Patrick Harries’s sudden death in Cape Town on 2 June 2016 came as a great shock to his friends and the wide scholarly community he worked with in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. As one of our most active advisory board members, he will be especially missed by the Journal of Southern African Studies. Recently retired from a senior professorship at the University of Basel, where he developed African history into a dynamic field of study, Patrick was busily rebuilding a home in Cape Town while working on a book about the east African oceanic slave route via Cape Town to Brazil, and a joint book on the history of science in southern Africa. Both these projects grew out of earlier work: his fascination with the presence of ‘Mozbieker’ slaves at the Cape and his long interest in the interpenetration of European and African knowledge systems in the 18th and 19th centuries.
According to his sister, novelist Ann Harries, Patrick was an unlikely candidate to enter academic life. At Rondebosch School, he was fully taken up with sport. He played rugby and held long-standing records for middle-distance running. His athletic prowess resulted in his being honoured as the school’s victor ludorum, but he was not much of a scholar and had to improve both his French and his finances in order to begin his degree. In later years, ‘Patch’ Harries enjoyed reminiscing about partying and training with his close schoolboy friend, Marcello ‘March’ Fiasconaro, who went on to set a world record in the 800-metre event in 1973. After matriculating in 1967, Patrick underwent compulsory military training and then hitch-hiked through Africa, ending up in France, where he worked in a wool-spinning factory in Mazamet and played rugby for the local team. This was an unusual trajectory for a young Capetonian who came of age at the height of apartheid.
When Patrick enrolled at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1972 to do a BA in history, new political currents were discernible, following a decade of widespread political repression. In the wake of the 1968 student protests against UCT’s withdrawal of a lectureship position to Archie Mafeje, the National Union of South African Students was undergoing a process of radicalisation. At the same time, the presumed right of white liberals to lead opposition to the Nationalist government was challenged by black consciousness intellectuals, on the one hand, and, on the other, by new left and marxisant radicals, who drew attention to the deep structural inequalities that underpinned apartheid. The southern African region was transforming as Portuguese rule was overthrown in Mozambique and Angola in 1974. Patrick was greatly enthused by these developments.
As a student and then as a junior lecturer in the UCT history department, Patrick’s thinking was influenced by Africanist as well as Marxist thinking. Patrick formed a close bond with Robin Hallett, a leading British Africanist scholar and teacher, who joined the UCT history department in 1972 to teach African history. Patrick became a junior lecturer in the department in 1975 and was an altogether inspiring – but not necessarily an over-prepared – tutor (irrespective of the topic, his early morning African history lectures were replete with references to ‘southern Mozambique, for example’). Patrick undertook his doctoral work at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), working with David Birmingham, an expert on Portuguese colonialism in Angola, who was well suited to guiding Patrick’s doctoral thesis on the history of Shangaan migrant labourers from southern Mozambique to the northern Transvaal and the Witwatersrand. This research became the basis of his first monograph, Work,Culture and Identity: Migrant Workers in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860–1910 (1994). Patrick was appointed a full lecturer at UCT in 1980, and his SOAS PhD was awarded in 1983.
Patrick’s first articles were on topics such as labour migration from Delagoa Bay to South Africa, on slavery and unfree labour, and on Mozbieker immigrants to the Cape. In 1981, he published major articles in the Journal of African History – ‘Slavery, Surplus Extraction and Social Incorporation: The Nature of Free and Unfree Labour in South-East Africa’, and in JSAS – ‘The Anthropologist as Historian: The Work of H-A. Junod’. Both articles introduced the major themes that he was to develop further throughout his career: African agency, the exploitation of migrant labour, and the interplay between African and European religious and secular systems of thought. Although political economy shaped his thinking, it was as a cultural and social historian, as well as a historian of comparative knowledge systems, that he found his distinctive voice.
In the mid 1980s Patrick spent a sabbatical in Lausanne, researching the archives of the Mission Romande in order to uncover new material about the involvement of leading missionaries active in South Africa, such as Paul Berthoud and Henri-Alexandre Junod. He met his future wife, Isabelle Vautier, at an anti-apartheid meeting in Lausanne. Isabelle attuned his understanding of Swiss and French cultures, providing long-term support and encouragement as he entered a new intellectual environment, which was to impinge in profound and remarkable ways on his research. A Europhile and an Africanist, Patrick began to develop the view that these two ‘centricities’ were far from being mutually incompatible; to the contrary, African and Swiss national (or ethnic) identities were formed together, each acting upon the other, mediated by the Swiss mission church in its encounter with southern Africa. This was the theme of his highly original and marvellously titled second monograph, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (2007). It was an exemplar of transnational social and intellectual history, though not expressly conceived as such.
Patrick’s view of history was always affected by his interest in anthropology, but over time his interpretation of anthropology changed significantly. Initially, Patrick was influenced by French Marxist anthropology, in particular by the work of Maurice Godelier and Claude Meillassoux, whose theories offered a means to understand the nature of economic and social exploitation in societies where capitalist forms of production impinged on precolonial ‘modes of production’. Such debates considerably informed interpretations of the migrant labour system, as well as the gendered structure of precolonial African households, and fed into wider political thinking about how to attack the enduring system of white supremacy.
