Bill Freund, 6 July 1944 – 17 August 2020

Bill Freund, an economic historian, died in Durban in August 2020. He was 76 years old. Since his death, his autobiography, Bill Freund: An Historian’s Passage to Africa,¹ has been posthumously published. It provides the detail that helps one to understand the drivers of his prodigious scholarship as well as his views on universities, teaching and politics.

Bill was a major figure in a generation of historiographical giants. The trees of the pioneering revisionist era have begun to fall: Phil Bonner, Jeff Guy, Patrick Harries, Martin Legassick, Terence Ranger, Stanley Trapido and Harold Wolpe are all no longer with us. But the contribution of this cohort cannot be overestimated. Historical materialism, social history and a commitment to identifying, analysing and fighting the excesses of apartheid, colonialism and capitalism were some of the hallmarks of this generation.

In some respects Bill fits easily into the historiographical map I have sketched above. Although he was among the younger members of this generation and his work included much on Africa rather than focussing (as many others did) primarily or exclusively on South Africa, his works, particularly his landmark The Making of Contemporary Africa, reflected the approach adopted by the revisionist school.² His focus on questions of labour, the working classes and cities fit comfortably within the revisionist genre.

On the other hand, in some respects Bill fitted rather uneasily into this grouping. Partly this was because he was American and the strength of revisionism was most apparent in the UK, and especially at places like Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Sussex and Warwick. Partly it was because his early work was on the early colonial history of the Cape³ and his subsequent work was on Nigeria.⁴ (He did not write about gold mining!) Partly it was because he battled to get a university job. Another reason, as his book makes clear, was his discomfort with nationalism, including that espoused by the African National Congress (ANC), and his distance from activism.

Bill was born in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of Austrian emigrés Carlo Freund (1902–1989) and Elisabeth Gross (1912–1995). His parents (not yet married) managed to escape the holocaust, leaving by ship from Trieste bound for the US in the second half of 1939. Most of their relatives who remained behind in Europe perished before the war ended in 1945.

He grew up in Chicago and did his PhD at Yale University, graduating in 1971. I met him early in 1985. I had just arrived in Durban for a lecturing job in history at the University of Durban-Westville, and Bill had just assumed the Chair of Economic History at the University of Natal (Durban). I had some sense of Bill before I met him as he had had a position at Wits with Charles van Onselen at the African Studies Institute, and I had studied in the Wits History Department with Phil Bonner in the early 1980s and so was connected to that world. I had also encountered Bill through his book The Making of Contemporary Africa. It was an impressive production. I can do little better than repeat a couple of sentences from John Lonsdale’s 1985 review in the Journal of African History: ‘This book is quite a landmark in African historiography. It is the first introductory work of narrative history to gather together all the ideas of the materialist revision which has so enlivened the subject over the past decade’.⁵ Lonsdale did have one criticism of the book: Freund knew too much about South Africa. Despite this shortcoming, a further testimony to the book’s quality was the appearance of a third edition in 2016.

It is necessary at this point to put the achievement of this book into the personal context of Bill’s life. He was 40 years old when it was published. He was introduced to books very early in his life and, indeed, books were his major companion in what was often a lonely childhood. Bill was most comfortable being with, reading and talking about books. I recall attending a seminar on reading skills in the early 1990s when a room of 30 or so academics were given a text to read in a short period of time and then asked to write a short summary. Most did not finish the reading at all and fumbled their way towards a vague grasp of its meaning. Bill finished the reading (it was not a history reading either) and delivered an astonishingly clear summary of its purpose, its scope and, for good measure, its weakness.

While books were central to Bill’s life, they were also in a way his Achilles heel. Bill’s mastery of the written word was not matched by an ease with people, although he steadily developed his ability to befriend and stay a friend. In the language of today, Bill was a geek who did not fit in easily, especially in the US establishment. Despite being an exceptional student – Bill studied at Chicago and completed his PhD at Yale – he never landed a tenured history job in the US despite a three-year stint teaching African history at Harvard. He felt shunned by the history establishment and unappreciated. Bill was totally incapable of schmoozing.

