‘The Past and its Possibilities: Perspectives of Southern Africa’
The Southern African Historical Society's 23rd Biennial Conference, 27–29 June 2011, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Howard College campus)

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Notes

¹Also receiving high praise were Lize Marie van der Watt (Stellenbosch University), former University of Zimbabwe classmates Wesley Mwatwara (Stellenbosch University) and Takunda Sylvester Dombo (UKZN), who received honourable mentions. Their papers were titled “‘…this 90 square miles of weird desolation”: Aspects of Science and the Environment in the History of South Africa's Prince Edward Islands, 1947–1995”, ‘The tick was not slow to take advantage’: A History of East Coast Fever in Southern Rhodesia, 1901–1920’, and ‘Whose Past, Whose Memory? Competing Perspectives on “Capturing a Fading National Memory” Oral History Project in Zimbabwe’.

²Sincere thanks are due to all the members of the SAHS 2009–2011 EXCO and to my colleagues in History at UKZN for their input and support, especially Thembisa Waetjen, Keith Breckenridge, and the super-hard-working, enthusiastic-and-creative-solutions-in-an-emergency-finding-UKZN Howard College postgraduate students.

³Antoinette Burton of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has published widely on the histories of gender, empire, political culture, world history, and archives. Professor Burton was, with Jean Allman, co-editor of the Journal of Women's History between 2004 and 2010, and was a Guggenheim Fellow 2010–2011. Her keynote address was titled: ‘Race and the Politics of Position: Above and Below in Frank Moraes’ The Importance of Being Black (1965)’.

⁴ Native Nostalgia (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009). The title of his keynote address was ‘After the Romance, Tragedy? Rethinking South Africa's National Liberation Struggle’.

⁵Subsequently published in the South African Historical Journal, 62, 2 (2010), 384–393. See pp. 394–397 for commentary on the 2009 conference by Julie Parle and John Wright.

⁶In 2008–2009, the SAHS and the Association of African Historians explored the possibility of a joint conference/congress in Durban 2011. Unfortunately, the AAH would have been almost completely dependent on the SAHS to raise the joint funding necessary to host what would have been a deeply historically significant meeting. It was decided therefore that the SAHS should prioritise the building of a Southern African regional network, a difficult task in itself given that the SAHS is entirely funded by members and (coming on-stream from 2011 only) subscriptions to the South African Historical Journal, and from recent modest income from conferences, all of which is ploughed back into the Society.

⁷The material, institutional and political conditions that saw larger numbers of students of History in the 1980s and 1990s no longer exist. Instead, not only are there the pressures to choose a more ‘vocational’ (and better-paying) career, but also too close a scrutiny of the past has, in the lecture halls in South Africa, the potential to threaten the fragile sense of new post-apartheid identity. This raises questions about what History should be taught at what tertiary level. Pressures to teach African histories at entry level are understandable, and indeed have long been the staple of access and introductory programmes, but anecdotal reports from some departments show that this is now leading to fewer, not greater, numbers of students choosing to study History.

⁸See A. Grundlingh, ‘Some Trends in South African Academic History: Changing Contexts and Challenges’, in S. Jeppie, ed., Toward New Histories for South Africa: On the Place of the Past in Our Present (Landsdowne: Juta Gariep, 2004), 196–215. Also, M. Mamdani, ‘The Importance of Research in a University’, Keynote Speech delivered at Makerere University Research and Innovations Dissemination Conference’, Makerere University, 27 April 2011.

⁹ http://www.africanstudies.org/index.cfm?FuseAction=Abroad.ViewLink&Parent_ID=0&Link_ID=9E038A77-26B9-564D-D688909DCA74D643, accessed 12 December 2011.

¹⁰J. Parle and T. Waetjen, ‘Teaching African History in South Africa: Post-colonial Realities between Evolution and Religion’, Afrika Spectrum: Special Edition on Teaching African History, 40, 3 (2005), 521–534.

¹¹S. Jeppie, ‘Africa: Whose History? Whose Memory?’, in Jeppie, ed., Toward New Histories for South Africa, 21–22.

¹²S. Jeppie, ‘Africa: Whose History? Whose Memory?’, in Jeppie, ed., Toward New Histories for South Africa, 22.

¹³The debate about African Studies as a separate stream of study saw renewed airing in the debate over the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town during 2011.

