. Some of the writers still used derogatory terms for indigenous people. The first volume of Geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika provides a chronological overview of the European settlement. It starts with a chapter titled “The discovery of South Africa”, as if no one had lived at the southernmost tip of Africa before 1652. The first third of the book contains virtually no mention of the San (“Bushmen”) or the Khoikhoi (“Hottentots”), except for passing remarks about the “rapacity” of the Hottentots and the “obstacle” represented by the Bushmen to white advance.

The first mention of the Xhosa people on the colony’s eastern frontier comes on page 178, where the text refers to “the terrible depredations” perpetrated by the Xhosa, who had moved across the Great Fish River boundary in “great hordes”. There is no reference to the “depredations” committed by the frontier farmers’ commandos.

The second volume of Geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika contains a chapter entitled “The native people of South Africa”. It states that the “Bushmen” soon “ceased to play any role”, and that the “Hottentots” “bartered away” their cattle wealth. As to where the black people had lived prior to 1652, it was merely said that existing knowledge in this regard was very limited.

The best chapter in the two-volume work was PJ van der Merwe’s interpretation of the Dutch East India Company’s native policy. He explained well how the Company, with its gaze focused on the sea and maritime trade, devoted little attention and limited funds to the frontier conflicts. In the absence of troops or a police force, the frontier farmers had to fend for themselves in defence of their families’ lives and property. But Van der Merwe, too, erred in arguing that the Fish River, which Governor Joachim van Plettenberg had proclaimed as a boundary after consultations with a few minor Xhosa chiefs, was supposed to apply as a boundary to all other Xhosa groups in the territory as well.

The two volumes assumed without any argument that white people had the right to exercise political control over the greater part of South Africa. This view of history underwent a radical revision during the 1960s. Radiocarbon dating of artefacts showed that Bantu-speaking communities had occupied the region between the Limpopo and the Vaal as far back as the eleventh century. Subsequent archaeological finds have placed the first black occupation south of the Limpopo several centuries earlier. By the 1750s some of the western Xhosa had already settled west of the Fish River. This was twenty-five to thirty years before Van Plettenberg proclaimed his boundary and the first trekboers (white migrant farmers) arrived in the area.

The first volume of the Oxford History of South Africa (1969), edited by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, provided a good summary of the new research. At the time when the Voortrekkers crossed the Orange River, vast parts of the interior were indeed depopulated in the wake of the Mfecane, a period of devastating conflicts among black communities that had resulted in a great loss of life. On the other hand, it was indisputable that black and coloured people had occupied vast parts of southern Africa long before white people first landed in Table Bay. The NP government and many of the Afrikaner historians preferred to avert their eyes and pretended that this information could be wished away.

There was a reason for this: for the NP of the 1960s, the historical right to the land had become the cornerstone of the ideology of apartheid. Apartheid was no longer based on white superiority but on white people’s supposed right to more than 80% of South Africa’s land, which was considered “rightfully theirs” on historical grounds.

Missiologists, anthropologists and sociologists were in the forefront of the academics who helped construct the ideology of apartheid. There were few historians in their ranks.

They had no problem, however, with the vision of South Africa as a predominantly white country. This view was also reflected in the Afrikaans press. Schalk Pienaar, one of the most respected Afrikaans journalists, wrote:

South Africa is by no means Bantu territory wrested from its rightful owners by the white man. There were no established Bantu homelands in South Africa when Van Riebeeck landed at the Cape in 1652. The Whites moving northwards and the Bantu moving southwards did not meet until more than a century later. If newcomers is the word one wants, then the Bantu are as much newcomers to South Africa as the Whites.31

In 1968 Prime Minister John Vorster declared: “We have our land and we alone shall have authority over it.”32 The “land” Vorster had in mind was the entire territory of South Africa except for the 13% that was classified as black areas.

By the time I embarked on my postgraduate studies in 1960, NP politicians had stopped using crude and hurtful terms in public when referring to people who were not white. The main reason for this change was Britain’s policy of granting independence to its colonies in Africa, which had started with the “liberation” of Ghana in 1957. The NP government was quick to embrace the new terminology. All nations were now equal, but this did not mean that all individuals in South Africa were equal.

As a result of the high economic growth in the 1960s, the black labour force and consumer market kept expanding. In spite of influx control, black people were urbanising rapidly, and fewer and fewer believed that this stream to the cities could be reversed. A need arose for an interpretation of history that was inclusive rather than exclusive.

When I joined the staff of the History Department at Stellenbosch in 1967, Geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika was no longer the frame of reference. A year later history lecturers from the University of South Africa published a new collective work, Vyfhonderd jaar Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis (Five hundred years of South African history). The history of the black ethnic groups before 1652 was covered in an addendum at the back of the volume. In this book, it was mainly white people that had taken the initiative in building the country.

For a period of about forty years, between 1930 and 1970, the battle between liberal and nationalist historians dominated historiography in South Africa. Numerous dissertations in Afrikaans were published in the annual Archives Year Book for South African History, which first appeared in 1938. After the NP assumed power in 1948, more and more Afrikaner historians received university training. The ideal was scientific historiography, but the question was: from what vantage point?

Members of my generation knew that we neither were nor wished to be liberal historians; at the same time, we did not want to write nationalist “volks­geskiedenis” as many of the previous generation had. As late as 1966 Prof. HB Thom still characterised the University of Stellenbosch as a “volksuniversiteit”. By implication, the history taught here would be volksgeskiedenis. It proceeded from the assumption that the Afrikaners were in the first instance the people who had historically taken responsibility for what Thom called “Christianity and civilisation, and specifically law and order and progress in history”.

However, there had increasingly been a shift from “volksgeskiedenis” to what was referred to at Stellenbosch as “scientific-objective” historiography. Piet van der Merwe was the personification of this new approach. By 1944, when he was still only 32 years old, he already had three excellent scientific studies to his name. (There was a fourth work, Die Kafferoorlog van 1793 (The Kaffir War of 1793), which, apart from the title, had other serious flaws.)

His focus was the trekboers, those pastoral farmers who had trekked away for non-political reasons from the southwestern part of the country that is now South Africa. But his major works had been written at a time when white domination still seemed unassailable.

