An Historian’s Passage to Africa. An Autobiography

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Notes

1 He says the seminar was based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (99, 143), which is where Shula Marks was based. He contributed to the first of the Collected Seminar Papers that emerged from the ICS.

2 In 1971, soon after joining UCT’s History Department, I had put forward another Africanist, Robin Hallett, for such a lectureship. Like Bill, Robin taught in Nigeria and Tanzania and did not have a permanent post when he came to South Africa, where he remained for some years, but Robin retained his attachment to England and returned there. Unfortunately, he passed away without writing an autobiography.

3 See the Select Bibliography of his work, usefully divided thematically: 202–205.

4 cf. David Moore, ‘Introduction: Festschrift for Bill Freund’, African Studies, 65, 1 (2006), 1–8.

5 B. Freund, The African Worker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); B. Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), which he merely says was ‘quite successful’ (190).

6 B. Freund, ‘The Art of Writing History’, Southern African Review of Books, 7 (September/October 1994), 24.

7 For a glimpse of this see C. Bundy, ‘William Mark (Bill) Freund (1944–2020)’, Africa, 91, 2 (February 2021), 351–353. There are only a few other memoirs by historians of South Africa, but some of them say more about the development of historical writing than this one does. The most recent and one of the fullest is H. Giliomee, Herman Giliomee, Historian, An Autobiography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2016). A briefer unpublished memoir by Rodney Davenport may have been destroyed in the recent fire at UCT. Alex Mouton begins to account for the lack of more such memoirs in ‘History, Historians and Autobiography: A South African Case Study’, African Historical Review, 39, 1 (July 2007), 59–79.

8 My last email communication with him concerned his very insightful review of Leslie Bank’s book on East London, City of Broken Dreams (2019), written for the Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, 73, 2 (2019), 231–234. One of his last reviews was of Kally Forrest’s Bonds of Justice: The Struggle for Oukasie (2019) in Global Labour Journal, 11, 3 (2020), 325–327.