¹⁴J.E. Philips, ‘Recent Studies of African History in Japan’, History Compass 7, 3 (2009), 554–565.

¹⁵E. Brizuela-García, ‘The History of Africanization and the Africanization of History’, History in Africa, 33 (2006), 85–100.

¹⁶I am of course fully aware of the ways in which these points could be construed as ‘reactionary’ and of wishing to preserve colonially-or racially-sanctioned ‘standards’ and how those with conservative agendas have made indeed made such arguments. On the contrary, however, it can be argued that any dilution of the full force of intellectual endeavour is to accept an internalised inferiority: what the ‘full force’ amounts to, or what is an acceptable threshold, is what must be debated. If indeed our degree requirements are out of kilter with elsewhere, let us revisit them, but this needs to be done in good faith between bureaucrats and professional historians.

¹⁷At the time of writing, I could establish that this is the situation at the University of Pretoria and, from 2012, the University of KwaZulu-Natal. SAPSE stands for the South African Post Secondary Education Information System subsidy formula, which was implemented in 1984 and revised in 1993; from 2004, the New Funding Framework (NFF) was adopted. It is beyond the scope of this piece to address the history and criticisms of this model, but see A.G.W. Steyn and A.P. de Villiers, ‘Public Funding of Higher Education in South Africa by Means of a Formulae’, in L. Lange and T. Luescher, eds, Review of Higher Education in South Africa: Selected Themes (Pretoria: Council on Higher Education, 2007), 11–52 and their ‘Effect of Changes in State Funding of Higher Education on Higher Education Output in South Africa: 1986–2007’, Stellenbosch Economic Working Papers, 24/08, http://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2008/wp242008/wp-24-2008.pdf, accessed 28 December 2011.

¹⁸Co-publications, whether with students or colleagues, are also less favoured by South African national funding agencies such as the National Research Foundation and are internationally regarded in a lesser light than individual publications.

²⁰C. Mbali, ‘Publish or Be Damned’, Mail & Guardian, 25 February 2011, http://mg.co.za/article/2011-02-25-publish-or-be-damned#disqus_thread, accessed 27 March 2012.

¹⁹For the limitations of biomedical and even social science models for historical research and of the problems of University Ethics clearance procedures as they pertain to humanities research, see R. Cribb, ‘Ethical Regulation and Humanities Research in Australia: Problems And Consequences’, Monash Bioethical Review, 23, 3 (2004), 39–57. Thanks to Philippe Denis of UKZN for this reference.

²¹De Villiers and Steyn, ‘Effect of Changes’, 19.

²²G. Wood, ‘In Defence of Academic History Writing’, from ‘The Art of History’ column of the April 2010 issue of Perspectives on History, http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2010/1004/1004art1.cfm, accessed 13 December 2011. For an interesting discussion, see ‘The Role and Future of the Monograph in Arts and Humanities Research: A Research Project carried out by CIBER / UCL Centre for Publishing for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, UCL’, which can be found at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/monographs.pdf, accessed 28 December 2011.

²³Wood, ‘In Defence of Academic History Writing’.

²⁴F. Cooper, ‘Africa's Pasts and Africa's Historians’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 34, 2 (2000), 312.

²⁵Brilliantly done, for instance, in William H. Sewell's The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

²⁶P. Cohen, ‘Questioning Privacy Protections in Research’, New York Times, October 23, 2011. found at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/arts/rules-meant-to-protect-human-research-subjects-cause-concern.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=oral. I am grateful to Goolam Vahed for bringing this article to my attention.

²⁷For more about the Archival Platform's ‘Letters for Lulu/Postcards for Paul’ campaign to pressure the Minister of Arts and Culture on the national archives and policy, see http://www.archivalplatform.org/news/entry/letters_for_lulu, accessed 28 December 2011.

²⁸J. Duncan. ‘The Prevention of Scholarship Bill’, 13 June 2011, http://themediaonline.co.za/2011/06/the-prevention-of-scholarship-bill/, accessed 28 December 2011.

²⁹See Larry Grubbs's recent book Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009) for the Cold War context of the influential and financially well-supported African Studies Association, for instance. The ASA is a non-profit organisation, with five full time staff members and considerable financial reserves. Its annual membership fees in 2010 ranged from: income above $35,000: $180 (R1260) income below $34,000: $115 (R805) Students: $70 (R490). Those for the SAHS, for two years are R450: and all SAHS EXCO members work voluntarily.