Shane Moran - Alternation Journal

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'Future of the Past' Conference at the University of the Western Cape in July 1996
vigorous prescriptions froin arange of eminent scholars as to how apost-apartheid
o~y-writing should proceed'. Rather than engage in detail with those arguments, this
le is offered as an attempt to re-read one particular historical figure-Jacobus
am De Mist-through the dramatically-adjusted lenses of the 1990s. My
ent is that while a concern with race filtered commentaries on De Mist during the
eid years, his writings inight now be re-read with an eye to how he understood
t forms ofnationhood.
Writing about literary criticism, Mikhail Bakhtin (l986:7) has described
sm as a dialogue between different cultures:
We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek
answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to
us its new aspects andsemantic depths .... Such adialogicencounter of two cultures does
not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its ownunity andopen totality, but they are
mutually enriched.
xtending Bakhtin's suggestive formulation to the writing of history, new questions in
present might be raised for a particular past moment, and the hope is that this past
inent might in turn reveal to us new aspects and semantic depths in our present. To
ply this to the writings of De Mist: we in 1990s South Africa seek answers in the Cape
ony of 1802 to our present concerns.
Two central questions in contemporary South African debates over the nature
forms of nationhood structure my discussion of De Mist's principal work, The
zorundztnz Contutning Recomnzendutions for the Fornz and Adnzinzstrat~on of
ernnzent at the Cape ofGoodHope (1 802). The questions are:
what is the relation between revolution and the post-revolutionary political
tlement?
at is the relation between the nation-as-political-colntnunity and an expanding
list economy?
These contributions have been collected In a special issue of South Afi~cnn H~~/orlcnl
rznl35 (November 1996)