Van der Merwe refused to practise any self-censorship. He told me once that he had stumbled upon something terrible in his research on the Voortrekkers and the Ndebele people, but would not elaborate on the matter. I wondered sometimes whether it was this incident that had kept him from sending the manuscript on the subject to the printers. A comprehensive work that dealt with the Voortrekkers and the Ndebele was published after his death in an Archives Year Book. It contained a detailed account of a massacre of the inhabitants of a black village that had been perpetrated by a Voortrekker commando under Hendrik Potgieter.33

What I as a historian was searching for in particular was a way in which to describe and analyse white-black interaction on the colonial frontiers at a time before the whites had consolidated their control over black people. My contemporaries as postgraduate students at Stellenbosch included Henning van Aswegen and Ernst Stals, who worked on white-black relations in the nineteenth century in the area between the Vaal and Orange rivers and in Ovamboland respectively, and Pieter Kapp, who critically analysed the liberal views of the missionary Dr John Philip on the Cape Colony’s eastern frontier.

Van Aswegen noted the major problem that confronted all of us: “The few available ‘non-white’ sources and the masses of available white sources constantly had to be interpreted and re-interpreted in order to arrive at a better understanding of the attitude of the non-whites.”34 In my work on inter-­ethnic relations on the eastern Cape frontier, I became more and more convinced that the conflicts on colonial frontiers should be analysed as a struggle characterised by conflicting claims to a disputed territory where no generally accepted authority existed because of the inability of any one ethnic community to impose its will on the others and gain the upper hand.

Ranke, the founder

Piet van der Merwe was largely responsible for the esteem in which the History Department was held in both Afrikaans and English circles. He had stamped the approach of “scientific-objective” historiography on the department. The German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) is generally regarded in the West as the founder of modern source-based or scientific historiography. His standpoint was that the historian had to record the past as it had actually happened: “wie es eigentlich gewesen”, as he put it. He was not under the illusion that the historian could ever be completely neutral or objective, but insisted that the historian had to determine as precisely as possible what had really happened and be impartial in his treatment of conflicts and disputes.

The chief principles of “scientific-objective history”, as I was introduced to the concept, were derived from this approach. The first duty was that of verification, for which primary or documentary sources were usually the best. Second, every epoch had its own unique particularity, with people who had their own time-bound moral convictions, values and mindsets. The views of the present should not be imposed on the past. At the same time, however, every era posed its own questions about the past. The historian who did not want to be considered antiquarian had to present history as realistic and relevant to his or her readers.

Van der Merwe was a formidable instructor who went through all theses and dissertations with a fine-toothed comb. One could not fail to admire his thoroughness and devotion to the discipline. On the other hand, he was a poor lecturer and could bore his students stiff in class when he endeavoured to thrash out the history of his specialist field, the trekboer movement, in minute detail. We used to joke that history was actually about whether the Voortrekkers had trekked to the left or to the right of a particular koppie.

Van der Merwe put the stress on what had occurred and how it had happened, and less and less on why things had happened as they did and not in any other way. Though the critcism he levelled at theses, including my own, was sometimes excellent, it could also be so destructive that the entire process of getting a thesis accepted would leave a bitter taste and a wry smile.

Flagrantly absent in the department was any focus on the theory or phil­o­sophy of history as a discipline. While it is true that Prof. Dirk Kotzé lectured enthusiastically on nationalism and communism as historical phenomena in Europe, in terms of his remit he could not present courses on theory or on South African history. In the case of Van der Merwe’s offering, there was scant reflection on theory or philosophy. I think he realised that his lectures were poor but was loath to admit it. Once when I mentioned to him that a lecturer from another university had asked me to send him my notes on his lectures, Van der Merwe said he definitely did not consider this a good idea.

We received virtually no guidance on where we could go for further reading on our subject and especially what books or journals we as prospective historians needed to acquaint ourselves with. There was a course in early historiography, but it was never explained how this could broaden our perspective.

Van der Merwe also made no effort to introduce his students to the world of thought of the leading historical figures. There was no scope for students to come up with imaginative insights, to speculate creatively, and to bring historical characters and their worldview to life. As a redoubtable examiner he made a huge contribution to the training of future historians, but it was also due to him that the department stagnated.35

Worst of all, the poor offering we were given went hand in hand with what Van Aswegen has rightly referred to as “the self-satisfied Stellenbosch tradition”.36 St Elmo Pretorius was the only lecturer who encouraged us to read books and journal articles, and to do so critically. It was certainly no coincidence that he was the only lecturer who had not been trained at Stellenbosch.

“A particular way of thinking”

I am grateful that I received the technical side of my apprenticeship as historian in the Ranke methodology. Few qualities are more important to a historian than a reverent respect for facts coupled with constant vigilance against an anachronistic treatment of the past. A historian wants to engage with the past as something that actually happened, not with the past as fiction.

Our inadequate theoretical training forced us to start doing our own thinking and reading about the value of history as a discipline. Aphorisms about the study of history abound, but the one that struck me most was a statement by GJ Renier, a Dutch historian who was influential between the two world wars: “The study of history is not just another field of study; it is a particular way of thinking.”

The essence of historical understanding lies in being attuned to complexity, context and causality, and to change over time. Historical reflection implies the obligation to take all sides of a matter into acount, but also assumes the adoption of a particular position. Like the novelist, the historian has to imagine that the characters in the “story” cannot foresee the future and the outcome of their actions. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga advises historians to constantly put themselves at a point in the past where the known factors will seem to permit different outcomes.37

Historians should ask themselves why there was ultimately a specific outcome instead of a different one, and what the decisive factors had been. In so doing, they will soon learn that the best-laid plans go awry, that the unexpected tends to be the norm, and that few things are as important as the character of leaders. There is something like thinking historically, which also helps one to understand the present better. History offers a particular perspective that is absent from other disciplines.

In the second half of my career, when I lectured in political studies at the University of Cape Town, I experienced a strong sense of the difference between political science and history as disciplines. In political science, one looks from the present at the past; in history, it is precisely the opposite – and there is a massive difference between these ways of looking.

