Kleio31 1. - Unisa

XXXI 1999 

Š Re-examining initial encounters 

between Christian missionaries 

and the Xhosa, 1820±1850 

Š African reasons for purchasing 

land in Natal in the late 19th, early 

20th centuries 

Š A history of the first sub-Saharan 

African football championship, 

1949±50 

Š Popular uses of the past in American 

life 

Š Intellectual lineages from South 

Africa in the `making of America'

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REPERTORIUM VAN SUID-AFRIKAANSE 

TYDSKRIFARTIKELS. 

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ABSTRACTS and/or AMERICA: HISTORY 

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INDEX TO SOUTH AFRICAN PERIODI- 

CALS.

XXXI 1999 

Editor/Redakteur 

ELSPETH McKENZIE 

Assistant editor/Assistentredakteur 

ALBERT GRUNDLINGH 

Review editor/Besprekingsredakteur 

ELSPETH McKENZIE 

Editorial Advisory Committee/ 

Redaksionele Advieskomitee 

M ADHIKARI, University of Cape Town 

N ETHERINGTON, University of Western Australia 

A J JEEVES, Queen's University at Kingston 

C C SAUNDERS, University of Cape Town 

Editorial Assistants/Redaksionele Assistente 

H J LUBBE B M THERON 

J T PRIDMORE R S VILJOEN 

Journal of the Department of History 

University of South Africa 

Tydskrif van die Departement Geskiedenis 

Universiteit van Suid-Afrika

Kleio XXXI, 1999 

Contents/Inhoud 

Articles/Artikels 

Re-examining initial encounters between Christian missionaries 

and the Xhosa, 1820±1850: the Scottish case 

Natasha Erlank 6 

African reasons for purchasing land in Natal in the late 19th, 

early 20th centuries 

John Lambert 33 

Katanga vs Johannesburg: a history of the first sub-Saharan 

African football championship, 1949±50 

Peter C Alegi 55 

Popular uses of the past in American life 

David Thelen 75 

`From white supremacy to black liberation': intellectual 

lineages from South Africa in the `making of America' 

Greg Cuthbertson 99 

Review Article/Besprekingsartikel 

Tracing roots: literary theory in temporal context 

Julie Pridmore 117 

Book reviews/Boekbesprekings 

Africa/Afrika 

John L & Jean Comaroff, Of revelation and revolution: the 

dialectics of modernity on a South African frontier, 

Vol II (Greg Cuthbertson) 147 

E Daniels, There and back. Robben Island 1964±1979 (F A 

Mouton) 151 

2


T R H Davenport, The transfer of power in South Africa 

(Albert Grundlingh) 152 

Apollon Davidson & Irina Filatova, The Russians and the 

Anglo-Boer War (S B Spies) 153 

Bryan Davies & Jenny Day, Vanishing waters (Jane Carruthers) 

154 

W A Edge & M H Lekorwe (eds), Botswana: politics and 

society (Louis Molamu) 156 

Ivan Evans, Bureaucracy and race: native administration in 

South Africa (F A Mouton) 159 

Frederick Hale (ed), Norwegian missionaries in Natal and 

Zululand: selected correspondence 1844±1900 (John 

Laband) 161 

Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific majesty: the powers of Shaka Zulu 

and the limits of historical invention (Ben Carton) 162 

Angus Hawkins & John Powell (eds), The journal of John 

Wodehouse first Earl of Kimberley for 1862±1902 

(Bridget Theron) 163 

Elfriede HoÈ ckner, Die Lobedu SuÈdafrikas. Mythos und realitaÈt 

der regenkoÈnigin Modjadji (Tilman Dedering) 167 

The Jameson Raid and beyond. Proceedings of a symposium 

held at the Brenthurst library, Johannesburg, 1997 (S F 

Malan) 168 

Helen Joseph, If this be treason (F A Mouton) 171 

Peter Kallaway, Glenda Kruss, Aslam Fataar & Gari Donn (eds), 

Education after apartheid: South African education in 

transition (Karen L Harris) 173 

Richard Levin, When the sleeping grass awakens: land and 

power in Swaziland (Hamilton Sipho Simelane) 174 

Norrie MacQueen, The decolonisation of Portuguese Africa: 

metropolitan revolution and the dissolution of empire 

(Michael Peres) 176 

Anthony W Marx, Making race and nation: a comparison of 

the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (P G Eidelberg) 

178 

Sarah Nuttall & Carli Coetzee, Negotiating the past: the 

making of memory in South Africa (Greg Cuthbertson) 179 

Johannes Rantete, The African National Congress and the 

negotiated settlement in South Africa (Albert Grundlingh) 

183 

3


Christopher Saunders & Nicholas Southey, A dictionary of 

South African history (Ruth Edgecombe) 184 

Karel Schoeman (ed), Witnesses to war: personal documents 

of the Anglo-Boer War (1899±1902) from the collections 

of the South African Library (AndreÂ Wessels) 185 

H O Terblanche, Nederland en die Afrikaner: gesprek oor 

apartheid (DioneÂ Prinsloo) 187 

Ulrich van der Heyden & JuÈ rgen Becher (eds), Mission und 

Moderne. BeitraÈge zur Geschichte der christlichen 

Missionen in Afrika (Gunther Pakendorf) 189 

Christo van Rensburg (red), Afrikaans in Afrika (Louis 

Claassen) 191 

Randolph Vigne, Liberals against apartheid: a history of the 

Liberal Party of South Africa, 1953±68 (J P Brits) 192 

Andreas Z Zungu, Usukabekhuluma and the Bhambatha 

rebellion (John Lambert) 193 

General/Algemeen 

Keith Jenkins, On `what is history?' From Carr and Elton, to 

Rorty and White; Beverley Southgate, History: what and 

why? Ancient, modern, and postmodern perspectives 

(Christopher Saunders) 194 

Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes & Kyrill M Anderson, The 

Soviet world of American communism (Irina Filatova) 195 

John Morrill (ed), The Oxford illustrated history of Tudor & 

Stuart Britain; Penry Williams, The later Tudors: 

England, 1547±1603 (John Lambert) 197 

Richard Gid Powers, Not without honor: the history of 

American anticommunism (F A Mouton) 201 

Other books received/Ander boeke ontvang 

Max Coleman (ed), A crime against humanity: analysing the 

repression of the apartheid state 203 

Michael Howard & Wm Roger Louis, The Oxford history of the 

twentieth century 203 

Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White 

Queen: Victorian Britain through African eyes 203 

4


Guidelines for contributors 205 

Professor Martin Legassick has requested that it be explained that 

the Statement by the South African Historical Society on the 

implications of Curriculum 2005 for history teaching in the 

schools, published in Kleio XXX, 1998, was compiled by a drafting 

committee consisting of Professor Pieter Kapp, University of 

Stellenbosch, Professor Kallaway, University of the Western Cape, 

Dr Eddie Moloka and Dr Rob Sieborger, University of Cape Town, 

and convened by Professor Legassick, University of the Western 

Cape. 

5

Kleio XXXI, 1999 Natasha Erlank: Christian missionaries and the Xhosa 

Re-examining initial encounters 

between Christian missionaries and the 

Xhosa, 1820±1850: the Scottish case 

Natasha Erlank 

Rand Afrikaans University 

The Protestant missionary initiative in Xhosaland has received much 

attention in South African mission historiography. 1 Discussion of 

missionary activity ranges from Donovan Williams's 1959 thesis `The 

missionaries on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, 1799±1853', to 

Leon de Kock's more recent Civilising barbarians: missionary 

narrative and African textual response, and encompasses a wide 

range of historiographical approaches. 2 However, much of it tends to 

concentrate on the missionary side of the Xhosaland encounter and 

little of it deals comprehensively with the issue of the transmission of 

faith from both a historical perspective and from the perspective of 

potential converts. Drawing from some of the more recent historiography 

in this area, for instance Elizabeth Elbourne's work on the 

transmission of faith amongst the Khoikhoi, I felt that the encounter 

between Protestant missionaries and the Xhosa deserved a revisit. 3 

This article is about the strategies of various segments of Xhosa society 

for coping with Presbyterian missionaries, the mission stations and 

Christianity in the context of the economic, social and political 

disruption of Xhosa society by the various manifestations of British 

colonial power. 

ÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐ 

1 This article is based on a chapter of my doctoral thesis entitled `Gender and Christianity among 

Africans attached to Scottish mission stations in Xhosaland in the nineteenth century' 

(Cambridge, 1998). The remainder of the thesis deals with the effect of other aspects of 

Christian ideology, including Western gender codes, on the Xhosa. 

2 D Williams, `The missionaries on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, 1799±1853' (PhD thesis, 

University of the Witwatersrand, 1959) and L de Kock, Civilising barbarians: missionary 

narrative and African textual response (Johannesburg, 1996). For other historiographic 

references see throughout. 

3 E Elbourne, Èarly Khoisan uses of mission Christianity', Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 19 

(1992). 

6


While the Scottish missionaries who formed the Glasgow Missionary 

Society (GMS) were not the only missionaries active in Xhosaland, 

various factors contribute to a focus on their role. The Xhosa 

themselves may not have been able to distinguish between the different 

societies' approaches to evangelisation (and generally the eye of the 

beholder is more important in gauging missionary effectivity) but 

Calvinism and the intellectual inheritance of the Scottish enlightenment 

did make for a different focus than, for instance, the Wesleyans or the 

Congregationalists. Rational Calvinism informed both Scottish perceptions 

of conversion and station residence (they were stricter about the 

former than other societies and laxer on the latter) and the Scottish 

tendency towards record-taking. The latter is particularly important. 

The Scots arranged their mission stations into a Presbytery, for which 

they held regular meetings and kept regular minutes. These records 

show a different kind of detail to those available from the records of 

other societies. 

Initial reactions 

When Scottish missionaries moved into Xhosaland in the early 1820s, 

they found that they had chosen to establish their stations on one of the 

most troubled sections of the Cape colonial frontier. This disruption 

was the result of clashes between two expanding groups, the Western 

(Rharabe) Xhosa and the Europeans who were attempting to move into 

one another's territory. Xhosa-speaking people had been settled in this 

area for centuries. 4 Population pressure, secessional disputes and the 

normal processes of social expansion were causing some of them to 

move west, while Dutch and then British colonists were expanding 

eastward. 5 Before 1820 conflicts between the two groups had led to 

five frontier wars. In 1847 the Xhosa finally lost their independence to 

the British. 

These processes were well under way by the time Scottish (and other 

evangelical Protestant) missionaries arrived on the frontier. 6 They 

established their stations against the backdrop of this explosive 


4 See M Hall, The changing past: farmers, kings and traders in southern Africa 200±1860 (Cape 

Town, 1987) for the prehistory of this area. 

5 See J Peires, The house of Phalo (Johannesburg, 1981), pp 53±62. Also more generally Williams, 

`Missionaries on the eastern frontier; L Switzer, Power and resistance in an African Society: the 

Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, 1993); J Lewis, Àn economic 

history of the Ciskei' (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1985). 

6 For example, Peires, House of Phalo; Williams, `Missionaries on the eastern frontier'; Switzer, 

Power and resistance; Lewis, Àn economic history of the Ciskei'. 

7


cocktail of Xhosa frustration, settler aggression and the colonial state's 

desire for order. The Xhosa chiefs were quite circumspect in their 

initial dealings with the missionaries. By this time the Xhosa were well 

aware of the results of European contact and understandably chary of 

the missionaries. Ostensibly the various mission societies needed the 

permission of local chiefs to establish stations in Xhosaland, but with 

the knowledge that the missionaries were nominally supported by the 

British colonial government the chiefs had little option but to comply. 

Acceptance of missionaries and mission stations, however, did not 

mean that the chiefs were prepared to accept Christianity or to 

acknowledge missionary authority in any way. 

When the Presbyterians arrived in Xhosaland in the early 1820s they 

settled on the fringes of various Xhosa chiefdoms, in a landscape 

already accustomed to the missionary presence. The first mission to the 

Xhosa had been established by J T van der Kemp in 1799, the second by 

Joseph Williams and his wife Elizabeth, who set up a station on the Kat 

River in 1816. In 1820 John Brownlee of the London Missionary 

Society (LMS) established Chumie Station on the river of that name. In 

1821 William Ritchie Thomson, his wife and a catechist, John Bennie, 

joined Brownlee at Chumie. 7 Chumie subsequently became the first 

GMS station in Xhosaland. These missionaries were followed by the 

Ross family in 1823, the Chalmers, Weir and McDiarmid families in 

1827 and the Laing family in 1831. These families established stations 

at Lovedale, Burnshill and Pirie over the next few years. In 1838 the 

GMS split into the GMS and the Glasgow African Missionary Society 

because of disputes in the home church (which little affected Xhosa 

perceptions of the mission). 

The establishment of separate mission centres was common to 

mission societies in southern Africa and elsewhere. 8 In South Africa 

many of them were modelled on the first Protestant stations set up 

by the Moravians in the western Cape in the previous century. 9 

Their situation was selected according to two sets of criteria. In the 

first place the missionaries wanted to be close to reliable sources of 


7 Chumie was established by the government missionary John Brownlee in 1820, but then taken 

over by the Scots after Brownlee left the service of the government to rejoin the LMS and 

establish Buffalo Mission to the east. 

8 `The pivot of Protestant missionary endeavour was the mission station.' D Langmore, `The object 

lesson of a Christian, civilised home' in M Jolly & M Macintyre (eds), Family and gender in the 

Pacific: domestic contradictions and the colonial impact (Cambridge, 1989), p 85. 

9 The Rosses visited five mission stations, including Genadendal, on their way to Chumie (Ms2637, 

Helen Ross to Miss Begbie, nd). For a discussion of the mission stations in the western Cape and 

their gendered arrangements see P Scully, Liberating the family? Gender and British slave 

emancipation in the rural western Cape, South Africa, 1823±1853 (Portsmouth, NH, 1997). 

8


water (sufficient for agriculture on a greater scale than that 

practised by the Xhosa), as well as adequate sources of wood, in 

order to ensure self-sufficiency. While they also wished to situate 

their stations in populous areas, they were unable to do so because 

the organisation of Xhosa society into homesteads made for very 

disaggregated patterns of settlement. Most Xhosa lived around the 

foothills of the small mountain ranges making up the South African 

escarpment, in a very undulating landscape composed of river 

valleys. 10 They formed their homesteads on the top of the ridges 

overlooking the valleys where their fields were to be found and 

grazed their cattle in the vicinity. This had implications for 

evangelical strategies. 

The missionaries also tried to situate themselves close to the local 

chiefs. 11 The missionaries had no authority of their own in Xhosaland, 

which was still independent of British rule, and required to be 

close to the chiefs in order to have access to them and their 

protection. Effectivity rested on the ability of the missionaries to tap 

into local social and political systems. While the missionaries 

attempted to situate themselves close to chiefs, the chiefs often 

resisted the establishment of stations too close to their kraals, 

correctly fearing missionary interference. 

The missionary reliance on chiefly patronage corresponded with 

the distribution of power locally. At the start of the 19th century the 

Xhosa were arranged into a number of rather loosely governed 

chiefdoms which shared the same social organisation. 12 By 1800 two 

large chiefdoms were distinguishable among all the Xhosa (the 

Ngqika and the Gcaleka), in addition to several more of smaller size 

and lesser power. 13 Chiefly power lay in the allocation of land and 

resources to the homesteads, which were the family-based units of 

society. The power of the chiefs was expressed and played out in 

various rituals and in their ability to extract tribute from their 

people in the form of cattle. 14 Male homestead members who fell out 

with their chiefs could join other chiefdoms as a form of protest. 

While the chiefs may not have held absolute power, there were links 


10 Peires, House of Phalo, pp 1-3. 

11 In part this was also because of government instructions about obtaining information on the 

Xhosa. D Williams, Where races meet (Johannesburg, 1967), pp 6, 21, 24, 52 and throughout. 

12 See M Wilson, `The Nguni people' in M Wilson & L Thompson (eds), The Oxford history of South 

Africa, vol I (Oxford, 1969), pp 116±130 and Lewis, `Ciskei', chapter two, for a discussion of the 

dynamics of Xhosa society. 

13 Wilson, `The Nguni people', p 119. 

14 Lewis, `Ciskei', p 14. 

9


between the homesteads and the chiefs which constantly recycled 

the nature of their obligations to one another. 15 

The stations were generally composed of the missionary's house (the 

first substantial structure built), a church, a school, the houses of 

converts, huts of the less ardent converts, the gardens of the 

missionary and the land worked by the converts. Until a separate 

church could be built the missionary's house often served as church 

and schoolroom as well. À Miss Station is a collection of houses 

(greater or Smaller), according to the Number of people who choose to 

settle at it, with an avowed desire to hear the word of God & to observe 

it; having for its nucleus the missionary's dwelling & perhaps a place of 

worship.' 16 

Fields were laid out around the station, to be worked by the 

residents. Irrigation canals were run from the local source of water to 

these fields. The cattle of the residents were kept in a kraal on the 

station, or sent out to pasture in the neighbourhood. The missionary 

families kept their own cattle, as well as goats, horses, sheep and 

poultry. They grew fruit trees in gardens close to their houses. 

In its idealised form the station ± its buildings, its internal layout and 

its plan of land use ± was different from the usual Xhosa umzi. Most 

station residents attended worship regularly, stopped work on Sundays 

and eventually sowed with ox-drawn ploughs, but life continued much 

as it would have done off-station. Residents still came and went as they 

chose, some going off to serve their chiefs as councillors. The stations 

effectively existed at two levels ± as both homesteads and as mission 

stations, and were more integrated with the rest of Xhosaland than has 

sometimes been asserted. 

Evangelical strategies 

A belief in the transformative power of the gospel ± the need for active 

constant preaching ± informed missionary strategy. 17 In keeping with 


15 Peires, House of Phalo, chapter three (`Chiefs and commoners'); W D Hammond-Tooke, `Kinship 

authority and political authority in pre-colonial South Africa' in A Spiegel & P McAllister (eds), 

Tradition and transition in southern Africa: Festschrift for Philip and Iona Mayer (New 

Brunswick and London, 1991). 

16 Cory Library for Historical Research, Grahamstown, Ms3139, John Ross to Revd and Dear Sir, 10 

March 1845 (hereafter Ms). See also D Williams, `Social and economic aspects of Christian 

mission stations in Caffraria 1816±1854, part 1', Historia, 30 (1985), p 35. Williams uses the 

same quotation as I do in his detailed description of what a mission station exactly entailed. 

17 A Hamilton, `Bond-slaves of Satan: aboriginal women and the missionary dilemma' in Family and 

gender in the Pacific, p 241. 

10


their evangelical beliefs the missionaries divided the countryside 

around Chumie into districts for regular itineration: 

another duty which we attend is itinerating among the neighbouring Kraals ... So far as 

we have put it into practice, we have met with the greatest encouragement ... I 

consider this to be one of the most important of a Missionary's labours in this part of 

Africa, in order to his being extensively useful ... 18 

The limited time available for itineration meant that non-residents only 

received limited exposure to mission Christianity. 

Another important task centred on teaching the gospel to those 

who settled near Chumie, through the establishment of schools and 

through church services. 19 Station residents got intensive instruction 

in the arts of a `civilised' people and the proper division of labour 

among them. A third and more specialised task concerned the 

reduction of Xhosa into written form so that portions of the Bible 

could be translated into the vernacular for the use of converts. 20 

These tasks were to be accomplished by the missionaries and 

suitably qualified Xhosa catechists. Bennie began with the work of 

translation, while Thomson and Ross devoted more of their time to 

teaching and itineration. 

Despite their initial enthusiasm the missionaries soon realised they 

were not having much effect on the Xhosa, either on or off-station. 

There are several intimations of this in their letters. 21 `[T]he letters 

of the Brethren are full of lamentations and prayers, that the Caffers 

and especially the Chiefs, should be so insensible to the truths of 

God's word.' 22 Even on their stations the missionaries did not 

always meet with much success and this was often transient. 

`[T]here are many among the people of our Instit. who tho' they 

know God, glorify him not as God, & are unthankful, who are lovers 

of themselves more than lovers of God.' 23 In 1828, they had only 22 

communicants and 22 candidates for baptism, out of a station 

population of 300 at Chumie and 116 at Lovedale. 24 Three years 


18 William Ritchie Thomson, Annual Report of the GMS 1823, p 11. Ms16579, Laing's Journal, 9 

February 1832. Laing singled out itineration as being the most important duty of a missionary. 

The GMS published three journals ± their Annual Reports, Quarterly Papers and Quarterly 

Intelligences. 

19 Ms9037, 1 January 1824. 

20 Ms9037, 7 February 1824. 

21 Annual Report 1826, p 18; Annual Report 1829, p 1. 

22 Editor, Annual Report 1826, p 18. 

23 Ms8182, John Ross to the Glasgow Corresponding Society for Prayer, 6 October 1831. 

24 Annual Report 1828, pp 12, 15. 

11


after its establishment, Pirie Station still only had one African 

member, the catechist who had come with the Rosses. 25 

In many instances people were quite happy to hear the 

missionaries speak about the gospel of Jesus Christ, but equally 

often they removed themselves from the reach of the missionaries. 

The missionaries were aware of the reluctance of people to spend 

time in their company. After the initial attraction of the missionaries 

wore off, the missionaries found that itineration was a vital part of 

their work for às long as they will not come to us, we should go to 

them'. 26 However, even success when itinerating was little and the 

missionaries often found that itineration bought few new hearers and 

not a little discourtesy. 27 

The terms of initial contact were set by the Xhosa rather than the 

missionaries. It did not take much effort to avoid contact with the 

missionaries. Potential converts had the option of removing to their 

cattle places (alternative grazing for cattle, generally away from their 

homesteads and used when local grazing was insufficient) when they 

had had enough of the missionaries, which option they appear to have 

exercised regularly. 28 `During the two winters past, we have to lament 

the practice of many of the people who remove to a distance with their 

cattle. Some remain almost throughout the year. From their distance, 

we can see them but seldom; and we have reason to fear that our visits 

are not desirable.' 29 

Non-station residents, especially the chiefs, also found it easy to 

avoid the missionaries. They had similar strategies to those of the 

station residents and in the case of chiefs their authority was often 

sufficient to establish a distance between themselves and the 

missionaries. When the missionaries visited them at their kraals they 

were often kept waiting. In 1829 the missionaries were dissuaded from 

settling among the Thembu after a polite rejection by Vusani, the 

chief. 30 In 1830 when the missionaries wanted to establish a further 

station, John Ross travelled to the east of Lovedale looking for a 

suitable position. 

After resting about two hours I set off for Ukuse, the nearest chief of the Imidange 

tribe ... The chief came at dusk. He seems to be desirous of a teacher, but would not 


25 Ms9037, 3 January 1833. 

26 Ms3126, John Ross to the Directors, 1831. 

27 See John Ross Journal in Quarterly Paper 6, 1830, for several instances of this. 

28 For example, Ms9037, 15 August 1827, 3 September 1829. 

29 William Ritchie Thomson, Quarterly Paper, 1827, p 6. 

30 Ms9037, October to December 1829. Vusani is more commonly known as Ngubencuka. 

12


say he requested one out of fear of offending Thlambe, as he said. He has few people 

and says he is subject to Thlambe; yet he always spoke on the supposition that he 

would like a teacher to be among his people. 31 

All the chiefs with whom he spoke wanted to engage him in 

discussions of other chiefs who had allowed missionaries to settle 

near them. 32 Intense discussions with their councillors about letting 

the missionaries settle near them followed. After visiting five or six 

chiefs Ross finally managed to persuade Vazi, a minor chief, to allow 

him to establish the station that would be named Pirie. 

Williams and Jeff Peires, among others, have stressed the lack of 

attraction that Christianity held for the Xhosa. `But this is certain: 

the value of missions was in direct relationship with the material 

benefits they could provide and not in relation to the Christian 

religion which they came to disseminate.' 33 According to this view 

the Xhosa only started converting in significant numbers after the 

1856 Cattle-Killing. 34 

The progress of Christianity and the appeal of the missionaries 

was more subtle than this. We need to reassess events before 1856 

in order to track this. 35 I would concur with Williams and Peires 

that Christianity and the missionaries initially held little attraction. 

The missionaries were undoubtedly little regarded. However, this 

lack of attraction needs to be examined in greater detail. There are 

two elements to it. In the first place the response to missionaries 

needs to be gauged in light of a reassessment of the nature of the 

authority and power wielded by the missionaries. Responses to the 

missionaries also varied considerably among different Xhosa social 

groups. 

Some of this line of questioning has been encouraged by the recent 

historiography of missions in southern Africa. Prompted in part by 

the work of the Comaroffs, recent research into Christianity has 

made it clear that the missionaries themselves may have had little to 


31 John Ross, Quarterly Paper 6, 1830, p 6. Thlambe was of course Ndlambe. 

32 In 1827 William Shaw and the Wesleyans were given the run-around by various chiefs over 

discussions on whom amongst them should receive missionaries. W D Hammond-Tooke, The 

journal of William Shaw (Cape Town, 1972), pp 74±75. 

33 Williams, `Missionaries on the eastern frontier', pp 70, 84 and Peires, House of Phalo, p76 

(quoting). 

34 Switzer, Power and resistance, p 122 and J Hodgson, `Ntsikana: history and symbol. Studies in a 

process of religious change among Xhosa-speaking people' (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 

1984), p 54 and Peires quoted in the same. 

35 For the former we have Janet Hodgson's excellent work on the progress of indigenous 

Christianity. The sixth chapter of my thesis contains a discussion of the greater spread of 

Christianity post-1856. 

13


do with the spread of belief. 36 We need to shift our attention from 

the work and intentions of the missionaries to the conscious 

mediation of those intentions by potential converts in ways which 

the missionaries had not even anticipated. By this I mean that 

potential converts recognised many different elements in the work of 

the missionaries ± religious, cultural, social, economic ± and 

responded to these elements in ways which were sometimes of their 

own choosing. Elbourne's work on the spread of Christianity among 

the Khoi and Paul Landau's work on its spread among the Tswana 

show how potential converts adopted all the possibilities of 

Christianity to this end, not always in perfect translation but out 

of perfect `choice'. 37 

Reviewing reasons for moving 

One way to approach the concerns mentioned above is to re-examine 

the reasons people had for moving to mission stations in the 1820s and 

1830s, before resistance to the missionaries became a concerted 

effort. 38 According to previous research people moved to mission 

stations either for material benefit or because of a socially ambiguous 

status which labelled them as misfits within their own society. 39 

Mission stations were either second choice residences or were settled 

for utilitarian reasons. Running through this description of the mission 

station inhabitants is the theme of `mission station as refuge'. 

The first inhabitants of the Scottish mission stations were the 

families of the missionaries, their servants and interpreters. Many of 


36 J V Taylor, The growth of the church in Buganda: an attempt at understanding (Westport, 

1958), examines the move to belief from a similar perspective, but Taylor seems to have been preeminent 

among mission historians of his time in not prioritising the work of the mission and the 

missionaries. Janet Hodgson's work was also ahead of its time and is now becoming more widely 

used by historians (Paul Landau, ` ``Religion'' and Christian conversion in African history: a new 

model', Africans Meeting Missionaries Conference, Minneapolis, 2±3 May 1997, p 2). 

37 Elizabeth Elbourne, ` ``To colonize the mind'': evangelical missionaries in Britain and the eastern 

Cape, 1790±1837' (DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1991) and Paul Landau, The realm of the word: 

language, gender and Christianity in a southern African kingdom (New Haven, 1995). 

38 Though preliminary research indicates that the Scottish case held for all mission stations in 

Xhosaland, I have not done the research needed to back this claim. 

39 Chapter seven, `The ethnic factor in ``Kaffir''-land, the composition of missions and the nature of 

conversion' in Williams, `Missionaries on the eastern frontier'. Also Peires, House of Phalo; 

Switzer, Power and resistance; D Gaitskell `Devout domesticity: a century of African women's 

Christianity in South Africa' in C Walker (ed), Women and gender in southern Africa to 1945 

(Cape Town, 1990), p 253. Many people quote Norman Etherington, Preachers, peasants and 

politics in southeast Africa, 1835±1880 (London, 1978) when discussing the origins of mission 

station inhabitants, but an examination of Etherington will show that he was a lot more 

circumspect than some other authors in his account of origins. 

14


these were of mixed descent. In addition the missionaries were 

followed to their stations by Khoikhoi from the colony who had had 

prior exposure to Christianity. Typically it seems that mission stations 

were set up with a nucleus of people who came as a body from another 

station. Chumie was established by Brownlee with some of the people 

who had been attached to Williams's station. Some of Williams's 

followers had been preached to by Van der Kemp. 40 Robert Balfour, 

Charles Henry and their families (numbering about 100) were among 

these transferring residents and their presence doubled the number of 

station residents. Lovedale's first residents came from Chumie. By 

1831 Chumie had a population of approximately 300, most of whom left 

to join the newly established mission in the Kat River. They were 

replaced by Fingoes. 41 People joined the Kat River because it offered 

access to land. 

Most mission station inhabitants therefore had connections with one 

another. New residents followed these links. Usually they did not join 

without a prior connection, so that station affiliation was to other 

residents rather than to the missionaries. They had different reasons 

for moving to mission stations. Mission stations offered access to land 

and irrigation sometimes unavailable elsewhere. This would have been 

the case for the families of young men waiting to inherit access to the 

resources of their previous homesteads. Residence on mission stations 

offered a quicker route to access to land. However, not only the 

materially disadvantaged moved to mission stations. Several high 

ranking councillors of the various chiefs ± the most notable being Old 

Soga ± moved close to stations because of the availability of better 

irrigation and pasture. 42 The hierarchies of Xhosa society were all 

repeated on the stations. 

According to Janet Hodgson, this reason for moving might accompany 

the desire to live closer to the Gospel, as was the case with some 

of the station residents mentioned above. Faith and material advantage 

might commingle in a person's desire to move to a station. For some, 

moving offered a distinct material disadvantage. Charles Henry's 

property was threatened if he moved to Chumie, yet he did so. 43 


40 Hodgson, `Ntsikana', p 336. Janet Hodgson's work includes a detailed examination of this move. 

41 Ms9037, 29 January 1831. I use the term `Fingoes' rather than `Mfengu' because I do believe that 

`Fingoes' were largely an invented category. See A Webster, `Land expropriation and labour 

extraction under Cape colonial rule: the war of 1835 and the `èmancipation of the Fingo'' ' (MA 

thesis, Rhodes University, 1991). 

42 Council for World Mission, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, CWM SA Incoming, 

Kayser to Ellis, 31 January 1837, Kayser to Ellis, 7 August 1838 (hereafter CWM). 

43 Hodgson, `Ntsikana', p 212. 

15


Many of the early station inhabitants were Gonaqua Khoikhoi 

(who lived to the west of Xhosaland). Several historians have 

dismissed the evidence for the spread of Christianity among the 

Xhosa on the grounds that early station inhabitants were not 

Xhosa. 44 This kind of analysis, while accurate, ignores the degree 

to which the Khoikhoi of the eastern Cape had accepted the 

suzerainty of the Xhosa and were being absorbed into the Xhosa 

polity. 45 This was in a very real sense for some of the converts: 

Charles Henry recognised Chief Nqeno as his leader and obeyed his 

directives. 46 

The population of mission stations did not remain unchanging 

from year to year. Many residents were temporary. Even among 

the permanent residents people travelled frequently and were often 

absent at their cattle places. They also moved between stations. 

Seasonal transhumance was a feature of Xhosa society and 

missions might form the location for a summer or winter 

residence. Maqoma used Blinkwater, the LMS station, as his 

summer cattle place in the late 1830s. 47 Nomathasanqa Tisani has 

likened the stations to the Great Places of the Xhosa chiefs, where 

people continually came and went. 48 

The economic independence (if it was that) offered by mission 

stations did not correspond to a political independence. In moving 

to mission stations residents did not remove themselves from the 

authority of their chiefs, nor replace this authority with that of the 

missionaries. Theoretically even the missionaries lay under the 

power of the chiefs. In 1832 Maqoma informed them that all their 

stations lay under his authority. 49 In 1834±35 when the call for 

participation in the war went out, only the inhabitants of Burnshill 

station (and a few other people) remained rather dubiously neutral. 

In 1843 some of the residents at Lovedale lent oxen to Bennie and 


44 Williams especially, see above and most people following him. Williams's article `Social and 

economic aspects of Christian missions in Caffraria 1816±1854, part 2', Historia, 31 (1986), 

pp 25±57, contains lists of the ethnic affiliation of station residents mentioned in mission records 

for this period. However this list is not especially useful because it does not indicate the 

occurrence of name variations for the same people nor is it entirely correct (for instance on p 36 

Jan Bek is referred to as a `coloured' ± he is prominently mentioned throughout the 1840s as 

Robert Balfour's son and Robert was Xhosa). 

45 Peires, House of Phalo, p 19. Williams, Where races meet, p45. 


47 CWM, SA Incoming, Calderwood to Ellis, 14 January 1840. 

48 N Tisani, `Gender relations in mission stations'. Paper presented at the Missions and Christianity 

Conference, University of the Western Cape, 1992, p 7. 

49 Ms9037, 5 April 1832. 

16


two died in his care. When he failed to provide adequate 

compensation the residents took the case first before Stokwe and 

then before Sandile. 50 The chiefs recognised the stations to be 

under their care, the residents recognised the authority of the 

chiefs and the missionaries recognised the authority of the chiefs. 

Stretch, the resident British agent among the `Gaikas', wrote to 

Bennie, with respect to the case of the borrowed oxen, that he 

`was informed [by Government] all British subjects in Caffraria are 

amenable to the laws of the Caffres'. 51 The ultimate indication of 

this comes from Sandile himself, in a rhetorical strategy designed 

to impugn missionary masculinity and which reveals Xhosa 

awareness of the embeddedness of gender in power. In adjudicating 

the case Sandile countermanded a missionary decision to 

remove Bennie from Burnshill, saying that àll the teachers are as 

my wives' but that he loved Laing best. 52 

The missionaries had no official status in Xhosaland. Under the 

1838 Stockenstrom treaties the chiefs were enjoined to offer them 

protection, but the missionaries were not allowed to interfere with 

the chiefs' rule. The Maitland treaties in the 1840s repeated this 

position. Even after annexation in 1847 the missionaries had no 

official position. This was the government's intention. Most of the 

governors, while desiring the missionaries to act as informants, 

were opposed to any political interference (though they seem to 

have bent these rules for the Wesleyans). 53 The colonial government 

assisted the missionaries, not by conferring power on them, 

but by occasionally enjoining the chiefs to outlaw practices which 

the missionaries and the colonial government found abhorrent. 54 In 

1847 Sir Harry Smith included a list of prohibitions of particular 

customs in the oath of loyalty to be taken by the chiefs. Colonial 

power in Xhosaland was manifested, after 1835, by the presence 


50 Ms9038, 5 April 1843, June 1843. 

51 Ms3500, Stretch to Bennie, 18 January. 

52 Ms9038, 5 April 1843. There are other instances of the Xhosa using this kind of language towards 

the missionaries. In 1835 Tyhali told the missionaries that they were old wives and should 

therefore not become involved in the war (Ms9037, 28 February 1835). 

53 This is very clear by viewing missionary documents against government documents. The 

government accounts of meetings with the Xhosa after the 1840s make no reference to missionary 

presence at these meetings, while the missionary documents do. The missionaries were crucial as 

interpreters. Compare for instance Ms3275, John Ross Journal, March 1853 with BPP 

Correspondence relative to Kafir tribes, 1635 of 1852±3, Despatch no 51. 

54 Imperial Blue Books, British Parliamentary Papers, BPP Papers and correspondence relative to 

the Kafir tribes, 424 of 1851, Amended Treaties, pp 232±237. 

17


of British diplomatic agents like Stretch, who had small forces at 

their command. 55 

What is striking about the period up until Hintsa's War (1834±35) is 

the complete lack of secular authority the missionaries had to enforce 

or encourage any of their beliefs. People could conduct their daily lives 

much as they had before the missionaries arrived. The missionaries 

themselves were not personally a threat to the Xhosa. The figure of the 

missionary may well have been feared (and there is little doubt that 

many Xhosa were scared of the missionaries) but the source of this fear 

tended to shift according to circumstance. Any authority they did have 

was vested in their persons, by virtue of their ability to `tap into a new 

source of power from above' which was bolstered by the power of 

English guns. 56 Their potential religious power did not translate into 

secular power, either over people or over what occurred on their 

stations. It was tied to particular events and occasions. When they 

summoned rain in the late 1830s they gained a temporary following, 

but this fell off when their prayers provoked dry ground. Vusani 

refused to have the missionaries settle near him, but other chiefs were 

quite happy to have the missionaries settle nearby when they could 

reap the benefits of such a move and dictate the distance of the mission 

station from their homesteads. 57 

This state of affairs was well recognised at the time. In a statement to 

the 1851 `Select Committee on Kafir Tribes' (reflecting on his 

experiences of the 1830s) Andrew Smith commented upon the subject 

of missionary influence over the Xhosa. 

Among a certain portion of them it is great; it is not great among the chiefs, the chiefs 

rather dislike them: they find that those persons who attach themselves to the 

missionary station get an idea of liberty and various other notions which are not 

exactly in conformity with their wishes and on very many occasions the chiefs, in the 

first instance, have endeavoured to get rid of the missionaries, finding the people were 

not so manageable by their tyrannical government as they were previously to the 

missionaries arriving there. With respect to the poor of the country, the missionaries' 

influence is great, because they look to them in some degree as their protectors. [As 

against their chiefs?] ± As against their chiefs; at least, not protectors exactly, but 


55 One only needs to read the British Parliamentary Papers, Accounts and papers; Papers and 

correspondence relative to the Kafir tribes, to gain some idea of what little role the missionaries 

had. Only the Wesleyans appear with any amount of frequency in official despatches. The role of 

the missionaries with respect to the state is discussed in Report of a select committee on the 

Kafir tribes, 635 of 1851. See also Williams, Where races meet, p9. 


57 Ms9037, 3 April 1828, 3 December 1829; John Ross Journal, Quarterly Paper, 1830. 

18


men who will always remonstrate with the chiefs and point out to them that those 

people are ill-used and that they ought, for their own sakes, to adopt a better system 

towards them. 58 

Most permanent station inhabitants then were people who had 

communal ties with each other. They had moved to mission stations for 

reasons of their own. In doing so, they had not removed themselves 

from their former social and political allegiances. There were 

exceptions to this, however, and these fall conventionally into two 

categories. Mission stations provided a temporary or (sometimes) 

permanent refuge for disadvantaged members of Xhosa society such as 

the old, the physically handicapped and those who fled to mission 

stations to avoid witchcraft accusations (mostly women). In addition, 

widows and women escaping forced marriages also sought out the 

stations. 

The missionaries were quite aware that many Xhosa viewed their 

stations as repositories for non-productive and unvalued members of 

society. In 1826 John Ross wrote about two widows he had come 

across when itinerating. 

I found out 2 [illegible] widow women in a situation nearly as bad ± they were left 

alone without food water or firewood & unable to procure them. They were thus 

exposed to starvation ... They used to sit at the door by the day to call passengers to 

bring them food &c &c. I know not my Dear Mother what their feelings were when left. 

But when one of them asked her son at the moment of parting what she was to do he 

told her to go to the kirk [alive] ... They have been removed here & kindly treated. 

Besides these the people here support two old women & one silly young woman who 

was hunted from place to place by the Caffres till someone [directed] her here ... I 

cannot allow the people to be burdened so much and will therefore set by £2 or £3 to 

assist them. 59 

Many of the people abandoned in this capacity were women who 

appear to have outgrown their potential as producers and reproducers. 

Their relatives realised that they could slough them off on the mission 

stations. Under Xhosa law old people, especially women, were 

supposed to be cared for by their sons. Reality, however, seems to 

have differed from theory in this. Norman Etherington emphasises a 

benign motivation behind such action. Òld men and women whose 

extreme debilitation made them an impossible burden to their children 

could be shunted away to mission stations with a fair assurance that 

they would be well cared for.' 60 None of the Scottish missionary 


58 Report of a Select Committee on the Kafir Tribes, 635 of 1851, p 64. My italics. 

59 Ms7713, John Ross to Mother, 28 September 1826. 

60 Etherington, Peasants, preachers and politics, p 94. 

19


records suggest that benevolence motivated the abandoning of relatives 

on stations, though the missionaries may have been biased. Mission 

stations, however, could not have supported many indigent people 

because their support would have devolved either upon the missionaries, 

who had limited means, or the converts, who may have been 

unwilling and were unlikely to have been motivated by Christian 

charity. 

Mission stations are also supposed to have provided havens for 

young girls escaping forced marriages. There is little evidence to 

suggest, however, that young women who took up refuge on stations 

were completely uninterested in Christianity. Their motives, too, were 

complex. People suffering from physical deformity are another 

traditional category of station residents, but this is uncertain because 

there is no evidence to suggest that they had negative status among the 

Xhosa. 61 

People accused of witchcraft form another and textually prominent 

minority moving to mission stations. 62 In the Xhosa worldview there 

was a continuity between this world and the next, with little distinction 

between the sacred and secular. Their belief in witchcraft and magic 

followed this view. While some illness and misfortune was attributable 

to natural causes, much was evil, caused by witchcraft or magic. Good 

health was the natural condition. Ill-health was assumed to have been 

brought upon a person by acts of their own contrary to the ancestors, 

or through being bewitched. To reverse ill-health and misfortune Xhosa 

chiefs summoned diviners. If suffering was attributable to the 

ancestors, they could be appeased through certain rituals. Serious 

illnesses and death were generally caused by witches or sorcerers, who 

would then have to be smelt out by the diviners, tortured, and either 

driven out of the community or killed. Once the witch's hold was 

removed, the person returned to good health. 63 It was seldom 

coincidental that the accused witch was often a person of some wealth, 

so that witchcraft accusations were a usual way for chiefs to 

accumulate new wealth. 64 

This attribution of evil to witchcraft, and the measures used to deal 


61 W D Hammond-Tooke, Bhaca society (Cape Town, 1962), p 72. 

62 In Natal only 3% of station residents were in this category. Etherington, Peasants, preachers and 

politics, p 94. 

63 H Fast, ` `Ìn one ear and out at the other'': the African response to the Wesleyan message in 

Xhosaland 1825±1835', Journal of Religion in Africa, XXIII (1993), pp 157±8; J Hodgson, The 

God of the Xhosa (Cape Town, 1982), p 17; M Hunter, Reaction to conquest, 2nd ed (London, 

1961), pp 272±319. 

64 Peires, House of Phalo, pp 38±41. 

20


with it, was anathema to the missionaries for theological and 

humanitarian reasons. 

Generally all sickness is imputed to witch craft; of course then when anyone gets sick, 

especially a chief, searches are made for the person who has bewitched the sick one. 