It should be a consolation to all true scholars that Bill’s gifts were recognised in different ways. He spent time at Oxford during which he met people like Gavin Williams and Stan Trapido and slowly was inserted into a network of Southern Africanists which critically included those with connections to SOAS in London. Many of Bill’s life-long friendships were to be made in these years. These friends ensured that Bill received invitations throughout his life to address conferences, give seminars and provide commentary – this trend actually grew in the latter parts of his career and post-retirement, and Bill frequented all of the centres of African studies in Europe and Africa, a revered guest.

Bill’s love of Africa might have grown through books, but it was solidified in his stint as lecturer in Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria. Bill spent four happy years, from 1974 to 1978, in Zaria. He adapted quickly to the local cuisine and enjoyed the cultural mix and social ease of university life. But when nationalist politics brought that to an end, he was able to continue his connection with Africa by obtaining a post at the University of Dar-es-Salaam. This was the time when postcolonial politics was being hotly debated, the euphoria of independence was wearing off and debates about what universities were for and what development path African states should adopt were current.

Bill’s enthusiasm for Africa was tempered by a growing realisation that liberation movements like the ANC were not benign or intellectually tolerant. One of Bill’s friends, David Hemson, was suspended (1979) and then expelled (1985) from the ANC in this period. Moreover, Bill – who was critical and never a true believer – began to detect deep problems with the state in Africa and its choice of development instruments. Bill was sceptical of nationalisms and constantly drew attention to how the working poor were victims of avarice and power hunger pursued in the name of nationalism by the new elites. He was to pursue his interest in class formation, power, capital accumulation and governance for the next four decades, writing about the challenges of development on the continent and especially in South Africa, culminating in his most recent book, Twentieth-Century South Africa: A Developmental History, published in 2018.⁶ It is worth citing one review of this book (by Ben Fine, University of London) to show how the quality of Bill’s work was sustained through the course of his career:

Painstakingly researched, across detail and sweep of change, and authored by a leading scholar of African economic history, this volume is of profound significance not only for understanding the economic history of South Africa but also for the light shed on the contemporary unravelling in which the post-apartheid state finds itself.⁷

Bill’s happiest years were lived in Durban. He found levels of acceptance and inclusion that were new to him and very welcome. He built up the Economic History Department, attracting colleagues like Dan North-Coombes, Iain Edwards, Shireen Hassim, Harald Witt and David Moore. He forged close ties with the History Department under Andrew Duminy and Paul Maylam and was a regular and engaged participant in the seminar series developed by Cathy Burns and Keith Breckenridge in 1995 and thereafter. This became a buzzing intellectual meeting place with speakers from around the world giving seminars. Attendance of postgraduate students was compulsory as was the reading of the pre-circulated paper. Bill was frequently the first to ask a question, bringing an encyclopaedic knowledge to bear and happily disagreeing with those present, including Jeff Guy with whom he shared a liking for being contrary. Despite being apparently entranced by proceedings, Bill was also capable of taking short power naps in the middle of seminars, his gentle snoring providing a sonorous distraction from the lofty and sometimes heated deliberations.

In 1986 Bill, Mike Morris and Gerhard Maré started the journal Transformation, which exists to this day and recently published its 100^th issue. The journal was started at a very different time, during a state of emergency. Its first issue, in 1987, featured Zwelakhe Sisulu’s National Education Crisis Committee (NECC) paper ‘People’s Education for People’s Power’, and this flavour – of political engagement, critique and independence – remains a marker of the journal to this day.⁸ The editorial team was joined shortly after the start by Vishnu Padayachee. Vishnu was at that time a lecturer in economics at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW) and a researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research. He was also Bill’s PhD student. In 1989 he graduated with a thesis titled ‘South Africa’s International Financial Relations, 1970–1989. History, Crisis and Transformation’. Subsequently, Vishnu and Bill worked and published together. Bill’s status as an attentive and knowledgeable supervisor attracted many good students. I, together with Rod Crompton, Shireen Hassim and Harald Witt, were amongst those fortunate enough to have Bill as PhD supervisor.