The difference goes further. There is a tendency on the part of political scientists and sociologists to argue that what had occurred was inevitable, and that history could not have happened in any other way. Historians, on the other hand, endeavour to put themselves in a different era and place. They attempt to imagine that various possibilities are still open and that they are unaware of how the historical narrative would actually unfold. Their observations are inductive and tentative.

The major lesson I learnt at Stellenbosch is that the writing of history is only of value when one tries one’s utmost to establish the truth and does not attempt to put this truth at the service of a particular political ideal. I felt, however, that at Stellenbosch the “scientific-objective” method had become a fetish that created the illusion on the part of some that they were recording history impartially. According to the British historian AJP Taylor, the historian who believes in his own impartiality runs a greater risk of being biased than others do.38

While guarding against one’s own biases and ensuring that one’s facts are correct are both crucial, it is impossible to ever arrive at the full truth or to say the final word. Pieter Geyl, an eminent Dutch historian, referred to historiography as “a debate without end”. It is inevitable that one will write history from a particular ideological perspective. Verification of facts to ensure accuracy is the duty of any historian, regardless of which “school” he or she belongs to, and not an exceptional virtue.

I started asking myself more and more who I wanted to write for and how I should approach my target group. In 1943 HB Thom argued that the historian should search for the historical truth from within “the bosom of the volk” with the aim of serving “the spiritual welfare of the volk”. The problem with this approach is that the attempt to give a sympathetic interpretation of Afrikaner history became conflated with defending white supremacy, segregation and apartheid. My contemporaries included a number of historians such as Ernst Stals, Henning van Aswegen, Pieter Kapp and Johann Bergh who did not want to use their history writing in the service of the existing order, but instead wished to show how white, coloured and black had shaped one another. Like them, I was not a liberal historian but rather a pluralist who interpreted the country’s history as one of contesting communities in which group interests rather than individual attitudes were decisive.

Up to the early 1970s, everything I wrote was in Afrikaans and I addressed myself to an Afrikaner audience in the first instance. But I started believing less and less that separate development offered a solution to South Africa’s problems. From 1970 onwards I voted for the Progressive Party and its successors, despite having strong doubts about whether the classical liberal solutions were appropriate for South Africa.

I decided to write as someone who stood on the margins of the Afrikaner community. Though I would attempt to understand the Afrikaners in parti­cular and explain them to others, I would be unsparing in my criticism where necessary.

I identified with NP van Wyk Louw’s dictum that one loves a nation because of its “misery,” and also with the words of William Faulkner, the great writer of the American South, who said that one does not love “because” but “despite”; “not for the virtues, but despite the faults”.

A liberal outlook

During the 1960s Afrikaner historians and their English-speaking counterparts, who had long worked in separate silos, started making closer contact, especially in the South African Historical Society and on the editorial board of the South African Historical Journal/Suid-Afrikaanse Historiese Joernaal. At Stellenbosch, however, the department still largely ignored the publications of liberal historians, all of whom wrote in English.

It was almost as if Van der Merwe thought that the Ranke school, to which he subscribed, was in opposition to the liberal school. Unlike the Ranke approach, the liberal historians advocated values such as individual freedom and equality. There was a tendency to interpret the past in terms of these values.

In our research, however, it was impossible to be indifferent to three eminent liberal historians who produced important work on South African history, namely CW de Kiewiet, Leonard Thompson and Rodney Davenport. Their studies challenged certain key views of Afrikaner historians.

Whereas Afrikaner historians had long regarded segregation as the only solution, De Kiewiet wrote that history showed segregation offered no solution to South Africa’s racial problem, and that any renewed efforts to intensify it were bound to fail.39 Thompson made the most significant contribution to the history of the constitutional development of South Africa. While the NP government contended in the 1950s that the sovereignty of Parliament was the only Afrikaner tradition, he pointed out that in the Republic of the Orange Free State the constitution had been sovereign, as in the case of the United States. Hence constitutionalism was not a foreign concept but part of the Afrikaner tradition.40

Davenport showed that between 1880 and 1910 the Afrikanerbond, the first political party in the country, did not stand on a platform of segregation but defined the term “Afrikaner” inclusively and eagerly sought allies, also across the colour line.41

On the other hand, anglophone historians tended to be blind to English chauvinism and the strong conservative element in the English-speaking community. A section of the anglophone elite accused the Afrikaners of various forms of racism, including their insistence on equality for Afrikaans within the context of the official policy of bilingualism. In the first two decades of the Union of South Africa this attitude was so pronounced that the writer, journalist and politician CJ Langenhoven asked in exasperation in a speech in front of an English audience: “Why do you always call our politics racialism, but your racialism you call politics?”42

Against this backdrop, a debate between history students from Stellenbosch and Cape Town would have been stimulating. On one occasion Davenport, then a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, proposed that one be held on the topic of General JBM Hertzog’s political thinking. The Stellenbosch professors were dismissive; “Davenport just wants to politicise history,” was their reaction. As if Stellenbosch did not politicise history.

“Insurmountable objections”

The department I joined at Stellenbosch had two professors and four lecturers. There was little collegiality in our departmental relations. The model was evidently that of the hierarchical university in the Netherlands and Germany between the two world wars. As lecturers, our status was not much higher than that of senior students. There were no departmental meetings or social gatherings such as shared tea-time where we could discuss history as a discipline. The professors did all the senior departmental work. We were later instructed to mark the third-year students’ assignments, but the professors themselves wanted to decide on the topics.

I expressed the desire to lecture on South African history as well, but my request was rejected. I had to continue with courses on American and European history. In 1976 I suggested that the department admit Henry (Jatti) Bredekamp, a coloured lecturer at the University of the Western Cape with whom I had become acquainted, as a doctoral student. Van der Merwe’s reply was that we should not “dirty our hands” with this matter.

I ran into a brick wall when I wanted to tackle a fairly recent topic for my doctoral dissertation. Van der Merwe, in particular, was unwavering. It was impossible, he declared, to be “scientific-objective” when writing about the recent past. I tried to persuade him, but he was adamant and did not give me much chance to argue my case.