Death is the almost inevitable punishment. It is effected by stretching the person on 

heated stones, or applying them all over the body till he dies. Some are rubbed over 

with fat & then tied down near to an anthill, or Ants ± large black ones ± are bro.t 

[brought] from the forest, on a bush & put on the person, who dies from the torment of 

their biting. 65 

The missionaries were therefore happy to receive escaping witches 

onto their stations, especially if it prevented such retribution. 

However, it is not clear that mission stations were viewed as refuges 

in such instances. 

The first reported case of someone taking refuge in such a manner 

occurred in 1826. 

Two weeks ago I discovered a woman whom they had [burned] so that the bones of the 

feet legs & hands were quite bare. In this state she was left to die & had been in it 2 

weeks when I found her ... I had her brought here by our people ... the people of her 

place ... blamed her for witch craft, & would have done the same to her husband but 

[illegible]. His cows were given away so that we could not get one for her or her 

husband who came here. 66 

In 1829 another woman took refuge on the station, while her brother 

lost his cattle. 67 A whole spate of witchcraft accusations occurred 

around the illness and death of Ngqika in 1829. In September a woman 

living on the station heard that she had been summoned into Ngqika's 

presence. 

The poor woman guessing that she was accused of witchcraft betook herself to the 

woods. Two days afterwards three principle men came and said that this woman 

bewitched Gqika with two kirries the ashes of tobacco etc which she possessed. A good 

deal was said on the subject; they in conclusion affirmed that was she given up no 

harm would be done her; but she could not be found; they therefore plundered her 

house. She was found four days after by Mr Chalmers who secreted her for some days 

and then escorted her to the nearest military post where she still remains. 68 

Only those who had paid for their alleged misdeeds, either through 

partial torture or loss of cattle, were able to take up refuge on the 

stations. Unpunished people did not find refuge on the stations. Where 


65 Ms2367, Helen Ross, letterbook, 1826. 

66 Ms7713, John Ross to Mother, 28 September 1826. In the presbytery version of the same events 

she requested to be taken to the station. Ms9037, 5 October 1826. 

67 Ms9037, 20 May 1829. 

68 Ms9037, 3 September 1829. 

21


people accused of witchcraft did escape, it was generally through 

missionary assistance in helping them to reach the colony, or through 

the missionaries' appealing to the British residents for assistance. 

Mission stations themselves were not refuges. 

The missionaries could issue proclamations about people accused of 

witchcraft, but they had no real power to protect unless through 

constant physical presence (although the 1845 treaties forbade the 

chiefs the exercise of authority over station inhabitants accused of 

witchcraft). This lack of authority to act in cases of witchcraft 

accusation (all of which had to be sanctioned by the chiefs) was 

reinforced through the presence on the stations of diviners as well as 

the practice of witch smelling rituals in some of the converts' own 

houses. 69 Shortly after Ngqika's death 

Umqomo, one of the inhabs. [inhabitants] with the assistance of another person, 

brought a poor woman from the cattle place to the Institution, she having been accused 

of witchcraft. Without the knowledge of the inhabts [inhabitants]or of any one else 

they bound her to a stake in her own hut and proceeded to torture her by fire for the 

purposes of causing her to confess where she had hid more ibuti [the bewitching 

matter] than she had previously produced. 70 

What I am trying to emphasise here is that the missions were not 

places of refuge, at least not in an area not under direct colonial rule. 

Part of the persistence of the discourse on missions as refuges comes 

from the language of the missionaries themselves. Their letters and 

minutes are filled with references to this function of their stations, 

although any real analysis of the motives of people who moved to 

stations permanently seldom involved the possibility of protection. In 

drawing attention to the status of missions as havens, the missionaries 

were trying to represent themselves as being less impotent than they 

were. Their representations were also driven by their belief that Xhosa 

women were incapable of being proactive. 

The lack of power on the part of missionaries is important because it 

suggests even less material reason for people to have converted in the 

period before 1847. Therefore the religious element to the motives of 

those few who did convert, or indicate interest in Christianity, must 

have been stronger than has been hitherto supposed. 


69 Warner's notes in Maclean's Compendium of Kafir law and custom (Mount Coke, 1858), p 85; 

Autumn Quarterly Intelligence 1839; Ms9038, 21 August 1839. 

70 Ms9037, 3 December 1829. 

22


Reasons for conversion 

The Scottish missionaries had a very precise and rigorous understanding 

of conversion. After a period of exposure to Christianity, 

potential converts were selected as candidates for baptism by either the 

missionaries or their lay agents. Catechumens were baptised after 

anything from six months to two years, on the evidence of their 

learning. The missionaries examined the candidates on their Bible 

knowledge before admitting them. Growth in knowledge had to be 

accompanied by behavioural change ± an outward observance of 

Christian morality had to accompany the inward transformation of the 

heart. Once baptism had occurred the missionaries kept a firm eye on 

their communicants' conduct. Backsliding was frequent though almost 

always because of inappropriate behaviour rather than for reasons of 

belief. Sinners were excluded from communion for up to two years. 

Behaviour and Bible knowledge were the key requirements of a convert. 

By and large this process was common for all mission societies within 

Xhosaland. 

African experiences and definitions of conversion were quite 

different. In the literature on the spread of Christianity in Africa 

conversion has been treated in different ways. According to Robin 

Horton the shift from African cosmologies, with no supreme deities, to 

larger cosmologies, which had, was a result of `the superior 

explanatory power of the new religion'. 71 While Horton's view has a 

wide following, many people have disagreed with him. 72 Other 

researchers have emphasised the universalistic religious commonalities 

between some African religions and Christianity. 73 According to this 

exegesis the existence of a deity similar to God in African religions 

made those religions more like Christianity and allowed people to 

become converts more readily. 

Landau, however, disagrees with the search for homologies between 

African religions and Christianity. He prefers a definition of religion as 

something that functions at a personal level. 74 `Perhaps cosmologies 

are best placed at the level of the individual, to be configured by and for 

him or her. As cognitive systems, they might act upon other systems, 

intersect and persist through time.' Landau also stresses that African 


71 R Horton, Àfrican conversion', Africa, 41 (1971), pp 85±108. Quoted in B Carmody, Conversion 

and Jesuit schooling in Zambia (Leiden, 1992), pp 56. 

72 Hodgson, `Ntsikana', p xiv; Carmody, Conversion, p 56. 

73 See R Shaw, `The invention of `Àfrican traditional religion'' ', Religion, 20 (1990), p 344, for a 

discussion of the historiography of this phenomenon. 

74 Landau is not the only person to have done this; see also Rosalind Shaw above. 

23


understandings of Christianity, as Christianity was understood by its 

European practitioners, could only occur as part of a historical 

process. 75 Ìf Christianity was selectively transmitted by missionaries, 

it was also selectively received by Africans as they listened to the 

Christian message, interpreted it and imbued it with meaning within 

the context of their own values and experiences.' 76 

In this view, conversion is a continual process so that our questions 

about the spread of Christianity should relate rather to the `how' than 

to the `why'. The Presbyterian understanding of conversion was 

therefore often unreflective of actual processes of conversion. It can 

be more accurately viewed as the end point of a previously occurring 

conversion in which individuals worked out their own understanding of 

what it meant to be a Christian. Conversion also needs to be integrated 

into the other motives people had for joining mission stations. It might 

be part of a complex package of reasons people had for contact with 

missionaries, but even as a bit part we cannot discount it. As Brendon 

Carmody reminds us, conversion entails different dimensions of 

personal transformation which segue in and out of one another in their 

relevance at particular moments. 77 

Knowledge of Christianity had been present among the Xhosa since at 

least the previous century. 78 Their first exposure to it came from their 

Khoikhoi neighbours. The Gqunukhwebe and Gonaqua Khoikhoi had 

always moved between the colony and Xhosaland, where they 

traditionally filled the roles of doctors and diviners. The effects of 

contact between the two societies over an extended period had resulted 

in the Xhosa adoption of key Khoikhoi religious beliefs, including a 

ritualistic approach to a supreme being, a dualistic concept of good and 

evil and the concept of resurrection. 79 Religious innovation which 

prepared the way for Christianity was therefore occurring among the 

Xhosa before its introduction. 80 

Khoikhoi had also gained knowledge of Christianity during the 

previous two centuries. Elbourne has remarked upon `how much faster 

mission Christianity was adopted by the battered remnants of Khoikhoi 


75 Ibid, p xix. 

76 T Spear, `Toward the history of African Christianity', Africans Meeting Missionaries Conference, 

Minneapolis, 2±3 May 1997, p 3. 

77 Carmody, Jesuits, pxi. 

78 Janet Hodgson's doctoral thesis is too intensive and too thorough on the development of 

indigenous Christianity among the Xhosa and how religious conversion occurred for me to need to 

repeat it. I do not treat her work to the degree which it deserves for reasons of space. 

79 J Hodgson, The God of the Xhosa, Also `Ntsikana', pp 5, 15. Though contact between the Xhosa 

and their Khoikhoi neighbours was frequently not amicable. 

80 Hodgson, `Ntsikana', pp 15, 55. 

24


communities of the eastern and western Cape in the late 18th and early 

19th centuries than it was by the less politically and economically 

damaged African societies outside the colony'. 81 However, these 

Khoikhoi converts did not receive the gospel in exactly the way in 

which European missionaries intended, but heard the message in 

accordance with their own needs and existing situations. 82 Inspired by 

their beliefs, many began itinerating on an extensive scale. 83 Even 

before the Protestant societies became active some of the Khoikhoi 

residents of colonial stations had travelled into Xhosaland. Their 

definition of the Gospel may have been very idiosyncratic but it had the 

virtue of being understandable. 84 Most of the prominent converts on 

the Scottish stations were partially Khoi, or Xhosa who had lived 

among the Khoi such as Dyani Tshatshu. 85 

Christianity also spread among the Xhosa through the preaching of 

Ntsikana and Nxele, two very different Christians. According to Janet 

Hodgson, the greatest influence of Christianity sprung from the work 

and examples of these two figures, particularly Ntsikana. Ntsikana 

learned his Christianity from Van der Kemp as a young man. 86 In 1815 

he experienced a vision on returning from a dance and from that 

moment forth preached a version of the gospel to his people. His 

Christianity centred on the sovereignty of God, the holiness of Sunday, 

river baptism, the rejection of ochre, monogamy, prayer and singing. In 

1816 he moved to be close to Joseph Williams. After Williams died 

Ntsikana kept his version of the faith alive among his followers. When 

news came of the establishment of Brownlee's station at Chumie, 

Ntsikana prepared to join but died before he could achieve this. 87 

Ntsikana's example accounted for more converts than the missionary 

teachings did. The son of Ntsikana was baptised on the `strong bible 

evidence of his faith in Christ' in 1837. 88 

Nxele, too, may have learnt his Christianity at Van der Kemp's first 

station, though his reading of it was more apocalyptic than Ntsikana's. 


81 Elbourne, Èarly Khoisan uses', p 3. 

82 Ibid, p7. 

83 Ibid, p 10. 

84 Ibid. 


86 In light of Elbourne's work we may need to reassess this. 

87 J K Bokwe, Ntsikana: the story of an African convert (Lovedale, 1914); A Hastings, The church 

in Africa (Oxford, 1994), pp 200±221; J Peires, The dead will arise: Nonqgawuse and the Great 

Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856±7 (Johannesburg, 1989); J Hodgson, `Soga and 

Dukwana: the Christian struggle for liberation in mid 19th century South Africa', Journal of 

Religion in Africa, XVI (1986), pp 187±190. 

88 Ms9038, 4 October 1837. 

25


He converted in about 1811. He preached the resurrection of the dead, 

in which all the ancestors would return to life. He became a wealthy 

man as people who wished the return of their ancestors paid for his 

services in cattle. 89 

Ntsikana was supported by Ngqika, while Nxele attached himself to 

Ndlambe as a war doctor. Considerable conflict arose between the two 

after 1816 over their doctrines. In 1818 Nxele led the Ndlambe Xhosa 

against the forces of the Ngqika during the Battle of Amalinde (the 

result of a land and power dispute between the chiefs). Subsequently 

Ngqika called upon the British to assist him against Ndlambe who was 

defeated, while Nxele was captured and exiled to Robben Island. He 

drowned while attempting to escape. He subsequently became a symbol 

of great potency and resistance to many Xhosa. 

According to Philip Mayer, the ideologies of Nxele and Ntsikana set 

the grounds for the red and school reaction to whites from the early 

19th century. 90 Nxele and Ntsikana epitomised certain reactions to the 

Europeans. However, Mayer and others miss the point when they 

characterise these ideologies as material. As Janet Hodgson's work 

shows, support for and resistance to Christianity had also to do with 

the appeal of, and resistance to, that faith. Ntsikana and Nxele were not 

merely representatives of particular ways of thinking about missions, 

but set the terms of an ongoing engagement with Christian ideas. 91 

Hodgson has a general explanation for Xhosa conversion which 

consists of various phases ± the search, the static, the paradoxical and 

the integrative ± which provide a model of particular contexts 

necessary before people will move from one set of beliefs to adherence 

to another. 92 Christianity became meaningful when it met the 

èxistential and interpretive' needs of the Xhosa. 93 The doctrines of 

Christianity were learnt and adopted in a gradual process, in which 

continuity of form disguised changes in content. Traditional customs 

and practices were preserved and given new meaning rather than 

replaced. `[C]hange may come about by giving new meanings to old 

forms & images, or by taking the new forms and content and filling 

them with the old.' 94 Hodgson's model, however, does not always tell 


89 Hodgson, `Ntsikana', pp 99±108. 

90 P Mayer, `The origin and decline of two rural resistance ideologies' in his edited volume Black 

villagers in an industrial society (Cape Town, 1980), p 7. 


92 Ibid, pp 509±511. 

93 Ibid, p 55. 

94 Ibid, pp xviii. 

26


us why particular people converted, nor does it account for the nonreligious 

elements involved in the process. 

Two strains of indigenous Christianity (what Hodgson refers to as the 

militant resistance and evolutionary models) were therefore in place 

before concerted missionary evangelisation of the Xhosa began. 95 

These traditions were very different from the Christianity offered by 

the missionaries which required intensive social reformation to 

accompany religious change. The balm of continuity did not ease 

conversion in the missionary case, but nevertheless their brand 

appeared to hold some attraction. 

In 1824 John Ross wrote to his mother about an old man who 

attended worship at Old Lovedale: 

He is a pretty old man ± lame & a smith ± the Chief man of Zeno. From the month of 

May he has been working with us preparing the thatch ± Since then he is here every 

morning a little after sunrise to worship, generally waits till the forenoon for the 

school & then goes off. I believe it was for money he came at first ± this sometime he 

has had no such inducement. It is a wet or very cold morning that I miss him. With this 

[illegible] time back he brings some of his people not only on Sabb ± but in the 

mornings with himself. 96 

John Ross did not then know that 32 years later he would write of the 

continued faith of this man and his family. 97 

The aged disciple, James Mackindlay, known then by the native name, Ufite, a man of 

no little importance in the country, rode along Lov. plain every morning, from his 

place to the Station, for he was very lame, on ox back, horses were rare in the land 

then; & his little son of about 9 years led the patient animal. & so they went home in 

the evening. The father cleaned the thatch used for the crops of the dwelling house & 

church. He gave great heed to the word of life & soon gave himself to God ... Nor is 

James' son the only descendant of a former generation, who having given him self first 

to the Lord, then gave himself to His work in these lands. 98 

There are other examples of people for whom the missionaries' 

message was clearly of great relevance. For them Christianity had a 

personal impact like that described by Landau. Our sources do not tell 

us what Ufite believed or why he converted. It is probable that there 

were only a handful of people like him in Xhosaland, yet their existence 

means that statements about material reasons for conversion are only 

partially true. 


95 Ibid, p 147. Also J Hodgson, À battle for sacred power: Christian beginnings among the Xhosa' in 

R Elphick & R Davenport (eds), Christianity in South Africa (Cape Town, 1997), p 71. 

96 Ms8093, John Ross to Mother, 2 November 1824. 

97 Ms2988, John Ross to Richard Ross, 23 July 1856. 

98 Ms7741, John Ross to Richard Ross, 23 July 1856. This is a neater copy of Ms2988. 

27


Williams has laid some of the difficulties surrounding conversion at 

the door of a distorted Christianity ± the product of imprecise 

translation and an imprecise understanding of doctrine on the part of 

Xhosa catechists. 99 This was not necessarily the case. In the first place, 

although the missionaries themselves initially needed translators, their 

non-European Christian agents, most of whom spoke English or Dutch, 

did not. 100 In the second, it assumes that conversion required a 

completely faithful translation of doctrine. However, as Elbourne's 

work shows, European interpretations of Christianity were often 

conscientiously avoided by non-Europeans. 101 The issue of translatability 

is in fact fraught for a related reason ± the very translatability of 

a text-based faith for an oral culture. According to Lamin Sanneh, 

Christianity translates well because of its need ab initio to move among 

the languages and thought systems of so many different people. 102 

Issues to do with translation, therefore, did not preclude the African 

discussion of Christianity and its central themes. 

Conversion, however, was not the sum of the spread of Christianity. 

A climate of intellectual debate about the subject existed before the 

1830s. The Xhosa valued debate and public oral decision-making. This 

was one of the few national character traits admired by the 

missionaries. Discussions about Christianity had been occurring since 

the early century and the missionaries added new grist to this mill. 103 

The itinerating missionaries continually engaged passers-by in 

discussion of the Bible. While they were still seen to be harmless, 

people were happy to debate back. 

On Lord's day, 23rd ult. while one of your Missionaries was visiting them from kraal 

to kraal, three of their young men came to the second kraal to which he had gone, 

where they listened attentively to what was said. He was but a short time seated at the 

third kraal, when they came to it and were invited to sit down with the people of it, to 

hear what was said to them. The Missionary afterwards, on learning they were going 

to a dance [(in other words, to fornicate)], spoke to them of the commands God had 

given, to rest from all worldly employments on that day; but they had much to say in 

justification of their purpose: at length they said they would not dance that day. An old 


99 Williams, `Missionaries on the eastern frontier'. Also Hodgson, `Ntsikana', p 84. 

100 According to Laing, Bennie and Ross only began preaching in Xhosa in the early 1830s (Ms16579, 

Journal, 3 September 1831). 

101 However this is a theological point on which I am very hesitant to continue. When is Christianity 

not Christianity? How faithful do interpretations of Christianity have to be in order to be 

Christian? 

102 L Sanneh, Translating the message (Maryknoll, New York, 1989). 

103 Fast, Ìn one ear', is especially useful on conversations between converts and missionaries and 

the way in which converts understood Christian doctrine. The Wesleyans were much better than 

the Presbyterians at recording the discussions they had with Xhosa people. The Scots 

unfortunately seldom referred to the content of discussions with Xhosa people. 

28


man, who was going to the same place, now joined the company. His age and 

experience only served to strengthen the young men in their views. The Missionary ... 

then left them. He had not gone far, when he met a fifth person going to the dance. 

While talking with him, the former three young persons joined them; and the four 

proceeded with the missionary in quite a different direction, saying they would not go 

to the dance on that day. It seems that, on his leaving the kraal, some of the people of it 

said to the others, will you still go after what you have heard? The old man thought it 

would not be right to go; and after a little consideration, all gave up their purpose and 

journey. 104 

Christianity was being discussed, whether its discussants were 

converts or not. Other mission societies were aware of this too. In 

1829 William Shaw, the Wesleyan, wrote that à warm discussion had 

taken place amongst some of the natives respecting Christianity and the 

missionaries ... No Missy. was within 50 miles of these people at this 

time and the frequent occurrence of discussion of this kind is a proof 

that the Gospel excites attention among people'. 105 The discussion 

covered more territory than the missionaries themselves were able to 

reach. 106 In fact Shaw's account was more true in a sense than Ross's. 

More discussion probably happened when missionaries were not 

present, since the missionaries' conception of dialogue was rather 

one-sided. 107 Initially, Christian doctrine had little relevance for the 

Xhosa, although increasing exposure appears to have had some effect 

during the 1850s. 108 

Women's responses to Christianity 

One of the most interesting features of the spread of Christianity in 

Africa is the greater appeal it has held for women. 109 Among the Xhosa, 

as both Mayer and Debbie Gaitskell have commented, most of the 

converts (at times double the number of men) were women. This 

contention is borne out in other general and specific studies, yet often 

this fact is not considered very important. 110 The average convert is 


104 John Ross, Quarterly Paper, 1827, p 7. 

105 Hammond-Tooke, William Shaw, p146. 

106 cf Ms9037, 4 July 1833. 

107 See also Fast,Ìn one ear', p 167. Ìt is clear that the Methodist missionaries rarely took the Xhosa 

worldview seriously and consequently did not anticipate nor wish to enter into dialogue with the 

strong objections of their hearers.' 

108 Fast, Ìn one ear', pp 147±174. Also Shaw in Hammond-Tooke, William Shaw, throughout. 

109 A Hastings, `Were women a special case?' in F Bowie et al, (eds), Women and mission: past and 

present (Providence and Oxford, 1993); P Mayer, `Two rural resistance ideologies' in Mayer (ed), 

Black villagers, p 34; Landau, The realm of the word, chapter three. 

110 For instance in Peires, The dead will arise, where Peires only considers the fact that women 

constituted the greater support for the Cattle-Killing Movement on four pages, pp 171±174. 

29


discussed as if he had been male. Current studies of mission contact 

ignore this fact in their emphasis on dialogic Christianity. 

The Scottish missionaries have left little detailed information on 

the sex of their early converts, so it is difficult to determine how 

many were male and how many were female. However, their writing 

contains numerous references to the greater number of women who 

listened to the Gospel. `The women were first in confessing the Lord 

Jesus and the men followed. 111 This seems to have been a pattern 

even among the Khoikhoi, as the majority of Van der Kemp's 

adherents were also women. 112 This is of great interest especially 

given that Ntsikana's church appealed more to men. 113 The figures 

for school attendance in the period before 1847 also show a majority 

of female pupils. 114 

Explanations for this phenomenon are varied. According to Adrian 

Hastings, the European approach to mission and the mutually 

beneficial relations that existed between some missionary couples 

promoted a view of Christianity which had particular appeal for 

women. `The sense of freedom, of a cooperative effort in which men and 

women were strenuously engaged, was quite often, I believe, communicated 

to African converts, women particularly.' 115 

Hastings' explanation centres on the empowerment of women 

which Christianity offered. A similar explanation is given by Landau 

for the BaTswana, where the Gospel and the cult of its word gave 

women the ability to accrue power through organising in the public 

realm. 116 Landau's analysis is more nuanced than Hastings', who 

tends to see gender categories as essential. It roots the appeal of 

Christianity historically and within particular symbolic and social 

contexts. 

According to Gaitskell, Christianity appealed to African women 

because of the primacy it placed on motherhood. 117 Under the gendered 

ideology of the missionaries motherhood was elevated into a more 

important, distinctive role for women, giving them access to greater 


111 James Laing, Home and foreign, October 1858, p 59. The Congregationalists observed the same 

fact, dating it back to 1838. CWM SA Incoming, Brownlee to Ellis, 15 October 1838. 


113 Ibid, p 221. 

114 Ms9037±40. 

115 Hastings, `Were women a special case', p 111. 

116 Landau, The realm of the word. 

117 D Gaitskell, `The Bantu people are very emotional' quoted in G Cuthbertson, `Between God and 

patriarchy: interpreting African women's responses to mission Christianity in recent South 

African historiography and biography', Africans Meeting Missionaries Conference Minnesota, 2± 

3 May 1997, p 10. 

30


self-worth through the greater responsibility for child-rearing which 

was placed in their hands. 118 In addition African women's Christianity 

also developed separately from masculine Christianity, which gave 

them a freedom to dictate a religious form which suited their particular 

needs. 119 

The nature of Xhosa society helped ensure that the first people to 

hear the missionaries were often women. During itineration they 

visited homesteads where they attempted to gather the residents to 

hear the good news. The sexual division of labour on homesteads meant 

that women, rather than men, were more often present to hear the 

missionaries. They attended to household chores, while the men were 

out hunting or away at the chief's homestead. Among children this 

pattern was particularly marked as boys tended to be absent herding 

cattle. 120 This also meant that the girls were able to attend the mission 

schools more often. The Xhosa were initially fairly indifferent to their 

daughters' attending school, possibly because it did not matter that 

they came into contact with the missionaries. Ngqika, for instance, was 

warned against paying heed to Joseph Williams and John Brownlee, but 

women were not as important and therefore their exposure to 

Christianity was not such a serious matter. 121 

While there is even less information on female than on male converts, 

it seems clear that Christianity's appeal went beyond material benefit. 

This can be seen in the lengths to which women went to remain 

Christian in the 1840s, in the face of forced marriages. Through their 

teachings on polygamy and the proper relations between men and 

women, the missionaries offered an alternative gender order to African 

women. As a result some of the women receiving Christian instruction 

began to refuse to be part of polygamous, and in some cases 

monogamous, marriages. 122 Refusals of this sort had tremendous 

potential to disrupt Xhosa society because of the importance of the 

marriage process in social renewal. Probably few women fell into this 

category, but those who did refuse to marry gained a certain notoriety 

in relation to the potential their acts had to disrupt society. 


118 D Gaitskell, `Wailing for purity: prayer unions, African mothers and adolescent daughters 1912± 

1940' in S Marks & R Rathbone, Industrialization and social change in South Africa (London, 

1982). 

119 This is touched upon by Gaitskell in her article in Women and gender. This line is expanded upon 

in my thesis. 

120 For example, Ms16579, Laing's Journal, 30 November 1831. This was also the case among the 

BaNgwato. Landau, The realm of the word, p 54. 

121 Hodgson, `Ntsikana', pp 162, 202. 

122 Ms9038, 25 November 1840, 1 January 1845. 

31


It would seem that some factor other than the desire to avoid a forced 

marriage lay behind the flight of young women to mission stations. 

Whether they did not wish to be married polygamously, or against their 

wishes because they were Christian, or whether they became Christian 

in order to avoid such, is unclear. The exact sequence of belief in this 

instance does not matter since Christianity was still part of the 

package. 

Conclusion 

The Scottish missionaries who settled in Xhosaland in the 1820s had 

initially little influence or effect. Xhosa society was largely intact and 

most people had no need of an alternative spiritual understanding. 

Even those Xhosa who had imbibed some Christianity from Ntsikana 

and Nxele were not all taken with the arrival of the missionaries. Many 

of the people who settled on mission stations did so for material 

benefit. This discussion of the first years of missionary endeavour is 

the view held by many researchers. While correct in most essentials it 

does gloss over the intricacy and variegated effect of the spread of 

Christianity among the Xhosa. It is incorrect to see a great distinction 

between the stations and the rest of Xhosaland, because the 

missionaries had very little secular power and any they did have was 

courtesy of the colonial government. As a result the missionaries were 

little regarded, but for some they had a power that certainly was not 

secular. The impact of Christianity was small in this early period, but 

for those interested in Christianity the differences between Ntsikana's 

faith and the missionaries' faith was already apparent. Women 

particularly were interested in what mission Christianity ± as opposed 

to the strains of African Christianity already in place ± had to offer. 

32

Kleio XXXI, 1999 John Lambert: African reasons for purchasing land in Natal 

African reasons for purchasing land 

in Natal in the late 19th, early 

20th centuries 

John Lambert 1 


By the mid-20th century, the province of Natal was a complex jigsaw of 

varying land tenures. These ranged from the great reserves marked out 

100 years earlier for African occupation, and in which traditional 

methods of communal agriculture were still to be found, to the highly 

capitalised commercial farms owned by individual white farmers or 

agricultural companies. Ranging between the two were a host of 

smaller reserves and farms, owned by whites, Indians or Africans. 

This article examines the reasons for land purchases by Africans; 

purchases which saw well over 300 freehold areas in African hands by 

1948. In apartheid terminology these lands came to be referred to as 

`black spots'. 2 With the Nationalist mania for tidying up the country 

after 1948, the process of eliminating the `black spots' began ± by 1982 

approximately 745 500 Africans had been relocated in Natal. 3 

The dispossession of so many people was accompanied by a 

minimum of compensation. Only a small proportion of those relocated 

received alternative land, for the Nationalist government recognised 

the right of compensation as belonging only to those residents who 

could prove landownership. And by 1948 these were a small minority; 

the great majority of residents could only prove squatting rights. Their 

status as squatters was to frustrate their attempts to gain compensation 

then, and continues today to bedevil their attempts to have their 

lands returned to them, despite the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights 

Act. This article is not concerned either with the `black spot' removals 

or with the attempts of the dispossessed to have their lands restored. 


1 The financial assistance of the Senior Researchers' Fund of the University of South Africa is 

acknowledged. 

2 From removals to development: Cornfields ± profile and history of a rural community 

(Association for Rural Advancement [AFRA], Special Report no 7), Pietermaritzburg, 1991, p 4. 

3 AFRA News, October/December 1994, p 5. 

33


Arguments used by land claimants, however, provide an interesting 

starting point to the discussion. Whereas the intention of the first 

African landowners had been to obtain freehold land under individual 

tenure, by the 20th century most African-owned lands were being 

farmed communally with the majority of cultivators being tenants 

rather than owners. In many cases, generations of families had farmed 

the same land and there was often little difference between their 

attitude to land and that held by reserve residents. To both, the 

presence of ancestral graves gave to their land a social and religious 

significance which is largely absent in western concepts of land 

ownership. Although written recently by a Sobantu schoolboy, the 

following words sum up this attitude: 

I don't believe people should be allowed to buy and sell land. Land should not be for 

money or for people to sell and make profits from ... This is what I know about the 

land. The land is a gift from God to the people. It is not like a house. A house is made by 

man's effort; land is not. That's why the land should not be for sale. I would not pay 

even a shilling for it. The land is my blanket. I wear it like my ancestors wore it ... 4 

Yet this attitude is diametrically opposed to that of the first African 

purchasers of land in mid 19th-century Natal. To these original 

Christian purchasers the ideal of land tenure was not that held by 

their fellow Africans, but that common to white society. They saw in 

landownership an opportunity to break free of communal cultivation, to 

establish individual tenure as the norm and become prosperous petty 

commodity producers on their own land. They believed they could do 

so by investing in small plots of land and cultivating these intensively 

through family labour. Being Christian, they also saw in landownership 

a way to secure their amakholwa (Christian) identity, a conviction 

which they were to share with many purchasers of later generations. 

Despite this original intention, by the mid-20th century, Africanowned 

lands were heavily overpopulated and the grazing and gardens 

were exhausted by over-utilisation. The farm Cornfields in northern 

Natal provides an example common to most `black spots': the 1 483acre 

farm, bought in 1912 and divided into 276 plots, carried a 

population of over 6 000 by 1980, the majority of whom were tenants, 

not owners, scratching out a living and housed in substandard, often 

derelict buildings. 5 Edendale, the earliest experiment in African 

freehold tenure, provides a similar example. Although the descendants 

of many of the original purchasers still hold their lands today, they are 


4 Themba Zondi, in AFRA News, October 1996, p 9. 

5 From removals to development, pp3,6,25. 

34


landlords rather than agriculturalists and the formerly prosperous 

settlement has degenerated into a peri-urban overcrowded slum. 

The purpose of this article is not to examine African landownership 

as such. Considerable work has already been done in this field by 

Norman Etherington and myself for the colonial period, by Sheila 

Meintjes for Edendale and by Verne Harris for northern Natal in the 

early 20th century. 6 My purpose is rather to draw together the threads 

between our various works in order to trace changing African reasons 

for purchasing land in the late colonial years and into the period of 

Union. There would obviously have been as many reasons for 

purchasing as there were purchasers and the absence of evidence in 

most cases makes it impossible to know exactly what their motivation 

was. Despite this, there does appear to be a general trend of a change in 

attitude over the years from one informed by the mission ethic of 

individual tenure to one which saw communal ownership as the 

purpose of purchase. 

Original attitudes to individual tenure 

Traditional attitudes 

African land purchases in Natal began in the mid-19th century, in a 

society in which the concept of individual tenure, let alone ownership, 

was alien. Africans understood land as given into their stewardship by 

their ancestors: `Land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, 

few are living and countless numbers are still unborn' 7 sums up the 

generally accepted attitude. Land usage within the family was 

essentially communal and patriarchal. The umnumzana (homestead 

head) exercised overall authority in his umuzi (homestead), allocating 

land for gardens and grazing to the households of his wives and the 

wives of his dependent sons. His authority was not only economic; he 

also had considerable legal authority over his dependants and was 

responsible to his chief for their good behaviour. 8 His control was not, 


6 N Etherington, Preachers, peasants and politics in southeast Africa, 1835±1880: African 

Christian communities in Natal, Pondoland and Zululand (London, 1978); J Lambert, 

Betrayed trust: Africans and the state in colonial Natal (Pietermaritzburg, 1995); S M Meintjes, 

Èdendale, 1850±1906: a case study of rural transformation and class formation in an African 

mission in Natal' (PhD thesis, London, 1988); V S Harris, Land, labour and ideology: 

government land policy and the relations between Africans and whites on the land in 

northern Natal, 1910±1936 [Archives Year Book for South African History, no 1, 1991] (Pretoria, 

1991). 

7 M Chanock, `Paradigms, policies and property: a review of the customary law of land tenure', in R 

Roberts and K Mann (eds), Law in colonial Africa (London, 1991), p 64. 

8 Lambert, Betrayed trust, pp 39±40. 

35


however, absolute ± he was obliged to set aside gardens for his wives 

and his son's wives, and to allocate cattle for the use of each household. 

Within the umuzi there was a rigid differentiation between the roles of 

men and women which stressed the dominant status of the male. 

Within each umuzi there was a sexual division of labour. Men were 

responsible for the husbandry of livestock, building and maintenance of 

huts and cattle kraals, digging of grain pits and clearing of land for 

gardens. Women and girls were responsible for agricultural production, 

domestic labour, thatching huts and portering. Both the survival and 

the reproduction of the umuzi were secured by the control of the 

umnumzana over the labour of the young men and over both the 

labour and the fertility of the women within it. 9 

Despite the built-in bias towards the rights of men and of elders, the 

homestead system provided considerable security for all the inhabitants 

of an umuzi. This was particularly so for women. Despite her 

subordinate status, provision was made for a woman throughout her 

life, either in the umuzi of her father or brother, or in that of her 

husband or her son. Although she could neither inherit nor bequeath 

cattle, it was the practice in most chiefdoms that once gardens and 

cattle had been allocated to her household, they remained her property 

and could not be alienated without her consent or that of her sons. 10 

The homestead system also provided mechanisms to meet the needs 

of distress or impoverishment. These mechanisms included the 

ukutekela custom which gave members of an umuzi whose crops 

had failed the right to obtain food from other, more fortunate imizi. 

Failure to provide food in such a case was considered to be a serious 

infraction. In a society which did not amass capital, this was an 

important factor in reducing the likelihood of severe distress. The 

custom known as ukusisa also played an important role in providing 

people with resources they would otherwise have lacked: chiefs and 

izinduna with large herds could sisa cattle to others to strengthen and 

expand a patron-client relationship. 11 

For the great majority of Africans in early colonial society, therefore, 


9 Ibid, p 40. 

10 C de B Webb and J B Wright (eds), The James Stuart archive of recorded oral evidence relating 

to the history of the Zulu and neighbouring peoples, vol 2 (Pietermaritzburg, 1979), Macebo, 2 

November 1898, pp 42±43, 90±91; J Shooter, The kafirs of Natal and the Zulu country (London, 

1857), p 85. 

11 Impendhle Administrator of Native Law [Natal Archives] 1, 17/92, Mahakanci v Valulisana; see 

also J Iliffe, The African poor: a history (Cambridge, 1987), p 2; L H Samuelson, Zululand, its 

traditions, legends, customs and folklore, new ed (Durban, 1974), p 180; Personal interview 

with R T Mazibuko, Edendale, 8 August 1979. 

36


the homestead offered security and they would have viewed individual 

tenure with considerable suspicion. They risked either chiefly or 

lineage disapproval by making individual purchases and in times of 

need sacrificed the safety net provided by the extended family support 

system. 

Settler attitudes 

Most settlers would have accepted that Africans should not be 

allowed to purchase land. Originally, however, Natal officials wanted 

to encourage individual tenure and the Locations Commission of 

1846 had recommended that such tenure be introduced into the 

newly established reserves. But the Diplomatic Agent (later Secretary 

for Native Affairs), Theophilus Shepstone, was afraid that this could 

lead to a loss of land should owners sell their holdings to settlers. 

He therefore ensured that while the possibility of individual tenure 

was not ruled out, traditional concepts of tenure remained in force in 

the reserves administered by the Natal Native Trust and in the 

Umnini Reserve he established for Mnini kaManti's Thuli chiefdom 

south of Durban. His belief in the need to maintain the homestead 

system came to be shared by the colony's handful of officials and 

merchants. Until the 1870s settler agriculture remained backward 

while most imizi produced an agricultural surplus. As a result the 

settlers, particularly in the towns, were largely dependent on 

homestead supplies of produce. In addition, absentee landowners 

drew large rentals from African tenants and the administration itself 

was dependent for much of its revenue on African taxes. Because of 

this it would have been foolhardy before the 1880s for the 

administration to attempt to undermine homestead independence 

and stability. 12 

There was, however, one sector of colonial society which viewed the 

continuation of the homestead system as incompatible with its own 

purpose ± the missionaries. Although the various mission societies were 

as keen as the administration to see Africans supplying the colony's 

needs, they believed that a peasantry based on individual tenure and 

cultivating cash crops would best meet these needs. This attitude tied 

in with their aim of creating à civilized people out of their converts', 13 

an aim which had its basis in the mid-Victorian acceptance that 

Christianity and civilisation went hand in hand and that the achieve- 


12 Lambert, Betrayed trust, chapter one, passim. 

13 Meintjes, Èdendale, 1850±1906', p 29. 

37


ment of both required a society based on the 'nuclear family, private 

property and the ``freedom'' of people to labour for others'. 14 The 

existence of mission reserves offered the missionaries an opportunity 

for encouraging the growth of a peasantry and, with the approval of the 

colony's Executive Council, it was decided that land grants could be 

allowed to Christian Africans on their reserves. 15 

African purchases of land specifically for individual tenure 

If Africans were going to make the transition from traditional and 

communal to individual land tenure, the kholwa were best placed to do 

so. Although the mission reserves were inhabited mainly by traditionalists, 

who were already in possession when the reserve grants were 

made, there was, on each, a small core of Christians, most of whom 

were refugees who had arrived in the colony virtually destitute, 

without kinship ties with the surrounding clans, and usually regarded 

by their neighbours with suspicion. Unable to identify with the social 

rituals of their neighbours or to fall back on a lineage support system, 

they sought to create for themselves new rituals within a new identity. 

They were therefore far more receptive to the missionaries' message 

that Christianity went hand in hand with wage labour, trade and 

individual land tenure. Similarly, arriving as they did either individually 

or in small family units, even should they gain access to communal 

land, they could not hope to farm it with the labour of an extended 

family. Individual tenure, therefore, was attractive to them ± it fitted in 

perfectly with the belief, which they imbibed from the missionaries, 

that the nuclear family cultivating its own plot of land, was a Christian 

ideal, and it emphasised their separation from their `pagan' neighbours. 

Equally important, the fact that early colonial Natal had what Meintjes 

has termed a `simple commodity economy' 16 ensured that if they 

became independent petty commodity producers they would find a 

ready market for their produce. 

The success of the first kholwa venture in individual landownership 

encouraged the belief that the nuclear family could support itself on its 

own land. Early in the colonial period, the Reverend J Allison of the 

Wesleyan mission established a station at Indaleni for his Christian 

converts, many of whom were refugees who had come into Natal with 


14 Ibid, p 30. 

15 Legislative Council (LC) Sessional Papers, 22, 1890, Reprint of the report of the Select Committee 

no 7, 1862, pp 519, 536±539, 553±560. 


38


him. In 1851 he broke from the Wesleyans and looked elsewhere for 

land. The 6 123 acre farm, Welverdiend, adjoining the Zwartkop 

reserve on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg was for sale but was too 

expensive for Allison to buy on his own. Accordingly, the missionary 

and 90 converts clubbed together to buy the farm. Renamed Edendale, 

it was divided into half-acre village and three-quarter-acre garden 

allotments with access for the purchasers to a commonage for grazing 

and wood. 17 Each purchaser had absolute freehold rights over his own 

allotments, and no restrictions were made on alienation. Ideally 

situated to serve the Pietermaritzburg market, Edendale was paid for 

within four years and 1 000 acres were under cultivation by 1860. 18 

The success of the venture survived a break between the kholwa 

landowners and Allison in 1860 and the return of the former to the 

Wesleyan mission. Under the new dispensation, the communal 

property and those plots which had been held by Allison and rented 

to tenants were administered by three trustees ± the resident 

missionary, a representative elected by the owners, and another 

nominated by the first two trustees. 

Although non-Christians had not been debarred from purchasing lots 

in Edendale, none seem to have done so and landownership in this early 

phase was associated solely with the kholwa. The success of African 

landownership at Edendale encouraged the American Board missionaries 

also to promote small-scale agricultural settlements on their 

lands. In the 1860s they began granting one-acre village and 15-acre 

agricultural allotments to kholwa on three of their reserves (Umvoti, 

Amanzimtoti and Ifumi ± in total 3 644 acres). The American converts 

enthusiastically took up the grants. They, too, saw in individual tenure 

a way of establishing a new identity for themselves and they responded 

to the opportunities opened up by landownership for producing 

extensively for the nearby Durban market. Sugar was becoming an 

important coastal crop and families such as the Lutulis were soon 

planting sugar on their allotments. Indeed, throughout the colonial 

period, sugar cane on the mission reserves was grown only on 

individually owned plots. 19 

The enthusiasm and successful enmeshment of these early kholwa 

purchasers into the wider colonial economy was largely made possible 


17 Ibid, p 120. 

18 Lambert, Betrayed trust, p 17. 

19 Ibid, p 17; South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC), 1903±1905 (Cape Town, 1905), 3, 

Hulett, p 166; Natal, Native Affairs Commission, 1906±7, Evidence (Pietermaritzburg, 1907), 

Lutuli, p 902. 

39


because of the support mechanism supplied by the mission societies 

and the encouragement offered by the colonial administration. Both on 

the American stations and at Edendale, while individual kholwa 

families owned their own lands, they did so with communal support 

and set aside land specifically for communal purposes, for example for 

grazing and for building a church and a school. In many ways, these 

settlements were based on the early Victorian `model villages' which 

sought to recreate rural havens in a rapidly industrialising Britain. 

Despite setbacks which will be looked at below, they pointed the way to 

a future in which an African peasantry farming its own land could 

become the norm. 

