The weight of history, a broad sense of the possible: Economic history, development studies, political economy and Bill Freund

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Notes

1. “Booknotes”, Africa 68(4) (September 1998):617.

2. Response to William Worger's review of The Making of Contemporary Africa in African Studies Quarterly 3(3) (Fall), http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v3/v3i3a15.htm. Freund's attitude to seemingly naïve promoters of ‘American’ democracy is reminiscent of Graham Greene's Fowler in The Quiet American (1955 London: Heinemann), a novel he has said is the best illustration of American imperialism he has read.

3. When he was addressing historians Freund narrowed the field further: “Economic history … is probably more capable [than other history subfields] of explaining the constraints and limitations, the range of the possible, that development has taken.” He went further, “concerned that … many historians in South Africa seem to feel that only conscious appearances, self-aware ‘representations’ of the historical subject, can legitimately be worthy of study … Economic study has been relegated to the sidelines, and analysis of social and political change leaning on that study even more so” (Freund 1996:128). This article is the text of an invited address to the South African Historical Society.

4. Henry Bernstein is credited with “elegantly” putting forth the notion of the social formation, “which can explain how material life is culturally and socially mediated as invariably it is”. There is a slight caveat in Freund's appreciation of this new form of Marxism involving “fresh interpretations of Karl Marx's own ideas”: having become unmoored from the incoherence and near-sightedness of political Marxism, flying “in new directions … far more stimulating than when it was the tail wagged by the party or union movement”, and becoming much more critical of the nationalist parties, the complexities it unearthed implied that it had lost much of its immediate political relevance. This would seem to be not a bad thing, given the propensity to only “hazily reveal” the particularities of social formations “if we insist on always referring back to a small list of universal categories” (Freund 1984a:11–14; Bernstein 1977:1–21). Hazy analysis leads to bad politics.

5. This is the phrase used in Freund's fourth chapter in The African Worker 1988:63–90.

6. For other views at various degrees of variance see Saul 1979; Leys 1976:39–48; and Williams 1976:84–89.

7. For more variations than available in Freund's footnotes, see Leys 1996:chapters 5 to 8.

8. The first edition was signed off in October 1982.

9. To borrow the phrase made popular by Reno 2000:434–459.

10. Freund would undoubtedly agree with Bob Shenton and Paul Idahaso in this volume on the latest intellectual trend shared by the NGOs and their seniors in the World Bank. On other aspects of this compatibility see Goldman 2005.

11. If the World Bank is correct, 90 per cent of Africa's rural areas have no form of formal tenure: if land is not commodified can there be a ‘free’ proletariat forced to sell its labour and become a classical – or mythical – ‘working class’? (Deininger 2003:xxi, xxiii, xxv)

12. Substantial proportions of The Making and The African Worker are devoted to study of women, and rural production: see also Freund 1991:414–429, and Insiders and Outsiders: the Indian Working Class of Durban 1910–90, 1995.

13. A book to be published soon will perhaps make them on a grander scale.

14. He notes how in Durban “environmental policy-making … has benefited enormously from the transition era to the present due to the presence and flair of Debra Roberts”; Freund 2001a:722.

15. It should be noted that Freund is the most punctual of contributors to team-taught courses, journals and other editorial endeavours, manuscript reviews and all the aspects of his very well organised department. He is the epitome of the Weberian ideal-type of the planner and bureaucrat, and certainly does not see these tasks as originating from or ending up in an iron cage. Rather, he sees them as essential to any form of decent society and as indicative of the levels of trust in sophisticated institutions (a form of ‘social capital’, one supposes). Perhaps his impatience with incompetent bureaucrats and planners, and those late with their review articles, indicates his ideals even more accurately than his written work!

16. See Sharad Chari in this volume for a particularly rich examination of the historical formation of some of these activists.

17. In addition to the citations above see Freund 2002:11–43.

18. Some activists found SEA to be a “damp squid”, p 730.

19. It should be noted that Freund was a founding editor of this most important of South African journals.

20. In the same issue, Jeff Guy (2004:87) seems to take some comfort, too, in the government's recent professed dedication to “active intervention on the side of the poor” amidst an otherwise acerbically critical piece.

21. To the chagrin of some of the members of a new generation of leftist critics, labeled by some of the South African régime's ideologues as ‘ultra-leftists’.

22. This view of history in Africa is in stark contrast to an historian much admired by Freund, Eric Hobsbawm, who essentially wraps up Africa in global shifts and tribal conflicts. When their “revolutions” seemed to belong to the “old revolutionary family of 1917, in reality they belonged to a different species, inevitably so given the differences between the societies for which Marx's and Lenin's analyses had been designed, and those of sub-Saharan post-colonial Africa” (my emphasis). To be sure South Africa offered an exception to this rule, as the ANC appeared to be a “genuine mass liberation movement crossing tribal and racial frontiers” and had the help of an “effective Communist Party”. However, even in South Africa “the movement was disproportionately strong among certain African tribes, relatively weak among others (for example the Zulus)”. After that caveat, Hobsbawm almost subsumes South Africa with the rest of Africa, wherein “except for the small and sometimes tiny cadre of the educated and Westernised urban intellectuals, ‘national’ or other mobilisations were essentially based on tribal loyalties or alliances … The only relevance of Marxism-Leninism to these countries was a recipe for forming disciplined cadre parties and authoritarian governments”. This from the historian who said the twentieth century had pushed the peasantry off the map! (Hobsbawm 1994:450–1; Bernstein 2001; Leys and Panitch 2001).