His standpoint was completely in line with the official stance of the time. In the archival depots, the government records for the preceding fifty years were closed. In 1965 the Joint Matriculation Board’s history curriculum excluded political events in South Africa between 1910 and 1965. As Van der Merwe put it to me, there were “insurmountable objections to contemporary history”.

Frustrated, I sat down and wrote an academic article on Van der Merwe’s “insurmountable objections”. It appeared in the February 1969 issue of Standpunte, a journal that covered both the arts and the humanities. I had sufficient ammunition at my disposal. In 1966 I had obtained a credit in a subject called contemporary history at the University of Amsterdam. The major part of the course consisted of a case study of Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany during 1933-34, just more than thirty years earlier.

I wrote that a great urge had arisen among the leading historians in Europe to write the history of their own times as a result of the horror evoked by the mass slaughter in the two world wars, and especially the extermination of the Jews and other minority groups. It was no longer advisable to wait until the time was supposedly ripe before taking up the pen to deal with particular historical events. The great disillusionment on the part of Westerners in particular and the moral confusion of the time demanded that historians provide answers to the question of why European civilisation had lost its way to such a degree.

Regarding the Afrikaners, I wrote: “Has there ever been, with the exception of Germany, a greater impulse or a stronger motivation for a nation to account for its history, and especially its recent history, to itself and to the world?” I also asked: “Does the Afrikaner, in the light of all the allegations about the nature and essence of his character, not also have a duty and calling to search for the answers in the past century?”43

The writing of contemporary history did not require any new skills, I argued; it did, however, bring the huge challenges of historiography into sharp focus. No one in the department reacted to my article. In all likelihood my modest revolt never came to the attention of the professors. I wonder if Van der Merwe would have deigned to discuss the article with me if he had read it.

In turbulent times

With no possibility of writing on a contemporary topic, I accepted the professors’ suggestions. My master’s thesis dealt with the first years after the second British occupation of the Cape in 1806. For my doctoral dissertation, the professors proposed that I write on the period 1795-1803 when the Cape was occupied by Britain for the first time, after having been governed by the Dutch East India Company for 143 years.

In the end, it turned out to be a very good exercise for me to write about an entire society in a time of crisis. In fact, the British seizure of power in 1795 was not a mere change of government but a regime change that was accompanied by radical changes in the form of government, the economic system and social values. I was surprised and thrilled to discover how challenging the history of turbulent times could be.

After 1795, as in the case of South African society after 1994, the population within the colonial borders – officials, burghers, slaves, Khoikhoi, San and Xhosa – had to adjust to sweeping changes and new ideas. To them it seemed as if the world had been turned upside down. Whereas, prior to 1795, there had been a hierarchy of legally defined groups consisting of officials, burghers and slaves, each with its respective status and different rights, there were now only “British subjects”, who had to be put on an equal footing before the law in due course.

In many respects, the state of mind in the colony in the early 1790s resembled that in South Africa in the early 1990s. In the early 1790s, the burgher JF Kirsten encapsulated the spirit of the times as follows: “The government has lost the respect of the people; everyone wants to command and no one wants to obey.”44

In 1972 I obtained my doctoral degree, and thereby formally completed my apprenticeship in history. But this was not the time to sit back complacently. Stellenbosch was decidedly not at the cutting edge of developments in Western historiography.

A momentous meeting

While doing research for my doctoral dissertation at the Cape Archives in 1968, I happened to meet Rick Elphick, who was working on his doctoral study on the Khoikhoi. He was a Canadian citizen and a student of Leonard Thompson at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1969 Thompson became professor in African Studies at Yale University and had Elphick’s enrolment transferred to that institution.

My chance meeting with Elphick would prove to be of crucial significance to my career. Elphick is one of the most subtle and innovative historians who write on South African history. My friendship with him and our professional collaboration have been among the most formative influences on my career.

In the course of his archival research Elphick also visited Stellenbosch, where I introduced him to several local academics. He recalls that I was optimistic about radical reform. The Afrikaners were not monolithic, I told him, and a younger generation was starting to shake the pillars of Afrikaner power. He writes that I assured him I had no intention of becoming an anglicised Afrikaner or volksvreemd (alienated from my community).45

On completion of his research in Cape Town Elphick travelled to Maseru, where he joined Thompson, who was working on a biography of Moshoeshoe. Thompson reacted negatively when Elphick told him about the fruitful conversations he had had with me and other Afrikaners in Stellenbosch. He hinted that Elphick might have been infected with racism, which was absurd. Never­theless, Elphick’s relations with Thompson improved to the extent that he could persuade him to invite me to Yale as a postgraduate fellow.

Thompson, too, would play a huge role in my career. Born in England in 1916, he was first educated there and then in South Africa, to which his parents had emigrated. He fought in the Second World War and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. After his studies he lectured in history at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for just more than ten years. As a member of the Liberal Party, he was actively involved in the fight against the removal of coloured people from the voters’ roll.

Thompson and Monica Wilson, an anthrolopogist attached to UCT, were the co-editors of the Oxford History of South Africa, the first volume of which appeared in 1969 and the second in 1971. The book could well be described as revolutionary. For the first time, eminent scholars from various disciplines collaborated on a work that depicted South African history as African history, with black people as the principal actors instead of bit players in a white-centric history. Whereas earlier historians, like Eric Walker, had seen the Great Trek as the central event in this history, this work portrayed the trek as an invasion to which the Zulu in Natal and the black polities on the Highveld had to react.

The second volume of the Oxford History of South Africa was less controversial. Notably the chapters on agriculture and urbanisation, by Francis Wilson and David Welsh respectively, approached the history in a fresh way. Chapters on Afrikaner nationalism by René de Villiers, a journalist, and on African nationalism by Leo Kuper, an anthropologist, were less successful. They confirmed the old rule that liberals find it hard to write about nationalism with insight and understanding.

The expectation was that the two-volume work, which ran to a thousand pages, would be accepted as the new orthodoxy. Instead, it became the target of a fiery assault by radical scholars, who were mostly people of my generation. They contended that the liberal approach, as displayed in the Oxford History, was outdated, despite the fact that it was sharply critical of white domination. According to them the emphasis had to be placed on structural analysis, and especially on capitalist exploitation, which, in their view, was the real driving force in history.