By the late 1870s, kholwa purchases were taking place throughout 

the colony. According to a valuation roll of colonial landowners drawn 

up in 1878, Africans owned 83 104 acres of rural land, and a handful of 

urban properties in Pietermaritzburg, Stanger, Ladysmith, Newcastle 

and Weenen. 20 There were no legal restrictions on African purchases 

and most of the lands were registered in their owners' names. 21 

The valuation roll, and evidence given to the Natal Native Commission 

in 1881, reveals that a number of owners were purchasing on their 

own initiative, not as members of a community with mission backing. 

This would have marked an important step forward, reflecting a 

growing self-confidence amongst some kholwa that they could compete 

on equal terms with settler producers. Some, indeed, were also 

becoming successful accumulators of land, beginning with small 

allotments and using their profits from produce sales to make further 

purchases. One African, only identified as Longo, provides a good 

example: he began by renting a small farm from the Natal Land and 

Colonisation Company for sugar cultivation. With the profit he made he 

began purchasing and accumulating land of his own. 22 

By the late 1870s it was, however, becoming more difficult for any 

person, African or settler, to purchase land. The population of both 

sectors was growing and with much land still tied up by absentee 

landowners such as the Natal Land and Colonisation Company, it was 

becoming difficult to find lands to purchase. One category of land 

remained unalienated in Natal ± Crown lands. Large tracts of the colony 

remained in the hands of the Crown and, after 1873, in order to prevent 


20 Natal Government Gazette (NGG), Supplement, March 1881. 

21 Natal, Evidence taken before the Natal Native Commission, 1881 (Pietermaritzburg, 1882), 

Allsopp, p 29. 

22 Natal Land and Colonisation Company [Natal Archives], 155, Bruce to General Manager, Durban, 

no 197, 28 June 1881; no 225, 4 July 1881; no 271, 8 July 1881. 

40


speculation, no purchases had been permitted. To alleviate the growing 

shortage of land, the Land and Immigration Board recommended in 

1878 that the Crown lands be open for sale again. The government drew 

up rules and regulations based on the Board's recommendations and 

published them in the Government Gazette on 16 October 1880. 

Individuals could apply for Crown land lots which would then be 

publicly auctioned at an upset price of 10s an acre, payment to be made 

in 10 equal and interest-free annual instalments and the purchaser 

undertaking to occupy the land `beneficially', which meant building a 

suitable house and cultivating not less than one acre in every 

hundred. 23 

The opening of the Crown lands marked a crucial turning point in 

African landownership. The opening coincided with an economic boom 

in the colony consequent on the Anglo-Zulu War. This gave prospective 

purchasers sufficient cash to pay for the survey fees and first 

instalment. Equally important was the encouragement the administration 

gave to African purchasers, despite an initial reluctance to allow 

individual homestead Africans to bid in case this weakened homestead 

society and endangered the chiefs' powers of distribution. But the 

Governor, Sir Henry Bulwer, and the Surveyor-General, Dr Sutherland, 

were equally reluctant to see Africans dispossessed should offers be 

made for the land on which they were living. It was finally decided that 

individual homestead Africans should be given the right to offer for lots 

and to bid at the auctions. 24 Despite this decision, few individual 

homestead Africans became purchasers and it appears that those who 

did purchase did so of land on which their imizi were situated. 25 There 

are unfortunately no records indicating whether such purchases 

resulted from the initiative of the actual buyers or whether offers 

were made by outsiders who were then outbid by the occupiers at 

auction. Whatever the case might have been, the motive behind 

traditionalist purchases would have been very different from that 

which informed kholwa purchases. Despite the beneficial occupation 

clause, few traditionalists abandoned their homestead lifestyle, erected 

European-style houses or carried out any of the required improvements. 

The Surveyor-General's Office believed that few such purcha- 


23 NGG, XXXII, no 1849, pp 735±737. 

24 Government House (GH) [Natal Archives] 1058, 437/83, Governor to SNA, 28 September 1883, 

SNA to Governor, 5 October 1883. 

25 See, for example, the case of Umsipa who bought a piece of Crown land in Alexandra on which his 

huts were located ± Surveyor-General's Office (SGO) [Natal Archives] III/1/88, 4572/92, D 

McAndrew to Surveyor-General, 2 November 1992. 

41


sers actually understood the requirements, either of beneficial 

occupation or indeed of payment. Many traditionalists had to surrender 

their lands because they paid only the survey fees or, at most, the fees 

and the first instalment. 26 

The majority of purchasers in the 1880s appear to have been kholwa 

who saw in the opening of the Crown lands an opportunity of buying 

lands more cheaply than those being offered by absentee landowners. 

As was already the case in the late 1870s, they were usually buying as 

individuals rather than as part of a mission venture. From the records 

dealing with those who succeeded in keeping up their payments, it is 

obvious that they had purchased with the intention of becoming 

beneficial proprietors of their lands. Despite buying only small holdings 

usually averaging about 100 acres, they were successful cultivators 

and many were useful members of their immediate farming community, 

when necessary joining in erecting boundary fences and generally being 

co-operative neighbours. 27 

African purchases of lands for tribal use 

By 1890, as a result both of the opening of the Crown lands and of other 

land purchases, the 83 104 acres owned by Africans in 1878 had 

increased to 210 952. 28 A new trend had manifested itself, however, 

with the opening of the Crown lands in that while kholwa remained the 

most important individual purchasers, traditionalists were also 

entering the market as joint buyers and for reasons very different 

from those which motivated the Christians. Like the kholwa they, too, 

were facing a situation of growing land shortage but they were trying to 

alleviate the problem through tribal purchases. 

The successful functioning of the homestead system as described 

above depended on the ability of the chiefs to distribute land to their 

followers. The need for new gardens and for the seasonal movement of 

cattle between summer and winter grazing was inherent in the system 

and by the 1870s the growing number of settler farmers in Natal was 

restricting their access to land. Despite the establishment of the reserve 

system during the late 1840s, the acreage of land set aside (just over 

two million acres by the 1860s) was inadequate even for those Africans 

then settled in them. Much of the land was steep and rocky, with erratic 


26 Lambert, Betrayed trust, chapter six, passim. 

27 See, for example, Colonial Secretary's Office (CSO) [Natal Archives] 2773, Crown Lands 

Commission, 1885, Evidence, Surveyor-General; CSO 2840, Lands Commission, 1901, Evidence, 

T Foster, p 125. 

28 A J Christopher, `Natal: a study in colonial land settlement' (PhD thesis, Natal, 1969), p 276. 

42


and generally low rainfall and with veld incapable of supporting large 

herds. By the late 1870s the African population had grown threefold 

since the late 1840s, with approximately 150 000 people living in the 

reserves. The growing population meant that chiefs were finding it 

harder to allocate land for imizi, and access to grazing was becoming 

restricted. Forced to graze their cattle on the same lands, and to 

cultivate the same gardens year after year, there was a rapid 

degeneration of the grasslands, undermining both agricultural and 

pastoral lands. 29 

Until the late 1870s Africans could move relatively freely to establish 

new gardens and to graze their cattle on neighbouring Crown lands. 30 

This was particularly so in south-western Natal and the western 

midlands where the reserves were small and interspersed among vast 

stretches of Crown land. Because of this, Africans seldom distinguished 

between reserve and Crown land. Some chiefdoms were in fact placed 

on Crown land by the administration in the 1840s, either because land 

was not available for them elsewhere or for a specific purpose, such as 

the placing of the Duma chiefdom on Crown land in Ipolela as a barrier 

against San raiders from the Drakensberg. 31 

At the same time, many chiefs were confronted by a situation of 

having to find land for followers evicted from private lands. White 

immigration and the coming of age of a new generation of settlers saw a 

demand for more land for settler farming which had a ripple effect on 

the African population. Resident farmers began restricting the land 

available for labour tenants while absentee landowners either began 

evicting rent tenants, or increased rentals to a level which forced the 

tenants off their lands. Faced with this situation, many tenants were 

forced to turn to their chiefs for land on reserves which could barely 

meet the needs of their existing inhabitants. 32 

Faced with this growing land crisis, many chiefs were turning to the 

Department of Native Affairs for assistance. The refusal of the 

administration to agree to requests that the reserves be enlarged or 

that new reserves be allocated to overcrowded chiefdoms caused the 

more sorely pressed chiefs to reassess their attitude to landownership. 


29 Natal, Proceedings of the commission appointed to inquire into the past and present state of 

the kafirs in the district of Natal, and to report upon their future government ... 

(Pietermaritzburg, 1852), VI, Mesham, p 11; J Tyler, Forty years among the Zulu (Boston, 

1891), pp 38, 73±82; M S Evans, The problem of production in Natal (Durban, 1905), p 7. 

30 L C Hansard, 1, 12 February 1880, Griffin, p 629 

31 Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA) [Natal Archives] 1/1/69, 865/84, Magistrate, Alexandra to 

SNA, 2 December 1884; 1/1/85, 448/82, SNA to Governor, 20 March 1884. 

32 Lambert, Betrayed trust, p71 

43


Unlike the kholwa, they were not prepared to accept the concept of 

individual land tenure, but they were prepared to accept landownership, 

providing that ownership was vested in the person of the chief. In 

other words, that he would continue to have full control of the 

distribution of land within the newly acquired property and that even 

members of the chiefdom who contributed to the purchase price have 

no such right. As Chief Mqhawe kaDabeka of the Qadi chiefdom in 

Inanda reserve informed the 1881 Native Affairs Commission, if their 

followers were given the right to hold land under individual tenure, it 

would `destroy our powers as chiefs'. 33 

By the late 1870s, a number of chiefs, including Mqhawe and Mnini 

of the Thuli, were beginning to look elsewhere for land and were 

considering purchasing lands over which they would hold tribal titles 

recognising their legal rights of ownership. The chiefs were well aware 

that evictions of chiefdoms had occurred in the past and that their 

tenure on their reserve lands was not inviolate. 34 Legal rights of 

ownership would prevent this happening to any lands they purchased. 

As Mqhawe's present-day successor puts it, the chief wanted to buy the 

9 000 acre farm, Nooitgedacht, because the reserve that had been 

granted to the Qadi `was not ours ... to have that farm would be 

security'. With Bishop Colenso's assistance Nooitgedacht was bought 

by Mqhawe, the £1863±16-9 purchase price being raised largely from a 

`tribal levy' contributed to by the Qadi. 35 

With the opening of the Crown lands, many chiefs were prepared to 

purchase. The administration hoped that they would use the opportunity 

to buy lands next to their reserves, often lands on which their 

followers were already living. Their hopes were realised; numerous 

chiefs applied and a large proportion of the sales in south-western 

Natal in the early 1880s were to those chiefs who had been imploring 

the Native Affairs Department for additional land. In most cases these 

chiefs purchased either lands on which a portion of their chiefdom had 

already settled, or adjoining lands. 36 These purchases were usually in 

blocks of 2 000 acres, and the chiefs' followers were expected to 

contribute to the annual instalments. 

The government recognised that this could lead to legal conflicts. 


33 Natal, Evidence taken before the Natal Native Commission, 1881, Umqawe, p 226. 

34 Ibid, pp 72±73. By 1880, Mqhawe had bought 9 000 acres in Inanda under tribal title. 

35 H Hughes, `Politics and society in Inanda, Natal: the Qadi under Chief Mqhawe, c1840±1906' 

(PhD thesis, London, 1995), pp 108±109; for other requests for purchase see, for example, SNA 

1/1/39, 350/80, Magistrate Ixopo to SNA, 17 June 1880. 

36 SNA, 1/1/39, 350/80, Surveyor-General to SNA, 28 July 1882; 1/1/75, 350/84, Governor to SNA, 

24 March 1884. 

44


Under African law, land held by a chief was held in trust for all 

members of the chiefdom and the chief could not alienate any part of it 

without the consent of the chiefdom. The deeds of sale for Crown land 

purchases, however, were registered according to colonial law in the 

name of the chief as an individual. There was thus no legal guarantee 

that land bought in a chief's name would belong to the people who paid 

for it. Sutherland urged that a trust deed be devised to protect the 

latters' interests but was defeated by official inertia. 37 There were, 

indeed, numerous problems arising from these purchases. On some 

lands, ordinary members of a chiefdom were reluctant to contribute to 

the instalments unless they themselves received land on the newly 

acquired piece. Despite this, continuing land pressure saw a number of 

chiefdoms continue to purchase land for tribal purposes, particularly in 

northern Natal where few reserves had been set aside for their use. It 

was only after the passing of the 1913 Natives Land Act, that official 

steps were taken to halt such purchases. 38 

Purchases of land by African syndicates 

The first experiments in individual landownership at Edendale and on 

the American mission reserves can, in a sense, be regarded as part of a 

communal initiative in that, although full rights over his allotment were 

held by the owner, he had the backing and support of the wider 

community and shared the grazing and other lands in common. In the 

1860s and 1870s most smallholders flourished and the success 

particularly of Edendale and of Groutville on the American Umvoti 

reserve was held up as an example that an African peasantry based on 

individual tenure was possible. Not all owners succeeded, however. 

Not only did they have to cope with the transition to a fundamentally 

different approach to land use, they also were hard hit by a financial 

collapse and recession in the mid-1860s. Both on the American stations 

and at Edendale, a number of kholwa smallholders had to borrow 

money or mortgage their lands to maintain their position. This led to a 

reaction against individual land tenure. The Americans, afraid that the 

owners would lose their lands when loans and mortgage repayments 

were demanded, granted no new freehold titles and turned instead to 

leasing lands to those kholwa who wanted individual tenure. Although 

there is no indication of what the attitude of the landowners was to this 


37 Lambert, Betrayed trust, p 75; Natal, Report of the Natal Native Commission, 1881±2 

(Pietermaritzburg, 1882), p 9. 

38 Harris, Land, labour and ideology, pp 202, 248. 

45


decision, the situation at Edendale suggests that they could have 

agreed. At Edendale, a number of plots were mortgaged or sold during 

the recession, in some cases to settlers and, later, also to Indians. This 

caused widespread disenchantment with individual tenure and a 

recognition that it was largely through the communal support the 

owners offered each other that more plots were not lost. 39 This does 

not mean, however, that the Edendale kholwa turned against landownership 

as such, but that in future they would take greater care to 

protect their investment. 

Thus, when in the late 1860s a growing shortage of land at Edendale 

saw a group of inhabitants, under the leadership of Johannes Kumalo, 

look elsewhere for property, they were determined to make any land 

they purchased inalienable. In 1867 they bought the farm Driefontein 

to the north of Ladysmith. Like Edendale, Driefontein was divided into 

individual village and garden plots, but in terms of the trust deed the 

new owners held the farm through the purchase of indivisible shares, 

therefore under communal and not individual tenure, ensuring that no 

plots could be alienated. A committee of management was set up which 

acted as a governing body for the whole farm while the shareholders 

enjoyed usufructuary rights over their own plots of land. 40 

Driefontein was spectacularly successful and its version of communal 

landownership pointed the way to later purchasing practices in 

northern Natal. Growing prosperity enabled the original purchasers to 

expand their holdings; during the following years they acquired five 

neighbouring farms which gave them two blocks of land amounting to 

nearly 37 399 acres. 41 

As has been shown above, the opening of the Crown lands for sale in 

the early 1880s had seen both chiefs and individuals bidding for farms. 

As has also been seen, chiefs and the few individual traditionalist 

purchasers had tended to buy lands on which they or their followers 

were themselves living and generally they had no intention of 

introducing individual tenure. Only kholwa purchasers had that 

intention in mind. The events of the mid-1880s caused many kholwa 

to reconsider their attitude. Just as the attitude of the Edendale kholwa 

to individual ownership had been influenced negatively by the 

recession of the mid-1860s, so a severe depression in the mid-1880s 

had an equal effect. Many of the kholwa purchasers of Crown lands 

had intended paying their annual instalments with money earned from 


39 Meintjes, Èdendale, 1850±1906', pp 195±197. 

40 SANAC, 3, Kambule, pp 455f, Kumalo, pp 485f; Meintjes, Èdendale, 1850±1906', p 205. 

41 Lambert, Betrayed trust, p 17. 

46


produce sales or from transport riding. The recession saw a collapse of 

both and by 1884 many purchasers could not raise their instalments. 

Although the Surveyor-General made numerous concessions to prevent 

them from forfeiting their lands, many had to default on all or part of 

their property and on any improvements they might have made. 42 

These difficulties could be expected to have discouraged further 

purchases, but by the beginning of the 1890s the African land shortage 

was becoming critical. African access to land was now seriously 

threatened by a commercialisation of settler agriculture and by an 

increasing number of Indian cultivators in the colony. Settler and 

Indian agriculturalists were now using land previously farmed by 

African labour and rent tenants, in the process evicting the tenants 

from the land. African rent tenancy in particular was under threat and 

there was often no place to which the evicted people could move other 

than the already overpopulated reserves. Partly in an attempt to ease 

the pressure on the reserves, the administration in 1891 changed the 

purchase of Crown lands from a 10- to a 20-year instalment system, a 

concession which saw a flurry of bids for lands. 

There was to be no further official encouragement of African land 

purchase. In 1893 responsible government was granted to the colony 

and a ministry hostile to African landownership took office. Thomas 

Murray was appointed Minister of Lands and Works. In line with the 

new government's determination to tighten official control over 

traditionalist society, Murray moved to make purchases by homestead 

Africans more difficult. For example, he tightened and enforced the 

requirements for purchase, preventing bids when he felt the applicants 

would not be able to meet the requirements for beneficial ownership 

and cancelling the sales of purchasers who failed to meet their 

commitments. 43 

Although the new government was also far more hostile to the 

kholwa than its pre-responsible government predecessors, it had as yet 

made no attempt to prevent purchases of Crown or any other category 

of land by Christian Africans. Yet by the 1890s the attitude of a new 

generation of kholwa to land ownership was changing from that of the 

earlier Christian purchasers. As has been seen above, the kholwa had 

initially seen purchases as a way of transforming themselves into a 


42 SGO III/1/96, 2430/94, USNA to Surveyor-General, 11 July 1994, 16 July 1994. 

43 NGG, XLV, 2611, 25 April 1893, Proclamation 18, 1893, p 370; SGO, III/1/89, 93/93, Asst 

Surveyor-General to SNA, 8 August 1893. The SGO papers for the 1890s contain numerous files 

dealing with Africans who had to surrender their lands to the government because of noncompliance 

with the regulations. 

47


class of independent smallholders. Yet growing population pressure 

and successful competition from Indian market gardeners meant that 

few such smallholders continued to prosper in coastal and midland 

Natal. Conditions even on Edendale and Groutville, the flagships of 

progressive and prosperous kholwa landownership, were deteriorating; 

in Edendale to the extent that of the 83 landowners in the mid- 

1890s, only 12 continued to live in the village. 44 

With few lands available in coastal or midland Natal, many kholwa 

were turning their attention to northern Natal where land was more 

readily available and much cheaper. Large stretches of Crown lands 

were available in Newcastle and Dundee divisions; these had not been 

placed on the market in the 1880s and were thrown open for purchase 

only in 1894. From the start kholwa bidders were prominent at the 

auctions. A new trend now appeared. The experience of the 1880s 

seems to have convinced most Africans that individual landownership 

was too risky. 45 Accordingly, few individual kholwa made bids for 

land, instead a number would group together and bid as a syndicate, 

buying the land jointly in undivided shares. 46 If there were sufficient 

members in the syndicate, there was often little difference between the 

annual instalment paid by each member and the rent he might be 

paying as a tenant. 47 This became particularly the case in the early 

20th century when the government introduced a £3 rental on the 

mission reserves, a step which saw many kholwa turning to syndicate 

ownership in northern Natal as a more viable alternative. 

The general attitude to landownership now was closer to that of the 

founders of Driefontein rather than to that of the earlier purchasers ± 

an individual purchaser had a better chance of retaining his plot of land 

if he bought it as part of a syndicate rather than as an individual. Thus, 

although by 1901 there was an over 80% increase in the amount of land 

held by Africans, from the 210 952 acres of 1890 to 382 227 acres, 

much of this increase reflected ownership by syndicates. 48 

Legally there were similarities between purchases by syndicates 

and purchases by chiefs, for the law did not recognise a syndicate as 

a purchaser and the sales had to be registered in the names of one or 


44 American Board Mission (ABM) [Natal Archives] A/1/2, Minutes 4 July 1895, p 143; 10 July 

1896, pp 229±230; Meintjes, Èdendale, 1850±1906', p 355. 

45 Legislative Assembly (LA) Hansard, 1899, Morcom, p 264. 

46 Inkanyiso Yase Natal, 19 May 1893. 

47 SGO, III/1/89, 93/93, Surveyor-General to Colonial Secretary, 6 January 1893; Crocker to 

Surveyor-General, 22 March 1893; III/1/109, 2084/96, Anderson to Surveyor-General, 28 May 

1896. 

48 LA Sessional Papers, no 3, 1901, p 25. 

48


two members leaving the other members with no legal claim to their 

land. Few syndicates established a trust defining the rights and 

limitations of shareholders on the Driefontein model. 49 Most of the 

purchasers were also ignorant of purchase and transfer procedures 

or of the need to provide for transfer on the death of a landowner ± 

in the words of the editor of Inkanyiso Yase Natal: `They buy land 

as they would a cow or a horse with just as little thought of the 

future.' 50 This was to lead to considerable difficulties when 

individual members of the syndicate tried to sell or were forced to 

mortgage their plots. By the early 20th century there were expensive 

internal legal disputes over property rights. Many of the poorer 

syndicate members found it impossible to pay their instalments and 

were either forced off the land or became indebted to wealthier 

shareholders, money lenders or lawyers. 51 

The inhabitants of northern Natal were hard hit by the South 

African War, which saw the region occupied by Boer forces. Many 

African landowners lost considerable property during the occupation 

and found it difficult to recuperate their losses after 1902. This 

encouraged a trend which was already evident on a smaller scale 

before the war ± the purchase of land not only for the agricultural 

use of the individual owners but also for the raising of revenue from 

squatters' rentals, a time-honoured tradition in Natal where absentee 

landowners such as the Natal Land and Colonisation Company had 

waxed rich on rent tenancy. The marginal nature of much of the 

region's lands also encouraged owners to allow squatters onto their 

lands. Northern Natal enjoyed few of the agricultural advantages of 

the coast and midlands and few syndicate purchasers were able to 

survive as petty commodity producers on the allotments allocated to 

them. This saw them encouraging labour tenants to move onto their 

lands as rent tenants which in turn led to a demand from white 

farmers in northern Natal for Africans to be prevented from buying 

the remaining Crown lands. By 1903, this demand was so insistent 

that the government bowed to the pressure and barred all Africans, 

including kholwa, from further purchases. 52 

This did not prevent kholwa purchases of private lands. The South 

African War had impoverished many Afrikaner farmers in northern 

Natal and forced them to place their farms on the market. Many of 



50 Inkanyiso Yase Natal, 19 May 1893. 

51 Lambert, Betrayed trust, p 171. 

52 Ibid, p 164. 

49


these farms, particularly in the Bergville and Klip River divisions, were 

bought by kholwa syndicates. 53 Yet the nature of the soil and the 

deteriorating economic position of most Africans in Natal following on 

the great rinderpest epizootic of the late 1890s and compounded by 

East Coast fever in the early 20th century meant that most bought with 

the intention of paying off the purchase price with money from 

squatters' rentals rather than from the sale of their own produce. 54 At 

an average of £2 per hut, the rentals were generally lower than those 

paid on settler-owned lands and mission reserves and led to a situation 

where overcrowding and overstocking were becoming endemic on most 

African-owned properties. 55 By Union many properties were also 

becoming heavily mortgaged as a result both of an inability to complete 

payment of the purchase price or of the need to pay legal costs arising 

from disputes over ownership. This caused a further encouragement of 

allowing squatters on the lands. By 1910 Africans in northern Natal 

owned 155 158 acres, or 39%, of African-owned land in the colony; by 

1916 between two-thirds and three-quarters of occupants of these 

lands were rent tenants and their families. 56 

After Union, overcrowding on syndical lands in northern Natal 

reached the extent where population density on such lands was greater 

than on any other category of land. In 1916, Africans on syndical farms 

averaged nine acres per person, on mission lands 15 acres, on occupied 

white-owned lands 37 acres, and on unoccupied white-owned lands 53 

acres per person. 57 

Purchases of land by the kholwa elite 

Although the great majority of African land purchases by the early 

20th century were by members of syndicates who relied on rent 

tenancy rather than on petty commodity production, one must avoid 

oversimplifying the position. There would still have been purchasers 

whose purpose was to use their lands productively; for example, of 

the 102 154 acres of African-owned land for which transfer had been 

effected in 1910, 17 138 acres had been purchased by individuals 58 


53 Agriculture (AGR) [Natal Archives], 9, 243/1905, President, Bergville Farmers' Association to 

Minister of Agriculture, 19 January 1905; SNA, 1/1/324, 1892/1905, District Officer, Natal 

Police to Magistrate, Newcastle, 7 August 1905. 

54 SNA, 1/1/324, 1892/1905, Minutes, 7 August 1905, 21 August 1905. 

55 Harris, Land, labour and ideology, pp 254±257. 

56 Ibid, pp 246, 256. 

57 Ibid, p 250. 

58 Ibid, pp 246±247. 

50


whose purpose in buying would most likely have been beneficial 

ownership. But unfortunately the records focus on problems arising 

from landownership, and these problems tend to be associated with 

syndicate ownership. Syndicate purchases were also still being made 

for the same beneficial purposes as had inspired the purchase of the 

Driefontein farms, as witness the case of Cornfields in 1912 

mentioned at the beginning of this article. In cases such as this, 

the intention was not to draw rentals but for the purchasers to 

produce for the market and to live as viable Christian communities 

with their own churches and schools. 

There was also one group of kholwa purchasers who have not yet 

been investigated, that of a class which began as petty commodity 

producers in the 1850s and 1860s but which, by the end of the 19th 

century, can be described as a capitalist landowning class. It will be 

remembered that when the Crown lands were opened for sale in the 

early 1880s the administration had been determined that the lands 

should not be bought for speculative purposes. This intention had 

been generally successful but there were a number of cases of men 

bidding without any intention of farming or even living on the land. 

Instead they used it to build up a landholding and in the meantime to 

draw rentals from tenants. This could be profitable after the effects 

of the mid-1880s depression had worn off; one purchaser paid 10s 

an acre for land and sold it after 15 years for £3±10-0 an acre. 59 

Many of the more prosperous Edendale and Driefontein landowners 

fall into this category. Even before the opening of the Crown 

lands they were becoming accumulators of more land throughout the 

colony than they themselves could farm. Stephanus Mini, a 

prominent Edendale landowner provides a good example. Over the 

years he accumulated a large landholding for himself, in Edendale 

itself increasing a holding of 39 acres in 1861 to 72,25 acres in 

1891. 60 In 1883 he and Stoffel Molife successfully outbid Chief 

Ramncana of the Duma when the chief applied to buy the Crown 

lands on which his chiefdom had been settled by Shepstone. The two 

men ordered the chief to remove his people from the land so that 

they could place their own tenants on it. 61 His son, Stephen, proved 

an even more successful accumulator of land. By the 1890s he was 

the second-largest landowner at Edendale with 143,25 acres 


59 SANAC, 3, J L Hulett, p 161. 

60 Meintjes, Èdendale, 1850±1906', pp 400, 423. 

61 Natal, Correspondence relating to the eviction of Native occupants from Crown lands 

(Pietermaritzburg, 1883), Magistrate, Ixopo, nd, p 26. 

51


compared to 0,5 in 1889. 62 He also held land on the Driefontein 

farms while in 1883 he had bought the 1 250-acre Crown lands farm, 

Eden, on the Mkomazi river in Ipolela, with the intention of drawing 

rentals from the 45 huts located on it. 63 

By the end of the century men such as these were engaged in a variety 

of economic activities of which landownership was only one. Of all the 

African landowners in the colony they had most successfully adapted to 

the settler order, albeit not as petty commodity producers as had 

originally been the intention. In most cases they were landlords, but on 

a scale quite different from that of the syndicate owners looked at 

above. The way in which they both viewed and utilised their land was 

far closer to that of the settler landowners. 64 They were more 

conscious of the value of their land and of the need to maintain its 

economic viability; thus they avoided the temptation of overcrowding it 

with squatters, instead renting out land to fewer tenants at higher 

rentals. 65 On their Edendale lands on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg 

they had become landlords of a growing tenant class of Africans 

working in the city. 66 Landowners at Groutville were doing much the 

same. By the 1890s the failure of the local sugar mill was discouraging 

the cultivation of sugar and it had become more attractive to lease 

small plots to Indian market gardeners at £1 per acre per annum. 67 

Ironically, amongst the most successful of the kholwa capitalist 

landowners were a handful whom the government was trying to 

assimilate into the chiefly system. The presence of so many non- 

Christian Africans on mission reserves and large African-owned lands 

had created a problem of authority. They remained under customary 

law but were not under the rule of any chief. To get around the 

difficulty the administration appointed a prominent kholwa landowner 

on each land to act as an induna. Under the Native Code of 1891 these 

men were upgraded to the rank of appointed chiefs. As chiefs, men such 

as first Stephanus and then Stephen Mini (Edendale), Johannes Kumalo 

(Driefontein) and Martin Lutuli (Groutville) exercised territorial 

authority and could accept onto their lands men who were prepared 

to transfer their allegiance to them. It was thus in their interest to build 

up a following of such Africans on their lands. 


62 Meintjes, Èdendale, 1850±1906', pp 354, 363. 

63 SNA, 1/1/112, 77/89, Administrator of Native Law, Ipolela to Magistrate, Ixopo, 16 March 1889; 

SGO, III/1/77, 4587/90, Mini to Surveyor-General, 19 December 1890. 

64 A fact which both they and whites realized; see SANAC, 3, De La Harpe, p 486; J Kumalo, p 486. 

65 See SANAC, 3, S E Kambule, p 459; S Mini, pp 965±966. 


67 SANAC, 2 J l Hulett, P 154; M Lutuli, p 868. 

52


By the early 20th century, despite the decline of settlements such as 

Edendale and Groutville, their chiefships ensured that these men 

remained ardent advocates of land purchase. Through their steady 

accumulation of land they were far more prosperous than most other 

chiefs and were accepting not only rent tenants but also labour tenants 

on their lands. Martin Lutuli, for example, had become an important 

sugar planter cultivating his cane with wage labour. 68 Their position 

did mean, however, that their attitude to land was significantly 

different to that held by the kholwa during the 1850s and 1860s ± 

instead of seeing individual land tenure as a way of breaking away from 

homestead society with its lineage and chiefly obligations, they now 

saw it as a means of consolidating their own hold over Africans on 

privately owned farms and of tying themselves securely into the chiefly 

system. Stephen Mini, for example, was very conscious of his chiefly 

status, and his attempts to enforce obligations, not only on non- 

Christians, but also kholwa on their own lands at Edendale, caused 

widespread resentment. 69 

Conclusion 

In this article I have tried to show that during the second half of the 

19th century and the early years of the 20th century there was a 

marked change in African reasons for purchasing land in Natal. At the 

beginning of the colonial period concepts of individual tenure were 

quite foreign to the African inhabitants of the region; in their need to 

find a new identity for themselves the often foreign kholwa were 

prepared to embrace the mission attitude to land ownership as 

practised in the model villages of Victorian Britain ± the peasant 

supporting his family on his own plot of land. While this attitude never 

completely disappeared, conditions in the colony saw concepts of tribal 

and syndicate purchases become more popular. By the early 20th 

century the great majority of lands owned by Africans were in the 

hands of chiefdoms or syndicates. Because of the need of chiefs to 

provide for their followers, and of syndicates to raise money to pay off 

the purchase price, these lands tended to become overcrowded, 

negating the original purpose of landownership. 

One aspect that had not changed by the 20th century, however, was 

that men who held land as individual landowners still regarded 


68 Lambert, Betrayed trust, pp 126, 164 ± Stephen Mini succeeded his father, Stephanus, at 

Edendale in 1893. 

69 Ilanga lase Natal, 4 March 1904. 

53


themselves as an elite and distinguished themselves from the mass of 

impoverished Africans whose access to land was insecure. But their 

concept of what they meant by elite had changed. For the more 

important African landowners, descendants like Stephen Mini and 

Martin Lutuli of the original petty commodity producers, landownership 

now meant access to wealth and privilege for it secured to them 

equality with the chiefs. Landownership also gave them political clout, 

with African if not with white society. The great landowners dominated 

the proceedings of the Natal Native Congress and set the political 

agenda for change in the colony. 

But for most kholwa purchasers of land, landownership had secured 

them neither privileges nor wealth. Many had lost their lands through 

failure to meet their Crown land instalments or mortgage repayments 

or through debt; others held on to their lands only by so crowding them 

with squatters that the agricultural and grazing lands were exhausted. 

Ironically, at this level landownership which had originally been seen 

as a way of stressing a distinctive kholwa identity became a way of 

securing the survival of precapitalist social relationships on syndicateowned 

farms. 

54

Kleio XXXI, 1999 Peter C Alegi: First sub-Saharan African football championship 

Katanga vs Johannesburg: a history of 

the first sub-Saharan African football 

championship, 1949±50 1 

Peter C Alegi 

Boston University, United States of America 

Introduction 

In 1949, J Graham Young, Chief Welfare Officer of the Johannesburg 

Non-European Affairs Department (NEAD), was on vacation in the 

Belgian Congo when he met Commandant Van Hoorebeke, a Belgian 

officer of the colonial security forces who presided over the Union des 

FeÂdeÂrations et Associations Sportives Indigenes (UFASI) in Katanga 

province. Since both Young and Van Hoorebeke worked as organisers of 

African sport, the two white men decided to organise a soccer match, 

between black teams from Johannesburg and Katanga, in the provincial 

capital of Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), the Belgian Congo's second 

largest city. Following Young's departure, Van Hoorebeke sent an 

official invitation to the South African consul in Elisabethville, H L 

Well, on 3 May 1949: `[w]e have pleasure in informing you that we 

intend ... inviting a selected team of native footballers from Johannesburg 

to Elisabethville to play against the local team'. 2 Belgian and 

South African authorities soon transformed the match into a `test to 

decide who are the Association Football champions ``South of the 

Sahara'' '. 3 Fourteen months later, Johannesburg and Katanga com- 


1 Many thanks to Catherine Foley, Nicoletta B Alegi, Gregory Alegi, Bruce Fetter, Peter Limb and 

James Pritchett for their help at different stages of this project. 

2 Union of South Africa, Department of Native Affairs files [hereafter NTS] 2732, 640/301: Van 

Hoorebeke's invitation is cited in a letter from Union Consul, H L T Taswell, to the Secretary for 

External Affairs, 9 May 1949. 

3 Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department, Welfare and Recreation Office files [hereafter 

WRO] 138/8 v 1: Letter from Consul of South Africa in Elisabethville, to Chief Welfare and 

Recreation Officer, J G Young, Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department (NEAD), 4 May 

1950. 

55


peted in a grandiose colonial showcase in Elisabethville staged in front 

of an overflowing crowd of 30 000 black and white spectators at the 

Stade Leopold II. 

A historical investigation of this first, unofficial sub-Saharan African 

soccer championship provides a snapshot of African soccer at the 

beginning of the apartheid era, on the eve of the formation of the 

Confederation of African Football in Khartoum in 1957. 4 This case 

study examines the political intentions of the Belgian Congo and South 

African states, and investigates the meaning of the sporting event for 

black urban working-class and middle-class participants. The actions 

and voices of South African players and administrators shed light on 

black sportsmen's social experiences and their agency within (and in 

spite of) the constraints of state-sanctioned racial discrimination and 

economic exploitation. The central argument presented here is that the 

history of African soccer cannot be neatly categorised as either an 

affirmation or a subversion of cultural imperialism. Primary evidence 

was extracted from South African government documents, the black 

alternative press, 5 newspapers of the Belgian Congo, and the annual 

reports of football associations. We now turn to the origin of a colonial 

sporting idea and open, in the words of Phyllis Martin, an ùnexpected 

window on the multifaceted colonial experience'. 6 

Soccer, cultural diplomacy, and political athleticism 

The cultural diplomacy of Belgian and South African authorities 

exploited the Katanga-Johannesburg championship as an exhibition of 

political athleticism. 7 Political athleticism in the African soccer 

championship meant the public display of `corporealised nation-states' 

that replicated the racial and economic hierarchies found in the mineral 

zones of Congo and South Africa. 8 For the white-minority regimes, 

black athletes were subordinated cultural ambassadors who would 

improve the domestic and international image of Belgian and South 

African totalitarian rule. Soccer was ideally suited to meeting these 

objectives because black people in the expanding industrial, urban 


4 Olu Amadasun, History of football in Africa (Lagos, 1994), p 5. 

5 Les Switzer, South Africa's alternative press: voices of protest and resistance, 1880s±1960s 

(Cambridge, 1997). 

6 Phyllis Martin, Leisure and society in colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge, 1995), p 99; Laura Fair, 

`Kicking it: leisure, politics and football in colonial Zanzibar, 1900s±1950s', Africa, 67, 2 (1997), 

p 225. 

7 John Hoberman, Sport and political ideology (Austin, 1984), especially chapters 3 and 6. 

8 Ibid, p 167. 

56


areas of the Witwatersrand and Katanga appropriated the inexpensive, 

egalitarian sport of football in the 1920s, much like their counterparts 

in other African colonies, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin America. 9 

By 1948 no other urban cultural practice in Africa matched soccer's 

force as a conduit for leisure, social control and popular expression. 

Since the 1920s, the unholy `colonial trinity' 10 in power in 

Elisabethville, that is the copper mining giant Union MinieÁre du Haute 

Katanga (UMHK), the colonial government, and the Catholic church, 

had devised ways in which to create a disciplined, efficient, moral and 

healthy African working-class. The welfare ideology of the whites was 

synthesised in the UMHK motto `good health, good spirits and high 

productivity'. 11 These early efforts to control African work and leisure 

led to the establishment of Elisabethville's African Football Association 

(FASI) by Benedictine missionary Father GreÂ goire Coussement in 

1925. 12 Labour protests during World War II motivated the UMHK 

company's expansion of sporting and recreational opportunities in 

mine compounds. 13 The failure of the UMHK's industrial sport policy 

was tragically exposed in December 1941, when troops armed with 

machine guns massacred almost one hundred striking mineworkers on 

the soccer field at the Lubumbashi compound. 14 

The usefulness of political athleticism in Katanga grew significantly 

when the colonial trinity tightened its control in 1945. 15 After the war 

colonial administrators, Catholic missionaries, and industrial capitalists 

reinvigorated the `good health, good spirits and high productivity' 

strategy to defuse the political energies of a rapidly expanding African 

population in Elisabethville. 16 Consequently, the Elisabethville Football 

Association (FASI) in 1950 had over 30 affiliated clubs competing 


9 Allen Guttmann, Games & empires, (New York, 1994), p 44; James Walvin, The People's game 

(Edinburgh, 1994), pp 96±117; Tony Mason, Passion of the people? Football in South America 

(New York, 1995); idem, `Football on the Maidan: cultural imperialism in Calcutta', The 

International Journal of the History of Sport, 7, 1 (1990), pp 85±96; Bill Freund, The making of 

contemporary Africa (Bloomington, 1984), p 152. 

10 Crawford Young, Politics in the Congo (Princeton, 1963). 

11 Jean-Luc Vellut, `Mining in the Belgian Congo' in D Birmingham and P Martin (eds), History of 

central Africa, vol 2 (London and New York, 1983), p 153. 

12 B Fetter, Àfrican associations in Elisabethville, 1910±1935: their origins and development', 

Etudes Histoire Africaine, 6 (1974), p 221; Vellut, `Mining in the Belgian Congo', p 160. 

13 John Higginson, A working-class in the making: Belgian Colonial labour policy, private 

enterprise, and the African mineworker, 1907±1951 (Madison, 1989). 

14 Ibid, pp 192±94. 

15 B Fetter, The creation of Elisabethville (Stanford, 1976), p 174. 

16 Between 1945 and 1957 the African population increased from 70 000 to 170 000, an 8% yearly 

rate of increase: Fetter, The creation of Elisabethville, p 174; `Report of the Annual Meeting of 

the UFASI-Katanga and FASI-Elisabethville', Essor du Congo, 6 December 1950; B Fetter, `The 

Luluabourg revolt at Elisabethville', African Historical Studies, 2 (1969), pp 269±77. 

57


in four leagues divided into three divisions. Sixteen clubs also fielded 

teams in two `Reserve leagues'. Names of local football clubs suggest 

company (Lubumbashi Sports), religious (Vaticano), government 

(Union Sportive Militaire Saio), and ethnic (Empire Lunda) allegiances 

shaped the organisation and social identities of Elisabethville soccer. In 

its annual report for 1950, the FASI listed 127 European members of 

administrative committees, over 1 250 registered African players, and 

`thousands of supporters'. 17 According to Commandant Van Hoorebeke, 

men, women, and children, workers and eÂvolueÂs (native eÂ lites), 

enthusiastically supported their favourite clubs, a fact which resulted 

in a `better accomplishment of their daily tasks'. 18 The colonial ban on 

boxing contributed to soccer's popularity among whites and Africans. 19 

Soccer's low-level violence, teamwork, and mass appeal made the game 

fit the colonial agenda to control African athletes' bodies and social 

energies. An added attraction of soccer was its very low cost, 

adaptability to any level playing ground, and immediate popularity 

among the African population. Football's success as a social pacifier in 

Elisabethville was such that Belgian officials paid half of Johannesburg's 

total travelling costs on the tour, and covered all the expenses of 

staying in Elisabethville. 

In postwar South Africa, where the National Party's electoral 

victory on an apartheid platform in 1948 coincided with the end of 

wartime economic expansion and increasing African urbanisation, the 

Katanga match appealed to whites and blacks. Historically, the 

development of soccer on the gold-rich Witwatersrand parallelled the 

game's rise in the mining zones of Katanga. Football in South Africa 

became a central aspect of black urban culture during the inter-war 

years. Between 1920 and 1940 Africans established clubs and 

leagues in many urban areas, as well as provincial and national 

associations. 20 In Johannesburg, mine clerks founded the Witwatersrand 

& District Native Football Association (WDNFA) in 1917. Soccer 

attracted the interest of white liberals and missionaries, mining 

companies, and municipalities who, like their counterparts in 


17 Essor du Congo, 6 December 1950: Commandant Van Hoorebeke, `L'activiteÂ de l'UFASI du 

Katanga et de la FASI E'ville'. 

18 Commandant Van Hoorebeke, `L'activiteÂ de l'UFASI du Katanga et de la FASI E'ville'. 

19 Austin Xaba, `How Africans live in Elisabethville', Bantu World, 2 September 1950. 

20 Peter Alegi, `Contract of joy? Players and supporters in South African soccer, 1948±1976', 

University of South Africa, Department of History seminar paper, 13 May 1998. For general 

overviews of soccer in South Africa see F J Nothling, `Soccer in South Africa (A brief outline)', 

Kleio, 14 (1982), pp 28±41; Tim Couzens, Àn introduction to the history of football in South 

Africa' in B Bozzoli (ed), Town and countryside in the Transvaal (Johannesburg, 1983); George 

A L Thabe (comp), It's a goal! (Johannesburg,1983). 

