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Abstract
As one of South Africa's pioneer professional historians, William Miller Macmillan (1885–1974) is best remembered as the founder of the ‘liberal school’ of South African historiography. In his famous trilogy, The Cape Colour Question (1927): Bantu, Boer and Briton, The Making of the South African Native Problem (1929), and Complex South Africa (1930), he stressed the notion that the different races in South Africa constituted a single society. But he is also important for beginning the teaching of history at two of South Africa's English-medium universities, Rhodes and Wits, and for giving that teaching a strong European bias, which long survived him. The Department of History at Wits was his creation, and despite a brief reaction under his immediate successor, Professor Leo Fouché, the direction he gave it proved enduring. His contribution to South African historiography together with his inspirational teaching at Wits were cut short in 1933 when he resigned while on sabbatical in Britain, never to return to South Africa on a long-term basis and never to find another academic home as a historian. The academic career he had shaped for himself was prematurely over. In his autobiography Macmillan suggests there were two primary reasons for his resignation. The first was work related, that he was tiring of teaching and wished to focus on his research and writing. The second was political, that the University's leadership had been unsettled by his role as a public intellectual critical of government policy, and sought to silence him. This paper establishes that there was a third major reason, relating to his personal life. It indicates that the University's leadership likewise found his friendship, as a married man, with the young Mona Tweedie, daughter of the British Vice-Admiral in Simonstown, unsettling. The University's disquiet on the personal as well as the political fronts were central to Macmillan's decision to resign.
Notes
1W.M. Macmillan, My South African Years: An Autobiography (David Philip, Cape Town, 1975), 148.
2W.M. Macmillan, My South African Years: An Autobiography (David Philip, Cape Town, 1975), 2.
3Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Macmillan Papers, Raikes to Macmillan, 27 September, 1933.
4For Macmillan's contribution to South African historiography see C. Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (David Philip: Cape Town, 1988), 47–75; and K. Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Southern Book: Johannesburg, 1988), 104–112. See also J. Naidoo, ‘W.H. Macmillan: South African Historian’ (MA thesis, UNISA, 1983).
5Macmillan, My South African Years, 148–149.
7Wits University, Cullen Library, Ballinger Papers A410/B.2.16.1, Margaret Hodgson to the Registrar, 19 December 1933.
6Macmillan, My South African Years, 114–115.
9P. Lewsen, Reverberations: A Memoir (UCT Press: Cape Town, 1996), 85.
8Margaret Ballinger to Macmillan, 6 January 1936, Macmillan Papers.
10For Macmillan and De Kiewiet see C. Saunders, ‘A Liberal Descent? W.M. Macmillan, C.W. de Kiewiet and the History of South Africa’, in H. Macmillan and S. Marks, eds, Africa and Empire: W.M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, 1989), 91–102.
11For Macmillan and De Kiewiet see C. Saunders, ‘A Liberal Descent? W.M. Macmillan, C.W. de Kiewiet and the History of South Africa’, in H. Macmillan and S. Marks, eds, Africa and Empire: W.M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, 1989), 91–102.
12Macmillan, My South African Years, 155.
13Macmillan, My South African Years, 162.
14Macmillan, My South African Years, 162.
15Smith, The Changing Past, 108.
16Macmillan, My South African Years, 163.
17Macmillan, My South African Years, 151.
18Macmillan, My South African Years, 151.
19For a fuller analysis see H. Macmillan, ‘Paralysed Conservatives’, in Macmillan and Marks, Africa and Empire, 72–90.
20J.D. Rheinallt Jones, ‘The Need of a Scientific Basis for South African Native Policy’, South African Journal of Science, 23 (1926), 79–91.
21Macmillan, My South African Years, 214–216.
22Macmillan, My South African Years, 215.
23B.K. Murray, Wits: The Early Years (Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 1982), 278–279.
24Macmillan to Mona Tweedie, 23 October 1931, Macmillan Papers.
25Murray, Wits, 302–311.
28Macmillan, My South African Years, 229.
26Macmillan, My South African Years, 188–189.
27For the Joint Councils see J.W. Horton, ‘South Africa's Joint Councils: Black-White Co-operation between the two World Wars’, South African Historical Journal, 4 (November 1972), 29–44.
29Macmillan, My South African Years, 223–230.
30Macmillan, My South African Years, 217; M. Macmillan, ed. Hugh Macmillan, Mona's Story: An Admiral's Daughter in England, Scotland and Africa, 1908–51 (Oxford Publishing Services: Oxford, 2008), 122.
31Lewsen, Reverberations, 79.
32Macmillan, My South African Years, 217.
33Macmillan, My South African Years, 205.
34Macmillan, Mona's Story, 107–109.
35Macmillan, Mona's Story, 106–109, and 117.
36Macmillan, Mona's Story, 119–133.
37Wits University, Cullen Library, Howard Pim Papers A881/Bb, Jean Macmillan to Howard Pim, 19 April 1934.
38Personal communication from Hugh Macmillan, Grahamstown, September 2011.
39Author interview with Professor Stanley Jackson, Johannesburg, 1981.
40Murray, Wits, 329–333.
41Macmillan, Mona's Story, 134–140
42Raikes to Macmillan, 9 August 1933, Macmillan Papers.
43Macmillan, My South African Years, 245. In her biography of Macmillan, Mona Macmillan asserts ‘It seemed clear to him that the wider interests of Africa had now become his concern, and that they could be furthered better from London than from a history department in South Africa where politics would now be frowned upon’ (M. Macmillan, Champion of Africa: W.M. Macmillan The Second Phase (Long Wittenham, 1985), 17).
44A. Keppel-Jones, A Patriot in Search of a Country (private publication, 2003), 162.
45Hodgson to Holtby, 7 November 1933, quoted in F.A. Mouton, ‘History, Historians and Autobiography’, African Historical Review, 39, 1 (July 2007), 72.
47Macmillan to Pim, 12 October 1933, Howard Pim Papers, A881/bl1.
46Jean Macmillan to Pim, 19 April 1934, Howard Pim Papers, A881/Bb.
48Jean Macmillan to Pim, 19 April 1934, Howard Pim Papers, A881/Bb
49Jean Macmillan to Margaret Ballinger, 14 November 1935, Ballinger Papers A 410/B 2.16.1.
50For Fouché see F.A. Mouton, ‘Professor Leo Fouché, the History Department and the Afrikanerization of the University of Pretoria’, Historia, 38, 1 (May 1993), 51–63.
51Murray, Wits, 332–333.
52Macmillan, My South African Years, 246–247.
53Information provided by Professor Noel Garson, Johannesburg, 2012.