I agreed with neither the radicals nor the liberals. What I did not know, however, was that certain Afrikaner historians, particularly Floors van Jaarsveld, would react with disgruntlement to my decision to pursue postgraduate studies at Yale under Thompson. To Van Jaarsveld, this was confirmation of the suspicion that I had crossed over to the liberal side.

A special year

The year that I spent with Annette and our two young daughters, Francine and Adrienne, in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1973 was an enriching experience. For me as a historian, it was a great stimulus. Of all the top American universities, Yale was the one where the largest proportion of undergraduate students majored in history.

I had a spacious office in the department and also spent long hours in the magnificent library. For Annette and the children, though, it was hard at times. We stayed in a minuscule apartment in the Divinity School. Our funds were limited and there was little opportunity for sightseeing trips and tours. At best, we were part of the “Greyhound set”.

At Yale I soon discovered that Thompson harboured suspicion towards me as an Afrikaner. I think he had expected me to be far more openly critical of the NP government and NP supporters. But I had no intention of passing myself off as a “detribalised Afrikaner”. It was clear that Thompson, who identified with the cause of black liberation under a liberal order, was upset by the criticism levelled at the Oxford History and was in search of allies.

Thompson thought highly of Van der Merwe as a historian, but his assessment of the Afrikaners was negative. He wrote that from the time of the first free burghers to the Voortrekkers only one social order had obtained, namely one in which the Afrikaners and their ancestors regarded people of African, Asian or mixed origin as a subspecies of humanity, as “creatures” rather than “people”. This view was, according to him, engraved in the minds of the Voortrekkers, who cemented it in legislation. Hence Thompson concluded: “That was what custom prescribed, self-interest demanded, and God ordained. That was how it always has been and always must be in South Africa.”46

I found it surprising that a historian as sophisticated as Thompson could make such an unhistorical statement, almost as if he simply had to give vent to a sense of resentment against the Afrikaners. It was completely at variance with the positive comments he had expressed in a scholarly article fifteen years earlier about the Republic of the Orange Free State whose constitution was based on that of the United States.47 He ignored the history of the Afrikanerbond in the Cape Colony and that of the early National Party, between 1915 and 1929, which had been in favour of the political and economic integration of the coloured people and had competed zealously for their vote.

Once Thompson asked me directly what I thought of the two volumes. I replied that the Oxford History’s stress on the interaction between people of different races and cultures provided an important corrective to the orthodoxy that white people had always just insisted on segregation, but that I had problems with the book’s view that the Afrikaners and their forebears were inveterate racists. He listened to my explanation in silence.

Thompson was someone with a huge ego and a thin skin. But I would always be grateful to him for the doors he opened for me. In the end we did establish a relationship based on mutual respect. In 1975 he was one of my referees in my application for the vacant King George V Chair in History at UCT. (He had previously occupied the chair.) When Colin Webb, an English-­speaking historian, was appointed, he expressed doubt in a letter as to whether Webb’s long residence in Natal would help him to understand the Afrikaners.

Influential people

In 1973, and again in the academic year of 1977/78, I got to know several of the other professors in the History Department at Yale. I always made a point of asking historians which book outside their particular field of research had influenced them the most. A name that cropped up frequently was that of Reinhold Niebuhr. His influential work Moral Man and Immoral Society had appeared in 1932 when the system of segregation in the southern states of the United States was at its worst.48

Niebuhr believed that an oppressive system such as segregation in the American South was not primarily the result of ignorance, erroneous doctrines or irrationality. People organised themselves in communities in order to protect their particular political identity, interests and social values. Contrary to what the liberal creed maintained, such groups did not dissolve easily. As members of a community, they tended to be much more unmerciful towards other groups than in their personal relationships with individuals from other communities. This struck me as an apt description of the Afrikaners.

Niebuhr did not believe that solutions lay in finding “reasonable leaders” who were prepared to talk to the leaders of competing parties or communities and come up with a clever solution. A nation, an ethnic community or a class believed in the justness of its cause. Appeals to people’s conscience and to “reasonableness” and “fairness” would fall on stony ground until the balance of power had shifted sufficiently to make a community change its course. A democracy only became possible once people’s fears about security and their sense of self-worth in a new dispensation were allayed.

Naturally, I also asked Thompson which historians I should study. He singled out De Kiewiet and WM Macmillan, and added that I did not have to take much notice of Lewis Gann’s recently published article on liberal interpretations of South African history. Needless to say, I immediately made a point of reading the relevant article in the Rhodes-Livingstone Journal of 1959.

Gann, a historian of German-Jewish descent, had received his university training in England and worked in the British colonial service before accepting a university position in Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe). He had written books on the history of Rhodesia and about the African continent.

Gann’s argument was that liberals sought to impose an inappropriate model on South Africa. The model was that of British society, which had first granted the franchise to its middle class before extending it to its working class. Unlike South Africa, British was a homogeneous society in terms of race and culture, and a rich and prosperous country to boot.

Gann rightly pointed out that if historians were looking for a model, they should rather study the history of ethnic conflicts in eastern Europe. In these societies ethnic and class differences coincided, as in South Africa; and in eastern Europe, too, ethnic groups had long been engaged in a fierce power struggle.

The dominant group made sure that it kept all the others subordinate. Gann emphasised that while the refusal of the NP government to give black people any representation in Parliament after 1948 could be described as selfish, from a short- to medium-term perspective it was not irrational.

Gann asserted that the fate of political minorities with no power was seldom pleasant, and that the loss of political power by the NP might well also mean the end of the Afrikaners as an ethnic minority.49

During the year at Yale I attended a memorable public lecture by the writer Alan Paton. In many respects a “Christian realist”, like Niebuhr, Paton was also one of the leading voices in South Africa in favour of a liberal alternative to apartheid. He firmly believed that if the international world were to force the Afrikaners to accept majority rule in a unitary state, they would rather “be destroyed than yield”.