58


Katanga, wanted to defuse discontent among black urban workers by 

`moralising leisure time'. 21 Thus, the Johannesburg Bantu Football 

Association (JBFA) was born in 1929, and the Johannesburg African 

Football Association (JAFA), which split from the JBFA, in 1933. The 

burgeoning popularity of soccer in Johannesburg and the `Bantu' and 

Àfrican' divisions made it difficult for liberals, missionaries, and the 

municipality to completely control the game in the black townships 

the way colonial authorities were able to do in the Belgian Congo, 

Congo-Brazzaville, Zimbabwe, and Zanzibar. 22 

The Katanga-Johannesburg championship served a dual political 

purpose. Internationally, the match in Elisabethville would be a public 

exhibition of the (supposed) tangible results being achieved by colonial 

and apartheid African social welfare policies. In so doing, the 

spectacular sporting event would help mask internal chaos and justify 

white domination. 23 In a letter to the Department of External Affairs in 

Pretoria, the Union consul, H L T Taswell, expressed the advantages of 

sport as a tool of cultural diplomacy and political athleticism: `[t]he 

sending of a Native Soccer team to Elisabethville could do much to 

improve the impression that the Union Natives are repressed and have 

little opportunity for sport or recreation'. 24 

On the domestic front, local governments in Elisabethville and 

Johannesburg stood to gain much from the match. A positive sporting 

performance by the Katanga team in front of a massive home crowd 

would `prove' the merits of continued highly centralised, white control 

of soccer in Elisabethville. The tour also presented the Johannesburg 

municipality with an opportunity to centralise control of African soccer 


21 Tim Couzens, `Moralizing leisure time: the transatlantic connection and black Johannesburg, 

1918±1936' in S Marks and R Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and social change in South 

Africa: African class formation, culture, and consciousness, 1870±1930 (New York, 1982); 

Cecile Badenhorst, `Mines, missionaries and the municipality: organized African sport and 

recreation in Johannesburg, c 1920±1950' (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen's University, 1992); 

Alan G Cobley, The rules of the game: struggles in black recreation and social welfare policy in 

South Africa (Westport, CT and London, 1997), especially chapter one; Shula Marks, The 

ambiguities of dependence in South Africa: class, nationalism, and the state in twentiethcentury 

Natal, (Johannesburg, 1986), pp 82±84. 

22 Martin, Leisure and society in colonial Brazzaville; Ossie Stuart, `Players, workers and 

protestors: social change and soccer in colonial Zimbabwe' in J MacClancy (ed), Sport, identity 

and ethnicity (Oxford, 1996), pp 167±180; Fair, `Kicking it: leisure, politics and football in 

colonial Zanzibar, 1900s±1950s'. 

23 Belgian and South African governments' support for the tour was possibly influenced by the 

British Colonial Office's organization of a Nigerian football team's highly publicized and partially 

successful tour to Britain in 1949, analyzed in Phil Vasili, `Colonialism and football: the first 

Nigerian tour to Britain', Race & Class, 36, 4 (1995), pp 55±70. 

24 NTS 2732, 640/301: Letter from Union Consul, H L T Taswell, to Secretary for External Affairs, 9 

May 1949. 

59


and thereby restrict black sporting organisations' role as potential 

social bases for political action. 

The road to Elisabethville 

The bureaucratic machinery of the South African state was unable to 

overcome time delays and financial difficulties so the match slipped to 

1950. Correspondence between the Department of Native Affairs, the 

Director of Native Labour in Johannesburg, and the Department of the 

Interior revealed that African teams were unwilling and unable to 

undertake a lengthy, expensive trip to Elisabethville. 25 When 

prompted, the powerful Chamber of Mines argued that employers 

`would have liked to send a representative team to the Belgian Congo 

[but] they could not, at such short notice, guarantee the financial 

implications of the proposal and arrange about two weeks leave for 

each of the selected players'. 26 Only the JAFA expressed interest in the 

tour. In order to make preparations, the consulate issued a report on 

the amenities and conditions to which the soccer visitors would be 

exposed in Elisabethville. 27 

The consular report cemented Pretoria's commitment to the sporting 

event by alleviating the South African state's political concerns about 

sending black athletes to a foreign land as cultural ambassadors. The 

consul reassured Pretoria that the `policy of `àpartheid'' is strictly 

enforced in the Congo ... there is not [sic] fraternisation between 

Europeans and Natives' 28 . The consul stressed the enforcement of 

evening curfews, residential segregation, and pass laws in Elisabethville, 

repressive policies that bore striking resemblance to Stallardist 

controls in Johannesburg. Taswell concluded, rather arbitrarily, that 

given these considerations and that African housing and labour 

conditions were no better in Katanga than in the Union, a soccer `visit 

would not have serious repercussion in the Union ... [provided] that the 

Johannesburg team be well trained and well equipped'. 29 Most 

important, the consul emphasised soccer's political value: `[I]f they 


25 NTS, 2732, 640/301: Letter from Secretary for Native Affairs to Director of Native Labour, 

Johannesburg, 13 June 1949; Letter from Director of Native Labour to Secretary for Native 

Affairs, 18 June 1949; Letter from Secretary for Native Affairs to Secretary for the Interior, 21 

June 1949. 

26 NTS, 2732, 640/301: Letter from the Director of Native Labour to the Secretary for Native 

Affairs, 18 June 1949. 

27 NTS, 2732, 640/301: Letter from the Secretary for External Affairs to Union Consul, 12 July 

1949. 

28 NTS, 2732, 640/301: Letter from Consul to Secretary for External Affairs, 3 August 1949. 

29 NTS, 2732, 640/301: Letter from Consul to Secretary for External Affairs, 3 August 1949. 

60


[Johannesburg players] give a good account of themselves here [in 

Elisabethville] they will do more to dispel unfavourable rumours here 

regarding Native administration in the Union than any amount of 

propaganda we can disseminate through official channels.' 30 

Union authorities made the final decision to send a team to 

Elisabethville after Van Hoorebeke suggested that the costs of the tour 

could be defrayed by incorporating Johannesburg's visit to Katanga 

into a larger programme with games on the Copperbelt of Northern 

Rhodesia (Zambia) and in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). 31 The tour's 

final schedule was a gruelling one: two matches in Elisabethville on 21 

and 23 July, followed by Copperbelt games at Chingola on 24 July, 

Kitwe on the 25th, Mufulira on the 26th. After two rest days matches 

continued in Ndola on the 29th, Luanshya on the 30th, Lusaka on the 

31st and, finally, Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia on 2 August before the 

team returned to Johannesburg. 

Who would represent Johannesburg's more than 320 African soccer 

teams? The answer was not readily apparent because the JBFA, the 

JAFA, and the Non-European Affairs Department were locked in a bitter 

struggle over control of land and resources for football in the `city of 

gold'. 32 In a move aimed at bringing Àfricans' and `Bantus' under the 

control of the municipality, NEAD Manager L I Venables proposed that 

the JBFA and the JAFA form a combined team for the Katanga 

championship. Fully cognisant of the NEAD's nefarious political 

motivations behind the proposal, the JBFA and the JAFA defiantly 

refused to cooperate and this particular attempt to take advantage of 

the tour was unsuccessful. 33 

The ideology of political athleticism in the Belgian Congo and South 

African governments, however, imposed black athletes' subordination 

to white authority. For this reason, a white supervisor was required to 

accompany the Johannesburg touring team. 34 This humiliating condition 

provoked a sharp response from the JAFA, the popular organisation 

that featured township glamour clubs Orlando Pirates and Moroka 


30 Ibid. 

31 NTS, 2732, 640/301: Van Hoorebeke's letter to the Union Consul dated 28 October 1949 is quoted 

at length in a letter from Consul H H Van Niekerk to Secretary for External Affairs, 4 November 

1949. 

32 WRO 138/8 v 2: The JBFA Annual Report for 1950 reported `more than 200 teams' while the 

JAFA Annual Report for 1950 recorded 121 affiliated teams. 

33 For a political history of the conflicts over African soccer in Johannesburg see C Badenhorst, `The 

struggle for independence: African soccer in Johannesburg' in her `Mines, missionaries and the 

municipality'. 

34 NTS 2732, 640/301: Letter from Union Consul, H L T Taswell, to the Secretary for External 

Affairs, Pretoria, 9 May 1949. 

61


Swallows at the Bantu Sports Club. Dan Twala, the tenacious, multitalented 

president of the JAFA, asserted African opposition to white 

racism and paternalism in a letter to the Native Commissioner of 

Johannesburg. 35 

We are not very keen to have a European accompanying the team as Manager, because 

we feel this is an unnecessary expense, and the European himself will be out of place, 

and will not have the confidence of the boys. There is no European in our Executive 

and we cannot think of anyone who could fill this position adequately other than our 

own African man. If they insist on a European Manager, we are not prepared to accept 

his preferential treatment as a charge to the gate at Elisabethville. 36 

The JAFA's ìndependentist' demands led to the exclusion of its 

players from the touring team. The JBFA Ð an organisation `born and 

bred in the Non-European Affairs Dept' 37 Ð was `prepared to consider 

the ... terms and conditions' of the tour. 38 On 29 January 1950, at an 

executive meeting held at the Jubilee Social Centre at Wemmer Hostel, 

the JBFA resolved that, ìn the event of the JAFA withdrawing their men 

because of a white manager ... we are prepared to supply the team 

ourselves'. 39 Cooperation with whites had its rewards. Not only did the 

JBFA represent Johannesburg against Katanga but, by the end of the 

year, the JBFA had moved its headquarters to a `magnificent and 

spacious office', courtesy of Graham Young and the NEAD. 40 

The JBFA's accommodationism was a product of the inextricable 

connection between sport and the political economy of apartheid. At the 

time, the popularity of the association was waning due to maladministration, 

deteriorating play, and the Johannesburg municipality's 

unwillingness to adequately support African soccer. 41 The departure of 

Orlando Pirates from the JBFA in 1947±48 and its subsequent 

affiliation to the JAFA in 1950 symbolised the decline of the JBFA in 

the late 1940s. The fast-rising Orlando Pirates replaced Sophiatown's 


35 Dan Twala was the secretary of the Bantu Sports Club, president of the Transvaal African 

Football Association, executive member of the South African Football Association, a radio 

personality, choir director, and playwright. In 1960±61, Twala played a central role in the 

establishment of the first domestic non-racial league, the professional South African Soccer 

League. 

36 NTS 2732, 640/301: Letter from JAFA President, Dan Twala, to Native Commissioner, 

Johannesburg, 9 November, 1949. 

37 WRO 138/8 v 1: Annual General Meeting of the JBFA, reported in letter from JBFA president, H P 

Maiden, to NEAD Manager, 16 March 1950. 

38 NTS 2732, 640/301: Letter from Native Commissioner to Director of Native Labour, 14 November 

1949. 

39 WRO 138/8 v 1: Letter from JBFA secretary, Columbus Radebe, to Senior Welfare Officer, NEAD, 

30 January 1950. 

40 WRO 138/8 v 2: JBFA Annual Report for 1950. 

41 Badenhorst, `The struggle for independence', pp 337±38. 

62


African Morning Stars as the Rand's top club in the late 1940s. 42 

African Morning Stars' fall from grace and the JBFA's decline were 

closely linked because both organisations were based in Sophiatown. 43 

For JBFA players, a sporting vacation beyond the borders of the Union 

offered them a temporary relief from work, adventure, and a chance to 

test their prowess in a continental competition. JBFA administrators 

sought to exploit the Belgian Congo tour to `pull it[self] out of the 

downfall' and regain prestige. 44 For these reasons the JBFA agreed to 

provide athletic ambassadors for white South Africa. 

For maximum political effect and economic gain, Van Hoorebeke and 

the Union consulate scheduled the match on the weekend of the Belgian 

independence holiday of 21 July. This date was deliberately selected to 

`give the Natives the impression that the Johannesburg Natives are 

coming direct from the Union to compete against the local Natives as 

the `Ìnternational Champions of Africa' ''. 45 The dress rehearsal for 

the championship began, notably, on May Day 1950 when interim 

consul A V Lille paraded with the Governor-General of the Congo, the 

Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa, and the Governor of 

Katanga at the aptly named, Governor General's Cup final in 

Elisabethville. Katanga won the trophy by defeating Leopoldville 

(Kinshasa) 2±1 at the end of a weekend competition that drew over 

40 000 Africans and a `very large number of Europeans' to the Leopold 

II Stadium. 46 

The consul was sufficiently impressed by Katanga's performance to 

send a `scouting report' of the team to Pretoria. This remarkable 

document contained a detailed technical analysis of soccer in 

Elisabethville and stressed the serious nature of the upcoming match. 

One point that should be mentioned is the fact that the Copperbelt plays the British 

type of Association Football, while the Congo Natives play continental football and 

consequently players are not allowed to interfere with the goalkeeper or obstruct him 


42 I am indebted to Richard Maguire for allowing me to use his oral history interviews with Sam 

Shabangu, Sydney Mabuza, Elliott Buthelezi, and Jimmy Sobi, August 1991. 

43 AndreÁ Proctor, `Class struggle, segregation and the city: a history of Sophiatown, 1905±1940' in B 

Bozzoli (ed), Labour, townships & protest (Johannesburg, 1979), pp 49±89; African Morning 

Stars also enjoyed the support of the notorious Sophiatown Àmericans' gang, see Richard 

Maguire, `The people's club: a history of Orlando Pirates' (BA Hons thesis, University of the 

Witwatersrand, 1991), pp 18±19. Further evidence of the connections between Sophiatown and 

the JBFA was Father Trevor Huddleston's presence as `Patron' of the JBFA, in WRO 138/8 v 1: 

Letter from JBFA president, H P Madibane, to NEAD Manager, 16 March 1950. 

44 Poth C Mokgokong, `Meet the soccer tourists to the Belgian Congo', Bantu World, 22 July 1950. 

45 NTS, 2732 640/301: Letter from Union Consul, H H van Niekerk to Secretary for External Affairs, 

[9 February 1950?]. 

46 Essor du Congo, 2 May 1950; NTS, 2732, 640/301: Letter from Union Consul, H H van Niekerk, 

to Chief Welfare and Recreation Officer, J G Young, 4 May 1950. 

63


in any way ... otherwise there will be ìncidents' on the field and spectators will 

express their disapproval in no uncertain way ... Penalties were awarded as a result of 

offsides and obstructionist tactics of which `shouldering' and `tripping' appeared to be 

very common. The referees were very strict. 

I am convinced that the standard of Native Association football is much higher than 

that of the European teams [in Elisabethville] ... I wish to impress upon you that the 

Katanga team has proved its superiority in the Congo and they regard this visit of the 

South African team as a test to decide who are the Association Football champions 

`South of the Sahara.' ... It will be embarrassing for the South Africans here, and 

especially for members of this consulate, if a weak team is sent here to represent South 

Africa. It must be remembered that only your very best team can beat the Katanga, and 

then only if they have the necessary combination. 47 

Government officials in South Africa failed to heed consular warnings. 

Instead, Graham Young claimed that the JBFA team was the `best that 

can be got', which was disingenuous in the wake of the exclusion of the 

JAFA players. Anticipating a poor result, Young dodged responsibility 

by pointing out that team selection was `made entirely by the Natives 

themselves' and that the athletes would likely be negatively affected by 

à long and tiring journey ... different climate, altitude and food ... 

[and] ground surface'. 48 White South Africa's political athleticism 

undermined the principles of sport. The ideological desire for a docile, 

disciplined black team precluded meritocratic selection, at the cost of a 

potentially embarrassing outcome on the playing field. 

Nevertheless, for the 18 players and two JBFA officials who 

assembled at Park station on 17 July 1950 it was ùnforgettable ... 

because on this day the dreams of sending a touring team abroad 

became true'. 49 The material cost of this dream amounted to three 

weeks of lost wages and £391 of (scarce) JBFA funds for 20 train 

tickets. 50 The JBFA and the NEAD agreed that lost wages would be 

compensated, in whole or in part, by gate-takings from a match in 

Bulawayo on the return leg to Johannesburg. 51 The team, under the 

direction of managers D Makhutso and J J Mabotja, was composed of 

four footballers from African Morning Stars, three from Hungry Lions, 

three from Mighty Greens, two from Naughty Boys, and one each from 

Wemmer Blue Birds, Ladysmith Home Boys, Pimville Champions, 


47 NTS, 2732, 640/301: Letter from Union Consul, H H van Niekerk, to Chief Welfare and Recreation 

Officer, J G Young, 4 May 1950. 

48 NTS, 2732, 640/301: Letter from J G Young to the Consulate for the Union of South Africa, 26 

June 1950. 

49 WRO 138/8 v 2: JBFA Annual Report for 1950, J J Mabotja, `Report of the Copperbelt Tour'. 

50 Ibid. 

51 WRO 138/8 v 1: Letter from J G Young to Director of Native Administration, Bulawayo, E Hugh 

Ashton, 22 May 1950. 

64


Southern Africa, circa 1932±33 

Railroad map of Southern Africa 

John Higginson, A working-class in the making (Madison, 1989), p 15. 

Imperial Forces, London Walk Away, and Bushbucks. This group was 

joined by eight boxers (scheduled for exhibition fights in Northern and 

Southern Rhodesia) and by official tour correspondent Austin Xaba, a 

27-year-old Zulu-speaking sports reporter from the Bantu World. 52 

The teams, travelling on a collective passport, left Johannesburg 

aboard a second-class car on the mail train to Elisabethville. D K 

Rycroft, the white NEAD overseer, took a comfortable seat in first 


52 The decision to add the boxers (with two trainers of their own, Harry Mekela and Walter 

Nombali) was made in May; see WRO 138/8 v 1: Letter from J G Young to Director of Native 

Administration, Bulawayo, Dr E H Ashton, 22 May 1950. 

65


class, courtesy of the Johannesburg City Council. On 19 July the South 

Africans reached Bulawayo station where they made final arrangements 

for the fund-raising contests with S S Juba of the Bulawayo 

African Football Association, and Neal Taylor, superintendent of the 

Bulawayo African township and trainer of African boxing teams. 53 In 

the early morning of Friday, 21 July, 83 hours after leaving 

Johannesburg, the sportsmen finally reached Elisabethville. Mabotja's 

comment captured the group's feelings: `we were not only tired of the 

journey but sick of it'. 54 

The championship 

On arrival in Elisabethville the South Africans were met by two Belgian 

officials who spoke some English and Afrikaans. The team was taken by 

bus to the Benedictine mission of St Jean. The Leopold II stadium was 

adjacent to the Catholic mission, itself strategically located on the 

southeastern border of the citeÂ indigeÁne Ð the segregated residential 

area for urban Africans established in 1921 Ð and the `white' city of 

Elisabethville. Colourful flags bearing the words `welcome Johannesburg' 

in colonial and African languages adorned city streets and the 

arch at the entrance of the mission compound where accommodation 

was arranged in the Catholic school's classrooms. 55 Despite the long 

trip the team did not rest; instead they explored the citeÂ where they 

mingled with local people. 

We were all curious. We wanted to learn more about the country. Except for 

the vast differences in language we were convinced that we had arrived 

among our brothers and sisters ... The young boys and girls gazed at us as 

we began our struggle to make ourselves understood. Of the tourists, 

`Shordex' was the first to attract big crowds. Trying to express himself in 

Sotho, Zulu, English and Afrikaans and even FanakaloÁ he was laughed at. 

One boy shook his head saying àpana buwana' meaning 'no sir'. These were 

the experiences of all the men. But what could they do? It was not possible to 

overcome language difficulties overnight. 56 

That afternoon Johannesburg played against a team from Broken Hill 

(Kabwe), a Northern Rhodesian industrial town home to some of the 


53 Austin Xaba, `Tourists arrive in Bulawayo', Bantu World, 29 July 1950. Two reporters from the 

Bantu Mirror newspaper also met the touring South Africans at the Bulawayo station. 


55 Ibid. Austin Xaba, `What I saw in the Belgian Congo', Bantu World, 19 August 1950. 

56 Xaba, `What I saw in the Belgian Congo. 

66


Carte cadastrale des comunes d'ELISABETHVILLE 

1960 map of Elisabethville 

from Anon, Elisabethville, 1911±1961 (Brussels, 1962?), p 234. 

oldest lead and zinc mines south of the Copperbelt. 57 The Leopold II 

stadium impressed the visitors: 'nothing in Johannesburg is like it. It is 


57 Broken Hill was the subject of Godfrey Wilson's Àn essay on the economics of detribalization in 

Northern Rhodesia, part I and II, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers no 5 and 6. These were Wilson's 

first studies for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. On Broken Hill-Kabwe see also Bruce Kapferer, 

The population of a Zambian municipal township: a preliminary report of a 1964 social 

survey of the Broken Hill municipal townships (Lusaka, 1966). 

67


a modern ground with beautiful lawns.' 58 The grass surface, however, 

proved unsuitable for the South Africans' physical, fast-paced style Ð 

a British inheritance perfected on township gravel surfaces Ð not least 

because the players lacked boots with proper studs and were competing 

only hours after a long, arduous journey. Broken Hill led 2±0 at the 

halftime break as Morning Stars midfield general Ùncle Louis' 

Kgarome and forward `We Ree' Maripa failed to link effectively with 

captain `Shordex' Kitsa. In the second half the Johannesburg passing 

`was of a very high standard' and Morning Stars striker `Booikie' 

Raphela scored two goals as the South Africans earned a 2±2 draw. 59 

Local fans praised the South Africans' `mathematical precision' in 

passing and their `spectacular' ball control technique. Spectators were 

heard exclaiming: `C,a, c'est du football!' (this is soccer). 60 

The South Africans' first day in the capital of Katanga ended with an 

evening reception at the movie theatre in the mission compound next to 

the stadium. The social event was hosted by the Centre Extracoutumier, 

an agency of African municipal government created and 

controlled by the Benedictines and the mining industry in the 1930s. 61 

Leading members of the Centre Extra-coutumier held prestigious 

positions in the all-black comiteÂ executif of the UFASI Ð the sporting 

body ruled by Van Hoorebeke's all-white comiteÂ direction Ð their 

subaltern position in sport replicating their political subordination in 

colonial society. 62 Austin Xaba described one such African official, 

Augustine Ilingio, as 

a well-to-do man ... [who] owns flats, taxis, a store and runs a fishery. He 

pays no less than 29 African employees. Ilingio is married with a family of 

seven children and during the last world war he served in the British 

Military Force. He takes an active part in the local football association, one 

of the best run in Central Africa. He also owns a big house worth more than 

56 000 francs which is about £400. 63 

Xaba concluded that àll told, it [the Belgian Congo] is a pleasant 


58 A Xaba, `What I saw in the Belgian Congo'. 

59 A Xaba, `Katanga want regular soccer contests', Bantu World, 5 August 1950; WRO 138/8 v 2: 

JBFA Annual Report for 1950, J J Mabotja, `Report of the Copperbelt Tour'. 

60 Essor du Congo, 26 July 1950. 

61 The Centre Extra-coutumier (CEC) was similar, in form and function, to Native Advisory Board in 

South African townships. On the CEC see B Fetter, Àfrican associations in Elisabethville, 1910± 

1935: their origins and development', Etudes Histoire Africaine, 6 (1974), p 221. 

62 Essor du Congo, 25 January 1950: ÙFASI du Katanga, Composition du ComiteÂ pour 1950' listed 

the president, both vice-presidents, and five of the 16 commissaires in the subordinate comiteÂ 

executif as being members of the Centre Extra-coutumier. 

63 Austin Xaba, `How Africans live in Elisabethville', Bantu World, 2 September 1950. 

68


place to visit provided you will be satisfied with the conditions as there 

are ``no politics allowed''. Even organised boxing is illegal, so that the 

big support for soccer is no surprise.' 64 

The following day the South African squad went on morning visits to 

the Leopold II museum and the zoological gardens, and watched 

Katanga demolish Broken Hill 6±0 in the afternoon. This result 

confirmed that the winner of the Sunday Katanga-Johannesburg match 

would be sub-Saharan African soccer champions. Later that day, the 

Sophiatown connections between Morning Stars and the JBFA surfaced 

and created a major controversy in the Johannesburg camp. Mighty 

Greens and Hungry Lions players benched in the Broken Hill game 

threatened to withdraw their services for the remainder of the tour if 

they were not selected for the Katanga game. `Vry Staat' Tsotetsi, 

`Zyks' Dumakude and `Dupes' Sekwalo charged that members of 

African Morning Stars bribed team selectors to play, claiming that 

`[t]hose who had provision will always be in the scheme'. 65 

When Sunday came, the gates of the Leopold II stadium opened at 1 

pm. The curtain-raiser between Elisabethville clubs Englebert F C 

(future winner of the 1967 and 1968 African Champions' Cup) and 

Vaticano F C entertained 30 000 spectators divided along racial, 

economic, and generational lines in the packed stands. Higher than 

usual ticket prices reflected the prestige of the match. 66 The match 

programme shows that admission to the EuropeÂens section in the 

roofed Tribune Centrale cost white adults 50 francs (white students 10 

francs) while African adults paid 25 francs for a seat in the segregated 

Congolais section. The overwhelming majority of the African crowd 

paid 10 francs for entrance to the Tribune Laterale, and five francs to 

stand on the terraces (black students three francs). Three-day tickets 

(available only to Africans) ranged from 50 francs for the main stand, to 

20 francs for the Laterale stand, and 12 francs for the terraces 

(students five francs). 67 Without social data on fans in attendance we 

can speculate from ticket prices that this spectacular soccer match 

attracted a crowd representative of the diverse social, economic, 

ethnic, linguistic, gender, and generational background of Elisabethville's 

African population. 


64 Ibid. 


66 A typical ticket price for adult whites at Leopold II stadium in 1950 was 25 francs, see, for 

example, Essor du Congo, 28 October 1950. 

67 WRO 138/8 v 2: Match program, `Double Tournoi Triangulaire aÁ l'occasion de la FeÃ te Nationale 

de la Belgique'. 

69


1955, photo of Leopold II stadium (where the championship took place), gymnastics 

exhibition in honour of King Badouin of Belgium from Anon, Ð Elisabethville, 1911±1960 

(Brussels, 1962?). 

Fans and players alike awaited the contest with tremendous 

anticipation and excitement. The Belgian authorities' ban on `superstition 

and fetishism' indicated not only their absolute intolerance for 

African cultural and social practices but, more important, the existence 

and use of propitiatory and protective magic in preparation for 

matches. 68 Witchcraft was, and still is, part of urban football cultures 

all over Africa. In the words of Phyllis Martin: 

Zulu religious specialists prepare teams for football matches. In Cameroon, 


68 NTS 2732, 640/301: `Katanga-Johannesburg-Broken Hill: Instructions pour le ComiteÂ et le 

Service du Controle' [nd]. 

70


Sierra Leone, and in Liberia, supporters and team members perform rituals 

to influence results in their favour. In Nairobi, teams budget for religious 

specialists. On the middle Congo, where resources were seen as finite, a 

match started with a preordained number of goals. The role of team 

magicians in this zero-sum game was to steal points from their opponents 

while protecting their own goals. African sport is `bathed in the occult', 

wrote a Zairois [Congolese] referee. 69 

In addition to spiritual and tactical preparation, Johannesburg's 

players made alterations to their boots by fitting studs to avoid the 

problems encountered against Broken Hill. Interestingly, when trainers 

Mabotja and Makhutso chose the starting lineup they included none of 

the dissenters. The only change from the previous match was the 

replacement of Sam `Mozambique' Duna of Hungry Lions, a lightningfast 

winger timed at 9,9 seconds in the one hundred-yard dash, with the 

crowd-pleasing scorer `King Marshall' Mvubu of Ladysmith Home 

Boys. 70 Before taking the field, 34-year-old captain and school teacher 

`Shordex' Kitsa offered moral encouragement and advice to the 17year-old 

secondary school pupil and goalkeeper Zachariah Àl Die 

Hoekies' Mahlatsi. 

The Katanga team consisted of employees of the colonial government, 

BCK railways, and UMHK mines. 71 In truth, the `Katanga' designation 

was misleading since all the players were from Elisabethville clubs. 

League champions St Eloi contributed five players, Englebert and 

Vaticano two, Lubumbashi and Kipushi one each. 72 The well-trained 

Katanga team had defeated all central African opposition encountered 

during the year and captured many trophies at the association and 

provincial level in 1950. The Leopold II stadium's grass pitch was 

perfectly suited for Katanga's short-passing game, a direct, machinelike 

style of play based on discipline, teamwork, tenacity, and 

relentless practice. The roots of this playing style were grounded in a 

colonial political economy that exploited soccer to ìnculcate respect 

for discipline, work and authority' among Africans. 73 

The white referee and two linesmen from the all-white Ligue de 

Football du Katanga (LFK) embodied colonial authority. Political 


69 Martin, Leisure and society in colonial Brazzaville, p 121. For a recent study on witchcraft and 

soccer in Africa see, Anne Leseth, `The use of juju in football: sport and witchcraft in Tanzania' in 

G Armstrong & R Giulianotti (eds), Entering the field: new perspectives in world football 

(Oxford and New York, 1997), pp 159±74. 

70 Mokgokong, `Meet the soccer tourists to the Belgian Congo'. 

71 Essor du Congo, 7 June 1950. 


73 Vellut, `Mining in the Belgian Congo', p 134. 

71


athleticism was trumpeted by the performance of the national 

anthems of Belgium (`The King') and South Africa (`Die Stem') by 

an African military band. 74 The pre-game festivities ended with team 

captains, FrancË ois Pandemoya and `Shordex' Kitsa, exchanging flags 

as a symbol of friendship. When the match got underway at 

4:30 pm, the enthusiastic crowd witnessed an anticlimactic rout. 

Katanga combined hard defence with fast attacks and wall-passes 

that released wingers forward to cause havoc in the visitors' 

defence. 75 Quick, spirited, and tough, the hosts demonstrated the 

efficiency of direct football according to the French-language daily, 

Essor du Congo. For their part, Johannesburg vice-captain John 

Àmerican Spoon' Khoza deflected three goals into his own net with 

teammate `Nonnie' Moletsane adding another. The young goalkeeper 

Mahlatsi mishandled three long-range shots from the wings to 

account for three more Katanga goals. Offensively, excessive 

dribbling and poor finishing led to a number of missed chances. 

Manager J J Mabotja attributed his team's disastrous play to 

witchcraft, poor refereeing, and ankle injuries to Moletsane and 

Maripa. 76 When the final whistle blew, Katanga had defeated 

Johannesburg by 8±0! A triumphant Katanga team received the 

winner's trophy from the chief executive of the COBOMA company in 

front of a jubilant home crowd. Observers judged the punishing 8±0 

score as trop seÂveÁre (too harsh) for a Johannesburg team. 77 The 

hosts' final message to the South Africans was: `Your standard of 

football is very high indeed but your front line refuses to score.' 78 

Conclusion 

As an exercise of political athleticism and cultural diplomacy the 

first sub-Saharan African soccer championship was relatively 

successful. The Belgians were clearly satisfied because everything 

in Elisabethville had gone according to plan. Large but disciplined 

crowds at the Leopold II stadium watched good quality football and 

celebrated a resounding victory of the Katanga side. Belgian colonial 


74 NTS 2732, 640/301: Confidential letter from Consul of the Union of South Africa, H L T Taswell, 

to the Secretary for External Affairs, 3 August 1949; Austin Xaba, `Katanga want regular soccer 

contests', Bantu World, 5 August 1950. 



77 Essor du Congo, 24 July, 26 July 1950. 


72


rule had showed it was as èfficient' as its African football 

representatives. In a self-congratulatory tone Van Hoorebeke concluded 

that the championship showcased colonial development and 

justified white rule; in his words, soccer in Katanga was `worthy of 

the Belgian Congo's Progress' and, therefore, `blacks and whites owe 

themselves full collaboration and understanding within the UFASI, 

and [that] the authority of the European comiteÂ direction assisted 

by the Native comiteÂ executif must be preserved to ensure the 

harmonious development of the federation'. 79 

Van Hoorebeke was so pleased by the outcome that he pressed 

South African officials to make the visit an annual affair. 80 With the 

coming of apartheid, however, the notion that black soccer players 

would represent white South Africa as cultural ambassadors, or in 

any other guise, disappeared from state ideology. But soccer tours to 

and from South Africa involving black teams continued throughout 

the 1950s without government support. Continued interest in 

international competitions reflected soccer's popularity as an 

expression of African urban popular culture. 

As for the South African participants, the rest of the 1950 tour 

saw Johannesburg win one match, lose three, and draw four. 81 When 

the team reached Bulawayo in August the men were exhausted, 

homesick and most were limping from leg injuries. After a sparse 

crowd attended their last scheduled game in Bulawayo, the drained 

men refused to stay for a second, unscheduled weekend game which 

might have produced the £150 in gate-takings not realised from the 

midweek contest. In the end the players were never compensated for 

lost wages, not least because of Young's lackadaisical attempts in 

recovering funds promised to the JBFA by the white-run Copperbelt 

African Football Association and the UFASI. 82 

Given the trying circumstances of the tour, the JBFA men fared 

reasonably well. The team showed sportsmanship under pressure 

and built a sense of camaraderie after the initial controversies. Top 

scorer `Booikie' Raphela and captain `Shordex' Kitsa were praised for 

their great `courage and perseverance' in playing in all nine games. 


79 Essor du Congo, 6 December 1950. 

80 Xaba, `Katanga want regular soccer contests'. 

81 The scores were: 2±2 vs Chingola, 1±2 vs Kitwe, 2±2 vs Mufulira, 8±0 vs Ndola, 2±2 vs 

Copperbelt, 1±2 vs Lusaka, while the scoreline in the final loss at Bulawayo was not recorded in 

J J Mabotja, `Report of the Copperbelt Tour'. 

82 WRO 138/8 v 2: Letters from Young to the Union consul in Elisabethville, and to Copperbelt 

African Football Association, Mr Howie, 7 September 1950. 

73


Manager J J Mabotja concluded that `we lost many matches and 

played unnecessary draws, but because we could not score. ... As far 

as ball control is concerned, we outclassed our opponents.' 83 

Nevertheless, in an interview in African Sports magazine several 

years later, `Shordex' Kitsa, also known by the praise name `Yasuka 

Yahlala' (ìt goes up and it sits') for his exquisite ball skills, looked 

back on his distinguished career over a quarter century and 

remembered the Katanga football machine. When the reporter asked 

him to single out the best team he had ever played against, `Shordex' 

replied without hesitation: `The Katanga side of 1950'. 84 



84 African Sports, September 1953: ` ``Shordex'' Kitsa has been topflight in soccer for 25 years' by 

Robert Resha. 

74

Kleio XXXI, 1999 David Thelen: Popular uses of the past in American life 

Popular uses of the past in American life 

David Thelen 1 

Indiana University, Bloomington 

This article began as a talk I presented in November 1998 to the 

Chairman's Forum for staffers and policy makers of the National 

Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Museum of American 

History, and Smithsonian Institution. The NEH's grant of about 

$200 000 to Roy Rosenzweig and me for the first national scientific 

survey of how Americans understand and use the past was the only 

time that agency had supported `basic research' of this kind into the 

uses (as opposed to the content and presentation) of history. We (and 

the NEH) wanted to know what Americans bring to their engagements 

with history in schools and museums. The actual survey was 

done by the Indiana University Survey Research Centre and 

represented a collaboration between Roy and myself as well as 

dozens of others scholars, curators, archivists, and teachers. We 

have just published our story about the data as The presence of the 

past. 2 

From my superficial readings South Africans have addressed issues 

of how memory intersects history, of how personal connects with 

public, and individual with collective and national, at deeper levels 

than discourse in the United States of America where jargon and 

political orthodoxy constrain our capacity to make sense of our 

findings and burden us with language that is too academic and 

abstract for us to recognise and analyse what we found. Our findings 

might be interesting for you, because Americans told us about how 

they processed experience and used the past to make a difference in 

somewhat different terms than I've seen in my very superficial 

reading in South African accounts. It will be interesting to explore 

whether we are looking at different things or merely looking through 


1 Editor, Journal of American History 

2 Roy Rosenzweig & David Thelen, The presence of the past: popular uses of history in American 

life (New York, 1998). 

75


different lenses. And at the end of the day I find the central question 

in our American data to be the one Sarah Nuttall raised for South 

Africa: `How can we create a collective memory that is multiple, 

flickering with the many meanings that individual experience can 

collectively [and I would add individually] bring to it?' 3 

This project began a decade ago when a dozen people from 

academy, museum, library and humanities council worlds gathered 

in Indianapolis to explore how the wonderful new scholarship in 

American history that was uncovering new actors in the past and 

exploring them in new perspectives could better connect with wider 

audiences in classrooms, museums and public forums. We were 

encouraged by what seemed a tremendous increase in popular 

interest in history, reflected in growing numbers of museums and 

museum visitors, of popular participation in festivals and commemorations, 

of community history projects to collect memories and 

preserve records, of audiences for movies and television programs 

about the past. We were encountering new audiences through new 

places for the practice of history like neighbourhood oral history 

projects, NEH-sponsored collaborations between scholars and museums, 

public programmes sponsored by the new state humanities 

councils. We wanted, we needed, to know what Americans were 

bringing to these activities in order for us, history professionals, to 

be able to recognise and engage people in meaningful dialogues. 

But at just this point in the early 1990s our desire to listen to our 

fellow Americans collided with the `culture wars' or `history wars' in 

which history, of all things, suddenly became an arena of major 

public debate. But instead of encouraging popular engagement with 

the past, as debate about the past might have done, the `history 

wars' had the opposite effect. Both Left and Right fought over the 

content of history to present to Americans, but they agreed that 

Americans were ignorant and incompetent users of the past who 

needed their guidance. From the Right NEH Chairman Lynne Cheney 

declared that: à refusal to remember is a primary characteristic of 

our nation'. From the Left Michael Wallace complained that òurs is 

an historicidal culture'. Speaking for many professionals, American 

Historical Association President Louis Harlan deplored the `present 

public ignorance of our cultural heritage. This ignorance and 


3 S Nuttall, `Telling ``free'' stories: memory and democracy in South African autobiography since 

1994' in S Nuttall & C Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the past: the making of memory in South 

Africa (Cape Town, 1998), p 88. 

76


indifference has alarming implications for the future of our nation 

and our historical profession.' 4 Americans, many history warriors 

assumed, cared little and knew less about the past. But instead of 

wanting to document what Americans did not know about the 

Missouri Compromise or the Yalta Agreement, we still wanted to 

know how people used and understood the past in their daily lives. 

But how to find out? We thought that a good starting place would 

be to discover frequencies of popular behaviours and attitudes and to 

be able to correlate them with demographic variables like age, 

gender, race, income, and education. Survey research methods 

promised to generate statistically reliable measures of the proportion 

of Americans who gave comparable answers to specific questions 

that we presented to all respondents in telephone calls to randomly 

selected individuals. The Indiana Survey Research Centre identified 

the people to be called and transcribed their conversations with 

respondents. By these procedures our results are more reliable than, 

say, newspaper opinion polls. Some Gallup polls randomly sample 

about 300±400 Americans; our national sample randomly called 808 

people. Because our national sample was better at capturing 

subgroups based on age, gender, income and education than those 

based on race and ethnicity, we added three samples each of 200 

(numbers survey researchers consider large enough to make gross 

comparisons) African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Sioux 

Indians. The responses that we tabulated are based on respondents' 

interpretations of the questions as well as what they wanted to tell a 

telephone interviewer. 

We saw the telephone survey not only as an opportunity to 

observe the frequency of attitudes and behaviours, but also as an 

opportunity to listen to a large number of Americans from all 

demographic groups talk in their own terms about their uses of the 

past. We wanted to ask them about themes that we had discovered 

in pre-testing elicited rich responses that would allow us to get 

behind the numbers at some underlying perspectives. We designed 

the telephone interview so that the quantitative questions would take 

only 10 minutes and the remainder, which ran to an average of 30 


4 L Cheney, American memory: a report on humanities in the nation's public schools 

(Washington, undated but published in September 1987), p 5; Michael Wallace, `The politics of 

public history' in Jo Blatti (ed), Past meets present: essays about historic interpretation and 

public audiences (Washington, 1987), p 38; Louis R Harlan, `The future of the American 

Historical Association', American Historical Review, 95 (February 1990), p 3. 

77


more minutes, was in response to open-ended prompts and 

questions. 

In forming questions we had learned from intensive piloting and 

pre-testing interviews that it mattered what term we used to 

describe what we were interested in. We found, for example, that 

if we asked about the word `history' people thought we were asking 

about things that happened to famous people, things that were 

studied and written about by experts, and then drilled into them in 

school in profoundly unpleasant experiences ± in other words, to say 

that something is `history' is to say that it no longer has life or 

meaning. The terms `heritage' and `tradition', by contrast, elicited 

warm and fuzzy feelings but did not stimulate much good reflection. 

But the term `the past' was both broad and sharp enough to invite 

people to reflect in probing ways about their personal experiences 

and national events, to talk about their uses with depth and candour. 

Our most basic finding is that Americans engage the past almost as 

naturally and commonly as they eat and breathe. `When you think 

about the past, you feel comfortable, like you belong,' a government 

clerk told one of our interviewers. Americans engage the past deeply 

and critically to live their lives. They make their own spaces for 

using the past and use those spaces on their own terms. They are 

not empty vessels waiting to be filled up with other people's content. 

They participate actively in the past regardless of age, gender, 

income, education, race, place of residence, or religion. 

Table 1 summarises the percentage of Americans pursuing each of 

ten past-related activities. Note the column headed `National sample'. 

More than half the people in the national sample had pursued at 

least half of these activities in the previous year. By taking and 

looking at pictures Americans decide what events they want to 

record and how they want to remember them and then to revisit and 

even re-enact and relive experiences. Put in albums, they provide 

ways of measuring change and continuity, progress and decline, good 

times and bad. By showing and talking about pictures or videos with 

others, they turn their experiences into stuff for building and 

deepening relationships with others, for sharing a past with those 

who were and were not there, providing a base for deepening the 

relationship with the person they show them to. And arguments 

about what pose a subject should strike, or even what picture to 

take, or what pictures to put in albums, are wonderful moments 

when people argue about how they want to remember the past. 

78


TABLE 1 

Participation in Activities That Relate to the Past ± by Racial/Ethnic Group 

We asked our respondents if they had participated in each 10 `àctivities related to the 

past . . . during the last 12 months.'' The table below reports the percentage of 

respondents in our national sample and each of four racial/ethnic groups who reported 

participating in the activities in the far left column. The numbers in parentheses indicate 

how many respondents in each group answered the given question. 