While Bill established an intellectual base and network at the University of Natal, his social life was flourishing. There were many like-minded people in Durban and some, mostly male, sought outlets for excess energy in a touch rugby game that began in 1985. Bill joined that game at the outset and – though having had no previous experience of the game of rugby – embraced it enthusiastically, becoming a regular in the weekly game for over 15 years. The game accommodated different skills levels and featured most of the people with whom Bill worked. It was also the meeting point of many academics, lawyers, doctors and members of progressive non-governmental organisations who visited Durban during the end years of apartheid and the 1990s. Bill’s life broadened and his home in Carrington Heights became a happy site of social occasions where wine and food were copiously consumed.⁹

Bill was able to write very quickly. His bibliography features many book reviews, which is one indicator of his ability to consume and interpret literary contributions. His long publication list is another example. But I want to add a third as a demonstration of Bill’s loyalty and intellectual generosity. In the late 1980s I gathered together a volume of essays on the history of poor whites. I got stuck when I tried to write the introduction. So what did I do? I asked Bill, and he wrote a brilliant introduction that begins:

There exists an international stereotype, dearly beloved in anti-apartheid literature, that all South African whites consist of the slave-driving but idle rich who sip sundowners at poolside and exist entirely on the backs of a conquered and abused black proletariat.¹⁰

A few years later, Bill again stepped into the breach on my behalf. The Natal Workers History Project had been grinding forward for many years and was nearly complete – except that the final chapter on the grim years that preceded the release of Nelson Mandela had not been written, and the collaborators scheduled to write it were indisposed. Once again Bill (1995) produced the goods, although swimming slightly upstream in questioning the role of the youth in the liberation struggle. His words ring now almost prophetically:

The dream of the amaqabane is liberation through the armed struggle of the people. The reality is that violence may lead in unexpected directions. It will impact on powerful social and economic forces and the strategies of dominant institutions and create the first phase of a post-apartheid society in ways that may unfortunately provide little of the ideal democratic and egalitarian world that enemies of apartheid have envisioned.¹¹

In 2002 Malegapuru William Makgoba became Vice Chancellor (VC) of the University of Natal and in the following year he became VC of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), the result of a merger between the University of Natal and UDW. It did not take long for Makgoba to embark on a purge of dissidents (mostly white and Indian males) in the name of ‘transformation’. A happy and productive intellectual hub was steadily changed into an airless, joyless and repressive institution. Within years a thriving progressive community based at the university had seeped away, some just leaving UKZN but many leaving the city for good. Bill remained, but his life changed.

Bill’s research productivity did not decline; if anything it picked up as he embarked on numerous projects increasingly focussing on the city of Durban, examining its governance, populace and economy. There is not space here to do justice to the richness and extent of this work; suffice it to say that Bill worked with many collaborators, several of them mentioned in this obituary. His last big project, on public housing, was incomplete at his death, but Alan Mabin, Kira Erwin and Les Bank are dedicated to bringing it to fruition.

Bill had a remarkable ability to work with ‘younger’ scholars – both as a mentor and as an equal. He was good at supporting and giving advice based on his academic experiences and also happy to be an equal as part of a research or writing team. There are many who will recognise this description: Catherine Skinner, Richard Ballard, Stephen Sparks, Nicolas Pons-Vignon, Siraaj Mohammed, Dori Posel, Nnzeni Nwtshitomboni, Lumkile Mondi, Sue Parnell and Owen Crankshaw. Bill’s reach was long, wide and deep, spanning disciplinary, age and geographical divides.