But he did not exclude the possibility of a voluntary transfer of power. Paton posed the key question: “When total apartheid is seen to be impossible, what will the Afrikaner intellectuals and religious leaders do? Will they choose white domination or the common society?” In this speech and in various articles, he answered the question himself: “Surely, with their intellectual qualifications and moral views, they must choose the common society.” In Paton’s view, the Afrikaners would not be forced from power. The initiative, he believed, would remain with them until they chose to give it up.50

Historian of the South

I was particularly fortunate in getting to know C Vann Woodward, the most eminent historian of the American South. His influential study The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which dealt with the evolution of American race relations, was at one stage considered the best-known historical work in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr called it “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement”.

Though Woodward, like the later president Bill Clinton, hailed from the southern state of Arkansas, he was nonetheless unflinching in his insistence on liberal values. Woodward’s studies of the emergence and mutation of segregation in the southern states of the United States after the abolition of slavery were of great help to me in understanding race relations in South Africa. In both cases one had to do with a dominant white community that refused point-blank to incorporate black people in their political and social system.

I had several conversations with Woodward over lunch at Mory’s, the popular faculty club. He could become extremely annoyed with the northeast elite (particularly that of the New England region) who were, in his view, hypocritical about the race question and labelled the South as backward, dumb and myopic without being conscious of their own racism.

Woodward told me of the formative influence Niebuhr’s books had had on him. As a Southerner himself, Woodward highlighted the contrast between the New Englanders and the Southerners in a way that immediately reminded me of the differences between Afrikaners and the English-speaking whites in South Africa. Like the “New Englanders” in the US northeast, the English-­speaking community in South Africa had a shared experience of economic prosperity. This went in hand in hand with their protestations of innocence on any charge of black exploitation and oppression.

The history of the Afrikaners, on the other hand, corresponded largely to that of white people in the American South. In both cases there was an era of slavery and later a devastating defeat in war (the American Civil War and the Anglo-Boer War), followed by another century of segregation. (South Africa took the term “poor white” as well as “segregation” from the South.) Like those of the Southerners, Afrikaners’ hands were stained in respect of both slavery and apartheid – the two great moral issues about which the West had developed an obsession. But Woodward did not feel that whites had the duty to pay off their debt in perpetuity.

In 1976 Thompson and Woodward travelled together to South Africa to attend a conference on apartheid in South African universities held on the UCT campus. This was just after the first wave of uprisings in Soweto and other black areas. Along with many others, I wondered whether we were heading for a full-blown civil war over the race question. I hosted Woodward at Stellenbosch, where I showed him separate entrances, separate residential areas and schools, and the other manifestations of apartheid.

We subsequently exchanged letters on a number of occasions. In 1998 he referred to the “black carpetbaggers” in the United States of that time, black people who sought to benefit personally from affirmative action even though they had not suffered under segregation themselves. To him, this was proof that advocates of white supremacy were correct in their assumption that skin colour was the overriding factor in the white-black conflict. On 15 June 1998 he wrote that it seemed to him as if racial rhetoric in America had been much worse than in South Africa:

The racial rhetoric here [in America] was framed in terms of hatred, bitterness, contempt, and personal violence. It appeared in these forms among the courts, the police, the militia, prisons and mobs. Was there anything in South Africa comparable with the Ku Klux Klan, the lynching mobs, the mass brutality in the South?

Once I asked Woodward a question that had long preyed on my mind. Would the white people in the American South have been able to abolish segregation if those states had been independent? He pondered it for quite a while and then replied: “No, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

Unintended consequences

In the course of 1973 Rick Elphick and I decided to compile a book of essays on the early shaping of Cape society, about which so many conflicting theories existed. We wanted to obtain contributions from young historians who had focused on the early colonial history of the Cape in their doctoral dissertations. Rick himself had written on the Khoikhoi at the beginning of the VOC era, while I had written on the last decades of the eighteenth century, of which the first white-black conflicts on the eastern Cape frontier were such an important facet.

Our pool of authors and their doctoral research topics included Leonard Guelke on the burghers, Gerrit Schutte on the Cape Patriots, Robert Shell and James Armstrong on the slaves and free blacks, Martin Legassick on the Griquas and Southern Sotho on the northern frontier, and William Freund on the transitional governments from 1795 to 1806. All of them accepted the invitation to contribute to the volume. I ended up being the only contributor who was still based in South Africa. It was a striking illustration of the migration overseas of the historians who were engaged in a radical reinterpretation of our early history.

We started our work on the book in a time before electronic communication. During the planning and editing stages of the manuscript, streams of letters made their way across the ocean. Rick still has a 30cm-high pile of correspondence between the two of us and between us as co-editors and the various authors.

Gradually we realised that our book had the potential to challenge the views of historians on the early colonial era fundamentally. With a friend, Mike Peacock, at the helm of Maskew Miller Longman, we were assured of a sympathetic publisher and an effective marketer. The book was published in 1979 as The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820. An Afrikaans version in collaboration with Karel Schoeman, who had translated a large section, appeared in 1982 under the title ’n Samelewing in wording: Suid-Afrika, 1652 tot 1820.

The reviews were generally positive, but Anna Böeseken, the historian who had introduced me to Elphick in the Cape Archives in 1968, called it a “presumptuous book” in Die Burger. She stated that it reflected the modern obsession with racial differences which resulted in scant attention being paid to interpersonal differences, and added: “Thus theories are constructed and conclusions drawn on the basis of insufficient data.”

Böeseken, an authority on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, evidently felt that we as young scholars were still too wet behind the ears to mount the radical reinterpretation to which the book laid claim. Nevertheless, the book sold very well. The University of South Africa prescribed it for their students, and within a few years several other universities followed suit. By the end of the 1980s the total sales exceeded 50 000.

We then embarked on a substantially revised and extended second edition which took the analysis up to 1840. The new edition, which appeared in 1989, comprised more than 600 pages and included essays by new contributors such as Candy Malherbe, Nigel Worden, Robert Ross and Jeffrey Peires. This work, too, sold well, but it went out of print when Pearson took over our publisher ten years later. In 2015 the Wesleyan University Press made it available as an electronic book.

Rick and I consider our most significant contribution the synoptic final chapter in which we posed the question: How did white control and black exclusion become entrenched while at the same time there were large-scale interracial sexual relations outside wedlock?