Racial/Ethnic Groups 

During the last 12 National White African Mexican Pine Ridge 

months, have you ... Sample American American American Oglala Sioux 

Looked at photographs 91% 92% 88% 87% 82% 

with family and (808) (624) (300) (195) (184) 

friends? 

Taken any photographs or 83 85 71 76 66 

videos to preserve (808) (624) (300) (195) (182) 

memories? 

Watched any movies or 81 82 74 68 72 

television programs (803) (620) (298) (195) (185) 

about the past? 

Attended a family reunion 64 63 63 68 59 

or reunion of some other (808) (624) (300) (195) (182) 

group with whom you 

have a shared experience? 

Visited any history 57 58 46 46 65 

museums or historic (807) (623) (300) (195) (182) 

sites? 

Read any books 53 54 45 35 45 

about the past? (805) (621) (300) (195) (185) 

Participated in any hobbies 39 40 30 25 37 

or worked on any collec- (807) (623) (300) (193) (182) 

tions related to the past? 

Looked into the history of 36 36 29 26 54 

your family or worked on (807) (623) (300) (195) (185) 

your family tree? 

Written in a journal 29 29 24 16 20 

or diary? (808) (624) (300) (195) (183) 

Participated in a group 20 20 21 15 25 

devoted to studying, (808) (624) (300) (194) (182) 

preserving, or 

presenting the past? 

Roy Rosenzweig & David Thelen, The presence of the past: popular uses of history in 

American life (New York, 1998), p 234. 

79


The most interesting clue for me in the numbers is that two-fifths 

of Americans actively pursue hobbies and collections related in some 

way to the past. Here are places where people engage the past on 

their own terms, decide what questions and sources to ask, and seek 

out others who share their hobby. An Oklahoma man captured his 

reasons for collecting old motorcycles in one sentence: Ìt's my life.' 

Those who write in a journal or diary do so for reasons very similar 

to those of photographs: to fix memories, to be able to revisit 

experiences, to question and build narratives of change and 

continuity over time. 

TABLE 3 

Connectedness to the Past on Six occasions ± by Racial/Ethnic Group 

We asked our respondents for the following information about six `òccasions'': `Òn a 

scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means you felt no connection to the past and 10 means you felt a 

strong connection to the past, please tell [us] how connected to the past you felt on the 

following.'' The table below reports the mean score our national sample and four racial/ 

ethnic groups gave the occasions in the far left column. The number in parentheses 

indicates the number of respondents on which each mean is based. 


How connected to the National White African Mexican Pine Ridge 

past do you feel when ... Sample American American American Oglala Sioux 

Gathering with your 7.9 7.8 8.3 7.7 7.6 

family? (795) (615) (291) (192) (180) 

Visising a museum or 7.3 7.4 6.5 6.9 6.7 

historic site? (782) (609) (270) (180) (177) 

Celebrating holidays? 7.0 7.0 7.0 7.5 6.5 

(797) (616) (295) (193) (177) 

Reading a book about 6.5 6.7 6.0 6.1 5.5 

the past? (775) (602) (280) (179) (166) 

Watching a movie or 6.0 6.0 6.1 6.2 4.6 

television program (778) (603) (288) (189) (177) 


Studying history in 5.7 5.7 5.2 5.8 4.1 

school? (788) (610) (290) (183) (180) 



80


Table 3 provides an overview of our attempt to find out where in 

their daily lives people feel most connected or involved with the 

past. We asked them to assign a number on a l0-point scale that 

reported how connected to the past they felt in each setting. 

`Gathering with your family' is the place where the past feels closest 

to them, where they feel most connected. A firefighter from 

Columbus, Ohio, explained: `My family is spread out. So when you 

get together you talk about things that have happened in the past 

and memories. The past is your connection really.' And the third 

item, celebrating holidays, overlaps the first, for people usually 

gather with families to celebrate holidays. Visiting a history museum 

or historic site, as I'll develop later, is also an experience that people 

connect with their families and friends. Americans feel less 

connected as they read books and watch television. A little later I 

will explore why museums and historic sites came out so high on our 

survey and history classrooms so low. Table 3 further deepens the 

picture that emerges of the family as the place where people most 

actively engage the past, and the past of the family is the past that 

matters most to most people. Three times more people are interested 

mainly in the past of their family than are interested in the past of 

the United States. 

Table 2 tells us about whom people trust as they try to find out 

about things in the past that are outside their own first-hand 

experience. Museums again are the most trusted sources, followed 

by grandparents and eyewitnesses. Americans want to be able to 

interrogate sources on their own terms, and they trust people who 

observed at first hand the tremendously varied ways that people can 

perceive an experience as it is unfolding. They trust movies and 

television least because they believe that the mass media are most 

remote and unrecognisable from their own experience. Their 

accounts not only cannot be cross-examined but are also heavily 

mediated by commercial and political agendas. Documentaries are an 

exception not because they are not mediated but because they are 

not mediated by commercial motives of appealing to lowest common 

denominators by adding details and dialogue solely because they will 

bring people to theatres or sell sponsors' products. 

The numbers provided fascinating and surprising clues that made 

us even more eager to listen to respondents' stories in order to try to 

understand findings that seemed to challenge many of our starting 

assumptions about history and how it is engaged. As we read the 

81


TABLE 2 

Trustworthiness of Sources of Information About the Past ± by Racial/Ethnic Group 

We asked our respondents for the following information about seven ``places where people 

might get information about the past'': ``Please tell [us] how trustworthy you think each is 

as a source of information about the past using a 1 to 10 scale, where 1 means not at all 

trustworthy and 10 means very trustworthy.'' The table below reports the mean score our 

national sample and four racial/ethnic groups gave the sources of information in the far 

left column. The number in parentheses indicates the number of respondents on which 

each mean is based. 

How trustworthy do you 

think .......... are as a 

source of information 



National White African Mexican Pine Ridge 

Sample American American American Oglala Sioux 

Museums 8.4 8.5 8.1 8.6 7.1 

(778) (608) (283) (185) (176) 

Personal accounts from 8.0 8.0 8.4 8.3 8.8 

your grandparents or 

other relatives 

(789) (615) (289) (189) (181) 

Conversation with someone 7.8 7.8 7.9 8.2 8.0 

who was there (790) (611) (290) (188) (177) 

College history 7.3 7.4 7.0 8.3 7.1 

professors (692) (537) (261) (172) (161) 

High school history 6.6 6.7 6.2 7.5 5.9 

teachers (771) (594) (293) (189) (178) 

Nonfiction books 6.4 6.4 5.6 6.6 5.4 

(747) (583) (278) (181) (169) 

Movies or television 5.0 4.9 5.2 6.0 4.2 

programs about the past (783) (610) (291) (189) (180) 



transcripts of 1 453 phone conversations that ran to 850 000 words, 

Roy and I felt acutely that what we were hearing from respondents 

was pushing against the limits of our training and experience as 

historians. We could recognise what they were telling us more 

readily from our experiences as human beings than from our training 

as historians. Samuel Schrager put the problem we faced very well 

82


in talking about oral history: Òur own immersion in this talk as an 

ordinary activity is surely part of the reason it has proved so 

resistant to specification, so hard to pin down as a subject for 

study.' 5 We were exploring things that may seem strange to public 

and professional practices of history as we know them, but things 

that are familiar to us as people. 

The clearest way to introduce these findings is to present my most 

troubling conclusion at the start and then try to connect that 

conclusion back to the more familiar terrain of history. Historians 

tend to assume that individuals shape their lives out of particular 

times and places. The real actors, the real initiators of change, are 

cultures, groups, institutions and nations, we assume, and the 

important things to study are large events like depressions and wars. 

Individuals, we presume, adapt to and reflect initiatives from these 

larger developments. We quote individuals mainly to illustrate 

something larger, such as industrial workers in the 1930s or 

housewives in the 1950s. After listening to our respondents, 

however, I am struck that individuals often use the past to meet 

needs that are at once unique and universal in uses that transcend 

time and place, uses like the need to establish identity and 

immortality, to find and hold on to others, or to make a difference 

in their lives and in the world. Those uses are less recognisable in 

professional history practice that they are in plays or novels or 

paintings. In order to find the people we called in our survey we 

need to foreground individuals and primary groups like families and 

friends and neighbours and work colleagues, to take seriously the 

needs they are trying to meet with those around them, and to leave 

open for investigation just how much their uses are shaped by larger 

circumstances. 

After trying to report how individuals seemed to use the past to 

shape their lives, I want to explore how and where they reached 

actively out to others to make and become part of collective 

traditions and pasts and how they embedded their personal 

experiences in stories of larger institutions, cultures and nations 

and events like wars and depressions. Then I will explore what they 

brought to professional history-making by comparing their favourable 

experiences with museums with their unfavourable experience 

with history classes in school. 


5 S Schrager, `What is social in oral history?', International Journal of Oral History, 4 (June 

1983), p 77. 

83


Respondents seemed to begin their uses of the past with an 

assumption that èxperience' provided the building blocks. Although 

some academics privilege the word `history' over the word èxperience', 

which they disdain as shallow, personal, even self-deceptive, 6 

our respondents placed an understanding of experience at the centre of 

their uses of the past. A 50-year-old African American high-school 

counsellor from Alabama described the difference between learning 

about the past from first-hand experience and learning about it from 

what he called `history'. 

If you didn't live through certain things, you just go by what people say, what history 

says. If they lived through it, they know what they are talking about. I lived through 

segregation. My grandchildren are learning about it in school. It's hard for me to know 

anything that I didn't come through. I didn't come through slavery times. But 

integration times I came through. When my kids read something, they can say, Ìs it 

true?' And I know because I was there. 

The content of the past ± slavery or integration ± mattered less than 

whether people had `come through' it on their own; in his words, had 

experienced it. To experience something, the Latin origins of the word 

remind us, is to undergo or undertake through personal first-hand 

engagement. And our respondents began their reflections on their pasts 

with a basic insight that experiencing or coming through something 

created two possibilities: participants could change the thing they were 

passing through ± whether a personal event or a world war ± or that 

experience could change them. The possibility of changing or being 

changed by an experience was the starting place for popular historymaking. 

But experiences did not come to respondents with prefabricated 

lessons; their meanings had to be made. They presented paradoxes and 

contradictions. They had to be approached through each of the senses, 

poked and handled. And experiences could be revisited, reenacted, 

relived and reinterpreted to address changing needs and desires. And 

respondents worked hard to make meanings of experience: to 

recognise, recall, interrogate and empathise. And the look and feel of 

an experience depended on its context and the perspective of the 

participant. `We may go to the same event,' explained a black Baltimore 

retail manager, `but my travels through that event may be different. My 

experience in those events may differ. I create different speculations 

about events.' So they wanted to get close to the experience in order to 

sense the many possibilities that existed at the time it happened. 


6 For example, Joan Scott, Èxperience', Critical Inquiry, 17 (Summer 1991), pp 773±797. 

84


Seeing themselves as agents who could change and be changed by 

experiences, using the past to meet personal needs and sustain 

relationships, the people we spoke with assembled isolated experiences 

into narratives or trajectories. From these narratives they could project 

what might happen next, set priorities and take responsibility for the 

future course of events. The rhythms of family life, often the 

responsibility parents felt to prepare their children for what they 

would find in life, inspired the narratives they formed to explain change 

and continuity in the larger world. 

Enough abstraction. Let me illustrate with a story that a South Texas 

Mexican American school district employee told our interviewer. She 

wanted to understand how her family would be altered by an 

experience her son went through. `When we Mexican Americans were 

in school, we had our own school on the other side of the track,' she 

began. `We didn't mix with anybody until junior high. We weren't 

allowed to go swimming in the town swimming pool. I could go on and 

on with those kinds of things.' But times changed. Ì really thought 

discrimination was all over in 1976.' But that year something shook her 

faith in progress: `My son was a senior in high school, and he asked a 

girl to the prom, and her parents would not let her go with him because 

he was Mexican American.' This rejection was even more puzzling 

because her son did not look like the kind of person Anglos 

discriminated against: `My son is blond-haired, blue-eyed.' The prom 

rejection ùpset me very much', she told our interviewer. Ìt just kind of 

brought it all back, and told me hey, it's not over, discrimination is not 

over, it's still around. It's very subtle.' 

She was troubled that she had failed to create an accurate narrative 

about discrimination from observing encounters between Mexican 

Americans and Anglos ± in schools, at swimming pools, in their choices 

of partners for prom dates and marriage. And she grieved that by 

wrongly interpreting the extent of change and continuity, she had failed 

in one of the basic tasks of parenthood: preparing her children to fulfil 

their dreams. Ì had not really said anything to my children because I 

thought discrimination was over and done with.' After all, she tried to 

reassure herself, `my kids have not really experienced the kind of 

discrimination that I did. They're all intermarried now, intermarried 

with Anglos.' The clear large difference in the experience of the two 

generations had given her hope for the future; she didn't want to alarm 

her children or dampen their dreams. Ì didn't want to bring this to 

their attention.' Wrestling with feelings of inadequacy both as an 

interpreter of experience and as a parent, she lamented: Ì was naive to 

85


think that it didn't exist.' The challenge of describing the course of 

discrimination against Mexican Americans was inseparable from the 

challenge of preparing children to make their way in the world. 

This story illustrates how the challenge for individuals to take 

responsibility for their lives and those of their loved ones connected 

with their needs to interpret larger developments like change and 

continuity in ethnic relations and thereby provides a good example of 

how to make history more visible to people like those we interviewed: 

how we could foreground individuals as interpreters and actors while 

also exploring more conventional social narratives. 

The people we interviewed tended to group their narratives around 

recurring themes and issues. First, they looked for the direction of a 

pattern: where it had come from and where it seemed to be heading, 

whether their weight was going down or their grades were going up. 

They measured the pace of a development ± of arguments in a marriage, 

alcohol consumption, or the waning of discrimination against Mexican 

Americans. They asked if events were moving too fast or too slow 

toward a dreaded or hoped-for outcome or away from a cherished or 

feared source. When they experienced something new, they tried to fit 

it into the narrative, to assess whether it would make things better or 

worse and for whom. They observed obstacles that might divert a story 

from ending at a place they expected as well as things that might speed 

its arrival at the expected ± or desired ± outcome. And they wondered 

how much longer a journey would take. 

The narratives our respondents made differed from those of novelists 

or historians because they were unfinished, their endings were not 

scripted ± they framed only directions and paces in which things 

seemed to be moving. By creating narratives and revising them to meet 

changing needs, respondents tried to understand how they could make 

a difference in sustaining or changing the direction of their personal 

lives, their families, or their larger world. When was something beyond 

their reach and when should they try to intervene? Ì can't worry about 

what I can't control,' reported a St Louis man in his seventies. 

When asked what narratives or themes about the past they hoped to 

pass onto their children, respondents often emphasised struggles by 

individuals to make a better world for themselves and those who came 

after them. By presenting history as a story of struggle, by insisting 

that blessings from political freedom to personal wealth and racial 

tolerance were the fruits of dedication and hard work by real 

individuals, respondents described not only a content of history but a 

responsibility they wanted users to feel when they engaged history. 

86


They wanted younger people, their children, to feel responsible for 

determining the course of events instead of merely accepting their fates 

as automatic rights or unearned gifts. A New Jersey woman in her 

fifties wanted children to know `how hard the struggle was for 

grandparents when they came to this country, how difficult it was in 

the neighbourhoods they lived in, in the ethnic separations of the 

people in the communities, the language barriers and the lack of 

education' because she believed that `the children of today think that 

everything was just given to them, that our parents were just given 

everything they had, that they didn't have to work for it'. A Maryland 

floral designer wanted children to draw the same conclusion about why 

they had political freedom: `They should know how people have 

struggled for freedom for this country ... we don't want them to think 

that life is always easy ... they have to work for what they want ... 

everything isn't handed to them.' 

The real issue for respondents in teaching about sacrifices and 

struggles at the core of civic heritage was the same as for family 

heritage. Did people feel these were personal inheritances they were 

compelled to defend and assert or were they merely distant conventions 

to be memorised for an exam or harmless stories with which to indulge 

Grandma at a holiday dinner? Participation shaped the historical 

culture our respondents revealed to us. The central issue was how to 

use the past to take responsibility for shaping the course of events. 

Before they could shape their futures, respondents said, they had to 

take responsibility for what they had or should have done or said in the 

past. When they spoke of `learning from the mistakes of the past' ± and 

many did ± they meant they regretted not only the things they had done 

or said but also the priorities they had set and the narratives they had 

made to guide them from past toward future. Ì wish I knew then what I 

do now,' typically observed a man from South Carolina. In the process 

of taking responsibility for actions in the past in order to change a 

trajectory in their lives they also sought to transform themselves into 

better people. They revisited events and decisions and tried to imagine 

how they might have created different outcomes if they had interpreted 

them or acted differently. They revisited experiences that in retrospect 

appeared to be turning points (such as a particular moment of making 

love or trying drugs) and re-examined resulting narratives (such as a 

pregnancy or pattern of drug addiction) as they contemplated how they 

might change or sustain the directions of their lives. Indeed, an Illinois 

woman in her late teens reported that she learned from her pregnancy 

`the importance of marriage before sex'. 

87


Only by acknowledging what they now felt about their pasts ± the 

grief or loss or shame or regret or guilt, as well as the pride and joy ± 

could they incorporate those experiences into new narratives. To relive 

moments or patterns he wanted to avoid in the future, a Tampa store 

owner kept what he called `my book of sins, things that I would do 

differently if I had the opportunity'. The most dramatic accounts of 

how people transformed themselves were the many stories of religious 

conversations. An Arkansas woman put it bluntly: Ì have been born 

again. I remember my life before I met Christ and now the difference is 

just like dark to daylight.' 

Our respondents grounded their changing patterns of using the past 

to take responsibility in the rhythms and seasons of their individual 

lives, not those of cultures or institutions. Between adolescence and 

young adulthood, the time when they were leaving home and 

establishing their independent lives, respondents began to take 

responsibility for themselves and others for the first time. They 

wanted to figure out who they were, where they came from, where they 

were heading, whom they wanted to be, to use the past to shape their 

identities. `To find out why I am like I am' an Indiana factory worker 

talked with his grandparents, looked up family genealogies, went 

through state and federal records, and consulted a computer database. 

In order to satisfy her `desire to know where my personality traits come 

from', a Florida fund raiser worked her way `back in generations, 

talking with my great-grandmother' and poring over old photographs. 

In the autumn of their lives, respondents worried about how they 

would be remembered after death, what legacies they could leave. In 

short, they worried about their immortality. They worried about what 

they could pass on ± identity, example, genes, skills, wisdom, 

traditions, hobbies, values ± to those who came after them, particularly 

grandchildren. A retired aviator from Denton, Texas, was `trying to 

pass on your values to your children'. A 70-year-old Oklahoma City 

woman said she assembled her family tree because she wanted `to leave 

a legacy to my children and grandchildren of their parents and 

grandparents. I am getting older, and if I don't do this no one else will. I 

want them to know where they came from.' 

Respondents turned the discovery, recognition, remembering, sharing, 

and interpretation of experience with others into basic means for 

building relationships with other people. A 66-year-old woman from 

Chesterfield, Missouri, recalled how the discovery of shared experiences 

had drawn her closer to her father-in-law: `He and I had very 

similar growing-up experiences. We both grew up on very poor farms ... 

88


We both had brothers that were ne-er-to-do.' And a receptionist in 

Carmichael, California, knew how to deepen her friendships: `When a 

friend is upset or angry, knowing a little about their past helps me to 

relate to them.' 

In listening to individuals actively explore their pasts to find 

connections with others I began to question a frequent assumption of 

historians that individuals are examples or pieces of larger groups. 

When our respondents agonised over how to describe their identities, 

they often sounded as if individuality were larger than groups or 

cultures as they explained who they were and wanted to be. They 

contained within themselves many identities and can construct 

themselves in more creative ways. An individual could be a woman, 

lawyer, Republican, Chicagoan, lesbian, Irish-American. Each piece of 

her identity carries with it materials and traditions that individuals, 

alone or with others, could turn into a collective past. A 24-year-old 

Brownsville, Texas, woman said: `My husband is an Anglo, and I am a 

Mexican. Our child may like both of [our cultures] or neither of them. 

That's up to him or her. It's very beneficial for the children to learn 

both.' We heard so often that `my family has a lot of intermingling' that 

we came to agree with Gary Nash that the general direction of the 

United States truly was toward `Mestizo America.' 7 An Oglala Sioux bus 

driver described how `the main thing is to blend both sides, the Indian 

and the Anglo, and taking the best of each and applying it to yourself'. 

And beyond cultures individuals could locate themselves on a 

continuum that stretched from individuality to humanity. A black 

retail manager from Baltimore told us that `the fact that I'm a different 

individual makes my past very different from everyone else's. And at 

the other extreme a black photographer from Memphis identified with 

what everyone shared: `We are all human. We all was born of a mother. 

We all have similarities. We all experience hurt, pain, financial burden, 

joy, disappointment.' 

When respondents identified with larger demographic identities and 

processes, they often used the larger category to extend their 

individualities. A majority of respondents from all ethnic groups said 

that the past that interested them most was the past of their families, as 

Table 4 reveals. But, as the same table reports, blacks were six times 

more likely than whites to be interested mainly in the past of their 

ethnic group, and Sioux Indians were nine times more likely than 


7 G Nash, `The hidden history of Mestizo America', Journal of American History, 82 (December 

1995), pp 941±964. 

89


whites. The basic difference, as the open-ended probing revealed, was 

that in the process of instilling the same family pride and heritage that 

white grandparents instilled, black and especially Indian grandparents 

blurred their extended families into the experience of the whole race 

and white grandparents stopped with the extended family. A 33-yearold 

Memphis photographer told an interviewer that her grandmother 

was the person who had most influenced her. And from the grandmother 

she had learned the same lessons that white grandchildren 

might learn from their grandparents: Ì learned from her that 

regardless of whatever you do as a person you have to learn to 

genuinely like people ... You have to tolerate things you don't like or 

you'll go crazy.' But then she extended the story of her grandmother 

into the story of slavery and racism. `My family is a part of me. My 

great-grandma, her parents were slaves, she used to tell us about living 

on the plantation. And as a kid you learned to stay out of people's way 

... the white man's way.' And a black woman from suburban Maryland 

argued for the artificiality of our question that asked her to choose 

between past of family and racial group because `the past of your 

family is also the past of your racial group'. 

TABLE 4 

Most Important Pasts ± by Racial/Ethnic Group 

We asked each of our respondents the following questions: ``Knowing about the past of 

which of the following four areas or groups is the most important to you: the past of your 

family, the past of your racial or ethnic group, the past of the community in which you 

now live, or the past of the United States?'' The table below reports percentage of 

respondents in our national sample and four racial/ethnic groups who choose each of the 

pasts in the far left column. 

Knowing about the past 


of which of the following 

four areas or groups is 

most important to you? 

National 

Sample 

White 

American 

African 

American 

Mexican 

American 

Pine Ridge 

Oglala Sioux 

Your family 66% 69% 59% 61% 50% 

Your racial or ethnic group 

The community in 

8 4 26 10 38 

which you now live 4 3 4 7 7 

The United States 22 24 11 22 5 

N = 796 N = 616 N = 297 N = 191 N = 176 

Roy Rosenzweig & David Thelen, The presence of the past; popular uses of history in 


90


Evangelical churchgoers turned religion, like race, into a collective 

identity that they used to buttress and extend their family worlds. `The 

church is like a second home,' said a 74-year-old Massachusetts 

woman. Indeed, part of the appeal of religion was that it offered 

answers to questions about morality, immortality, identity and agency 

that troubled most people in our survey. Evangelicals told agonising 

stories of struggles to bring the trajectories of their own lives into line 

with a single, eternal master narrative that extended from the creation 

of the earth to the end of time. 

In the same way that they created collective pasts as extensions of 

their individuality, they grounded their interpretations of the national 

past in the independent and active participation, in recalling how they 

had changed or been changed by national events. The fact that twofifths 

of respondents said that the events that had most greatly affected 

them came from their personal lives (like the divorce of parents) and 

one-fifth named national events (like World War II) might lead us to see 

personal and national pasts as separate realms. But an additional twofifths 

of respondents named public events and then volunteered one of 

two patterns in which they had participated in those events. Thirteen 

per cent of respondents volunteered that they had taken part in the 

public event (as soldiers in a war or marchers in the civil rights 

movement, for example) and 29 per cent said that they had had a 

memorable social experience in hearing about and making sense of the 

event (crying with other fifth graders when they heard of Kennedy's 

assassination, for example). Among those who selected public national 

events as the most memorable of their lives, two-thirds talked about 

them as things they had experienced and engaged for themselves in 

their own terms. A 30-year-old fund raiser from Florida said she was 

uninterested in history when she took formal history classes in school, 

but às soon as I got out I wanted to know more about history'. Soon 

after graduation she explored one of the most national of all historic 

sites, the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, which she enjoyed 

because ìt was done on my terms rather than being force-fed it in 

school'. 

In explaining how they reached out to wider pasts, many respondents 

focused on the experience of individuals ± themselves and others. A 

Kokomo, Indiana, truck driver defined history as the story of `the 

people and the changes they've gone through'. A 75-year-old retired 

man from Westfield, New Jersey, recalled: 

There are two things that have had a profound effect on my life. One was the Great 

Depression. My father lost his job and I had to go to work rather than go to college 

91


when I was l6 years old and help support the family. The second was the Second 

World War. I was enlisted in the Marine Corps and served four years and really 

started my career well behind the people who had not served in the armed forces. I 

think that it makes you a stronger person from having lived through adversity and 

having overcome it. 

While history textbooks might present the depression and war as 

different phenomena in different chapters, this participant recalled that 

the two events had a strikingly similar impact on him. 

For a 71-year-old-man from Omaha service in World War II was not 

about patriotism or foreign policy but about changing from an 

irresponsible adolescent into a responsible adult. Ì was a l9-year-old 

kid when I went in,' he said, and four years later he was a flight 

commander carrying `10 people's lives in your hands every time you 

take off'. 

As they tried to situate themselves in larger historical trajectories, 

respondents said that their families and friends both exemplified and 

resisted those trajectories. Sometimes they saw their families as swept 

along by a larger thrust of history, toward greater tolerance and 

encouragement for women and members of minority groups, for 

example. But sometimes they saw their families as trying to resist a 

thrust of history ± toward greater crime, permissiveness, or materialism, 

for instance ± that seemed to threaten their cohesion and even 

survival. 

Americans wanted to engage the past actively, critically, on their 

own terms, to shape their lives. They illustrated the depth of this 

perspective most clearly in the reasons they gave for their favourable 

experiences with history museums and historic sites and their 

unfavourable experiences with studying history in school. Asked to 

rank how connected they felt to the past in various places, respondents 

ranked visiting a history museum second, behind only family gatherings, 

while they ranked studying history in school dead last, the place 

they felt least connected with the past. And they trusted museums more 

than any other source for information about the past, ahead of even 

grandparents and eyewitnesses. 

Respondents liked and trusted museums and historic sites for the 

same reasons they liked and trusted other intimate uses of the past. 

They could decide where, when and with whom they go, could choose 

what they want to engage, and could interrogate objects from the past 

on their own terms and with their own questions. Visiting the Alamo 

`makes me feel like I was there' at the fateful siege and battle back in 

1836, said a Mexican American secretary from Laredo. And a black 

92


postal worker from Detroit liked to visit the Henry Ford Museum 

because he was àble to sit in one of the early-model cars that were 

made, to walk down brick paved roads and go into the old general store 

and walk into a log cabin'. An education coordinator reported what he 

experienced when he passed the site of the Wounded Knee massacre: 

You can almost hear the voices. You can almost see the events taking place. You can't 

help but wonder how cold was it or how many people actually were alive, how hurt 

were they. Or I would put myself into it by asking myself what could I have done if I 

were there. 

Approaching sites and artifacts on their own terms, visitors could cut 

through all the intervening stories, step around all the agendas that had 

been advanced in the meantime, and feel that they were experiencing a 

moment or an object from the past almost as it had originally been 

experienced ± and with none of the overwhelming distortions that they 

associated with movies and television, the other purveyors of 

immediacy ± but with all the ambiguities, the possibilities of changing 

and being changed. A 60-year-old man from Downers Grove, Illinois, 

valued museums because visitors could observe the artifacts and `come 

to some conclusions on your own instead of listening to someone else's 

tainted conclusions'. A 35-year-old Sioux Indian from South Dakota put 

it most eloquently in praising the Dinosaur Museum: `The bones are 

right there. The bones don't lie.' 

Knowing that history was controversial, many respondents assumed 

that museums aired all points of view before committing to one. 

Reasoning from her own experience as an interior decorator ± Ì had to 

come up with things that would be acceptable to half a dozen different 

people' ± a 78-year-old woman from Houston trusted what she saw in 

museums because ìt has been researched by more than one person. 

You are going to have a compilation of a lot of people. They all discuss 

things and arrive at one version that they wish to promote to the 

public.' A police officer from southern California believed that 

`museums are developed as a collaboration of many people and many 

resources. Information from a single source may not be as accurate'. 

And finally they felt connected with the past at museums because they 

felt connected with the people they went to museums with. They went 

to museums when friends or family came to town or when they went on 

vacations. `My friend came to visit me and this is the first time she had 

ever been in this part of the country,' began a 43-year-old Pine Ridge 

Sioux woman, who believed that their friendship would deepen if she 

could show her the Badlands National Park and Wounded Knee 

93


Massacre site which were such defining features of the Oglala Sioux 

past. 

Studying history in school presented almost the exact opposite 

experience. While many admired their teachers, they had little good to 

say about the actual classroom experience of studying history. Most 

respondents said that they felt excluded from actively engaging the past 

in school ± either as empathetic reliving or critical interrogation or selfdirected 

projects ± because history classes seemed to be shaped by 

remote bureaucrats, to cover subjects remote from their interests, and 

to feature memorisation and regurgitation of senseless details. Ìt was 

just a giant data dump that we were supposed to memorize ... just 

numbers and names and to this day I still can't remember them,' said a 

financial analyst from Palo Alto, California. Ìt was very cut and dried,' 

remembered a St Petersburg, Florida, woman in her fifties. Respondents 

often pictured themselves as conscripts or even prisoners and 

their teachers as drill sergeants or wardens who simply did as they 

were told. A 50-year-old from Mobile, Alabama, gave the most vivid 

characterisation: `My teacher was 70 years old and she carried a 

blackjack.' 

Not only did they have to approach the past on senseless terms, but 

they couldn't even recognise themselves or much of anyone from the 

real world in the content of history classes. A New Jersey woman 

complained of the `picture-perfect view of history' she received, too 

neat, too rosy, too remote. The content `seemed so fake ... it does not 

give you an anchor or anything to relate to'. A 58-year-old woman 

complained that `they want to give you the very best of something' 

while leaving `the skeletons in the closet'. 

The minority of respondents who felt very connected with the past in 

their history classes ± and one-eighth gave school history a score of 

nine or ten ± reported that their classrooms had presented the mirror 

image of what the majority had experienced in classes. They liked 

classes that resembled museums in presenting the chance to explore 

and relive the past on their own. A North Carolina marketing director in 

his twenties recalled a teacher who `got us very involved' because she 

`took us on various trips and we got hands-on' history. `She took us to 

old colonial-type towns, the Capitol, White House, Indian reservations, 

museums, she took us everywhere', meaning she took them to the place 

where Americans liked to engage the past. They liked teachers who 

made them participants instead of spectators. A New Jersey technician 

reported: Ì had teachers that would just get us more involved. They got 

us to do projects more than just sitting in front of the TV, and I learned 

94


from that.' Or teachers, like museum artifacts, had the capacity to 

transport students directly to the past, to encourage them to relive or 

re-enact the past at firsthand, so they could see it for themselves. A 

Texan in his sixties remembered that his high school history teacher 

`made the kids feel like they were reliving history. They all loved it.' Ì 

loved history,' recalled a 79-year-old Minnesota widow because ìt 

made me feel very much like I was there'. 

Americans bring similar perspectives on using the past whether they 

are doing it in a museum, classroom, movie theatre, or family reunion, 

whether they are showing a photograph album, writing in a diary, or 

trying to see how they can overcome social injustices or personal 

failures. 

By placing individuals at the centre both as actors in and users of 

history, we see the full creativity of popular history making. 

Individuals, after all, experience, interpret, revisit, reinterpret, in 

short they remember and forget. Cultures and institutions cannot do 

these things. Individuals can discover, recognise, ignore, crossexamine, 

fear, dream and hope. Best of all, by comparing their 

experiences and interpretations with others, individuals create empathy 

that permits them to enter into and make use of the experiences 

of people from other times and places. Our findings encourage us to 

imagine that underneath all the talk that Americans are indifferent to 

the past there is a very different reality of a participatory historical 

culture in which people from all groups use the past actively and 

critically to lead their lives. Many professionals have long recognised 

and initiated approaches that build from their first-hand observation of 

things we required a survey to find out, and we should build from these 

initiatives. Those pioneers know, as we found out, that Americans don't 

use the past in the places and ways where professionals expect. That 

fact challenges us to try to develop practices that better and more 

actively connect formal history with popular uses. The `history wars', 

for example, have distorted the development of a participatory 

historical culture by politicising history as a struggle among claims to 

authority that silences and demobilises potential participants instead of 

welcoming them to broaden and deepen uses of the past. In the debate 

over the National Air and Space Museum's proposed exhibit on the 

Enola Gay, for example, people were asked to choose between the 

authenticity of a pilot's memories and the accuracy of written sources 

recovered by a history professor. In a fundamentally historical culture, 

both would be respected and treated for what they are: different uses of 

the past coming from different people with different perspectives, all 

95


crucial for thinking about the memory of the decision to drop the atomic 

bomb. The public debate ended up over how many American lives might 

or might not have been saved, which in the end was over whether to 

second guess the decision, rather than the other argument as policy 

makers confronted it then, or the fact as it was experienced in 

Hiroshima or Iwo Jima or Dubuque. We need to move from a concern 

with accuracy to a concern with experience, from establishing truth to 

looking for patterns in how people use the past. 8 

Our discovery that 40 per cent of Americans have hobbies or 

collections related to the past points toward people who use the past 

enthusiastically on their own terms, often with a passion for accuracy 

and authenticity. NEH once launched a major initiative that stimulated 

and transformed history museums by connecting scholars and 

curators. Could we open dialogues between hobbyists and collectors 

and history professionals? I imagine that a much fuller sense of the 

Civil War could come from collaborations between curators of historic 

sites and scholars with Civil War re-enactors, who think themselves 

into the war by reliving what soldiers experienced as pictured so 

brilliantly by Tony Horowitz in Confederates in the attic, how 

hammocks felt and how guns smelled and sounded and felt, how the 

war to end slavery or to save the `Lost Cause' have been contested in so 

many memories. 9 

We need to seek better feedback from people about how they 

experience and what they bring to and take away from public 

programmes. Either with deeper evaluation forms or better still with 

exit interviews, we should not let all these experiences with public 

programmes go without learning from them about how to connect 

popular and intimate uses with more formal programmes. Instead of 

asking whether a lecturer was dynamic and entertaining, let's try to 

understand what people expected to hear and heard, how a slide show 

or lecture or oral history initiative connected. Ten years ago we 

imagined that our survey would be a first step that could chart some 

terrain, but we thought that fine-turned ethnographic observation 

would make it easier to translate between professional and public uses. 

In the same spirit why not create more places where we listen to 

people who might be our audiences. The Minnesota History Centre 

required new curators to interview several dozen Minnesotans to form 


8 For an elaboration, see David Thelen, `History after the Enola Gay controversy: an introduction', 

Journal of American History, 82 (December 1995), pp 1029-1035. 

9 T Horowitz, Confederates in the attic: dispatches from the unfinished Civil War (New York, 

1998). 

96


their own senses of how people use the past and what they expect in a 

museum. The Chinatown History Museum in New York invited people 

in the neighbourhood to come into the museum and help them identify 

people in old photographs and in the process, it must be hoped, talk 

about how they experienced Chinatown. 

We know that people like primary sources, first-hand experience, 

interrogating the past on their own terms, and this certainly should 

encourage teachers to try anything that encourages students to 

participate and engage for themselves, from interrogating primary 

sources to field trips to museums and historic sites to interviews with 

older people in the community or exploration of old high-school 

yearbooks or newspapers or phone books or court records. 

We can use artifacts or documents or interviews to look differently at 

the past: to foreground individuals and leave for exploration how they 

fit or do not fit larger historical developments, how they interpret 

change and continuity in Anglo tolerance of Mexican Americans, as part 

of assessing one's responsibilities and competences as a parent. Some 

of the best micro history is doing this now in scholarship. Greg 

Dening's Mr Bligh's bad language or Kim Chernin's In my mother's 

house or Jonathan Schell's History in Sherman Park are wonderful 

books whose authors reveal how individuals turn their intimate worlds 

into the exciting sites for interpreting and experiencing and constructing 

the larger past, for using the past to take responsibility for shaping 

the course of life. 10 We see and imagine the timeless interactions of a 

few dozen men cramped in a very small space for a very long time, and 

we see the entry for the first time by the British into the South Seas and 

a challenge to authority in the larger world of the French and American 

Revolutions. And role-playing provides a great opportunity for people 

to try to get into the shoes of people at other times and places and 

confront in the exercise just how much their thoughts and actions 

might be those of any human being at any time and how much they are 

socially and historically constructed. And by transporting them to a 

dramatic moment or a scene of controversy in the past it invited 

participants to build on the basic insight that experiences carry in them 

many possible perspectives and outcomes, including the capacity to 

change or be changed by the participant. 

We can encourage initiatives that foreground individuals and families 

and communities and provide people with the chance to research 


10 G Dening, Mr Bligh's bad language: passion, power and theatre on The Bounty (New York, 

1992); K Chernin, In my mother's house: a daughter's story (Boston, 1983); J Schell, History in 

Sherman Park: an American family and the Reagan-Mondale election (New York, 1987). 

97


documents or interview people for videotapes or magazines that 

circulate among people interested in the family or community. I'm 

thinking of school projects like Sycamore and Sassafras or the black 

Mississippi oral history publication I ain't lyin'. 

Our results have led me to imagine classroom initiatives that could 

deepen and create more empathy as we explore themes that are often at 

present marginalised. I always begin with Clifford Geertz's observation 

that `thought is spectacularly multiple as product and wondrously 

singular as process'. 11 I translate this to mean that adolescents 

generally explore the past with great curiosity and intensity to figure 

out why they are like they are, where they came from and where they 

are going, but this single quest produces `spectacularly multiple' 

conclusions. In studying history of African Americans, or Indians, or 

women, why not have students try to identify similar processes by 

which they try to figure who they are as well as different sources and 

conclusions they draw. 

I hope that these findings can generate new and useful clues for 

understanding how we can all better engage people as we try to bring 

out of the shadows the participatory historical cultures that are all 

around us. With the exciting development of new kinds of monuments 

and heritage programmes, with the spectacular and painful encounters 

between present and past, pride and remorse, individual and nation, 

authenticity and accuracy, perpetrator, victim, and bystander generated 

by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I think that South 

Africans are uniquely placed to generate ideas and practices that will 

help history practitioners in places like the United States to move 

beyond the political gridlock and academic fashion that make it hard for 

us to connect professional history with popular uses of the past. 


11 C Geertz, Local knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology (New York, 1983), p 

151. 

98

Kleio XXXI, 1999 Greg Cuthbertson: Intellectual lineages from South Africa 

`From white supremacy to black 

liberation': intellectual lineages from 

South Africa in the `making of America' 

Greg Cuthbertson 


This paper was presented at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the 

Amerika Instituut in Amsterdam in September 1998. Participants were 

asked to reflect on the `making of America' in their own research and 

teaching. The intention was therefore to exchange very personal 

perspectives on how scholars from different parts of the world interpret 

American studies. Teaching the history of the United States of America 

in the 19th and 20th centuries at graduate level has been profoundly 

influenced by my research interests in South African history and by 

political and cultural forces in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. 

I 

Last week I learned something quite astonishing. Athol Fugard's 

plays are produced almost as frequently as Shakespeare's in the 

United States of America (USA). Now that's an intellectual and 

political lineage worth exploring. Perhaps it is best explained by the 

dramatic way in which a society obsessed with racism became an 

exemplary non-racial democracy, one in which the force of legal 

segregation gave way with equanimity to a finely tuned constitutional 

non-racialism. The change was breathtaking for those of us 

who live in South Africa, 1 but I imagine that outsiders must have 

asked how a nation that had pushed the logic of `race' as far as any 

society in history could also produce one of the world's most 

enduring non-racial political traditions. 2 This conundrum makes 


1 For a recent history of the change to democracy in South Africa, see T R H Davenport, The 

transfer of power in South Africa (Cape Town, 1998). 

2 James Campbell, `Romantic revolutionaries: David Ivon Jones, S P Bunting and the origins of 

non-racial politics in South Africa', Journal of African History, 39 (1998), p 313. 

99


South African literature and history of universal importance and 

gives the Fugards, Brinks, Gordimers, Mphahleles and Matteras an 

international audience, and more especially an American audience. 

The other attraction of Fugard's work is its personal portrayal of 

the lives of ordinary people under apartheid. It is on this personal 

dimension which the organisers of this conference on `Predecessors: 

intellectual lineages in American studies' have asked us to focus. In 

my case, it has provided an opportunity to historicise my own 

`making of America' as a South African historian who also teaches 

United States history and who has been involved in the American 

Studies Association of Southern Africa. What has always struck me 

most about South Africa and the USA is their racial attraction, 3 

which more than anything else points to the profound interconnections 

and borders that 

made apartheid an issue in Berkeley as well as Soweto, that disrupted the smugness of 

privileged whites in Johannesburg and made liberal whites in the United States 

uncomfortable with their investments in multinationals doing business in South 

Africa, that gave African and other ex-colonial leaders a basis for exposing at the 

United Nations or in meetings of heads of state in the British Commonwealth the limits 

of democracy, self-determination, and non-racialism within Western ideologies. 4 

Apartheid had global salience because of its violence. It has therefore 

in many ways become a `predecessor' in analysing all other 

oppressive systems, even those, like the Holocaust, the African 

diaspora or European colonisation, which occurred much earlier. In 

this sense, apartheid has been read backwards onto other national 

histories. It has also been used to define more recent forms of 

discrimination in the world. Linguistically, this Afrikaans word has 

crossed the boundaries of language; it now represents a whole 

discourse about alienation and the denial of human rights and ± more 

importantly for the purposes of my argument ± about the widening 

gulf between black and white Americans. 