Bill lamented changes at UKZN but also within the South African Higher Education system. The critique that grew stronger as the years went by was initially developed before the full advent of democracy in 1994. While looking back nostalgically to the 1990s he noted the growth of managerialism and a new ‘bean-counting’ approach, which assaulted the autonomy of academics and eroded the space for decision-making where academic concerns were foremost. He traced this development at the University of Natal to the ascension of Brenda Gourley to the VC position at UND in 1994. (She came from the Department of Accountancy and lacked a doctorate.) In the twenty-first century, in his retirement, Bill noticed changes in South African higher education with alarm. He lamented the steady decline in academic standards. His view was that incoming students were mostly ill prepared for university study – ‘they don’t read books’, he said. He found little to commend in the increasingly violent student protests, and condemned the pyromaniacal attacks on libraries and university property. While retaining his ties with UKZN, he found his affirmation at the University of the Witwatersrand – where he joined Imraan Valodia and Vishnu Padayachee as former high-flying UKZN professors who preferred to ply their trade on the Highveld. It is a sadness to record that Vishnu, with whom Bill worked closely, producing such volumes as (D)urban Vortex, also died recently, on 29 May 2021.¹²

Bill’s important place in South African scholarship was recognised in a festschrift dedicated to him in 2006. A special issue of the journal African Studies was devoted to an assessment of his work. Bill’s colleague in economic history at UKZN, David Moore, concluded that Bill’s multidisciplinary approach that acknowledged both structural limitation and agentic power provides room for cautious epistemological (if not political) optimism:

Thus, at the right time, history’s legacies – composed in good part of struggles for social justice, deep democracy, and full employment – can not only constrain but be ‘on our side’ […] to further transformation. Given these possibilities, there is no reason to think that making new African history will always be fettered and futile.¹³

Notes

1 Bill Freund, Bill Freund: An Historian’s Passage to Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2021).

2 Bill Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

3 W.M. Freund, ‘Race and the Social Structure of South Africa 1652–1836’, Race and Class, 18, 1 (1976), 53–67; W.M. Freund, ‘The Cape Eastern Frontier during the Batavian Period’, Journal of African History, 13, 4 (1972), 631–645.

4 W.M. Freund and R.W. Shenton, ‘Vent-for-Surplus Theory and the Economic History of West Africa’, Savanna (Zaria, Nigeria) 6, 2 (1977), 191–196; Bill Freund, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines, Ibadan History Series (London: Longman, 1981).

5 John Lonsdale, ‘A Materialist History of Africa –The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African Society since 1800. By Bill Freund’, Journal of African History, 26, 1 (1985), 122–123.

6 W.M. Freund, Twentieth-Century South Africa: A Developmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

7 Cambridge University Press website, accessed 19 August 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/vi/academic/subjects/history/african-history/twentieth-century-south-africa-developmental-history?format=HB

8 Zwelakhe Sisulu, ‘People's Education for People's Power’, Transformation, 1 (1986), 96–117.

9 Robert Morrell, ‘Touch Rugby, Masculinity and Progressive Politics in Durban, South Africa, 1985–1990’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 34, 7–8 (2017), 619–638.

10 W.M. Freund, ‘Introduction: The Poor Whites: A Social Force and a Social Problem in South Africa’, in Robert Morrell, ed., White But Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–1940 (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 1992), xiii–xxiii.

11 W.M. Freund, ‘The Violence in Natal: 1985–1990’, in Robert Morrell, ed., Political Economy and Identities in KwaZulu-Natal (Durban: Indicator Press, 1996), 179–195.

12 Bill Freund and Vishnu Padaychee, eds, The (D)urban Vortex; A South African City in Transition (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002).

13 David Moore, ‘The Weight of History, a Broad Sense of the Possible: Economic History, Development Studies, Political Economy and Bill Freund’, African Studies, 65, 1 (2006), 9–26.