Up to about 1775, the government and the burghers virtually never used the terms “race” or “white people”. Laws did not differentiate or discriminate on the basis of race or colour. A racist ideology did not exist. The word “black” was used very rarely except in the formal term “free blacks”, which referred to former slaves who had been freed by their owners. The police force consisted of black men who were called “kaffirs”. They were colour-blind in the execution of their duties and arrested people without making any distinction based on colour.

How did it come about that the Afrikaners developed the system of apartheid from such a pioneer history? It was a question one could indeed ask oneself. Liberal historians and social scientists enthusiastically offered explanations. According to some, the blame for white racism had to be laid at the door of the burghers’ “primitive” Calvinism with its doctrine of predestination. The problem with this interpretation was that, up to the end of the eighteenth century, the burghers had not been particularly devout.

Other historians again traced the origins of racism back to the conflict on the eastern frontier where the burghers and the Xhosa clashed in six frontier wars between 1780 and 1836. What was never explained was how the poorly educated frontier farmers managed to influence the much more cultivated inhabitants of Cape Town and its surrounding areas.

After numerous conversations on the stoep of the Lanzerac Hotel in Stellenbosch and many letters, Rick and I formulated an argument with five legs. The first leg was the administrative framework that the VOC initially imposed on the Cape, which distinguished between three legal status groups: Company officials, free burghers and slaves. The government imported slaves (who were exclusively black or Asian) from Africa and the East Indies as labourers. The free burghers were almost exclusively people who hailed from Europe.

Over the first 150 years of the settlement, the legal status group and race/colour started to correlate more and more closely. The burghers were white people and the slaves black people; those who owned land were white, and the landless people were black or coloured. There were many white people who did not own land, but they had the status of burghers. Among other things, they helped defend the landowners’ farms and livestock.

Burgher status went hand in hand with certain rights, obligations (such as commando service) and social status. For example, the VOC appointed only burghers as heemraden and field cornets. Until well into the nineteenth century members of the burgher community did not regard themselves as a race, but referred to themselves as burghers or “ingesetenes” (inhabitants).

The second element was demography. By 1725 the initial imbalance between men and women in the European community, which had given rise to several mixed marriages, had largely disappeared. The European men who managed to find a European wife got married, and a large majority of the others took a black or coloured concubine. As a general rule, children born from such extra-­marital interracial liaisons were not absorbed into the European community.

Thirdly, there was the role of the church in the promotion of a racially exclusive white community. The Dutch Reformed ministers were officials of a trading company, the VOC, which saw no profit in christianising black or coloured people. With regard to baptism, some ministers distinguished between born Christians (infants whose parents were Christians and who were baptised immediately) and baptised Christians (whose parents were not Christians). Those in the latter category often had to first prove that they understood the basic teachings of Christianity before they could receive baptism.

After Shaping had already been published, I came across the words of the Stellenbosch minister PB Borcherds. He had to explain to the British governor why, in a district as large as that of Stellenbosch, so few slaves had been baptised. Borcherds replied that he could not baptise slaves before they answered his questions about Christian doctrine to his satisfaction. He expected them to know the answers by heart. According to him, while they did have the “fear of God” in their hearts, they were too “stomp” (obtuse) to answer the questions.51

A fourth element was the system of Roman-Dutch law, which gave women in the Netherlands and in Dutch colonies more rights than those enjoyed by women in any other European legal system. In the event of adultery, a woman could divorce her husband and she then received half of the estate. During the eighteenth century, a pattern was established where women took the lead in becoming confirmed members of the church, and where they insisted that men who courted their daughters first had to be confirmed.52

Finally, the economy was so basic that no need arose to free a limited number of slaves to fill positions (such as those of merchants and soldiers) for which there were not enough Europeans and for which slaves were unsuitable. By contrast, in certain parts of Brazil an intermediate category of mulattoes emerged because of this need. An order without sharp racial distinctions developed in that country, which was completely different from that of the Cape.

During the time Rick and I were working on our final chapter, Cillié de Bruyn carried out genealogical research in the Archives which we would cite. He found that in a sample from the year 1807, only 5% of more than a thousand children had a grandparent that genealogists designated as non-European. Our conclusion was that by 1800 a community had emerged which intermarried and which had developed a high rate of endogamy. Thus a white “nation” emerged in South Africa without there initially having been any plan to “found” one. The VOC was succeeded by a British regime which, in a different way but equally purposefully, entrenched white power and white status.

My collaboration with Elphick provided me with the best possible exposure to the complexity of history and the unintended consequences of historical processes. It was a lesson that stayed with me and that I would find very useful in the last quarter of the twentieth century when the political order again changed fundamentally.

A sometimes venomous debate

In the last three decades of the twentieth century a heated debate raged at academic level between so-called radicals and liberals. It had been sparked in large part by the publication of the two volumes of the Oxford History of South Africa in 1969 and 1971.

The debate was about the question whether race (white versus black) or class (the “haves” who owned land and other fixed assets versus the “have-nots”) had been the key factor in the evolution of human relations in South Africa. Liberal historians tended to argue that certain myths and superstitions about descent or race (such as the idea of “Ham’s descendants”, the Calvinist notion of predestination, and beliefs about white “genetic” superiority) were responsible for white people’s subjugation and exploitation of black people. Radical historians (also called Marxists), on the other hand, proceeded from the assumption that the dominant class exploited other people, for example through slavery in the eighteenth century or through cheap labour in the twentieth century. The capitalist exploiters tried to justify this by means of a racist ideology.

A variant of this question was the following: Were the Afrikaners, with particular ideas that had been shaped by Calvinism, slavery, frontier conflicts and apartheid, the real culprits in the political crisis that started mounting in the country in the 1970s? Or were the real culprits the capitalists, with their exploitation particularly of the black working class?

From the outset I had reservations about the manner in which the race-class debate was conducted. There was a tendency among some liberal historians to serenely blame the Afrikaners for racial conflict in the country’s history while appropriating all the credit for economic growth for the English community and ignoring the massive disruption and exploitation of the capitalist system. Radical historians such as Martin Legassick saw through this and forced the liberal historians to engage in introspection. The Marxists, in turn, regarded nationalist movements as the work of a “petty bourgeoisie” who mobilised people through culture-mongering in order to derive the most benefit from the movement for themselves.