The title of my paper represents the shift of emphasis in the 

comparative US-South African historiography reflected in the work of 

George Fredrickson, president of the Organisation of American 

Historians. What is interesting is that he has used the political 

status of South Africa to define his comparison, moving from the 

`white supremacy' (the title of his first comparative history) 


3 Greg Cuthbertson, `Racial attraction: tracing historiographical alliances between South Africa 

and the United States', Journal of American History, 81, 3 (1994), pp 1123±1136. 

4 Frederick Cooper, `Race, ideology, and the perils of comparative history', American Historical 

Review, 101, 4 (1996), p 1136. 

100


associated with the high watermark of apartheid in 1981, to `black 

liberation' (the title of his second comparison) at the birth of a 

democratic nation in South Africa in 1994. 5 In both cases he used 

South Africa to read the experience of African Americans under 

racism in the USA. What is even more significant is that he is an 

American historian genuflecting to another history in order to 

explain the USA in terms of the òther'. 

II 

I remember wondering why I should have to write about the war of 

1812 in my first undergraduate essay in my third-year elective on 

American history at the University of Cape Town in the early 1970s. It 

seemed an extraordinarily arcane topic far removed from the concerns 

of white English-speaking liberal student politics on the campus at the 

time. But resistance to an apparently irrelevant US history soon 

crumbled as we later tackled the political economy of slavery in the 

antebellum South and read some of the `revisionist' interpretations of 

Lincoln's abolitionism. These issues had resonance with those in our 

South African history courses. 

American history courses have often mirrored South Africa's 

changing perception of itself. In the early 20th century the history 

of the American colonies was taught as part of the expansion of 

Europe or of British colonisation, or of what was called `colonial 

systems'. In 1910, at the time of the Union constitution, courses 

comparing the US federal system with various Dominion constitutions 

became popular. It appears from the contents of university 

calendars during the inter-war years that US history hardly featured 

in the curriculum, but with the emergence of the US as a superpower 

after World War II, survey courses were introduced at many South 

African universities. At this time, emphasis was placed on the 

international context of American history, or as a comparative study 

in the rise of the USA and USSR as `world powers'. During the 

1960s, when South African historians discovered African history, US 

courses were often included under comparative revolutions. 6 

Even at the beginning of the 1970s, the work of Palmer (1959) and 


5 George M Fredrickson, White supremacy: a comparative study in American and South African 

history (New York and Oxford, 1981); Fredrickson, Black liberation: a comparative history of 

black ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995). 

6 B A le Cordeur, Àmerican history for South Africa: perceptions and objectives', in Greg 

Cuthbertson (ed), Black writing: an American studies perspective from southern Africa 

(American Studies Association of Southern Africa, Pretoria, 1994), pp 107±108. 

101


Godechot (1965), 7 which compared the French and American 

revolutions, weighed heavily on our minds, and the twin tomes of 

Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg were prescribed reading for a 

generation of students. 8 New Left interpretations of the American 

revolution had some relevance in the debates about political 

oppression as Black Consciousness ideology brought discomfort to 

politically compliant young white university students. I was aware of 

the rift between the National Union of South African Students 

(NUSAS) and the South African Students Organisation (SASO) which 

had segregated university politics in 1969, and which festered 

between 1971 and 1976, when white liberal students were seen as 

the accomplices of apartheid by Steve Biko and his growing following 

among black students at the University of Fort Hare in the eastern 

Cape and at the University of the North, near Pietersburg in the 

northern Transvaal. 9 Since Black Consciousness derived some of its 

intellectual content from the civil rights movement in the USA, 

syllabuses changed quite dramatically by the 1970s, to centre on 

race, nationalism and later, the African diaspora. 

I was in the United Kingdom during the Soweto uprising of 1976. I 

therefore missed the defining moment of the liberation struggle 

against apartheid, except from a distance and interpreted by the 

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It was more than that; it 

was also the decisive turning-point of the apartheid state. A 

revolution followed in the writing of history in South Africa mainly 

under the aegis of the History Workshop begun at the University of 

the Witwatersrand (Wits) in 1977. This followed the radical critique 

of liberal and conservative historiography of the early 1970s, which 

was influenced by British social history, especially the work of 

Edward Thompson. At first, the dominant intellectual current in 

radical South African history was àn instrumentalist, structuralist 

Marxism in which human activity and agency barely figured at all'. 10 

In the aftermath of the 1976 insurrection, however, issues of popular 

consciousness and culture became part of the social history 


7 R R Palmer, The age of democratic revolution, 2 vols (Princeton, 1959); J Godechot, France and 

the Atlantic revolution of the eighteenth century, 1770±1779 (New York, 1965). 

8 Samuel Eliot Morison et al, The growth of the American republic, 2 vols, 6th ed (New York, 

1969). 

9 See Toussaint, `Fallen among liberals: an ideology of Black Consciousness examined', African 

Communist, 78 (1979), pp 18±30. For a recent analysis of the Black Consciousness movement in 

South Africa, see David Howarth, `Complexities of identity/difference: Black Consciousness 

ideology in South Africa', Journal of Political Ideologies, 2, 1 (1997), pp 51±78. 

10 Philip Bonner, `New nation, new history: the history workshop in South Africa, 1977±1994', 

Journal of American History, 81, 3 (1994), pp 977±985. 

102


repertoire, in order to explain contemporary politics, but also the 

older social movements of the past. 

In 1980 I took up a post in the Department of History at the 

University of South Africa after three years of teaching English at a 

high school in Cape Town. By then I had written a MA thesis on the 

political career of a member of Jan Smuts's cabinet in the late 

1930s. 11 It looked mainly at white politics and its influence on 

Africans before World War II. It had chapters on the `Native Acts' of 

1936 which disenfranchised African voters in the Cape and Natal, on 

the Àliens Acts' between 1930 and 1937 which were anti-semitic, 

and on the legislation that prevented Indians in South Africa from 

moving to other provinces after 1939. It was essentially a political 

history influenced by liberal concerns about the effects of segregation 

before apartheid. It was probably this kind of history that got 

me an appointment in Pretoria at the University of South Africa, a 

white Afrikaner-dominated, distance-education institution teaching an 

increasingly black student body. Afrikaner nationalist historiography 

had been dramatically undermined by both liberal and radical 

impulses in the history profession. The liberal trajectory was 

probably more palatable than radicalism to conservative historians 

in 1980. 

I thus began my academic career in earnest, teaching both South 

African and US history. I inherited an American course which had 

been designed in the early 1970s. I set about changing things by 

introducing new themes during the 1980s, especially on slavery, 

industrialisation, civil rights and the Vietnam War. This engagement 

with US history in the 19th and 20th centuries was spurred by the 

more or less simultaneous publication of four major US-South 

African comparisons: Fredrickson's White supremacy, John Cell's 

The highest stage of white supremacy, Stanley Greenberg's Race 

and state in capitalist development, and Leonard Thompson and 

Howard Lamar's The frontier in history: north America and 

southern Africa compared. 12 These works revived comparative 

studies in the United States generally and established the South 


11 G C Cuthbertson, `The political career of Richard Stuttaford, 1924±1942', (Unpublished MA 

thesis, University of Cape Town, 1977). 

12 John W Cell, The highest stage of white supremacy: the origins of segregation in South Africa 

and the American south (Cambridge, 1982); Stanley Greenberg, Race and state in capitalist 

development: comparative perspectives (New Haven, 1980); Leonard Thompson & Howard 

Lamar (eds), The frontier in history: north America and southern Africa compared (New Haven 

and London, 1981). 

103


African comparison as one of the central problems in the field. 13 

They also unsettled my sense of familiarity with South Africa by 

raising new questions. The opposite was also true; I began to read 

US history in terms of South African history. I was struck in Cell's 

book, for instance, by his discussion of South African segregationists' 

reflections on the relevance of American precedents. 

III 

The US-South African comparison offers `such a dense web of 

interconnections and `ìntrinsic'' comparisons' that one is amazed by 

the salience each of these societies has in the political and cultural life 

of the other. This goes back to the 1870s when South African 

newspapers carried reports on developments in the American south. 

Liberal segregationists in both countries compared notes in the early 

20th century and the Àmerican model' became a reference point for 

black and white. African periodicals, such as Bantu World and Drum, 

reverberate with the African American experience. Americans have 

fully reciprocated the interest in W E B du Bois's The crisis and A 

Philip Randolph's Messenger. The Phelps-Stokes Fund and Carnegie 

Foundation sponsored US-South African exchanges focused on `race 

adjustment' in both countries. 14 There have been so many intersections 

in the two histories; Garveyism was one such nexus which had huge 

implications for black politics in both countries. 15 There are many 

differences too, especially the difference in size, the length of colonial 

rule, and the dissimilar demography. 

Colin Bundy's evocative essay, Àn image of its own past?', compares 

historical writing in the United States and South Africa. 16 He compares 

equivalent historiographical schools in order to elucidate their 

ideological contexts and highlight the particular contribution of social 

history in the respective historiographies. Writing in 1990, he went 

beyond a mere comparison for comparison's sake to a profound 

exploration of how history is produced in particular situations. His 


13 James Campbell, `Towards a transnational comparative history', in Beyond white supremacy: 

towards a new agenda for comparative histories of South Africa and the United States, 

Collected Seminar Papers, 49 (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, London, 

1997), p 24. 

14 Campbell, `Transnational comparative history', p 26. 

15 See R Edgar (ed), An African American in South Africa: the travel notes of Ralph J Bunche 

(Johannesburg, 1991). 

16 Colin Bundy, Àn image of its own past? Towards a comparison of American and South African 

historiography', Radical History Review, 46, 7 (1990), pp 117±143. 

104


article was an important `predecessor' in my own excursion into 

comparative slave historiography in the early 1990s. 17 

In the 1980s the political stirring among students on the Cape Flats 

near Cape Town and the transformation of the University of the 

Western Cape prodded Cape historians to look for more sophisticated, 

persuasive and relevant ways of explaining the nature of western and 

south-western Cape society. Slave studies therefore fed directly into 

political consciousness and produced some politically committed 

histories that look at the legacy of slavery in Cape society today. The 

rise of new research on Cape slavery led to a recovery of the slave 

literature of the American south which counteracted the historiographical 

parochialism of the social history of African townships in South 

Africa that had become a hallmark of the University of the 

Witwatersrand's History Workshop at this time. Recent reviews of 

Wits History Workshop scholarship have noted its insularity, 18 which 

perhaps explains the reluctance of many social historians to entertain 

comparative perspectives. 

The notable exception is Charles van Onselen, who has found 

resonances in US slave historiography which have thrown particular 

light on paternalism and `sharecropping' in the agrarian south-western 

Transvaal during the 19th and early 20th centuries. 19 He has argued, 

for example, that Afrikaner landlords habitually referred to the black 

families labouring on their properties as ons volk (our folk) and ons 

mense (our people). He draws on Eugene Genovese's work, but plays 

down the class differences between Southern slaves and Transvaal 

labourers to suggest that `there is still sufficient substance left in the 

comparison between the white masters and black servants on the two 

continents for it to be used as a platform on which to construct a 

working definition of paternalism'. 20 

Slave historiography played a decisive role in the development of 

social history in the US. In South Africa, however, slave studies 

accompanied a much later phase of the social history enterprise, and in 

some ways its rise reflected the waning of Marxist orthodoxy. Slavery 


17 Greg Cuthbertson, `Cape slave historiography and the question of intellectual dependence', South 

African Historical Journal, 27 (1992), pp 26±49. 

18 See Jeremy Krikler, `Waiting for the historians', Southern African Review of Books, 3, 6 (1990), 

pp 16±17. 

19 This pioneering view informed the analysis of Charles van Onselen's much acclaimed history of 

sharecropping in South Africa: The seed is mine: the life of Kas Maine (Cape Town, 1996). 

20 Charles van Onselen, `The social and economic underpinning of paternalism and violence on the 

maize farms of the south-western Transvaal, 1900±1950', Journal of Historical Sociology, 5,2 

(1992), pp 133±135. 

105


came at the end of a succession of historical preoccupations, such as 

the mineral and mining revolutions of the late 19th century, African 

state formation in the interior, and industrialisation, to name a few. Its 

focus on the pre-industrial, early colonial Cape, geared mainly to 

agricultural production, was an obvious counterpoint to the earlier 

concerns with industrial capital and a system of wage labour in 

response to the mining revolution. Slavery has therefore never truly 

been part of mainstream South African `radical' anti-apartheid 

historiography. It has only attracted historians in the Cape liberal 

tradition, which has nurtured quite different historical concerns from 

those of the Witwatersrand. 

South Africa became an explosive political issue in the USA in the 

1980s. Television newscasts beamed the trauma of apartheid upheavals 

into every American home. This was reminiscent of Selma and 

Birmingham a generation earlier. South Africans were caught up in the 

various states of emergency between 1985 and 1987, which emphasised 

the experiences of ordinary people under oppression. This was 

reflected in the `people's history' tradition which tried to give voice to 

black South Africans who had been denied a past. Social history 

experienced various twists and turns during these turbulent times. It 

became less comparative and less concerned to connect with other 

historiographies. This was partly an effect of the cultural boycott 

against South Africa after the enactment of the comprehensive Antiapartheid 

Act of 1986. 21 

This boycott by musicians, academics, playwrights and writers was 

highly successful in weakening the apartheid state. It did, however, 

make South Africa more self-absorbed than ever, wrapped up in its own 

history, teaching more and more about itself and less and less about the 

outside world. The embargo meant that enrolments for US history 

courses were low. Another consequence when thinking about how 

America was `made' in the South African mind was the polarisation of 

those who believed in sanctions and those who opposed them. This in 

many ways determined the portrayal of the USA as either a friend of 

black liberation or the foe of the South African economy. There were, of 

course, other positions in between. 

The anti-apartheid boycott had another effect. It prevented the 

writing of other national histories by South Africans. Isolation 

obviously prevented historians from doing archival research in the 


21 On the impact of sanctions on South Africa, see Robert E Edgar, Sanctioning apartheid (Trenton, 

NJ, 1990) and more recently, Robert Kinloch Massie, Loosing the bonds: the United States and 

South Africa in the apartheid years (New York, 1997). 

106


USA. Although other histories were taught in universities, lectures were 

given by non-specialists. It is quite significant that history departments 

were made up almost entirely of Africanists, of whom the majority 

were, and still are, southern Africanists. This naturally had a profound 

influence on how America was constructed. The remoteness of US 

history was further emphasised by the lack of PhD research on topics 

other than South African history, which was the consequence of the 

lack of expertise in other fields. With the embargo on Fulbright 

scholarships there was not even the chance of a visiting Americanist to 

provide supervision of research, or even superior teaching on the USA. 

I completed my PhD thesis in 1986 at the moment of the antiapartheid 

boycott. I wrote on anti-war religious movements during the 

Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. This research was not unconnected with 

my participation in the End Conscription Campaign (ECC) that opposed 

compulsory military service which had led to deployment in black 

townships and in South Africa's border wars in Angola and Mozambique 

for young white South Africans. My interest in religious 

conscientious objection also shaped a fourth-year honours degree 

programme I was teaching on American history. The anti-war movement 

in the USA during the Vietnam War enjoyed prominence. It was 

easy for students to see the link between anti-war lobbies in the USA 

and the ECC in South Africa. American foreign policy in the war against 

Angola was also part of this discussion because all South Africans were 

caught up in that apartheid war. 

IV 

The year 1989, that watershed in world history when the symbol of the 

Cold War, the Berlin Wall, came down, also had an enormous effect on 

South African politics. Early in 1990, when the African National 

Congress (ANC) and the other banned organisations were freed, I 

became an editor of the South African Historical Journal (SAHJ), 

which took up the next eight years of my academic life. That journal's 

historiographical contours have in many ways been superimposed upon 

my understanding of American history. The historiography of the USA 

also introduced me to a wider range of approaches to the writing of 

history. This became more pronounced after I went to the USA for the 

first time in 1991 as a United States Information Agency visitor. 

Although I had taught American history for more than a decade, I had 

never been to the USA because of the anti-apartheid cultural boycott. 

The most important thing about that first visit was my sense of the 

107


regionalism in the USA. And the preoccupation I had always had with 

'nation' in writing history was severely challenged. 

Apartheid has made South Africans extremely conscious of the 

'nation', mainly because of our history of competing nationalisms from 

the days of Dutch and British colonisation through to neocolonialism 

under National Party rule after 1948. This has rubbed off on the way 

we interpret the past. The porous nature of borders ± cultural, 

economic and political ± has not figured prominently in our writing. We 

have been self-absorbed, parochial and introspective in reflecting on 

our past. In fact, we have remained remarkably silent about the 

Americanisation of our society, especially in architecture, music, film, 

dress and consumerism. Jazz and McDonald's are as much icons of our 

culture as they are of the USA's, and Nelson Mandela's eightieth 

birthday was a celebration of Hollywood rather than an African 

occasion. Yet we don't write about it much. 

Since 1990 historians have been concerned to rethink the South 

African 'nation' in terms of incorporating black people into the 

national narrative. At the beginning of this decade, therefore, we got 

into the business of nation-building, trying to rewrite the past 

according to a `rainbow nation' (a term first used by Archbishop 

Desmond Tutu) recipe. Nations, writes Benedict Anderson in 

Imagined communities, share with individuals the predicament of 

having to construct identity out of simultaneous acts of memory and 

forgetting. 22 To achieve a `widening of the circle' of the nation, 23 

historians energetically started to refashion the narrative of South 

African history to make it more inclusive, no longer centred on 

Afrikaner nationalism. Liberation history therefore became a counterpoint 

to nationalist history, and yet was itself nation-centred and 

often, in its more polemical forms, also nationalistic. It was, of 

course, hard not to be polemical at the moment when transition to 

democracy had a chance of succeeding. Debates about multiculturalism 

were current and I edited a collection of papers presented at 

the American Studies Association of South Africa meeting in 1993 in 

an anthology on Black writing, which drew on American literary, 


22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of 

nationalism (London, 1991). 

23 An influential discussion of post-ethnic America was provided in David Hollinger, `How wide the 

circle of the ``We''? American intellectuals and the problem of ethnos since World War II', 

American Historical Review, 98 (1993), pp 317±337. Also see Hollinger, `The narrative of 

inclusion and the will to descend: American historiography at the multiculturalist moment', in 

Wendy F Katkin (ed), Beyond pluralism: essays on the definition of groups and group identities 

in American history (Durham, 1994). 

108


political and historical work. 24 It also looked at èxceptionalism' in 

both South Africa and the USA. The uniqueness of the South African 

experience is a myth similar to that about American èxceptionalism' 

which is dispelled by comparing their respective literatures. 

An interrogation of South African historiography began in the pages 

of the South African Historical Journal in the 1990s, which focused on 

the making of ethnicity, on `tokens of the past' in symbols, monuments 

and museums, on popularising history in a changing South Africa, on 

critiquing the radical social history of the 1970s and 1980s, on 

uncovering the pre-colonial and pre-industrial past, and on examining 

the debates about materialism versus idealism in the historiography. 

All this happened against the background of academic and popular 

contestations of the past. In the academy a challenge to Marxist social 

history emerged from the need to take conflict out of the meta-narrative 

of South African history for the purposes of `rainbow' nation-building. 

Symbols, such as the Voortrekker Monument, were examined in terms 

of myths around Afrikaner nationalism. Articles in the journal also 

looked at the political uses of history in the making of new power 

relations after F W de Klerk's February 1990 speech. 25 

These historical preoccupations and the innovation of carrying 

multiple reviews of important South African books as historiographical 

features attracted the attention of historians abroad who were also 

questioning the nature of the craft in the face of specialisation and 

fragmentation. South African history seemed to have some purchase on 

outside intellectual interest because its context made history as 

contested as the attainment of political power. Black student 

enrolments mushroomed in the period 1990±1994. Heightened political 

consciousness searched for the moral high ground of an anti-apartheid 

history to undermine an illegitimate and weakening apartheid state. 

Historians in the USA were particularly interested in the intellectual 

crucible of political encounter. 

In 1992 I was asked to be an international contributing editor for the 

Journal of American History (JAH) as part of its project of 


24 Greg Cuthbertson (ed), Black writing: an American studies perspective from southern Africa 

(Pretoria, 1994). 

25 See, for example, Carolyn Hamilton & John Wright, `The making of the AmaLala: ethnicity, 

ideology and relations of subordination in a precolonial context' and C A Hamilton ` `Àn appetite 

for the past'': the re-creation of Shaka and the crisis of popular historical consciousness', South 

African Historical Journal, 22 (1990); Luli Callinicos, `Popularising history in a changing South 

Africa' and Jack Lewis, `Materialism and idealism in the historiography of the Xhosa Cattle- 

Killing Movement 1856±7 `, South African Historical Journal, 25 (1991); Cynthia Kros, `Tokens 

of the past?' and Elizabeth Delmont, `The Voortrekker monument: monolith to myth', South 

African Historical Journal, 29 (1993). 

109


globalisation. Thus began my most valuable contact with David Thelen, 

editor of the JAH, who forced me to think about how US history is 

constructed across the Atlantic and how South African history can 

bring another reading to the American past. In many conversations 

since then we have discovered that transnational histories are not only 

possible, but desirable. By harnessing South African history to the 

project of internationalism, its particularism is immediately undermined 

as it is interpreted by a wider audience through mutual 

cooperation between the SAHJ and the JAH. This connection has 

profoundly changed my own reading of American history through 

engagement with US historiographical developments, especially in the 

fields of memory, commemoration and transnationalism. 

V 

In 1994 Eric Foner, a past president of the Organization of American 

Historians, gave a paper at an important conference called `Democracy: 

popular precedents, popular practice, popular culture' at the University 

of the Witwatersrand History Workshop. The significance of the 

event is obvious, but Foner's address is even more telling. It was 

entitled `We must forget the past: history in the new South Africa'. 

Reflecting on the election, he remarked that 

like others throughout the world, I was thrilled by the photographs of men and women 

waiting in endless lines to cast their first ballots, a reminder in these days of the 

widespread cynicism about politics that voting can be a deeply empowering act. 

Indeed, as a historian of the Reconstruction era after the American Civil War, the 

pictures brought to mind the dawn of interracial democracy in the United States and 

the scenes of celebration when former slaves voted for the first time throughout the 

South. 26 

Another American historian and an activist during the civil rights 

campaign of the 1960s, Paul Gaston, of the University of Virginia, saw 

the 1994 election in South Africa as an inspiration for African 

Americans: 

South Africa, with the greater inequality, is ... more focused on finding solutions, 

though it is not faithful to the redistributive principles of the Freedom Charter [of 

1955]. The American majority, at least for the moment, seems at the crest of a wave of 

massive denial, wide-eyed in its utopian vision of all evils washed away in the purity 

of the free market. Historic roles are stunningly reversed. In the long interchange of 

leaders and ideas, South Africans have looked for guidance and inspiration to African 


26 Eric Foner, ` ``We must forget the past'': history in the new South Africa', South African 

Historical Journal, 32 (1995), p 166. 

110


Americans, coming to visit Tuskegee, consulting W.E.B Du Bois, or learning from 

Marcus Garvey. Now it is the South African leader [Mandela] who has captured 

American imaginations ... 27 

This euphoria about the democratic achievement and its meaning for 

America was, however, overshadowed at the History Workshop 

conference by foreboding about the future of history itself in South 

Africa. `History,' one participant jested, ìs fast replacing economics as 

the dismal science.' Somehow democracy replaced liberation in 1994 

because transition politics meant burying the past to make a new 

future. In this sense, one might talk of democracy and the end of history 

in South Africa. 

History was important as part of the armoury of political struggle 

because of its moral power. Anti-apartheid history which had been 

forged in the intellectual struggles between progressive and conservative 

scholars had, like Afrikaner nationalist history, been a usable past. 

The writing of history is in some senses political in every country, but 

in few places has it been more avowedly so than in South Africa. As 

democracy brought accommodation, so academic history was eclipsed 

by popular memory. American historians were interested in these 

developments because Nelson Mandela's rise to power was an 

international moment, and social history's plight was also universal. 

Social history in South Africa in 1994 was searching for a new 

paradigm. 28 

Michel Foucault has replaced Karl Marx in footnotes because the 

power of knowledge is the new field of contestation in academic life. 

Who writes history and its production have become pressing questions 

precisely because universities are still run mainly by white academics. 

And since there are few black historians, history has been taken out of 

the hands of academics and passed to the Truth and Reconciliation 

Commission (TRC), which has just completed its mammoth task of 

collecting evidence about the atrocities of apartheid. 

It is not coincidental that in 1995 George Fredrickson published a 

sequel to his White supremacy. And significantly he called it Black 

liberation: a comparative history of black ideologies in the United 

States and South Africa. He used the South African experience to think 

about the USA in the same way he had done 14 years earlier. Also in 

1995 James Campbell wrote his acclaimed transnational history of the 


27 Paul M Gaston, `Black liberation in the United States and South Africa', South African Historical 

Journal, 35 (1996), pp 184±185. 

28 See Ran Greenstein, `The future of the South African past', Journal of Southern African Studies, 

20, 2 (1996), pp 325±331. 

111


African Methodist Episcopal Church, which explored the links between 

African American Christianity and Èthiopianism' in South Africa in the 

late 19th and early 20th centuries. 29 The comparative and transnational 

perspectives were indicators of South Africa's re-entry into the 

world. The history of white supremacy and black liberation in the USA 

and South Africa are also ìntrinsically interesting not because it 

consists of two discrete ``cases'' but because it is part of an immensely 

complicated tale of global transformation and struggle'. As Frederick 

Cooper argues, à global, interactive approach to history needs 

comparison, and comparison needs interactive and global analysis'. 30 

But perhaps the most influential history to appear at this time was 

Charles van Onselen's Life of Kas Maine, an African `sharecropper' in 

the western Transvaal, whose obscure past is constructed from 

fragments of oral testimony, archival material and the inimitable 

imagination of a gifted writer. 31 

Colin Bundy has observed the ways in which Van Onselen has been 

inspired by American scholarship and shows the importance of the vast 

literature on the American south for understanding rural South Africa 

in the early 20th century. 32 For me, the strength of Van Onselen's social 

history is not how much it draws on US historiography, but on how he 

rewrites the history of sharecropping in the American south by shifting 

the location and the chronology. The transportability of `sharecropping' 

to South Africa in the 20th rather than the 19th century, adds 

another dimension to transnational history; it fundamentally questions 

American èxceptionalism'. Historiographies are not hermetically 

sealed. Intellectual lineages do cross boundaries. 

In the mid-1990s, the South African experience weighs heavily on us; 

it certainly shapes my own writing about the USA in the 19th and 20th 

centuries. 33 There is not much difference, I find, between writing about 

the USA and constructing a history of South Africa, especially if the 

themes are anything to go by: slavery, frontier expansion and 

dispossession; segregation; economic depression; civil rights; gender, 

and so on. My own interest in pre-colonial communities in South Africa 


29 James T Campbell, Songs of Zion: the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States 

and South Africa (New York, 1995). 

30 Cooper, `Race ideology and the perils of comparative history', p 1135. 

31 Van Onselen, The seed is mine. 

32 Colin Bundy, `Comparatively speaking: Kas Maine and South African agrarian history', Journal of 

Southern African Studies, 23 2(1997), pp 363±370. also see Cynthia Kros, `Farewell to the 

middle style? Reflections on The seed is mine', South African Historical Journal, 37 (1997), 

pp 178±185. 

33 Greg Cuthbertson et al, The USA in the 19th and 20th centuries, 2nd ed (University of South 

Africa, Pretoria, 1996). 

112


and their encounters with colonisation also finds an echo in my 

interpretation of the experiences of Native Americans on the western 

frontier of the USA between 1800 and 1890. The indigenous communities 

of both countries have gained impressive historiographies in the 

past 20 years. It is remarkable how a reading of Khoikhoi and Bushmen 

history informs an understanding of the Cherokee or the Sioux. 34 

VI 

In the late 1990s memory is being negotiated in a way that history was 

negotiated in the early 1990s. This has given enormous currency to the 

TRC which has become the àrchive' of apartheid memory. The notion 

of `truth' is at the heart of the commission. It therefore endorses a 

notion of history that has been abandoned in the post-colonial and postmodern 

discourses of academia. This underlines popular perceptions 

about `telling the truth' about the past which confronts the `lies' of 

apartheid. Kader Asmal, the Minister of Water Affairs in the ANC 

government, co-authored a book in 1996 which defended the role of the 

TRC as a vehicle that would allow South Africans to move towards 

`reconciliation' through `truth' by reckoning with apartheid's actors. 35 

The TRC has raised important debates about history in South Africa. 

AndreÂ Brink, among our best-known novelists, regards the TRC as a 

representation of healing through narrative. He sees each `story' of 

those interviewed by the TRC as a `history' of the struggle against 

apartheid, in the same way as South African historians in the `twilight 

of apartheid' offered their accounts of the past to redress unjust 

emphases and perspectives. 36 

In the wake of the TRC there has been some hard rethinking about 

history and the àrchive'. The new Graduate School of the Humanities 

and Social Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand has recently 

started a seminar on `Refiguring the archive'. Its aim is to examine the 

construction of history, its power relations and the stretched meanings 


34 For similar comparisons, see James O Gump, The dust rose like smoke: the subjugation of the 

Zulu and the Sioux (Lincoln, 1994); Ran Greenstein, `History, historiography and the production 

of knowledge', South African Historical Journal, 32 (1995), pp 217±232; Richard Hull, `Native 

reserves and Indian reservations: what the South Africans learned from the Americans on dealing 

with land and indigenous populations', Paper presented at the 16th South African Historical 

Society Conference, University of Pretoria, South Africa, July 1997. 

35 Kader Asmal et al, Reconciliation through truth: a reckoning of apartheid's criminal 

governance (Cape Town, 1996). 

36 AndreÂ Brink, `Stories of history: reimagining the past in post-apartheid narrative', in Sarah 

Nuttall & Carli Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the past: the making of memory in South Africa (Cape 

Town, 1998), p 32. 

113


of `history', àrchive' and 'narrative'. The impulses of literary theory 

and post-colonial discourses are keenly felt and social history's truth 

claims are being consigned with positivist empiricism. These developments 

are all related to globalisation. 

The `making of America' in terms of the making of a new South Africa 

is therefore a combination of academic reflection and of popular 

memory. Revisiting the traumatic political terror of state violence in 

the apartheid era intrudes on the `big story' that historians try to tell. I 

recall my horror listening to the testimony of women from KwaNdebele 

who had lost children in the 1985 atrocities in that Bantustan. They 

told their stories in the large hall on the campus of the University of 

South Africa. I, like many other progressive historians, had been asked 

to research certain aspects of the social history of the 1980s to provide 

a framework for the particular evidence of witnesses at the TRC 

hearings. When I heard the horrors, it struck me how clinical the 

research had been and how palpable was the pain of apartheid. These 

testimonies raise questions about how such accounts of murder and 

mayhem will ultimately be written and reconfigured in òfficial' 

histories of the 'new nation', and how they will be read as `world 

history' in which humanity is implicated. There is also the problem of 

historiographical representation, compounded by the tendency of 

official and popular accounts of `collective suffering' to serve (ethnic) 

nationalist agendas. 37 

Just as Holocaust memory has been shaped by museums and 

monuments in different ways in different countries, it remains to be 

seen how apartheid is shaped by the TRC archive. Remembering and 

forgetting will play an important part in how apartheid is commemorated 

in the future. After all, the TRC received 20 000 statements from 

victims, 2 000 of these in public hearings, and it has processed 8 000 

applications for amnesty from perpetrators. 38 I have to agree with 

AndreÂ Brink's endorsement of Antjie Krog's disturbing book about the 

TRC, Country of my skull, that `trying to understand South Africa 

without the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be futile; 

trying to understand the Commission without this [Krog's] book would 

be irresponsible'. Krog provides a gendered account of the personal 

trauma of human rights violations in South Africa during the apartheid 


37 On this point, see Steven Robins, `Silence in my father's house: memory, nationalism, and 

narratives of the body', in Nuttall & Coetzee, Negotiating the past, pp 120±140. 

38 The most powerful record of the TRC to date is by Antjie Krog, Country of my skull 

(Johannesburg, 1998). 

114


era which translates into collective memory and transcends national 

borders. 

The apartheid experience has implications for all histories. The 

impact of episodes of trauma on societies occupies much scholarly 

attention these days. South Africa has been part of what has been called 

the Àmerican century', one in which we have seen the horrors of 

Nazism, Vietnam and apartheid. Conclusions about the century must 

therefore be ironic. Apartheid is one of the shadows cast over the 

Àmerican century'. Arthur Neal has suggested that national traumas 

do to a nation what personal traumas do to individuals. 39 They alter the 

collective sense of stability and replace feelings of security with 

feelings of crisis and danger. To avoid this potential for moral chaos, 

nations often try to restore a sense of order by creating sacred symbols, 

such as the Arlington National Cemetery or the Vietnam Veterans 

Memorial. Neal's work set me thinking about the South African case in 

which private and collective memory have come together in the TRC 

and in the Robben Island Museum in the Cape. Robben Island somehow 

acts as a heroic antidote to the TRC, celebrating Nelson Mandela's `long 

walk to freedom' from prison to president. 

VII 

In 1998 Anthony Marx published Making race and nation, an 

important work which shows how the essentialised categories of `race' 

and 'nation' are problematic, but also how histories transgress national 

and cultural boundaries. Intriguingly, he recounts how his study was 

reinforced by his own engagement with the comparison: 

I found myself interviewing George Wallace in his Montgomery sickbed, and a month 

later attending Nelson Mandela's inauguration in Pretoria. The South African Defence 

Force saluted its new commander and former adversary with a dramatic fly-by of jets. 

Central state authority was passed to its former nemesis. Back in the United States, 

such central state authority was itself being newly challenged by an assertion of 

states' rights led by the Republican Party ± the same party that had defended the 

Union under Lincoln. 40 

But comparisons are not only made in scholarly works; they are made 

in the popular mind too. More than anyone else, Amy Biehl, the 

American student who was murdered by African People's Liberation 


39 Arthur G Neal, National trauma and collective memory: major events in the American century 

(New York, 1998). See the review by John Bodnar at H-Net Review Project, August 1998. 

40 Anthony W Marx, Making race and nation: a comparison of the United States, South Africa, 

and Brazil (Cambridge, 1998), p xiv. 

115


Army (APLA) activists in a township on the Cape Flats, has come to 

symbolise white America to black South Africans in the late 1990s. The 

willingness of her parents to forgive their daughter's killers was seen as 

a form of American identification with the political struggles of black 

South Africans against apartheid. 

President Bill Clinton's visit to South Africa in 1997 was also about 

the `making of America' in Africa. It became an intellectual as well as a 

political moment because it evoked popular notions of Àmerican 

democracy' to harmonise with Thabo Mbeki's discourse on the Àfrican 

Renaissance'. American imperialism was forgotten for a while as black 

and white South Africans celebrated the first visit of a United States 

president to the country. America stood for prosperity and everyone 

wanted that. And then the cavalcade moved on. 

116

Kleio XXXI, 1999 Review article/Besprekingsartikel 

Review article/Besprekingsartikel 

Tracing roots: literary theory in temporal 

context 

Julie Pridmore 


Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York, Routledge, 1996), 201 

pp, bibl. ISBN 0 415 09219 1 

Aidan Day, Romanticism (London and New York, Routledge, 1996), 

217 pp, bibl. ISBN 0 415 08378 8 

Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London and New York, Routledge, 

1996), 226 pp, bibl. ISBN 0 415 11051 3 

David Hawkes, Ideology (London and New York, Routledge, 1996), 

210 pp, notes, bibl. ISBN 0 415 09809 2 

In the contemporary field of broadly labelled `literary studies' there 

is, as Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn point out, a wide range of 

disciplinary boundaries which, while they might be `crossed, 

confused, consolidated, and collapsed' as well as `revised, reconceived, 

redesigned or replaced', can never be entirely abolished. 1 

Routledge's stated aim in their `New critical idiom' series is to define 

recent key terms used in literary studies and also to provide 

chronological overviews of the specific context of cultural representation 

in which, and from which, a growing body of terminologies 

have emanated. 2 This series is indicative of the need for basic texts 

on the increasingly comprehensive set of analyses on literary theory, 


1 S Greenblatt & G Gunn, Ìntroduction' in S Greenblatt & G Gunn (eds), Redrawing the 

boundaries: the transformation of English and American literary studies (New York, 1992), 

p4. 

2 F Botting, Gothic (London, 1996), Series editor's preface. 

117


and reflects the rapidly growing publication list of similar series in this 

field. 3 Amidst such a wealth of definitions Thomas Docherty has 

pointed out that there are very real dangers involved in delivering to 

students a theoretical approach which is ànti historical' and he 

stresses the need for a sense of temporal development in literary 

studies. 4 By providing an introductory level critique the Routledge 

series aims, through a careful chronological analysis, to identify the 

origins of the key themes and trends in late 20th-century literary 

studies. In the mid-1980s, during the immediate aftermath of the poststructuralist 

movement, American scholars viewed British literary 

studies as being somewhat resistant to new theoretical approaches, 

particularly the trans-Atlantic debate surrounding the contentious 'new 

eighteenth century'. 5 This series serves to illustrate that during the 

past two decades British literary studies have been fully aware of the 

predominantly French post-structuralist challenge and, as a whole, 

have shown remarkable pragmatism in appropriating what is useful 

from post-structuralism, while at the same time discarding what is 

superfluous for specific research fields. 

Fred Botting's Gothic is an example of the utility of a chronological 

approach, as he aims to provide an overview of Gothic issues, linking 

the theoretical debate with a detailed chronological narrative of the 

developments in the genre. Botting aims to examine the diffusion of 

what constitutes `Gothic forms' disseminated over two centuries, and 

the manner in which this genre has been continuously appropriated and 

transformed. 6 

In line with his stated narrative project, Botting examines the origins 

of Gothic form during the 18th-century enlightenment, a historical and 

theoretical space which is clearly a key focus for recent deconstructions 

of existing values and practices, as expressed through literary 

images within Western traditions. 7 He provides further chronological 

frameworks by discussing the overlap between the sublime and 

Romantic aesthetic forms. 8 

Botting's third chapter deals with the various epistemological forms 


3 There is considerable literature in series form. See Macmillan's `Transitions' series edited by 

Julian Wolfreys, the Edinburgh University Press series on `Postmodern theory' edited by Thomas 

Docherty and Longman's `Critical readers' series edited by Raman Selden and Stan Smith. 

4 T Docherty, `Theory and difficulty' in R Bradford (ed), The state of theory (London, 1993), p 27. 

5 F Nussbaum and L Brown, `Revising critical practices: an introductory essay' in F Nussbaum and 

L Brown (eds), The new eighteenth century: theory, politics, English literature (New York and 

London, 1987), pp 4±5. 

6 Botting, Gothic, p 14. 

7 Ibid, p 22. 


118


of Gothic and, appearing as it does within a narrative framework, is 

perhaps easier to follow than other, more theoretical-centred recent 

writing on similar themes. 9 Using a clearly defined temporality, from 

the mid-18th-century enlightenment to 20th-century post-modernism, 

he examines the ongoing political struggle and contested literary 

ground over meanings of Gothic. 10 Botting identifies Horace Walpole's 

1760 text The castle of Otranto as containing the main ingredients of 

the Gothic literary tradition, encompassing in general a move away 

from neoclassical fictional forms. 11 The novel also contained a set of 

values conversant with 18th-century discourse which distinguished the 

enlightened present from the primitive and barbaric medieval past. 12 

The forms established in Walpole's text, Botting suggests, were then 

appropriated and imitated by successive texts which claimed authenticity 

as Gothic forms, for instance Clara Reeve's 1778 narrative, The 

old English baron and Sophia Lee's The recess, published from 1783 to 

1785. 13 Lee's text, Botting points out, was also highly significant in 

establishing domestic space as the primary location for the ideals of 

female virtue and domesticity, at odds with the outside world which is 

representative of dark threats and veiled menace. 14 

Having located broadly defined Gothic fictions in the later 18th 

century, Botting goes on in his next chapter to explore the specific 

contexts of the literary discourse evident in that period. He identifies 

the 1790s as the decade of Gothic fiction, noting that terror had 

particular political and social overtones for readers in Britain as the 

French Revolution followed its course on the continent. 15 The violence 

inherent in Gothic literature was a reflection of the threat to the 

established social order and, as Jones notes, the sensibilities of fear 

and anxiety contained in literary images became closely aligned with 

the polarisation of radical and conservative political life in Britain 

during the 1790s. 16 Botting highlights Ann Radcliffe's novels The 

mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794, and The Italian, published in 

1797, as the most successful of the numerous feminine-authored Gothic 

texts which appeared during this decade. While Radcliffe's work was, 


9 See, for example, N Cornwell, The literary fantastic: from Gothic to postmodernism (London 

and New York, 1990), pp 34±41; A Williams, Art of darkness: a poetics of Gothic (Chicago and 

London, 1995), pp 80±86. 


11 Ibid, p 48. 

12 Ibid, pp 52±53. 

13 Ibid, pp 54±57. 

14 Ibid, pp 58±59. 

15 Ibid, pp 62±63. 

16 C Jones, Radical sensibility: literature and ideas in the 1790s (London, 1993), pp 59±61. 

119


at one level, an appropriation of images used by earlier writers, Botting 

also sees her as contributing unique elements of terror and mystery, 

juxtaposed with domestic life. 17 As he did in the previous chapter, 

Botting continues to explore the ramifications of feminine literary 

images and domestic space, but he does not interrupt his chronological 

overview in doing so. 18 He draws a distinction between `terror' in 

Gothic literatures similar to Radcliffe's which enables the sentimental 

element to reassert itself, and `horror' which exerts a continuous 

effect. 19 Horror, for Botting, `marks the response to an excess that 

cannot be transcended'. 20 This particular Gothic form was, Botting 

suggests, demonstrated in Matthew Lewis's 1796 text, The monk, 

which played on the deployment of excess in its sensual descriptions, 

violent imagery and extravagant scenes. 21 Thus horror assumes the 

nature of an inescapable labyrinth as it comes to represent the 

apotheosis of extreme irrationality. 22 Botting notes that the lurid style 

of Gothic narrative was also appropriated in narratives which 

condemned the terror and anarchy of the French Revolution, such as 

Burke's 1791 text Reflections on the revolution in France. 23 This 

association between the social and political chaos of the last decade of 

the 18th century and fictional horror has also been explored by Noel 

Carroll as `the antithesis of the `àge of reason'''. 24 Botting concludes 

his section on the 1790s by noting that Gothic had moved beyond a 

simple literary discourse and was, by the end of the century, associated 

with a whole network of meanings. 25 

While Gothic can be clearly located in the temporal and ideological 

dimensions of the enlightenment, its tropes also have strong resonance 

in the Romantic period. Elizabeth Napier places the Gothic at a specific 

historical juncture, at a moment which encapsulates both the decline of 

the classical and the emergence of Romanticism. 26 Botting characterises 

the Romantic period as a key point in the development of Gothic 



18 Ibid, p 70. For detailed assessments of gender and the Gothic see K Ellis, The contested castle: 

Gothic novels and the subversion of domestic ideology (Urbana, 1989) and T Castle, The female 

thermometer: eighteenth-century culture and the invention of the uncanny (Oxford and New 

York, 1995). 

