A re-reading of Ben Kies’s “The Contribution of the Non European Peoples to World Civilisation”

ABSTRACT

This article undertakes a critical review of the lecture on “The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation” which the left-wing Cape Town intellectual Ben Kies makes in Cape Town in 1953. The argument is made that the lecture signals not only a break with dominant thinking about human progress, but in its framing of world history both anticipates the contribution of the Indian subaltern movement and offers new analytics for explaining social, cultural and economic development. In redrawing the lines of human development over the last 5,000 years it not only introduces to socio-cultural history what Jaffe called a world systems theory, but, also, critically, a decentred explanation of how the world system worked. In prioritising, however, the place of human beings in the world, he essentially re-centred his explanation behind a modernism which was premised entirely on the subjugation of nature. In this he was firmly invested, as was almost every other socialist tradition of the time, in what O’Connor describes as a “productivist” view of human life – the idea that greater productivity, economic growth in the main, is needed to create more free- or leisure-time for human beings to develop to their full potentialities.

KEYWORDS:

• Socialist thinking in twentieth-century Cape Town
• Ben Kies
• radical cape town intellectuals
• Trotskyism in South Africa
• non-racialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Simply “The Contribution” from this point.

2. When Kies was a teacher at Trafalgar High School in the 1940s, he produced a weekly publication called The Bulletin. He wrote many of the articles which would have appeared in the TLSA’s The Education Journal.

3. This column was penned under the pseudonym, I.N. Fandum. Writing in response to reader who criticised him for the positions he was espousing, he said that all he wanted to be was just “a man, one of many, who has tried to rid himself of all dogma, irrationality, cant and hypocrisy, and who has tried to build up, slowly and painstakingly, a scientific philosophy… ” (Fandum 1941, 4).

4. Mnguni was the pseudonym, on this occasion, for Hosea Jaffe and Majeke that for Dora Taylor.

5. Key politicians in the National Party who, at the time, were propagating the basic racial principles of separate development.