Some Reflections on ‘Life after Thirty’

Abstract

More than thirty years have passed since the History Workshop (HW) was established in South Africa in 1977. Much has changed in these years. The 1970s was a conjuncture of struggle. In the universities a tradition of radical history had begun to take shape, and outside, workers and students movements were sweeping through the cities. Coming into being at a time of tumult, the identity of the HW became intimately connected to the battle against the apartheid regime. In the decades that followed, triennial conferences were mounted, efforts were made to understand the struggles of workers, explore popular culture and popular consciousness, and encourage local communities to write their own history. Inspired by Thompsonian social history and the pioneering efforts of the HW at Ruskin, historians set out to restore to the oppressed their agency, and give voice to those silenced by history. The consequence was a revolutionary transformation of South African historiography, a flowering of a vibrant new radical tradition, a displacement of earlier conservative and liberal narratives. By the mid-1990s the apartheid regime was gone, the social context that sustained the new history had changed, and many of the assumptions and categories that framed its projects were being debated. The HW has sought to face the challenges, broaden its projects, and re-invent itself in the new political context. This article suggests that this process of re-thinking needs to be deepened. The ideas that inform the projects of social history, local history, oral history, community history, or public history need to be subjected to critical scrutiny. A dialogic engagement with new critical traditions will be productive.

Keywords:

• social history
• local history
• community history
• public history
• truth and history

Notes

This is an expanded version of comments I made at the concluding plenary session of the History Workshop colloquium ‘Life after Thirty’ held at Johannesburg.

This is a theme repeatedly emphasised in the publications of the HW at Ruskin and the early editorials of the History Workshop Journal. See in particular Editorial (1976); Samuel (1974, 1981); Thompson, Wailey and Lummis (1983). On the South African context see Bonner (1994); Bozzoli (1979a).

See the early effort to define the contrast between urban history and local history, Editorial (1979). Urban history was associated with academic and analytic writings, depersonalised accounts that focused on development, stratification, social structures, demography within urban spaces; while local histories developed outside the academia, and were more personalised, emotive accounts, descriptive rather than analytic, developing around events and anecdotes, biographies and recollections.