19 Botting, Gothic, pp 74±75. 

20 Ibid, p 75. 

21 Ibid, p 79. 

22 Ibid, pp 80±84. 

23 Ibid, p 86. 

24 N Carroll, The philosophy of horror: or paradoxes of the heart (London, 1990), pp 55±57. 


26 E A Napier, The failure of Gothic: problems of disjunction in an eighteenth-century literary 

form (Oxford, 1987), p xi. 

120


writing, as it marked the beginning of an internalisation process 

whereby the darkness of external landscapes reflected the mental and 

emotional state of the inner consciousness. 27 Botting illustrates these 

trends through a discussion of what he calls `Romantic individuals' in 

literature including William Godwin's Caleb Williams which appeared 

in 1794. The despair and alienation suffered by such a hero, he 

suggests, are directly linked to the Faustian elements in Gothic fiction, 

particularly a misuse of broadly-defined alchemy either in medieval or 

18th-century form. 28 These elements are more Romantic than strictly 

Gothic in genre and Botting notes that it is these heroic motifs that form 

the basis for Mary Shelley's influential Gothic novel, Frankenstein, 

first published in 1818 following the establishment of classic Gothic 

forms. This narrative, notes Botting, `though one of the texts now 

synonymous with Gothic, deploys standard Gothic conventions sparingly 

to bring the genre thoroughly and critically within the orbit of 

Romanticism'. 29 Botting gives this text a specific historical moment and 

notes that in Frankenstein the Gothic tradition entered a new phase of 

modern science where nature and humanity are threatened by 

electrical and chemical replacement. 30 The ramifications of the scale 

of the experiment render the `monster' both a private and a public 

horror and the project became both exclusive and totalising. 31 As 

Botting has noted in earlier work on this theme, Frankenstein's creation 

cannot be limited and exists beyond the determinations of authority. 32 

The immense influence of Frankenstein is, for Botting, illustrated in 

the text's crossing of generic boundaries and its dissemination in 

popular culture and modern mythology às a byword for horror'. 33 

Botting then examines the diffusion of Gothic forms in literary and 

popular fiction in the 19th century. The boundaries between the 

inner and outer worlds of human consciousness had been disrupted 

by novels like Frankenstein in the early 19th century and these 

disturbances were evident in British and American literature. 34 

Developing from the work of Edgar Allen Poe, several key trends in 

American Gothic are identifiable, including a concern with modes of 



28 Ibid, p 98. 


30 Ibid, p 103. 

31 Ibid, p 104. 

32 F Botting, `Reflections of excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution and monstrosity' in A 

Yarrington & K Everest (eds), Reflections of revolution: images of Romanticism (London, 1993), 

p 36. 


34 Ibid, p 113. 

121


representation and the scientific transgression of accepted limits. 

This particular Gothic genre was also closely linked with the 

criminal world and paved the way for a new hero in fiction ± the 

detective. 35 In Britain during the same literary period criminal 

underworlds were fascinating sites for Gothic themes in their implied 

threat to the established social order of home and family. 36 Marshall 

has described the close association between crime, capital punishment 

and the Gothic genre in 19th-century England, suggesting that 

the gallows represented the possible threats to the peace of the 

social order. 37 Botting suggests that Victorian Gothic in Britain was 

in fact an expression of fear of the social depravity and criminal 

corruption which lay beneath the established bourgeois literate 

culture. 38 The extreme fragility of Victorian society was shown in 

Gothic texts like Wilkie Collins's The woman in white, where 

`threats to law, domestic relations and cultural and sexual identity 

are only temporarily rebuffed'. 39 

Having provided a detailed chronological overview of the development 

of the Gothic since the 1760s, Botting moves on to discuss the 

Gothic returns of the 1890s. He focuses specifically on the familiar 

figures recurrent since the late 18th century ± the double and the 

vampire. The two texts dealing with these themes, Stevenson's The 

strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Stoker's Dracula Botting 

notes, were firmly rooted in the context of modern science. 40 

Modernity and its scientific discourses provide a setting for Jekyll 

and Hyde and it is empirical science that discloses the instability of 

dualities contained in a single personality. This scientific modernity 

suggests, in Stevenson's plot, an ambivalence and uncertainty in the 

boundaries between nature, culture, law and identity. 41 In Stoker's 

1897 Dracula modern technology is more central and the narrative 

revolves around a subtle juxtaposition of modern mechanical devices 

with what Botting terms the stock features of the Gothic novel. 42 In 

his detailed study of the iconography of the vampire, Keith Gelder 

has noted that Stoker's construction is firmly modernist ± psycho- 


35 Ibid, p 123. 

36 Ibid, p 123. 

37 T Marshall, Murdering to dissect: grave-robbing, Frankenstein and the anatomy literature 

(Manchester, 1995), p 92. 


39 Ibid, p 134. 

40 Ibid, p 136 

41 Ibid, p 142. 

42 Ibid, pp 146±147. 

122


logically, technologically and socially. 43 The Dracula text, Botting 

suggests, can also be viewed as feeding off, literally and figuratively, 

the prevailing cultural anxieties about corruption, sexuality and 

spirit. 44 Hurley has similarly contextualised the late 19th-century 

Gothic revival within the tropes of a general concern with the nature 

of human identity together with scientific discourses such as 

criminal anthropology, biological and social medicine, all of which 

tend to transform the human to abhuman. 45 

Botting opens his final chapter on 20th-century Gothic with 

quotations from two formative post-modernist thinkers, Jean-Francois 

Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. The choice of the latter is highly 

significant for the theme of this chapter, that in the contemporary 

world of images, `Gothic is everywhere and nowhere'. 46 This statement 

reflects Baudrillard's assertion that post-modern or late 20th-century 

truths are evident only secondhand in the `signs of reality'. 47 Botting 

provides an informative, if brief, section on recent Gothic writing, in 

which he includes a range of authors on both the literary and popular 

level, and he centres on the multifaceted visual images of the Gothic 

evident in the current genre of cyberculture. 48 Again, this resonates 

with Baudrillard's premise that the medium of cinema is an expression 

of the ultimate concealment of the truth through images, and through 

which replicas and representations of the real interact through media 

texts with the world of lived experience. 49 Botting selects Ridley Scott's 

films Blade runner and Alien, both produced in the mid-1980s, to 

explore these cinematic representations of Gothic forms of this media 

reality. 50 Botting contends that Alien contains the key elements of 

`Gothic associations' though its depiction of a wrecked alien spaceship 

and a bleak planet which suggest `the gloom, ruin and awful desolation 

of ``Gothic'' architecture and landscape'. 51 Botting's discussion of this 

particular film text as an embodiment of the Gothic is not unprecedented, 

though other analyses tend to be more gender-centred, for 

instance Williams's exploration of both Alien and its successor Aliens 


43 K Gelder, Reading the vampire (London, 1994), pp 65, 83. 


45 K Hurley, The Gothic body: sexuality, materialism and degeneration at the Fin de Siecle 

(Cambridge, 1996), p 5. 


47 J Baudrillard, Selected writings (Oxford, 1990), p 166. 


49 N K Denzin, The cinematic society: the voyeur's gaze (London, 1995), pp 198±200. 


51 Ibid, pp 164±165. 

123


as `patriarchal, male Gothic', 52 and Barbara Creed's assessment of the 

Alien trilogy as a site of the horror represented by the truly monstrous 

nature of woman's body and the close association between `pregnancy' 

and death. 53 Botting also includes medievalist Umberto Eco's The 

name of the rose as an example of late 20th-century Gothic including as 

it does the tropes of mysterious death, diabolical machination and a 

dialectic between enlightened rationality and medieval superstition. 54 

Botting's identification of specifically Gothic forms differs from other 

recent assessments of Eco's popular novel which stress the 19thcentury 

detective story genre after the texts of Arthur Conan Doyle. 55 

Botting's concluding statement is that the contemporary cinema and 

popular Gothic fictions are in fact a prelude to other `spectral forms' in 

post-modern cyberculture. 56 This premise would seem to be confirmed 

by the recent film Alien resurrection and the multimedia vampire 

narrative, Blade. In this context, Gothic reality is in effect a mirror of 

cyberreality reflecting a set of meanings `recreated in a world at odds 

with the social and political tensions of reality'. 57 

In 1981 and 1988 Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich co-edited and 

published pioneering works in which they provided the impetus for a 

reexamination of the immense complexity and depth of both enlightenment 

and Romanticism as national phenomena. 58 More recently, 

Copley and Whale have argued that the claim for resistance to theory on 

both sides of the Atlantic is, in terms of the Romantic period, clearly 

absurd. Romanticism, they argue, has for the past 20 years `represented 

the peak of applied deconstructive and post-structuralist critical 

practice'. 59 In British academic circles the articulation between literary 

criticism and literary theory has been significant. 60 Aidan Day's 

Romanticism takes British Romanticism as its primary subject for 


52 Williams, Art of darkness, pp 249±252. 

53 B Creed, `Horror and the carnivalesque: the body monstrous' in L Devereaux and R Hillman (eds), 

Fields of vision: essays in film studies, visual anthropology and photography (Berkeley, 1997), 

p 163. 

54 Botting, Gothic, p 171. 

55 D H Richter, `The mirrored world: form and ideology in Umberto Eco's The name of the rose'inR 

Capozzi (ed), Reading Eco: an anthology (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1997), pp 258±264. 


57 K Robins, `Cyberspace and the world we live in' in J Dovey (ed), Fractal dreams: new media in 

social context (London, 1996), pp 1±3. 

58 R Porter, The enlightenment in national context (Cambridge, 1981); R Porter & M Teich (eds), 

Romanticism in national context (Cambridge, 1988). 

59 S Copley & J Whale, Ìntroduction' in S Copley & J Whale (eds), Beyond Romanticism: new 

approaches to texts and contexts 1780±1832 (London and New York, 1992), p 1.. 

60 S Curran, Ìntroduction' in S Curran (ed), The Cambridge companion to British Romanticism 


124


analysis and his book presents the key issues of this debate in 

chronological survey. 61 Day begins his discussion by locating Romanticism 

in the late 18th century suggesting, like Botting does in his 

analysis Gothic, that the enlightenment period provided a temporal and 

ideological base for the Romantic movement. 62 The political context of 

the French Revolution, he further suggests, was also a crucial focus for 

literary trends during the 1790s, a decade similarly stressed by Botting 

as a highly significant historical moment. Day contrasts the radical 

humanitarian elements suggested in Thomas Paine's Rights of man as a 

response to Burke's conservative Reflections on the revolution in 

France. 63 This political polarisation in British politics formed the 

political and social dialectic against which British Romanticism 

developed. Drawing on E P Thompson's formative social history, The 

making of the English working class, Day illustrates the fundamental 

economic inequalities in English society which Paine's narrative 

addressed. 64 Representing the `liberal Romanticism' of the 1790s, 

Day includes Blake's arguments in favour of the American Revolution 

and a quest for freedom from both literal and figurative empires. 65 

While the Romantic writer's relationship with imperialism is seen as 

arguably conservative rather than liberal, 66 Day's choice of writers 

expressing forms of liberalism is carefully defined in terms of that 

broad definition, for instance Mary Wollestonecraft's views on gender 

equality, 67 Burns's acclamation of `liberty-seeking Americans', 68 

Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical expression, and Landor's radical 

sensibility as evident in his work Gerbir. 69 Day goes on to provide a 

detailed provenance of the Romantic links between 'nature' and 

`sensibility', a connection he locates in the earlier 18th century. 70 He 

suggests that both these concepts have pre-enlightenment roots while 

at the same time having strong political connections with contemporary 

liberal thought such as that of Paine. 71 


61 A Day, Romanticism (London, 1996), preface. 

62 Ibid, p7. 

63 Ibid, pp 13±16. 

64 Ibid, p 16. 

65 Ibid, p 22±23. 

66 N Leask, British Romantic writers and the east: anxieties of empire (Cambridge, 1992), p 103. 

67 Day, Romanticism, pp 24±25. 

68 Ibid, p 28. 

69 Ibid, pp 33±38. 

70 Ibid, p 64. 

71 Ibid, p 78. 

125


Having given a temporal context for the definitions of enlightenment 

and Romantic writing, Day then tackles the historical 

antecedent of the construction of Romantic, suggesting that the 

essence of the genre lies in its background which is both medieval 

and renaissance though not classical. 72 He also establishes Romantic 

as a 19th-century imposition, associated with the revolutionary 

thought of the 1790s, but never used by the writers of that period. 73 

Day shows how this retrospective labelling was developed by 

Dowden's attempts to connect French revolutionary politics and 

spiritual transformations as well as 20th-century appropriations, for 

instance with totalitarianism. 74 Day continues this outline by a 

critical discussion of Abrams's 1953 The mirror and the lamp in 

which the Romantics were viewed as making a virtue of the 

displacement of socio-political energy into spiritual energy. Day also 

examines the emphasis on inner processes of the individual mind as 

stressed by literary critics Frye and Bloom in the 1960s and 

1970s. 75 While Abrams saw the work of writers like Coleridge as an 

expression of a dialectic between subject and object and between 

mind and nature, Paul de Man's more recent deconstruction debates 

the difficulties of reconciling ideology and aesthetics, an argument 

also recently taken by Paul Hamilton. 76 For Day, de Man opened the 

way for deconstructive readings on the temporality of Romanticism 

suggesting as he did that Romantic authors have no `trans-historical 

aesthetic space but must be read as subject to discourses of 

particular time and place'. 77 The argument for a post-structuralist 

approach to Romanticism has also been recently assessed as a 

phenomenon which de-idealises but under-privileges literary discourse. 

78 

Having established the theoretical basis for a study of Romanticism, 

Day devotes his third chapter to a historical survey of the 

political concerns of the Romantic authors. Included here is a 

succinct analysis of Abrams's work on Wordsworth's politics and 

spirituality, 79 Day suggesting that an emphasis on inner, spiritual 


72 Ibid, pp 79±82. 

73 Ibid, p 85. 

74 Ibid, p 90±92. 

75 Ibid, p 93±105. 

76 Ibid, pp 106±113. See also p Hamilton, ``À shadow of a magnitude'': the dialectic of Romantic 

aesthetics' in Copley & Whale (eds), Beyond Romanticism, pp 11±12. 

77 Day, Romanticism, p 125. 

78 See, for instance, T Rajan, `Deconstruction or reconstruction: reading Shelley's Prometheus 

unbound' in D Wu (ed), Romanticism: a critical reader (London, 1995), p 212. 


126


concerns is conservative rather than revolutionary in the historical 

context of the events in France and England in 1792 and 1793. 80 

Thus the `spiritual liberty' of Wordsworth's London, 1802, for 

instance, is an expression of political conservatism at the expense of 

political commitment, expressing as it does the virtues of an ancient, 

feudal order of society. 81 Included in this politically conservative 

grouping is Day's location of Walter Scott as a `conservative 

novelist'. 82 This is in line with other British scholars' views on 

Scott's early 19th-century texts, containing as tropes an anti-Jacobin 

stance in favour of progress against a feudal barbaric past. This was 

in keeping with the Scottish enlightenment critique of the medieval 

court culture and the eradication of feudalism. 83 Scott's particular 

form of conservative nationalism has also been seen as representative 

of a championing of Hanoverian England and the `British new 

order' following the Act of Union. 84 For Day, Austen fits into a 

similarly conservative worldview, embracing a patriarchal social 

order. 85 Formative post-colonial critic Edward Said has also 

suggested that Austen should be read within her imperial and 

undeniably upper-class English historical context rather than from a 

more liberating post-colonial stance. 86 Day uses what Said terms 

`historical honesty' when he roots both Wordsworth and Coleridge, 

not as historically transcendent, but as firmly established in the 

conservative politics of the Britain of their period. 87 Historically, he 

notes the contrast between the radical political attitudes of the 

enlightenment and more inwardly focused socially evasive and 

conservative thought of `Romanticism proper'. 88 In the move towards 

political conservatism he describes Coleridge as reactionary and 

Wordsworth as expressive of a retreat from direct socio-political 

engagement. Ultimately this was, for Day, a `capitulation to the ways 

of the British state'. 89 As Marylin Butler noted in Porter and Teich's 

seminal work, this conservatism was, in essence, an àcceptance of 


80 Ibid, p 132. 

81 Ibid, p 138. 

82 Ibid, p 139. 

83 G Kelly, `Romantic fiction' in Curran (ed), Cambridge companion, pp 211±212. 

84 E Evans, Ènglishness and Britishness: national identities, c1790±c1870' in A Grant & K J 

Stringer (eds), Uniting the kingdom? The making of British history (London and New York, 

1995), pp 227±229. 


86 E Said, `Jane Austen and empire', in Wu (ed), Romanticism, p 432. 


88 Ibid, p 150. 

89 Ibid, pp 153±154. 

127


the current system'. 90 It is against this background that Day situates 

Thomas Love Peacock's 'new radicalism' as expressive of a 

frustration with what he viewed as an abandonment of radicalism 

by the first generation of Romantic writers. Peacock also saw the 

second generation of Romantics as weakened by `German influenced 

spiritual introversion and political reaction'. 91 Day then examines 

several key texts authored by the `second generation' and sees these 

as attempts to address a move away from political radicalism. He 

includes among these Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Percy Shelley's 

The revolt of Islam, Byron's Don Juan and Keats's Endymion. 92 

Day sees the temporal and ideological distinctions between Romantic 

and enlightenment as identical to the counter-revolutionary and 

radical political movements. 93 Given these seemingly clear-cut 

divisions, however, he suggests that ìt is not possible to speak of 

a single, self-consistent thing called Romanticism'. 94 

Day concludes his book with a detailed assessment of the contribution 

of studies in gender issues to the Romantic period, taking as his 

starting-point Burke's interconnections between the sublime subject, 

masculine identity and feminine beauty. 95 A reading of Frankenstein, 

Margaret Homans suggests, indicates the link between masculinity and 

the solitary creative imagination. 96 Day also takes up Isobel Armstrong's 

argument that Western readers have had two centuries to 

develop ways of reading male poets, and that alternative politics, 

epistemology and theories of language are required in order to read 

women poets. 97 Such readings, Armstrong suggests, require a keen 

awareness of the immensely powerful symbolism in Romantic writing 

of male and female gender, sexuality and the sublime. 98 Day suggests 

that the Western cultural tensions, for instance those revolving around 

gender, which emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century, are still 

`being worked out in the late twentieth century'. Thus, in conclusion he 


90 M Butler, `Romanticism in England' in Porter & Teich (eds), Romanticism in national context, 

p 54. 


92 Ibid, pp 161±170. 

93 Ibid, p 176. 


95 Ibid, p 185. 

96 M Homans, `Bearing demons: Frankenstein and the circumvention of maternity' in C Chase (ed), 

Romanticism (London, 1993), pp 163±164. 


98 I Armstrong, `The gush of the feminine: How can we read women's poetry of the Romantic 

period?' in P R Feldman & T M Kelley (eds), Romantic women writers: voices and countervoices 

(Hanover and London, 1995), pp 17±19. 

128


suggests that `the development of a hermeneutics for reading the 

literary production of women writers is one of the principal directions 

that criticism of the Romantic period will now take'. 99 

Both Botting's Gothic and Day's Romanticism give a significant 

role to the critical tools of a broadly defined historicism. In his text 

entitled Historicism, Paul Hamilton suggests that this is à critical 

movement insisting on the prime importance of historical context to 

the interpretation of texts of all kinds'. 100 Like the other authors in 

this Routledge series, Hamilton presents the topic in historical 

context, tracing the development of historicism from ancient times to 

the post-modern context. 101 Thus his opening chapter provides a 

chronology of historicist thinking, beginning with a reassessment of 

the `poetics of history' as defined by classical philosophy. The 

boundary between what constitutes history and fiction, Hamilton 

suggests, was constantly crossed and redrawn by ancient historians 

in their search for an accurate yet acceptable version of the past. 102 

A brief historicising of Herodotus serves to locate him as the `first' 

historian and situates him ideologically. As his critic Hartog implies, 

Herodotus can be placed within the 'new historicism', as expressed 

by Michel Foucault, where all writing is viewed as conniving at the 

political power which permits it. 103 In this context, both historical 

explanation and its attendant causality of events become subjective 

as a `confusion of genres'. 104 Hamilton points out that Karl Popper's 

celebrated attack on the belief in predicting history was not directed 

against this type of definition and his seminal Poverty of historicism, 

but rather against the philosophical writings of scholars like 

Condorcet who looked for a prediction of the course of human 

history on the basis of past behaviour. 105 Hamilton then moves on to 

suggest that the hermeneutic tradition, which forms a considerable 

section of the debate in this book, is the most suitable method for 

understanding historical issues, particularly the dialectic suggested 

by E H Carr between facts and interpretation. 106 Looking at recent 

trends, Hamilton notes that historical explanation and historiography 



100 P Hamilton, Historicism (London, 1996), p 2. 

101 Ibid, p3. 

102 Ibid, pp 9±10. 

103 Ibid, p 13. 

104 Ibid, p 16. 

105 Ibid, p 17. 

106 Ibid, p 20. 

129


are conflated in recent post-structuralist writing, such as that of 

Hayden White. 107 White's analysis of the way in which narratives 

are 'narrativised' is, notes Fludernik, of central concern for 

historians in the post-structuralist context. 108 The work of scholars 

such as Michelet and Barthes has, for Hamilton, removed `historical 

difference, and the dialectic between past and present we have seen 

it make possible'. What we are left with then is a `synchronic 

tropology of the present (which) ... displaces a diachronic map of the 

past'. 109 

In his next chapter on `The rise of historicism' Hamilton traces the 

chronological development of this form of critique. Like Botting and 

Day he locates the origins of the movement in the 18th century, whose 

historians, he suggests, inspired by their belief in human societies with 

a common rationality and natural law, looked towards a possible 

universal history. 110 However, enlightenment historians were unable to 

reduce historical facts to general principles. Reactionaries to enlightenment 

history, like Herder, pointed to the multiplicity of facts which 

led to confusion, and to losing sight of any historical organisation. 111 

This can also be seen, suggests Carrithers, as the failure of enlightenment 

thinkers in being pre-hermeneutic. 112 Hamilton sees both Vico 

and Herder as critics of these flaws in the enlightenment history 

project. Vico in the respect he accorded to historical specifics of 

cultural expression ± which went well beyond the enlightenment's 

liberal tolerance of national diversity ± and Herder in his premise that 

we become human in as many ways as there are languages, cultures 

and societies. 113 Hamilton points out that, chronologically and 

conceptually, historicism did not simply supersede the enlightenment. 

The complexity of the debate is illustrated by Kant and Hegel who 

believed in some form of universal truth while at the same time 

applying new ideas of historical interpretation, moving ultimately 

towards a hermeneutic approach. 114 

Hamilton defines hermeneutics as the science of interpretation, 

historically placed as a useful tool for religious texts, but carrying an 


107 Ibid, p 22. 

108 M Fludernik, Towards a 'natural' narratology (London, 1996), pp 328±329. 

109 Hamilton, Historicism, p 28. 


111 Ibid, p 34. 

112 D Carrithers, `The enlightenment science of society' in C Fox et al (eds), Inventing human 

science: eighteenth-century domains (Berkeley, 1995), p 239. 

113 Hamilton, Historicism, pp 38±39. 

114 Ibid, pp 42±50. 

130


ambivalent legacy of the secular and the religious world as it became 

recognised as an ability to radically reinterpret in the light of historical 

circumstances. 115 This specific form of hermeneutics he locates 

temporally in the early modern context, rooting its origins in Luther's 

self-sufficiency. 116 Hamilton then traces the development of this 

hermeneutic tradition through Spinoza's conflict of national and 

hermeneutic liberty, and the tensions between the enlightened 

ambitions of hermeneutics and local rivalries, most evident in England 

which had no common culture well into the 18th century. These 

inequalities, Hamilton suggests, were expressed in Burke's Reflections 

on the revolution in France, also used by Botting and Day to illustrate 

tensions in English society. 117 Continuing his historical overview, 

Hamilton then examines the development of hermeneutics through 

Friedrich Schleiermacher's work, which was `dialectical in form'. 118 He 

suggests that Schleiermacher's stress on the role of language and 

authorship are in fact pre-emptive of post-structuralist thought. 119 

Similarly post-structuralist is Wilhelm Dilthey's premise that literary 

understanding is a primary skill for historians. 120 Hamilton concludes 

his section on hermeneutics with a look at Gadamer's response to the 

deficiencies in historical science bequeathed by Dilthey's Romanticistinspired 

`human sciences'. 121 Gadamer's culture is eventually unable to 

reconcile with the past through 18th-century discourse, either through 

Romanticism (endorsement) or enlightenment (suspicion). 122 

In his fourth chapter, an important one, Hamilton deals with the 

historicism of Marx, Freud and Lacan, and postpones a definition of 

the loaded term `modernity' until later in the chapter. Modernity, he 

suggests, is best described historically as `the belief from Descartes 

onwards that our knowledge of the world is dictated by our own 

capacities rather than by a being in excess of our objective uses of 

the world'. 123 Hamilton sensibly does not waste textual space here 

by engaging in complicated or meaningless definitions of modernity, 

the modern and post-modern. The historicisms of modernity, 

Hamilton declares, are linked to materialism ± but his choice of 


115 Ibid, pp 51±52. 

116 Ibid, p 53. 

117 Ibid, pp 54±55. See also Botting, Gothic and Day, Romanticism above. 


119 Ibid, p 62. 

120 Ibid, p 77. 

121 Ibid, pp 81±86. 

122 Ibid, p 98. 


131


Marx, Nietzsche and Freud is also motivated by their common aim in 

breaking away from past ìnauthentic history'. 124 In line with this 

approach, Hamilton goes on to identify Marx's literary reserve and 

sparse use of language as remaining free of `historicizing rhetorical 

constructions.' Thus for Marx, Hamilton suggests, `the proletarian 

revolution beggars all description but not because of its sublimity; 

because of the unprecedented literalness which alone will do justice 

to its break from the literary historicizing of ideology'. 125 Marx's 

`poetry of the future' thus escapes what Hamilton calls ìdeological 

contamination'. 126 Unfortunately, as he goes on to argue, a similar 

freedom cannot be said for Marxists and post-structuralists as both 

Àlthusser and his pupil Foucault leave us instead with a history 

composed of ideological perspectives'. 127 

In the context of historicisms of modernity, Hamilton views 

Nietzsche as devising a philosophy to assist in coping with a loss 

of outmoded certainties, including history. 128 His aim was to render 

history oracular, full of a meaning with which it would discompose 

the present, ideas which were also highly influential on Foucault. 129 

Hamilton goes on to examine how, as a historicism, Freud's 

psychoanalytic method, like Nietzsche's genealogies of power, 

exposes the instrumentalism of history as well as its characteristic 

uses. Thus, instead of innocently supplying us with an objective 

record of the past, Freud's history is caught up in the business of 

assuaging present feelings caused by our repression of the past. 

Hamilton points out that both Freud and Nietzsche aimed to unravel 

illusions and to find an interpretive path through the rhetorical 

tricks of which those deceptions were composed. For Freud, this 

formed the location of literary criticism. 130 Hamilton sees Freud, in 

the temporal context of late 19th-century modernity, as a compromise 

between enlightenment and historicist tradition in which his 

expressive theory of history clashes with the enlightenment idea of 

science. Like Vico and Herder, Freud disagrees with unproblematic 

linear progress. 131 Freud's scientific method lets us reinterpret the 


124 Ibid, p 100. 

125 Ibid, p 107. 

126 Ibid, p 108. 

127 Ibid, p 110. 

128 Ibid, p 113. 

129 Ibid, pp 114±117. 

130 Ibid, p 119. 

131 Ibid, p 120. 

132


past in new ways which necessitate a reappraisal of the present. 132 

Hamilton then suggests that Lacan's recasting of Freudianism seizes 

on the opportunities Freud offers for his followers to understand 

subjectivity as something made in the process of dream work, from 

latent to manifest content rather than as fixed identity. 133 Lacan, 

through a reduction of linguistic function, diagnoses the destructive 

subject-object paradigm of knowledge as the immersion of the 

subject in the incomplete process of self-interpretation and renders 

it thoroughly historical. 134 Hamilton stresses Lacan's role in 

prolonging Freud's historicism, `weaving together past and present 

in a story which guarantees explanatory ascendency to neither'. At 

the same time Lacan's emphasis on language ensures that literary 

interpretation and historical explanation are brought closer together. 

135 Thus, criticism simply keeps pace with history, adding 

to the original story, bringing it up to date. 136 

For Hamilton, historicism becomes more flexible in addressing the 

problems characteristic of modernity as it moves towards a more 

radical dialectic between past and present. He then questions 

whether post-modernism can retain the productive kind of dialogue 

evident between Lacan and Freud, or whether a declared sceptism 

towards all narrative precludes this. 137 Taking Foucault as a starting 

point, Hamilton examines his influence on historicist criticism 

against his suspicion of hermeneutics. Hamilton points out that 

Foucault, while he appears fascinated with history, is only interested 

in proving human discontinuity from the past. Foucault has been 

debated at length as a critic who unpacked 18th-century human 

science, including the Western historical narrative which was, he 

claimed, essentially a series of cultural myths. 138 A history based on 

any kind of continuity is, for Foucault, compromised by the subject 


132 Ibid, p 126. 

133 Ibid, pp 128±129. 

134 Ibid, p 129. 


136 Ibid, p 132. 

137 Ibid, p 134. 

138 See H D Harootunian, `Foucault, genealogy, history and the pursuit of otherness' in J Arac (ed), 

After Foucault: humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges (New York, 1988), p 113; C 

O'Farrell, Foucault: historian or philosopher? (London, 1989), p 36; R Mc Gowen, `Power and 

humanity or Foucault among the historians' in C Jones & R Porter (eds), Reassessing Foucault: 

power, medicine and the body (London, 1994), p 93. For a recent reassessment see M Poster, 

Cultural history and postmodernity: disciplinary readings and challenges (New York, 1998), 

pp 134±151. 

133


unified across the time which it serves. 139 Foucault uncovers the 

rules of the modernity/discursive formation and locates epistemes, 

for instance Western medical knowledge in which he identifies the 

19th-century practitioner as the chief enunciator of medical 

discourse, working within the frameworks of power associated with 

the medical profession. 140 Foucault's descriptions of the past disrupt 

its hierarchies and his writing must consequently show continuity 

only through discontinuity. 141 Hamilton concludes that it is hard not 

to view Foucault's final immersion in historical practice as yet 

another variant on the historicism with which he always tried to 

break. 142 Hamilton places Foucault both temporally and academically 

as the post-modern tail of psychoanalytic theory, connected with the 

post-modern critique of modernity but recast as the problematic of 

historicist criticism. This convergence of post-modernity and historicism 

was followed up by Derrida 143 and Foucault and Derrida's 

significance, for Hamilton, lies in their setting up post-modern 

hermeneutics, whereby they explored the tensions between past and 

present as the tensions within writing and discourse. 144 Hamilton 

sees a very real danger in viewing historicism as simply a 

readjustment of the boundaries of history, as new critical practices 

will merely repopulate without displacing the old configurations. 

Thus, post-colonialism becomes neo-colonialism and feminist hegemony 

replaces traditional masculine-focused discourse. 145 

Hamilton describes the 'new historicism' as the `most selfconsciously 

historicist critical practice of the present day'. 146 Useful 

explanations have also been provided by Harold Veeser who has 

defined the new historicism as a core link between literature and 

material base, rather than a discontinuity and fragmentation between 

history and criticism and text. Content and form are, for Veeser, 

homogenous not separate. 147 This debate continues to remain a key 



140 Ibid, p 137. On Foucault's medical discourse see, for instance, G Gutting, Michel Foucault's 

archaeology of scientific reason (Cambridge, 1989), p 164; R Porter, `The eighteenth century' in 

L I Conrad et al (eds), The western medical tradition: 800BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge, 1995), 

p 427; R Porter, Medicine: a history of healing, ancient traditions to modern practices 

(London, 1997), p 48. 

141 Hamilton, Historicism, p143. 

142 Ibid, p 144. 

143 Ibid, p 145. 

144 Ibid, p 149. 

145 Ibid, p 150. 

146 Ibid. 

147 H A Veeser (ed), The new historicism (London, 1989), p xi. 

134


focus for scholars as literature and history continue to be 

juxtaposed, and literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably. 

148 As Hamilton notes, the new historicism is usually applied 

specifically to a body of critical work on the English Renaissance, 

particularly through the work of Stephen Greenblatt who is seen as 

inaugurating a new phase in contemporary historicism with his 

controversial text, Renaissance self-fashioning. 149 In this and his 

later work, Shakespearean negotiations, 150 Greenblatt confronts 

Shakespeare from a contemporary post-colonial perspective and 

engages with the text of, for instance, The Tempest to sketch a 

colonialist mentality from his own position of post-colonial disapproval. 

151 Hamilton notes Terence Hawkes's significant contribution 

to this debate by referring to his `continuous process of meaningmaking'. 

152 Hawkes's analysis of Shakespeare's meanings as a 

powerful element in specific ideological strategies is a key concept 

in the current discussion on Shakespeare as text 153 and, for 

Hamilton, Hawkes's point that ìt all depends on what we want to 

do with the text' is one of the most original comments on new 

historicism. 154 Contemporary meanings and appropriations or `self 

fashioning' continue to be a core focus for Shakespearian studies and 

this historicist approach has lent vigour to the work of both leftist 

and conservative scholars. 155 Hamilton sees the new historicist 

approaches to the Renaissance as in effect casting history as a site of 

communicative conflict over competing fictions. 156 A continuing 

theme here is a repeated set of returns to the `New World' as a 

kind of paradigm, for imperial textual communications, and a 

hermeneutical defeat which is indistinguishable from physical 

submission. 157 As John Brannigan describes, Greenblatt's Marvel- 


148 H A Veeser, `The new historicism' in H A Veeser (ed), The new historicism reader (London and 

New York, 1994), p 16. 

149 Hamilton, Historicism, p 152. See S Greenblatt, Renaissance self-fashioning: from More to 

Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980). 

150 S Greenblatt, Shakespearean negotiations: the circulation of social energy in Renaissance 

England (Oxford, 1988). 


152 Ibid, p 165. 

153 T Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London, 1992), p 3. 


155 Recent lively discussions include, for instance, G Holderness, ```What ish my nation?'': 

Shakespeare and national identities' in I Kamps (ed), Materialist Shakespeare: a history 

(London, 1995), pp 218±237; C Fitter, À tale of two Branaghs: Henry V, ideology and the Mekong 

Agincourt' in I Kamps (ed), Shakespeare left and right (London, 1991), pp 259±275. 

156 Hamilton, Historicism, p 171. 

157 Ibid. 

135


lous possessions: the wonder of the new world is essentially an 

investigation of an instrument of what he calls Èuropean representational 

practice', which enabled the Europeans to colonise America. 

158 New historicism, concludes Hamilton, is a rewriting of 

discourse with analytical difference, a process which reaches its 

full critical potential in the articulation of post-colonial and feminist 

theories. 159 Hamilton traces the post-colonial debate back to Franz 

Fanon's work and then places Homi Bhabha's response to this in 

historical context. 160 Post-colonial criticism, as Bhabha has recently 

noted, `bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural 

representation involved in the contest for political and social 

authority within the modern world order'. 161 Post-colonial theory is 

much preoccupied with the methods whereby a culture co-opts 

others to its own point of view, a debate instigated largely by 

Edward Said's controversial but extremely influential Orientalism 

which emphasised these questions of style. 162 As John Mackenzie 

has pointed out, Said's analysis of a wide-reaching òrientalism' 

imposed from Europe was an unprecedented challenge to the 

representational devices of the West. 163 Hamilton then warns 

scholars of the emphasis on the critical potential of mimicry evident 

in post-colonial debate. Mimicry, he suggests, has replaced the 

earlier bid for power against the cultural centres. 164 Historian Keith 

Windschuttle has also voiced reservations about the blatant appropriation 

of French post-structuralist labels by scholars working in 

post-colonial temporal and spatial spheres. 165 Hamilton concludes his 

analysis by outlining the historicism evident in feminist criticism, a 

project which, while it contains similar problems to the post-colonial 

in setting up a rival hegemony, 166 has been one of the most 

successful in what Hutcheon has called the `detotalising' of the 

power structures of the historical narrative. 167 Hamilton ends his 


158 J Brannigan, New historicism and cultural materialism (New York, 1998), p 225. 

159 Hamilton, Historicism, p 175. For a recent comprehensive feminist critique of imperialism from a 

post-colonial perspective see A Mc Clintock, Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the 

colonial conquest (London and New York, 1995). 

160 Hamilton, Historicism, pp 179±181. 

161 H K Bhabha, `Postcolonial criticism' in Greenblatt & Gunn (eds), Redrawing the boundaries, 

p 437. 

162 Hamilton, Historicism, p 181. 

163 J Mackenzie, Orientalism: history, theory and the arts (Manchester, 1995), pp 4±5. 


165 K Windschuttle, The killing of history: how literary critics and social theorists are murdering 

our past (New York, 1997), pp 16±17. 

166 Hamilton, Historicism, pp 189±195. 

167 L Hutcheon, The politics of the post-modern (London, 1989), p 62. 

136


text by summing up the concern with post-modernist historicisms, 

quoting Walter Benjamin's warning that the `dialectical historicity of 

past and present generates its own momentum'. 168 

As is evident from the three works discussed above, defining postmodernity 

has been a major concern for scholars in various disciplines 

in recent years. The most readable analyses are arguably those which, 

like Bertens', attempt to place the post-modern in a clearly defined 

temporal or historical space. 169 According to David Hawkes, the postmodern 

era is the period during the late 20th century, characterised by 

a shift from industrial production towards consumption- and exchangebased 

economies, accompanied by the cultural prominence of the 

technological media of representation. 170 Hawkes sees post-modernist 

thought primarily as an unprecedented suspicion of the concept of 

`false consciousness'. 171 In order to locate these ideas, he focuses 

initially on the modern world theories of `false consciousness', defined 

from the 16th century, during the period of production-based capital as 

distinct from the exchange-orientated post-modern economy. 172 In the 

transformation from pre-capitalist to capitalist economies, Hawkes 

suggests, ideology became a weapon against old entrenched assumptions. 

173 The Platonic-Christian tradition, which established the 

idealist hierarchy in which material knowledge is necessarily imperfect, 

was inadequate to be utilised in the challenges and social change 

of early modern life as human society began to experience `the 

unprecedented experiences of modernity'. 174 Working chronologically 

through conceptualisations of `false consciousness', Hawkes then 

traces the early modern secularisation of Machiavelli's deception and 

representation, Luther's human inclinations to make fetishes of their 

own deeds, and Francis Bacon's identification of idolatry as a fully 

secular theory of `false consciousness'. 175 Bacon's argument on the use 

of secular ideology as the perpetuation of a particular form of power or 

control is, for Hawkes, a crucial comment on the coming of the English 

Revolution in the mid-17th century. 

Moving on to a chapter on empiricism, Hawkes follows up his 

comments on Bacon by describing the English Revolution as an initial 



169 H Bertens, The idea of the postmodern: a history (London, 1995), pp 6±7. 

170 D Hawkes, Ideology (London, 1996), pp 2±3. 

171 Ibid, p 13. 

172 Ibid, p 14. 

173 Ibid, p 16. 

174 Ibid, p 22. 

175 Ibid, pp 24±32. 

137


modern attempt to reorder an entire nation politically. 176 John Milton, 

as the spokesperson and propagandist of that revolution, linked custom 

and idolatry, and his wholesale criticism of Anglicanism, Hawkes 

suggests, had much wider epistemological ramifications. 177 British 

historian Christopher Hill has recently reexamined traditions in 17thcentury 

England and has similarly explored the notion of custom and 

law in the context of revolutionary change, using instead of a single 

voice (as Hawkes does with Milton), the base-level popular ballads of 

the time. 178 In terms of the history of empiricist thought in England, 

Hawkes sees Milton's influence as crucial in preparing the way for a 

secular investigation of ideology as expressed by Hobbes, who 

effectively separated ideology from theology. 179 This brings Hawkes 

to the writing of John Locke, an empiricist whom historians have 

located in the specific political space of England's 17th-century 

revolutions. 180 English empiricism as espoused by Locke was an 

aggressive, debunking mode of thought, imposing as it did the 1688 

Glorious Revolution as a wholesale solution for France. 181 Hawkes sees 

the 18th-century French response to empiricism as more urgent due to 

the obstacles to empirical revolution, hence the virulence of, for 

instance, Voltaire's anti-clericism. 182 Rousseau, by contrast, Hawkes 

describes as a reactionary against bleak empiricism and more 

representative of Romanticist passion against the burgeoning of 

industrial capitalism and political conservatism. 183 Hawkes's approach 

to the dichotomy of enlightenment and Romantic is similar here to 

Aidan Day's. Political conservatism, Hawkes suggests, characterised 

the post-French Revolution bourgeois ideology as this concept came to 

represent a kind of orthodoxy linking human sciences and ideology. 184 

Hawkes identifies 1796 as the historical moment at which Destutt de 

Tracy invented ideology, which then became institutionalised as the 

science of ideas and a scientific genealogy of thought, with a notable 

superiority complex over other disciplines. 185 This new discipline of 

ideology as a science to end all sciences was, Hawkes suggests, crushed 


176 Ibid, pp 32±33. 

177 Ibid, pp 25±26. 

178 C Hill, Liberty against the law: some seventeenth-century controversies (Harmondsworth, 

1996), pp 19±20. 

