New Accents on the Social: Thinking on South Africa’s History at UWC

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Erratum

Notes

1 It should be noted, of course, that the normative dictates of this discussion were given expression in the official documents of the Dutch East India Company from the 1650s already and elaborated extensively in the Cape Blue Books that appeared from about 1810. In these documents a taxonomic framing of the physical, biological and the social is initiated which is determinative for discourses, vocabularies and practices of classification in both formal and informal knowledge regimes. Important to note too is the work of A. Bank, ‘The Great Debate and the Origins of South African Historiography’, The Journal of African History, 38, 2 (1997), 261–281, in which he shows how the ‘preoccupation with race’ one sees in the landmark contributions of Theal begin with a text entitled Researches in South Africa produced by the abolitionist John Philip in 1828. This text written in support of the rights of the indigenous people provoked a flurry of responses from both Dutch-speaking and English South African commentators.

Since original publication, the version of record has been corrected. Please see the erratum statement [10.1080/02582473.2018.1493839]

2 G. McCall Theal, History of South Africa under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company. (London, 1897), 254.

3 C. Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Claremont: David Philip), 1988, 26.

4 A. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Johannesburg: Wits University Press,), 2017, 7.

5 J. R. Forte, P. Israel and L. Witz, eds, Out of History: Re-Imagining South African Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2016); L. Witz, G. Minkley and C. Rassool, eds, Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017); M. van Bever Donker, R. Truscott, G. Minkley and P. Lalu, Remains of the Social: Desiring the Postapartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press). They are presented hereafter as Out of History (OoH), Unsettled History (UH) and Remains of the Social (RotS).

6 E. Webster and K. Pampallis, eds, The Unresolved National Question (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2017).

7 M. Foucault, Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 93.

8 South African historiography from the time of Theal is dominated by ‘race’ as the explanatory frame within which to account for the nature of the society. As Saunders, The Making of the South African Past, 54, makes clear, the most significant historians took the question of ‘race’ as their points of departure. Several examples can be provided. Saunders, The Making of the South African Past, 65, is helpful again. He says: ‘McMillan realised that the key issue in South Africa’s past, as also is in its present, was the role of the blacks and their relationship with whites.’ In an attempt to develop a more complex explanation of the nature of South African society, Heribert Adam wrote Modernizing Racial Domination in 1971 in which he raised the question of the economic and its salience for understanding the dynamics of privilege and subordination in the country: H. Adam, Modernizing Racial Domination: The Dynamics of South African Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. This historiographical intervention was preceded, but little noticed, by the publication in 1952 of Hosea Jaffe’s Three Hundred Years published under the nom de guerre of Mnguni:(Mnguni, Three Hundred Years (Cumberwood: APDUSA, 1988). This was to be followed by the Marxist revisionist historiography of the British trained historians Colin Bundy, Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe, but Jaffe’s work was the first serious attempt in the tradition of accounting for the nature of the country to introduce class in a rigorous way.

9 See A. Stadler, The Political Economy of Modern South Africa. (Cape Town: David Philip, 1987), 45. He comments: ‘The fact that mining dominated the economy during the period after the war, and remained the ascendant force during the period in which the industrial infrastructure was developed, intensified their (Afrikaners) problems, and cast them into social and economic roles that deeply marked the forms of social stratification which subsequently developed in South Africa.’ He continues to describe the collapse of the African peasantry and their forced conscription into the working class.

10 K. Breckenridge, The Biometric State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).

11 Ibid., 20.

12 General Act of the Conference at Berlin of the Plenipotentiaries of Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Norway, Turkey and the United States: http://www.waado.org/colonial_rule/general documents/berlin_act_1885.html, accessed 12 October 2017.

13 As ideas of ‘race’ were firming up in Europe, there continued to be, even in the most prestigious intellectual circles, thinkers who challenged the biological ideas of ‘race’. Amongst the most influential of these was Johann Gottfried Herder who sought to make an argument for the ‘basic unity of humankind’: see B. Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press,), 93.

14 B. Kies, ‘The Policy of Educational Segregation and Some of its Effects Upon the Coloured People of the Cape’ (B.Ed. thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 1939, 2006), 11–12.

15 Breckenridge, The Biometric State, 21, 19.

16 H. Bradford, ‘Not a Nongquase Story: An Anti-heroine in Historical Perspective’, in N. Gasa, ed., Women in South African History: Basus’iimbokodo, Bawel’imilambo/They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council Press), 45.

17 The point to emphasise about this resistance, to illustrate the complexity of the period, is that while certain communities, such as the Mfengu, as is well known, may have co-operated with the imperial project, many Africans, either through outright rejection of the new colonial apparatus expressed through the Frontier Wars, or adaptation, as Colin Bundy’s, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London: James Currey, 1979), or Charles van Onselen’s Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886–1914 (London: Longman, 1982), resisted the imposition of the kinds of biometric techniques and the politics behind them.

18 S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); S. Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1995).

19 L. Gordon, ‘Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonisation of Knowledge’, Africa Development, 39, 1 (2014), 81–92; 2002.

20 L. Althusser, Reading Capital (London: NLB, 1970), 41.

21 Ibid., 52.

22 D. Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 4.

23 C. Rassool, ‘Taking the Nation to School’, paper presented at the University of the Western Cape, South African and Contemporary History Seminar, Tuesday 15 May 2001.

24 The Communist International, ‘The South African Question’, 1928, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/sacp/1928/comintern.htm, accessed 12 May 2017.

25 See C Soudien, ‘With Them and of Them, Teaching and Leading Our People’: The Hidden History of the New Era Fellowship (Unpublished manuscript, Cape Town, 2017).

26 Ibid.

27 D. Taylor, Second Lecture (presumably to New Era Fellowship) on ‘The Law of the Vultures’ by Phyllis Altman, Cape Town, no precise date, 1952 in C. Sandwith, World of Letters: Reading Communities and Cultural Debates in Early Apartheid South Africa (Scottsville, Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2014), 112.

28 S. Dube, ‘Presence of Europe: A Cyber Conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty’, in S. Dube, ed., Postcolonial Passages: Contemporary History-writing on India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 254.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 257.

31 Ibid.

32 L. Witz, J. Forte and P. Israel, ‘Epistemological Restlessness: Trajectories in and out of History’, in OoH, 1–30.

33 Ibid., 5.

34 Minkley, Witz and Rassool, ‘A Preface’, in UH, viii.

35 Ibid., 6.

36 Ibid., 6–7.

37 Minkley, Witz and Rassool, in UH, viii.

38 Witz, Forte and Israel, ‘Epistemological Restlessness’, 7.

39 Ibid., 21.

40 Minkley, Witz and Rassool, ‘A Preface’, 20.

41 Witz, Forte and Israel, ‘Epistemological Restlessness’, 20.

42 Ibid., 16.

43 Ibid., 17.

44 I. Hofmeyer, ‘Reading Oral Texts: New Methodological Directions’, in OoH, 100.

45 P. Lalu, ‘The Absent Centre: Human Capital, Nationalism and the Postcolonial Critique of Apartheid’, in OH, 240.

46 R. Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 13.

47 B. Latour, An Enquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

48 G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7.

49 C. Mills. ‘Giorgio Agamben’. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, para 13. http://www.iep.utm.edu/agamben/, accessed 16 October 2017.

50 Lalu, ‘The Absent Centre’.

51 Ibid., 224.

52 Ibid., 260.