The problem of intellectual history in (post) colonial societies: the case of South Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates some underlying problems in the intellectual and political history of (post)colonial societies, and the cultural and political implications of settlement, conquest and imperial rule. The social and intellectual history of colonial discourses can not be studied in their own terms only. Colonial settlements transplanted fragments of cultures and traditions rooted in the parent societies; and colonial traditions did not then develop autonomously. The imperial power and metropolitan centre continued to be of primary significance to colonial developments and to provide much of the intellectual context for emergent colonial thinking. Colonial intellectual history is characterised by a combined and uneven development of critical importance to the historical understanding of colonial and post‐colonial discourses. Emergent local traditions had to define their own ideas, values and aims within the ambit of hegemonious imperialist and other ‘foreign’ discourses even (perhaps especially) where they deliberately set themselves against these. Typically colonial and postcolonial intellectuals found themselves as ambiguous intermediaries, functioning both as missionary agents of ‘civilised’ values and imperial discourses and as spokesmen for local interests and communities. Thus the roles of intellectuals in emergent local traditions and movements characteristically did not fit either of the Gramscian categories of traditional or organic intellectuals.

The paper explores these general problems of intellectual history in (post)colonial societies and then analyses them in terms of specific, case studies taken from the South African context.