At this time, Patrick was critical of the role of South African anthropology in offering ideological support for the concepts of ethnicity that underpinned racial segregation and apartheid. He contributed two major articles examining the social and historical contexts in which African political identities were formed: ‘The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and the Politics of Language Construction in South-East Africa’ (African Affairs, 1988), and ‘Exclusion, Classification and Internal Colonialism: The Emergence of Ethnicity amongst the Tsonga-Speakers of South Africa’, in Leroy Vail (ed.), The Growth of Tribalism in Southern Africa (1989).
Both of these articles wrestled with the problem of ethnicity and ‘tribe’, seen either as a primordial set of attachments, or as ‘invented’ traditions. Patrick was strongly disposed to the latter interpretation, yet his subtle analysis and deep research resisted simplistic explanations which assumed that ethnic categories were merely imposed on Africans as a result of colonialism. This view is now commonplace, but Patrick was at the forefront of such ideas. Ongoing research in the Bantustans of Gazankulu and Venda, where the Swiss Mission Church remained active, alerted him to the complexities of apartheid’s manipulation of ethnicity. The Swiss Mission networks also guided him to information and informants as he became involved in activist research projects around forced population resettlement and poverty in the rural areas.
As the political fervour of the 1980s and early 1990s waned, so it became possible for historians to pose more refined questions about the nature of white settler colonialism in southern Africa. Patrick’s ethnographic interests deepened his understanding. Increasingly, he moved away from instrumentalist accounts of identity formation, in which political economy predominated, to the realms of experience, identity, and ideas. He came to see H-A. Junod’s cultural relativism as the product of a humanistic religious worldview, one that was willing to incorporate the teachings of his African informants, rather than a means of exclusion or control. Patrick’s growing interest in his grandfather, a native administrator in the early 20th-century rural Cape, helped to shape his view of the complex relationships that could develop between white authorities and African subjects.
Patrick embarked on a bold new phase of life when he took up a position at the University of Basel in 2001 as the inaugural professor of African history. Family considerations were part of this move, and his daughter Emily soon became far more proficient in Swiss-German than her father. Basel offered new intellectual possibilities for Patrick. He was dismayed by developments at UCT, where the African Studies Department, of which he was deputy director, became politicised in ways that he found uncongenial. Divisions in the intellectually powerful history department also proved tiresome. Yet, for all this, Patrick flourished at UCT, where he found good intellectual fellowship and participated enthusiastically in African Studies’ cross-disciplinary research environment. Visits to the northern Transvaal allowed him to combine his love of fieldwork with his passion for library and archival research. It was while at UCT that Patrick developed all his main lines of research, and in retirement he was looking forward to returning to the History Department to work with younger scholars and graduates.
Patrick’s broad intellectual horizons eschewed insularity and exclusivism of all sorts, whether he found these in Cape Town or in Switzerland. Regular research trips led him to become absorbed by the history of the latter and by Basel, a city rich in Enlightenment intellectual culture, with strong links to Germany and France. The University of Basel, and the institutional support offered to him by the philanthropist and Africanist Carl Schlettwein, gave him a unique opportunity to build a properly resourced African History programme. Patrick launched African History at undergraduate level, while developing a flourishing graduate programme.
Between 2001 and 2015, he supervised to completion more than a dozen PhD theses and 30 masters’ dissertations written in English, French and German. He worked closely with the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, which has unique holdings relevant to Namibian history, as well as a major outreach programme, and also with the Centre of African Studies. He invited many distinguished scholars from South Africa, Europe, and the United States to give papers and to teach at Basel University. In so doing, Patrick established Basel as a vital centre of African and global history research in Europe. A number of edited volumes and collections followed, including a collection of essays, with David Maxwell: The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa (2012). At the time of his death, Patrick was involved in several collaborative research projects, together with Martin Lengweiler (Topologies of Knowledge: Europe, Africa and Science in the 19th and 20th Centuries) and with William Beinart and Saul Dubow (The Scientific Imagination in South Africa).
Patrick’s politics traversed the spectrum of the progressive liberal left, but his independence of thought prevented him from aligning himself closely with any particular organisation, though he was supportive of the United Democratic Front, the leading non-racial, broad anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. He was not much interested in academic politics, tending to avoid conflict wherever possible. Instead, he focused his efforts on building the field of African History in Basel and in supporting his students and friends, upon whom he often relied. Although never much of a committee person, Patrick proved to be a highly effective networker, raising grants, serving on funding bodies, and securing fellowships that allowed him to spend productive periods teaching and researching in Lausanne, Paris, Berlin, Cambridge, Wisconsin–Madison, and Nantes.
Those who spent time with Patrick will always remember his boundless intellectual enthusiasm and curiosity, his easy charm, and his love of books, African art, film and jazz. He read widely beyond his specialist field, and his fluency in French, together with his proficiency in German and Portuguese, took him well beyond the English-speaking world that so shaped his upbringing. A sudden movement of his head, followed by a deep intake of breath and a chuckle, was the signal for a fresh new insight, a moment of epiphany, or a mischevious piece of gossip that was invariably free of malice.