History Making and Present Day Politics - Stolten's African Studies ...

H i s t o r y i n t h e n e w S o u t h A f r i c a
War, as the process of decolonisation swept the world, the early, partly segregationist,
liberal view gave way to the renewed liberal Africanist discourse of
the Oxford History and the subsequent Neo-Marxist historiography. 103
What in Magubane’s opinion is striking about even the two latter paradigms
is the absence of the African as an active participant in history despite
the long record of national struggles. In Magubane’s view, very little of what
has been written from both liberal and Neo-Marxist perspectives about the
African experience has taken into full account the African memory. The author’s
central argument, therefore, is that any historical discourse in South
Africa should of necessity focus on African agency.
The methodology that Magubane brings with him from historical anthropology
attempts to raise the levels of abstraction and understanding through
the use of historical parallels; a possibility often ignored by conventional historians
in favour of the search for the unique and individual. 104 Magubane
asks the important question: Did the events of 1994 make everything written
by liberal historians nonsense? A question just as important seems to be
where 1994 – or rather, global pragmatism towards neo-liberal solutions – has
left the radical historians.
In some respects, Christopher Saunders’ second contribution to this book
“Four decades of South African historical writing” stands in contrast to
Magubane’s article. One of the key observations in Saunders’ paper is that
the transfer of power in South Africa in the 1990s was not accompanied by
any major new trend in historical writing. He argues that a major reason for
this is that South African historiography had already undergone a fundamental
change since the 1960s, when the liberal Africanist work came into existence.
In Saunders’ view, previous interpretations of twentieth century South
African historiography, including those in his own work, 105 have laid too
much emphasis on the distinction between liberal and radical historiography.
While he recognises that there were fierce battles between the two schools
of thought, he argues that the more important historiographical development
was the one in which both liberal and radical historians were involved:
placing black Africans at the centre of the story of the South African past.
103. Wilson, Monica and Thompson, Leonard M. (eds), The Oxford History of South
Africa, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969–71.
104. See also, Bernhard Magubane, The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and
the Union of South Africa 1875–1910, Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 1996.
105. For instance, Saunders, Christopher C., The making of the South African past: Major
historians on race and class, Cape Town, David Philip, 1988.
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