What surprised me was the arrogance and venom with which some radicals in particular fought against the liberals. The reason, of course, was that this was not merely an academic debate but a civil war in the ranks of the English-­speaking intelligentsia. If someone considered class the determining factor, it followed almost automatically that he or she also believed that capitalism was the root cause of the South African problem, and that the solution lay in sanctions, boycotts and, for some, revolution. Those who adhered to race (or ideas) as the key element believed instead that capitalism was the solution. If capitalism were to be given free rein, apartheid would be swept away by economic growth, like a sandcastle by the incoming tide. Hence sanctions had to be opposed with might and main.

What the radicals did successfully was to draw attention to the illusions of sections of the English-speaking community and to the ideology of liberalism in South Africa. It was hard to believe that this community, which dominated the economy, had played only a minor role in the development of racism as dominant ideology. The much lower wages that English employers paid their black workers were most likely backed up by a view of black people that hardly differed from racism. By the beginning of the 1970s the white-black ratio for earnings in the private sector was a shocking 21:1 in the mining sector and 6:1 in the manufacturing sector. The vast majority of these employers were English speakers who, until 1987, had voted faithfully for the opposition parties.

In general, neither the liberals nor the radicals showed much interest in the interpretations of the Afrikaans-speaking historians. In his book on the debate, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (1988), Christopher Saunders states categorically that Afrikaner historians made no contribution to the liberal-radical debate. He writes that this “may be explained at least in part” by their “more unquestioning acceptance of white supremacy”.53

Saunders’s view is wide of the mark. It is a myth that English speakers as a community were significantly more liberal than the Afrikaners. In 1988, when the Progressive Federal Party for the first time resolutely propagated a non-­racial form of majority government, their policy was supported by nearly all the English newspapers. There was, however, a huge gulf between the editors and their readers. In an opinion poll conducted in the same year, only 10% of English speakers supported majority government, compared with 3% of Afrikaners.54

Afrikaner historians were generally not interested in participating in a debate whose basic terms had been formulated by academics outside the group. Pieter Kapp makes the valid point that the Afrikaner historians attempted to answer the questions put to them by their Afrikaans readers.55 Until about 1960 the most important questions on the part of Afrikaans readers related to the establishment of white control and to what was called the “struggle between Boer and Briton”, which only started to fade away after the advent of a republic in 1960.

The aftermath of humiliation

Instead of the old nationalist historiography, what I identified with was the approach known as pluralism. It seeks to understand deeply divided societies, where a common social will and shared values are lacking, in a particular way. It emphasises the cultural as well as material influences that have shaped the Afrikaners. In this approach, culture represents a force in its own right and is not merely a component of the ideological superstructure that serves to legitimate particular interests, as the radical historians would have it.

Pluralists also grasp the great extent to which politics are driven by national or cultural humiliation.56 My study of Cape society during the first decades of British rule made it clear to me that what had united the burghers as a community was their culture and the disdain with which they were often treated by British officialdom, rather than their material interests.

After the British conquest of the Cape, a small group of burghers, the so-called “Cape Dutch”, offered their services to the new government, adopted English customs, swore unconditional allegiance to the new government – and soon became anglicised. But they were an unrepresentative elite. The majority of the burghers continued to identify with the culture and institutions to which they were accustomed, namely the system of landdrost and heemraden, and their church and congregation. They were well aware of the contempt with which leading figures in the English community regarded “the Dutch” and their culture.

In British eyes, most of the burghers remained nothing more than Hollanders – with the implication that this was an inferior status. Thirty years after the second British conquest of the Cape, Christoffel Brand, a leading Afrikaner in Cape Town, wrote that “their conquerors had continually worked to remind them that they were Hollanders”.57

History studies written in English tend to assess the Great Trek largely in terms of material interests, such as the emanicipation of slaves and the hank­ering after land beyond the colonial borders. What they overlook, however, is the scornfulness on the part of many government officials and the grave lack of representative institutions through which burghers could air their views.

The writer Olive Schreiner, who had worked as the governess of Afrikaner children in Cradock and other eastern Cape districts a few decades after the Great Trek, commented on the trek as follows:

[What] most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the cold indifference with which they were treated, and the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior race by their rulers ... [The] feeling of bitterness became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals determined for ever to leave the colony and the homes they created and raise an independent state.58

After 1994, two hundred years after the regime change of 1795, it was again the humiliation that had been imposed on black people during the previous two centuries that determined the new government’s politics.

The central question

The big question I asked myself at the start of my career was the following: From what perspective would I tell my story? Tony Judt, one of the most respected historians of our time, was born of Jewish parents in London and grew up there. He never felt himself to be specifically Jewish or English, but identified with both identities at different times. He was neither a radical nor a conventional liberal.

Judt has pointed out that in everyday life, the person we tend to trust the most is the one who is upfront about the perspective from which he comes and from which he tells his story, rather than the one who tries to pass himself off as totally objective.59 Of course, one does not reject the need to avoid partisanship, but in the final analysis one gives one’s personal interpretation.

I also learnt that one can derive great benefit from seeking information from a historian with an ideological perspective that differs from one’s own. My collaboration with Rick Elphick on the analysis we did of early Cape society in the final chapter of The Shaping of South African Society taught me more about historiography than all the classes at Stellenbosch had done.

A focus on both the overall picture and the detail is important. Without the detailed study I had done of Cape society between 1780 and 1812, I would never have grasped the bigger picture of the shaping of a particular society. The same holds true for the transition from white to black control in the years between 1960 and 1994. Perhaps Piet van der Merwe was right in insisting that every aspiring historian first has to undergo an apprenticeship by writing a conventional dissertation on a demarcated period from the past before tackling a topic from contemporary history.

During the year at Yale, I often asked myself the following question: How can the study of history serve to make people, and notably the Afrikaners, aware of the way in which they were liberated from English political, economic and cultural domination, and, on the other hand, inspire them to fight for freedom for all in South Africa?