179 Hawkes, Ideology, pp 38±39. 

180 S Priest, The British empiricists (Harmondsworth, 1990), p 52. 

181 Hawkes, Ideology, p 43. 

182 Ibid, pp 44±46. 

183 Ibid, p 48. 

184 Ibid, p 54. 

185 Ibid, p 57. 

138


by Napoleon as it represented a continual unmasking of ideas and had, 

in addition, dramatically materialist overtones. 186 

The current concern with post-modernism as the failure of Western 

empiricism has, Anthony Easthope notes, been a prime cause in the 

demise of the traditional literary studies paradigm. 187 However, as 

Hawkes shows, empiricism was already experiencing a certain level of 

disillusionment amongst 18th-century thinkers. 188 The notion of the 

mind as a mere object of `human science' was too materialist for the 

French philosophes, particularly Rousseau. 189 Hawkes maintains that 

the concept of a mind free from matter was best expressed, not in 18thcentury 

thought, but in the work of Descartes, whose sense of divinity 

within the mind was radically at odds with the materialist project of 

tracing the origin of human ideas to external causes. 190 Descartes's 

famous aphorism, which he intended as a self-confirming proposition ± 

that truth is established in the very act of conceiving it ± was 

expressive of an irreconcilable divergence or dualism between the 

material world and ideas, quite distinct from the materialists. For 

Descartes, our perceptions of objects are really only ideas which may 

or may not exist, and it is ignorance of this which is the prime cause of 

Hawkes's `false consciousness'. 191 

This Cartesian dualism between reality and ideas influenced 

philosophers for the next three centuries as they tried to overcome or 

reconcile these fundamental oppositions. Hawkes identifies George 

Berkeley and David Hume as key thinkers in this tradition and points 

out that in a sense they anticipated the post-modernists in their grasp 

of this debate. 192 Hawkes sees Kant's reaction to empiricism in trying 

to establish beyond all doubt the existence of a transcendent human 

subject as a `Copernican revolution'. Kant's idea that our experience of 

the material world is made possible by the transcendent subject 

constituted an ìdeology of the aesthetic', a label arguably applicable to 

the Romantic poets. 193 Kant's subjective aesthetic, and his notions of 

the potential of the sublime as an iconoclastic force make him, for 

Hawkes, the epitome of enlightenment thought. 194 Hegel's ideology as a 


186 Ibid. See also R Porter, `Medical science and human science' in Fox, et al (eds), Inventing human 

science, p 69. 

187 A Easthope, `Paradigm lost and paradigm regained' in Bradford (ed), The state of theory, p 93. 


189 Ibid, p 59. 

190 Ibid.. 


192 Ibid, pp 63±64. 

193 Ibid, pp 64±65. 

194 Ibid, pp 71±73. 

139


critique of abstract rationalism is also indicative of an enlightenment 

approach to `false consciousness'. 195 Hawkes views Hegel as 

essentially conservative, but with ideas encompassing a radical 

potential which influenced the generation emerging in the 1840s who 

seized on the historicising aspect of Hegel's thought and developed it 

into a theory of political revolution. Hawkes includes Marx and 

Engels in this modern framework as well as David Strauss and 

Ludwig Feuerbach. 196 Feuerbach's dialectical approach, Hawkes 

suggests, was a relapse away from Hegel back towards de Tracy, a 

discourse taken up by his most perspicacious follower, Marx. 197 In 

this chapter, Hawkes has provided a bridging historical discussion 

which links early modernities, such as Kant and Hegel ± a frame of 

reference also used by Harpham, who describes these ideologies of 

the aesthetic as modern in outlook 198 ± with Marx and the 

materialists of the 19th century. 

Marxism, in its 20th-century form as materialist determinism, has 

been a primary location for ideology, a focus which has often served 

to negate its prior and concurrent independent history. 199 Certainly 

in literary studies Marxism has come to provide an underlying basis 

of economic forces and relations of production which define the 

functions and limits of cultural activity, even extending to language 

itself. 200 Hawkes emphasises that Marxists, as distinct from Marx, 

suggest a historical process which unites objective circumstances 

and subjective ideas. 201 Hawkes attempts a historical location of 

Marx's early work, which was idealist in thought but in which he 

aimed to transcend the opposition between materialism and 

idealism. 202 This is later indicative of an extremely complex 

relationship in Marx's work between the ideal, the material and 

the representational with the end result that `false consciousness' is 

not caused by a single factor. 203 Engels, on the other hand, 

constructs a rigid antithesis between materialism and idealism in 

response to the idealism of Hegel, resulting in what Hawkes terms à 



196 Ibid, pp 82±85. 

197 Ibid, p 87. 

198 G G Harpham, Àesthetics and the fundamentals of modernity' in G Levine (ed), Aesthetics and 

ideology (New Brunswick, 1994), pp 125±126. 

199 M Jehlen, `Literary criticism at the edge of the millennium: or, from here to history' in Levine 

(ed), Aesthetics and ideology, p 46. 

200 C Hampton, The ideology of the text (Milton Keynes, 1990), p 4. 


202 Ibid, p 99. 

203 Ibid, p 40. 

140


brutal materialist determinism far removed from Marx's historical 

dialectics'. 204 Citing Plekhanov, Hawkes demonstrates that the link 

to materialism was not made clear, and that this was an 

unprecedented tragedy for the subsequent history of institutional 

Marxism particularly in its Leninist form. 205 In the 20th century 

ideology then became a set of vague and nebulous ideas which claim 

independence from material circumstances and the resulting confusion 

has plagued the theory of ideology ever since. 206 

Hawkes continues his chronological assessment with an examination 

of Georg Lukacs's 1922 text which he claims advanced the theory of 

ideology while at the same time retaining Marx's original dialectic. 207 

With the value of hindsight Hawkes views Lukacs's investigation of the 

ways in which commodity fetishism permeates capitalist society and, 

moving temporally forward to the work of Baudrillard, notes that the 

Western proletarian revolution did not occur as `the proletariat settled 

down in front of its commodified world in peace'. 208 The task of 

philosophy from this point on was, for Hawkes, an ongoing negation in 

the form of criticism of the virtually universal `false consciousness'. In 

post-modern terms, notes David Hebidge, just as the enlightenment self 

was de-centred by Marxism, so the late 20th-century self is de-centred 

practically in the West by the rise of mass consumption and 

advertising. 209 Hawkes then returns to his earlier narrative with the 

work of Antonio Gramsci, which can be seen as the first attempt to 

address the defeat of the proletarian revolution. For Gramsci, while 

revolutions may be facilitated by shifts in the economic structure they 

are also fought out, and their outcomes are decided, on the level of 

ideologies. 210 Gramsci's study of the realm of ideology as a field of 

class conflict and his conceptualisation of hegemony is, states Hawkes, 

a nexus of the material and ideological, and a form of praxis wherein 

ideological institutions like mass media uphold the dominance of the 

ruling class. 211 Finally, Hawkes roots Gramsci by noting that although 

his ideas were not followed up for 30 years, he formed the major 

inspiration for the 20th-century Marxism of Louis Althusser. 212 


204 Ibid, p 105. 

205 Ibid, pp 108±109. 

206 Ibid, p 108. 

207 Ibid, pp 109±110. 

208 Ibid, p 115. 

209 D Hebdige, Àfter the masses' in N Dirks et al (eds), Culture/power/history: a reader in 

contemporary social theory (Princeton, 1994), p 226. Hebdige's italics. 


211 Ibid, pp 117±119. 

212 Ibid, p 120. 

141


While historians have, in the past decades, loosely rejected Marxism's 

ùntoward uncertainties about history's vector', 213 Hawkes' 

analysis provides a clearer chronological synthesis of these changing 

trends in a post-Marxist context. The `post' here (like the `post' in postcolonial) 

is temporal as well as ideological. Thus, Althusser is the 

precursor to Foucault but at the same time the inheritor of Marxist 

materialism. 214 Materialism as ideology was embodied in the work of 

the structuralists, such as Saussure's linguistics and the anthropology 

of Levi-Strauss. 215 As a setting for his final chapter, Hawkes describes 

how the post-structuralist mythical use of representation, possibly a 

materialist ideology in an ultimate form, has been established by 

contemporary technology to the extent that it is now indistinguishable 

from reality. 216 As Whetmore notes, `virtual reality' is thus the final 

form of consumer technology in the era of post-Marxist, late 

capitalism. 217 

Gramsci's identification of culture as a site of ongoing power 

relations within society 218 provided, in one sense, for the rigorous 

post-structuralist questioning of Marxism. 219 These deconstructions 

have become central to literary studies as boundaries are constantly 

redrawn and discourses de-totalised. Hawkes places Foucault, Nietshe 

and Baudrillard in this section, unlike Hamilton who locates Nietsche 

firmly in modernity. Hawkes maintains that the epistemological 

relativism of the post-modern world, and its scepticism about the 

possibility of distinguishing truth from falsehood, finds its prototype in 

Nietzsche's nihilistic thought. 220 For Nietzsche, the whole of Western 

philosophy was, historically, an ideology and a self-legitimation of 

hierarchical power structures. 221 Foucault combines Nietzsche's 

history with post-structuralist linguistics, in looking for concrete 

results of rules of formation. 222 For Hawkes, Foucault's Order of 

things demonstrates Foucault's ultra-materialism, which he appropriated 

from Althusser, and his inability to use truth or consciousness 


213 B Agger, The decline of discourse: reading, writing and resistance in postmodern capitalism 

(New York, 1990), p 186. 

214 Hawkes, Ideology, p 121. 

215 Ibid, p 148. 

216 Ibid, p 154. 

217 E J Whetmore, Mediamerica, mediaworld: form, content and consequence of mass 

communication (Belmont and London, 1995), p 477. 

218 T Docherty, Alterities: criticism, history, representation (Oxford, 1996), p 192. 

219 Bertens, The idea of the postmodern, pp 6±7. 


221 Ibid, p 156. 

222 Ibid, p 160. 

142


in any real sense ± a limitation also evident in Kant's conditions of 

possibility. 223 Christopher Norris has also pointed out, however, that 

Foucault deplored Kant's critique of pure reason, which merely 

reproduced an existing power system of knowledge. 224 Hawkes sees 

Foucault's Archaeology of knowledge as an escape from a subjectcentred 

approach, and a rebellion against history as a coherent 

narrative acted out by a coherent subject. 225 Hawkes places Foucault 

philosophically with Hegel and Marx, as he tries to transcend the 

polarity between idealism and materialism, using discourse as a middle 

ground between these points. 226 Hawkes does not include Foucault's 

analysis of medical discourses, although The birth of the clinic was a 

key earlier work which appeared in 1963, before the Order of things. 

Hawkes moves on instead to Foucault's later work on power which he 

contends assumes a quasi-divine status, as shown in the power 

mechanisms discussed in Discipline and punish and Power/knowledge. 

227 Hawkes concludes by asking àre we so far away, here, from 

the traditional religious conception of the subject as the site of a battle 

between cosmic good and evil?' 228 

Hawkes views Foucault as being a contrast to Walter Adorno who is 

`consistently dialectical' in his commitment to the commodity fetishism 

of Lukacs's Marxism. Foucault, who lacks analysis of this issue, is 

`therefore ultimately driven into a species of the quasi-religious 

metaphysics which he purports to deplore'. 229 Debord's Lukacsian 

analysis of commodity as a way of understanding that the traditional 

division between ideal and material was being confused and displaced 

is also out of line with Foucault's restricted approach. Both Nietzsche 

and Foucault have suggested a subversion of the self in modern and 

post-modern society. In late 20th-century society, Hawkes suggests, 

commodity culture has embodied the materialisation of ideology and 

representation has become autonomous. The heart of the post-modern 

project is traditionally seen as an articulation of freedom from the 

repressed enlightenment self. 230 As Benhabib has stated, the postmodern 

achievement was encompassed in a destruction of the 

`metaphysical illusions of the enlightenment ... a self-transparent and 



224 C Norris, The truth about postmodernism (Oxford, 1993), p 31. 


226 Ibid, p 163. 

227 Ibid, p 165. 

228 Ibid, p 166. 

229 Ibid, p 168. 

230 Ibid, p 170. 

143


self-grounding reason ... of a disembedded and disembodied subject'. 

231 It is against this background that Hawkes's assessment of 

Baudrillard should perhaps be examined. Baudrillard started his 

academic career as an associate of Debord, deploring the commodity 

system on consciousness, though he later moved towards a more benign 

view of post-modern society. 232 In his early work on the ècstasy of 

communication' Baudrillard assessed the effects of replacing the mass 

consumption of late capitalism with a new universe of communication, 

connections and feedback. 233 Baudrillard's simulacrum explored the 

multifaceted images which conceal the truth and the ways in which 

Western culture deploys signs which constantly change their relationship 

to reality. 234 This, for Hawkes, was a move towards a `glorification 

of the disarray of the transcendental subject'. 235 The use of media 

as an escape from reality, suggests Umberto Eco, preempted a genuine 

apocalypse of Western civilisation by appropriating cultural forms 

which bear no relation to the real culture of the West. 236 Still on the 

subject of representational media, Hawkes includes Zizek's reaction to 

the triumph of representation as an extension of material practice, and 

the effects of commodity fetishism on the individual psyche as an 

objectified illusion. 237 Although Zizek can be placed within Foucauldian 

debate, traceable to Althusser's contention that ideology is material 

practice, he differs from conventional post-modernists like Baudrillard 

in that he views materialisations of ideology as an unmitigated 

catastrophe and an ongoing process of `living a lie'. 238 In a dialectical 

analysis, this process of fetishism operates simultaneously on the 

material, representational and ideal levels. In the reduction of the ideal 

and the representational to the material in practice, theory has to be 

rigorously and consistently opposed to the real and the factual. For 

Hawkes, Adorno's Negative dialectics is thus far the most promising 

attempt to locate the presence and power of exchange value and return 

these to Marxist dialectics. 239 The objectification of people under 


231 S Benhabib, Situating the self: gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics 


232 Hawkes, Ideology, p 171. 

233 P Baudrillard, `The ecstasy of communication' in H Foster (ed), The anti-aesthetic: essays on 

postmodern culture (Washington, 1983), p 130. 

234 N K Denzin, Images of postmodern society: social theory and contemporary cinema (London, 

1991), p 30. 


236 U Eco, Apocalypse postponed (Cambridge, 1994), pp 17±19. 


238 Ibid, p 180. 

239 Ibid, p 182. 

144


capitalism and its wrongness is shown in themes which have a double 

subject, both living and dead. Here Hawkes, like Botting, cites Ridley 

Scott's Gothic film text Blade runner as a dialectic exchange between 

what Marx termed the domination of dead over living labour. 240 

Hawkes suggests that this position is ultimately too frightening for 

many thinkers, including Althusser and Foucault, as it implies a move 

towards self-destruction and the ultimate message that `we are the 

dead'. 241 Hawkes concludes that it is neither possible nor impossible to 

escape from the contemporary dialectic between ideology and 

representation. 242 Other scholars have offered a less negative view of 

the post-modern project, stressing its own enlightenment conceptualisation 

of progress, cultural evolution and discovery. 243 

This series, particularly the three British-authored works by Botting, 

Day and Hamilton, illustrates that British literary studies are no longer 

out of theoretical line with American trends. British historical 

narratives have also escaped, in recent years, from an exclusive 

tradition which Anthony Easthope described as òne of the most 

contaminated by unexamined Englishness and its ideology of the 

real'. 244 Specifically, literary studies have led to an integrated 

approach to cultural power relations during the 18th century, a 

temporal and political space increasingly recognised as one of the most 

controversial and conflict ridden periods in modern British history. 245 

Edward Said has suggested that the current debate is not the presence, 

but the relevance of post-structuralism, given what he perceives as its 

sense of intellectual mission and its erosion of the historical matrix. 246 

This Routledge series succeeds in illustrating how temporal as well as 

spatial continuity and discontinuity can be addressed. This seems to be 

in keeping with Eric Hobsbawm's quest for the whole historical 

narrative which juxtaposes a chronological narrative with separate 

discourses. 247 


240 Ibid, p 185. 

241 Ibid, p 188. 


243 W T Anderson, Èpilogue: the end and beginning of enlightenment' in W T Anderson (ed), The 

Fontana postmodernism reader (London, 1995), p 219. 

244 A Easthope, British post-structuralism since 1968 (London, 1991), p 105. 

245 See, for instance, P Linebaugh, The London hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth 

century (London, 1991), pp ix±xi; I A Bell, Literature and crime in Augustan England (London, 

1991), pp 10±11; P Rawlings, Drunks, whores and idle apprentices: criminal biographies of the 

eighteenth century (London, 1992), pp 17±23. 

246 E Said, `The Franco-American dialogue: a late twentieth-century reassessment' in B G Lyons (ed), 

Reading in an age of theory (New Brunswick, 1997), p 32. 

247 E J Hobsbawm, On history (London, 1997), pp 194±195. 

145


Spivak has emphasised the crucial importance of a multi-disciplinary 

approach in teaching colonial and post-colonial discourse. 248 An 

unfortunate result of post-structuralist literary studies has been the 

`hermeneutics of suspicion' which has characterised the constant shift 

in boundaries between disciplines. 249 Local academic Patricia van der 

Spuy has noted that historians are less influenced by post-modernism 

than literary theorists and that they are more territorial about the 

ownership of knowledge. 250 While a multi-disciplinary framework may 

be essential, historians have expressed their concern with the need for 

students to study history within a context of the past. 251 History, 

whether in cyberspace or any other technological territory still 

requires, above all, a fundamental knowledge of the chronology of 

events before its students can proceed to a productive engagement with 

historical debates. 252 


248 C Spivak, Outside in the teaching machine (London, 1993), p 277. 

249 Greenblatt & Gunn, Ìntroduction' in Greenblatt & Gunn (eds), Redrawing the boundaries, p8. 

250 P van der Spuy, `Silencing race and gender', South African Historical Journal, 36 (May 1997), 

pp 262±263. 

251 M Legassick et al `Statement by the South African Historical Society on the implications of 

Curriculum 2005 for history teaching in the schools', Kleio, 30 (1998), p 8. 

252 H Deacon, Ùsing computer technology in history teaching', South African Historical Journal,38 

(May 1998), p 12. 

146

Kleio XXXI, 1999 Book reviews/Boekbesprekings 

Book reviews/ 

Boekbesprekings 

Africa/Afrika 

John L & Jean Comaroff, Of revelation 

and revolution: the dialectics of 

modernity on a South African frontier, 

vol II (Chicago and London, University 

of Chicago Press, 1997), 

xxiii + 588 pp, illus, notes, bibl, 

index. ISBN 0 226 11444 9 

Sequels are seldom as good as originals, 

and when the original achieved a paradigm 

shift in mission history, the second volume 

has a hard act to follow. The significance 

of volume I of the Comaroffs' Of revelation 

and revolution (1991) on Tswana receptions 

of mission Christianity in the 19th 

century can be gauged by their detailed 

critique of reviews in the introduction to 

this second volume. They deal systematically 

with each criticism of the first 

volume, but insist that they are right to 

keep political economy and spirituality in 

equilibrium. Their clear grasp of culturalist 

analysis is always run against economist 

notions of colonial power and 

dominance. It is a pity, however, that they 

treat Paul Landau's work on the Ngwato so 

dismissively. His published thesis, Realm 

of the word (1995), is a much more 

profound challenge to the Comoroffs' 

understanding of African Christianity than 

any they rebut in the first 60 pages of The 

dialectics of modernity. They take John 

Peel and Terence Ranger much more 

seriously (pp 42±52). 

It is breathtaking that the authors have 

been able to sustain the central thesis of a 

dialectical encounter between Nonconformist 

missionaries and the Tswana across 

two weighty books. The sweep of their 

writing, carried along by buoyant metaphor 

and strong theoretical currents, 

transports us into a world of belief in 

which the spiritual and temporal redefine 

and reshape each other as Africans meet 

missionaries. The Comaroffs show how the 

èvangelical enclave' was changed by the 

way Africans embraced and then changed 

the missionary gospel. The title, Of revelation 

and revolution, is so apt; indeed, the 

forces of Nonconformist preaching and 

African interpretation are held in careful 

tension throughout the 413 pages of 

narrative. 

The flow of ideas and language in 

volume II echoes the power of religious 

rhetoric on mission stations. The reader is 

struck by the seduction of words and how, 

when skilfully used, they can disarm, 

cajole and persuade. If in academic discourse, 

then why not also in missionary 

rhetoric? The power of language in conversion 

and in constructing a colonial 

universe are central to the missionaries' 

teaching and the Comaroffs' construction 

of it. The authors are concerned to keep 

everything in balance, to weigh each 

missionary thrust against an African response. 

In chapter 2 they construct a `long 

conversation' between European `preachers' 

and African `prophets' as Christianity 

became `domesticated'. This approach is 

reminiscent of the first volume. They show 

how the `charisma of missions' gave way 

to a routine and èveryday entanglements' 

(p 68). If there is a weakness here, it is 

perhaps a tendency to configure the 

Tswana response to mission as a discourse 

in itself, which is described as counter 

hegemonic to colonialism. They assemble a 

rubric of contestation and compromise or 

appropriation and try to invent an African 

Christianity in the image of missionary 

religion. The result is a rather too homogenised 

Tswana spirituality. 

The Comaroffs' deep knowledge of Nonconformist 

theology prevents facile judgements; 

missionaries are portrayed as 

credible Christians who were aware of 

African resistance to their cultural and 

religious message, and were also offended 

147


by many Tswana social practices which 

`fed the discourse of racial inferiority' in 

colonial circles (p 73). There is, however, 

a sense of unease in their interpretations 

of Modimo and badimo, which are 

mediated through missionary translations. 

Meanings that were forged by missionaries 

and their Tswana converts were clearly 

imbued with a Christian point of reference 

which historians and anthropologists need 

to keep in mind when they attempt to 

reconstruct African beliefs. The Comaroffs 

sometimes seem over-confident in attributing 

certain characteristics to the `devotional 

self of independent African 

Christianity' (p113). The arrogance of 

missionary texts is, of course, the biggest 

obstacle in any project to unravel African 

religion and usually means that missionaries 

dwarf their converts. An Africanist 

perspective remains elusive. 

One of the most satisfying parts of the 

book is the section on Ethiopianism 

(pp 78±106). Here, the Comaroffs follow 

James Campbell's Songs of Zion (1995) 

and graft a sophisticated cultural analysis 

onto a political economy of independent 

Christianity which provides a complex 

picture of struggles over religious space. 

The Comaroffs give examples of the inventiveness 

of an African prophetism whose 

`symbolic repertoire' reached far beyond 

the ritual compositions of missionaries 

and their agents right into the hearts of 

the Tswana: Ìn unyoking the Christian 

legacy and making it their own, African 

reformers seized its potential and put it to 

work in the attempt to nurture a sense of 

collectivity' (p 106). Liturgies, portentous 

signs, diviners' devices and magical 

prayers transformed the mundane missionary 

gospel into a powerful millenarianism. 

African Christians therefore 

redefined the very idea of the sacred. They 

drew on diverse influences, from Sankey's 

hymns to praise poems and African-American 

oratory, which came from contact 

with the African Methodist Episcopal 

(AME) Church (p 115). 

The dialectics of modernity acknowledges 

that the encounter between Eur- 

148 

opean Christianity and African religion 

`was an intricate affair, a dialectic whose 

curious mix of determinations and indeterminacy 

produced a wide horizon of 

religious actions and reactions, and had a 

profound effect on everyone concerned'. 

But the Comaroffs insist that as much as 

recent scholarship shies away from `treating 

Africa as victim' we should not forget 

that Europe colonised Africa ± not the 

other way around ± and ìn so doing 

perpetrated and provoked a great deal of 

violence, both physical and cultural' 

(p 117). They refuse to jettison a political 

economy of mission Christianity in the 

vein of recent histories of Christianity in 

South Africa (for example Richard Elphick 

& Rodney Davenport (eds), Christianity in 

South Africa: a political, social and 

cultural history (Cape Town, David Philip, 

1997)). 

Chapter 3 looks at the connection between 

cultivation and Christianity. Agriculture, 

it is argued, was central to 

colonial evangelism because of the ties 

that bound missionaries to a `displaced 

peasantry at home' (p 121). Cultivation 

and salvation became explicitly linked and 

were also tied to notions of `civilisation'. 

Agriculture was about order in the missionary 

mind, an order that was missing in 

Tswana communities. Sculpted landscapes 

became metaphors of Christian redemption 

and Nonconformist rationality, in 

stark contrast to the ènchantments of 

savagery' in untidy fields (p 129). The 

Comaroffs show that orderliness in agriculture 

was connected to hard work; `toil 

was the key to a decent life' (p 135). The 

London Missionary Society (LMS) soon 

turned preaching about crops and cultivation 

into a creed based on class. `Class 

formation, social reformation and cultural 

distinction' are the stuff of the Comaroffs' 

analysis (pp 151±165). For them, signification 

is also about material moorings. 

Ploughs displaced pastoralism; Christian 

Tswana became an agrarian elite.


The ravages of the rinderpest in 1896, 

however, led to rural impoverishment and 

by the early 20th century labour demands 

from an industrialising economy weakened 

the Southern Tswana dramatically as they 

became `scattered peasantries' rather than 

`traditional' chiefdoms (p 162). Missionaries 

encouraged decentralisation by advocating 

individuated farmsteads. This led 

to the decline of towns which were a 

feature of Southern Tswana society. John 

Mackenzie and William Willoughby of the 

LMS were the main catalysts of Tswana 

dispersal and the emergence of an àssertive 

bourgeoisie' at the expense of an 

increasingly dispossessed `lower peasantry' 

(p 164). The Comaroffs do not play 

down missionary culpability in the disruption 

of African communities, but are careful 

not to target them alone. 

The title of chapter 4, `Currencies of 

conversion', is suggestive of the close bond 

between commerce and Christianity in 

much missionary teaching. Important elements 

of secular theology informed Nonconformist 

motives in the drive for African 

conversions. The Comaroffs' detailed 

study of Victorian Christianity's `spirit of 

capitalism' is difficult to gainsay and they 

deftly demonstrate that `spiritual accumulation 

favoured those with capital' (p 172). 

This is likely to attract the ire of researchers 

who detect an agnosticism in their 

selective use of evidence and from those 

who have persuasively reminded us of the 

central concerns of mission theology, 

especially sin and salvation. The imbrication 

of conversion in the commerce of 

civilisation still dominates the missionary 

debate at the end of the 1990s. The 

Comaroffs' elegant defence of the economic 

imperatives of Christian mission in 

volume II means that the jury is still out 

on this case. They have combed such a 

variety of sources to support their interpretations 

of the evangelism of trade and 

the moralised nature of missionary discourse 

on wage work that they are very 

compelling (pp 190±203). Intriguingly, in 

the latter part of the chapter they discuss 

how wealth in cattle among the Tswana 

contended with missionary money in a 

contest of value (pp 208±217). 

`Fashioning the colonial subject' in 

chapter 5 deals with clothing and the 

outward appearance of Christianity. Missionaries 

believed that civility was the 

product of a properly clothed body. As Dr 

John Philip observed, à revolution in the 

habits' of Africans could be achieved by a 

campaign to clothe them in European 

manufactures. In this chapter the Comaroffs 

move away from the `brute mentalities 

of political economy' to the àesthetics of 

embodiment' and an analysis of a new 

moral economy which emerged from cultural 

exchanges among Africans and colonial 

missionaries (pp 220±221). The 

discussion draws on new work on the 

history of the body in colonial contexts 

which they relate to missionary descriptions 

of the `heathen body' and Àfrican 

adornment' (pp 222±233). They also deal 

with the effects of Christian dress and 

concomitant cultural assertions in both 

urban and rural African communities 

(pp 267±273). 

The Comaroffs' encyclopaedic command 

of the social and cultural history of 

colonial architecture and interiority is 

dexte-rously displayed in chapter 6. They 

examine how the development of a domestic 

domain was a corollary of the Protestant 

ethic and industrial capitalism, and a 

social construct of middle-class modernity, 

which addresses the central hypothesis 

of volume II. The imaginative prose 

mirrors the transformation of material 

cultures among colonial African elites in 

the wake of the missionary encounter. 

Homestead design and the politics of social 

space, squaring buildings, making huts 

into homes and integrating these into a 

Christian community, are carefully examined 

in the missionary record. `Teaching 

the Tswana to build a world' is therefore 

the theme of this rich cultural analysis, 

which is accompanied by apposite illustrations. 

In tune with recent medical histories, 

the Comaroffs assess the influence of 

missionary medicine among the Tswana 

149


in chapter 7. They argue convincingly that 

ìt was in the domain of healing that the 

distances and distinctions of the imperial 

frontier were most often breached' 

(p 323). Africans and European missionaries 

were most receptive to innovation 

from `the other' in this area. Western ways 

of curing changed profoundly as missionaries 

encountered African methods of 

healing and then began to assert colonial 

hegemony through the `language of 

science'. This search for authority was, 

however, a gradual process. Only by 1920 

did the distinction between scientific and 

African healing become established. As 

this happened, colonial evangelists seized 

upon healing às a unique sphere of 

competence' which gave rise to the medical 

mission (p 325). The Comaroffs intuitively 

make the connection between `the 

cure and the cross' among the Tswana, 

and they test this interpretation of the 

`healing ministry' of missionaries against 

the witness of Robert Moffat and John 

Mackenzie, among other LMS agents. They 

also focus on the deeper interest of the 

southern Tswana in the meaning of suffering, 

beyond the physical chemistry of 

medicine (pp 343±344). The missionaries 

therefore presented `the medicine of God's 

Word' to meet a wider conception of 

healing held by their potential converts. 

New patterns of colonial consumption had 

a deleterious effect on African health 

which exercised the Nonconformist conscience. 

This was heightened when European 

diseases took their toll and the 

medical mission, read by the Comaroffs 

as the handmaid of a `heroic science', 

rushed to defend its spiritual credentials. 

This perfunctory review of such a profound 

intellectual intervention in the cultural 

history and anthropology of mission 

Christianity does not do justice to the 

nuanced writing of the Comaroffs. Chapter 

8 offers another fine example of the dialogue 

between Africans and European 

missionaries as rights, identities and moral 

communities emerged from contestation, 

and as spiritual authority changed to secular 

legality. The subjectivity of the Tswana 

150 

in missionary discourse is dealt with 

systematically and Nonconformist depictions 

are painstakingly dis-aggregated. The 

authors pay particular attention to the 

imposition of a modernist European cultural 

heritage on the missionised African 

subject through the introduction of citizenship 

and individual, as opposed to communal, 

rights (pp 370±386). The constructedness 

of Tswana identities is also the 

burden of this chapter. Missionaries devised 

cultural and political categories, such 

as tribes, councils, dynasties, and conceived 

an elaborate ethnography around 

notions of ethnic consciousness. The `Bechuana' 

were conjured up as an èthnonation' 

with specific rights and interests. 

Missionary languages around rights and 

laws thus shaped Tswana polities and 

redefined their nature, which in turn 

undermined chiefly authority. The Comaroffs 

indicate that this disempowerment led 

to a `double consciousness' among Africans, 

one linked to their pre-conquest 

identities and the other to their later 

colonial status (pp 397±400). 

In the conclusion, the Comaroffs see the 

long-term effects of missionary `revelation' 

in the cultural and political `revolutions' 

of the 19th and 20th centuries by 

taking the story of the Tswana up to the 

present. They also re-state their aims and 

intellectual predispositions. They also underscore 

the importance of understanding 

colonialism in terms of the interaction of 

economic, cultural, political and symbolic 

forces, without denying the inextricable 

bond between Christian political economy 

and British industrial capitalism (p 409). 

Dialectical processes are emphasised again 

and again as essential to uncovering the 

nature of the African encounter with 

missionaries. Finally, they defend their 

theoretical proclivities, but claim no special 

authority for their approach. 

Of revelation and revolution: the dialectics 

of modernity on a South African 

frontier is another tour de force which 

confirms the pioneering insights of the 

Comaroffs' first volume. Like its predecessor, 

it will become a reference work for all


serious scholars of religion and colonialism. 

Its consummate interdisciplinarity 

demonstrates the fruitful engagement of 

cultural anthropology, literary theory and 

history to produce a thorough interrogation 

of missionary enterprise and its 

African receptions, appropriations, rejections, 

mutations and transformations. The 

sequel is not as good as the original classic 

only because we know the characters and 

the plot has simply been made more 

complex. For some, the sense of deÂjaÁ vu 

may also elicit even stronger critique 

because of the Comaroffs' robust defence 

of the formula. 

Greg Cuthbertson 


E Daniels, There and back. Robben 

Island 1964±1979 (Cape Town, Mayibuye 

Books, University of the Western 

Cape, 1998), 251 pp, illus. ISBN 1 

86808 3802 

The subtitle of this fascinating book is 

misleading as the work is the autobiography 

of Eddie Daniels, not just his memories 

of the 15 years which he spent as a 

political prisoner on Robben Island. 

Although the section on his time in prison 

is gripping, some of the best parts of the 

book are of his life before he became 

involved in politics. 

Daniels was born in District Six, Cape 

Town, to a white father and a mother of 

`mixed blood' and was classified as coloured 

by the racist laws of the country. 

He was born into a poor family and 

community, the majority of whom were 

God fearing, honest and hardworking. 

They were, however, terrorised by segregation 

laws, murderous criminal gangs 

and a brutal, corrupt and inefficient police 

force. Despite this, Daniels had a happy 

youth with a formidable mother who was 

the anchor in his life. 

What is striking about the book is 

Daniels' zest for life and his appreciation 

of nature. It is full of glowing descriptions 

of the beauty of Table Mountain which 

Daniels explored as a youth, images of the 

ocean whilst he was a fisherman and 

whaler, and of the desert when he was a 

miner at Oranjemund. Even as a prisoner 

on Robben Island, Daniels noticed nature's 

beauty. On the island the prisoners were 

locked up all night and the lights in the 

cells were always on. One night there was 

a break in routine and Daniels experienced 

darkness for the first time in years. The 

stars were big and bright and on seeing 

them he felt gloriously free. It is to his 

credit that Daniels did not allow mindless 

segregatory laws and masses of apartheid 

signs which regulated even nature, for 

example visits to the Cango caves, to stifle 

his enjoyment of life. 

Because of financial constraints Daniels 

had to leave school early with only a 

Standard 6 qualification. This led to 

various careers including those of a fisherman, 

a miner and a photographer. He 

also became active in politics and joined 

the small Liberal Party. There he became a 

leading member of the party in its struggle 

against apartheid. After 1961 Daniels and 

some liberals were of the opinion that 

peaceful methods had no impact on the 

apartheid behemoth and they decided to 

form an underground movement to undermine 

it with sabotage. As a devout Christian 

and Methodist, Daniels could not 

convince even white Methodists of the 

brutality of apartheid. This frustration led 

to the formation of the National Committee 

of Liberation, later to be renamed the 

African Resistance Movement (ARM), and 

a campaign of sabotage. 

Daniels' description of the ARM's armed 

campaign against apartheid makes the book 

a valuable source of a much-neglected part 

of the history of the liberation struggle. 

Compared to the African National Congress's 

armed wing, Umkonto we Sizwe, 

the ARM has either been written out of 

history or is mentioned only in passing. 

By 1964 the ARM had been smashed by 

the security police and Daniels sentenced 

to a prison term of 15 years on Robben 

Island. He rejected more than one offer to 

become a state witness against his com- 

151


rades in exchange for his freedom. The 

state's chief witness against Daniels and 

Spike de Keller, his co-defendant, was 

Adrian Leftwich, their ARM commander. 

Yet Daniels forgave him ungrudgingly, 

accepting that Leftwich was under a lot 

of pressure and fighting for his own life. 

The chapters on his period on Robben 

Island are harrowing, but also uplifting. He 

served his entire period on the island in B 

section with prominent prisoners such as 

Mandela, Sisulu and Kathrada. Reading 

this book reminds one of the formidable 

personalities of Mandela and Daniels. They 

and the other prisoners did not allow 

brutal warders armed with petty and harsh 

prison regulations to break their spirit. 

Daniels, like Mandela, even used prison to 

improve his qualifications and he studied 

successfully for a BA and a BComm degree 

through the University of South Africa. 

What makes Daniels especially admirable 

was that he spurned all attempts, even by 

supreme court judges, to secure him a 

conditional early release from prison. 

On his release from prison Daniels was 

immediately banned by the government, 

but remained uncowed in his opposition to 

apartheid. In 1984 he qualified as a 

teacher and, in defiance of the Mixed 

Marriages Act, got married. In 1990 he 

witnessed the release of Mandela and the 

collapse of apartheid. 

There and back is an honest and readable 

book and is highly recommended. It is 

also a reminder that anti-apartheid activists 

like Daniels who made sacrifices to 

oppose apartheid must not be forgotten in 

the new South Africa. 

F A Mouton 


T R H Davenport, The transfer of power 

in South Africa (Cape Town, David 

Philip, 1998), xvi + 143 pp, notes, 

index. ISBN 0 86486 410 8 

Rodney Davenport, formerly professor of 

history and head of department at Rhodes 

152 

University, needs no introduction. His 

initial work has been on party politics in 

the late 19th-century Cape Colony and he 

is also the author of a standard text on 

modern South African history. The book 

under review consists largely of revised 

versions of a series of lectures that he gave 

at the University of Western Ontario in 

Canada. To these he has added a piece on 

the performance of South Africa's new 

government up to 1997. 

No doubt, as Davenport indicates, South 

Africa's transition from virtually a oneparty 

apartheid state to virtually a oneparty 

democracy (an àwkward embrace' 

as Herman Giliomee calls it) is a subject 

that is bound to be of enduring interest to 

scholars. Davenport brings to his analysis 

of the recent past the measured tones and 

careful formulations of a seasoned historian. 

This book of just over 100 pages 

presents a clear overview of the tangled 

web of politics and constitution-making 

that marked the transfer of power. 

The first essay briefly charts the pre- 

1990 period and the events and pressures 

that gave rise to F W de Klerk's historic 

announcement on 2 February 1990. Davenport 

provides some firm pointers for 

other scholars to come to a more rounded 

evaluation of the relative importance of the 

various factors that contributed to the 

National Party's change of policy. 

In chapters 2 and 3 the author reviews 

the volatile and often violent politics of the 

transitionary period and then takes us 

through the labyrinth of constitution-making. 

All of this is done with due regard for 

the dynamics of power relations at work 

and the high stakes involved. At times one 

wishes, though, that Davenport had allowed 

himself more space for analysis. 

One cannot but help ask why the white 

electorate came out so overwhelmingly in 

support of De Klerk's initiatives in the 

March 1992 referendum, while a fuller 

exposition of the National Party's negotiation 

strategy at Codesa would not have 

gone amiss either. 

Davenport's last chapter, covering the 

period 1994 to 1997, deals mainly with the


gradual disillusionment of the National 

Party with the Government of National 

Unity and the initial work of the Truth and 

Reconciliation Commission. This chapter, 

perhaps because it is so close to the 

present, lacks some of the insights present 

in the other chapters. There are those 

critics who would argue that the quest of 

the African National Congress for `transformation' 

is a thinly disguised drive to 

acquire unchecked power, and that events 

since 1994 should be seen in that light. 

Whether that is indeed the case remains a 

matter for debate. 

Overall, Davenport has provided an 

admirably lucid and easily accessible 

account of a particularly intricate and 

momentous period in South Africa's history. 

It will be an invaluable guide to all 

historians and to social and political 

scientists who lecture on this subject. 

Albert Grundlingh 


Appolon Davidson & Irina Filatova, The 

Russians and the Anglo-Boer War 

(Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg, 

Human and Rousseau 1998), 

287 pp, illus, maps, notes, bibl, index. 

ISBN 0 7981 3804 1 

The Russian historians Professors Appolon 

Davidson and Irina Filatova have written 

extensively on colonialism in Africa and on 

links between that continent, particularly 

South Africa, and their country. They have 

also taught at South African universities 

and in fact completed this book at the 

Centre for Russian Studies at the University 

of Cape Town. 

The authors repudiate the view that the 

topic of the book, Russians and the Anglo- 

Boer War, is àntiquarian' or an example of 

`micro-history'. They claim that far from 

being an insignificant episode, Russian 

involvement and interest in the war of 

1899 to 1902 paved the way for subsequent 

relations between the two countries. 

Prior to the publication of this book, the 

most detailed work on the topic, in 

English, was Elisaveta Williams-Foxcroft's, 

Russia and the Anglo-Boer War 

1899±1902, published in 1981. The author, 

who taught Russian at the University of 

South Africa, was not a professional 

historian. Davidson and Filatova maintain 

(p 207) that Williams-Foxcroft's book was 

`largely derived' from a PhD thesis submitted 

to the Leningrad State University in 

1949 by Alexander Vitukhnovsky and that 

she ùsed his materials extensively' (p 13). 

It is in any case clear that Davidson and 

Filatova, who have worked on the topic for 

decades, have done far deeper and wider 

research in Russia and South Africa than 

Williams-Foxcroft (and for that matter, it 

would appear, than Vitukhnovsky). An 

absorbing feature of the book being reviewed 

is that the authors take their readers 

into their confidence by relating their 

experiences in searching for evidence; their 

research adventures and discoveries are 

described after the style of Martin Gilbert in 

his In search of Churchill. 

The first part of the book, Ìn the 

crucible of war', focuses on various Russians 

who were in South Africa between 

1899 and 1902. Fittingly, most of the 

chapters in this section are devoted to 

the volunteers who fought on the side of 

the Boers. A chapter each is also written 

on the activities of the official and unofficial 

military attacheÂ s (or àgents') and 

the doctors and nurses who came to South 

Africa. 

The authors accept the generally held 

estimate that no more than 225 Russians 

fought on the side of the Boers ± less than 

one-tenth of the 2 500 foreigners who took 

up arms in support of the republics. The 

vast majority of these Russian fighters 

have remained nameless, although the 

determined and meticulous research of 

Davidson and Filatova has enabled them 

to trace the names and backgrounds of 

some hitherto unknown figures. They also 

provide valuable insights into, and fresh 

biographical details of, characters such as 

Prince Nikolai Bagration (`Nike the Boer'), 

153


Alexander Gutchkov, Yevgeny Augustus 

and Leo Pokrovsky, who have previously 

featured in historical narratives. But it is 

the most colourful of them all ± Yevgeny 

Maximov ± who dominates the saga of the 

Russian volunteers. Only one of these 

volunteers, Augustus, published a book 

relating his experiences in South Africa. 

The authors are probably correct in attributing 

the lack of Russian Anglo-Boer War 

memoirs to their country's turbulent history 

of war and revolution after 1902 that 

swept so many of the volunteers away. In 

writing about the volunteers the authors 

correct a number of errors made by 

Williams-Foxcroft, Roy Macnab and Brian 

Pottinger in their books about foreign 

participation in the war. 

Whereas the first part of the book 

concentrates on Russian experiences in 

South Africa, the second views the war in 

Russian context ± perceptions of the 

conflict by members of Russian society 

and government are analysed. There was 

considerable public sympathy for the Boer 

cause in Russia, both from supporters and 

opponents of the Tsarist regime. While 

direct intervention by the Russian government 

in distant South Africa was clearly 

not a viable option, diplomatically or 

militarily, there were those who believed 

Russia should take advantage of Britain's 

preoccupation with the war in South Africa 

by a forward policy elsewhere. The harsh 

reality, however, was that the parlous 

state of the Russian economy precluded 

any foreign adventures. 

The authors' assessment of European 

diplomacy at the end of the 19th century is 

shrewd. It could, however, have been 

complemented by more detail relating to 

the Hague Peace Conference of July 1899 

which receives only a passing reference 

(p 209). The conference met as a result of 

proposals made in the name of Tsar 

Nicholas II by the Russian Foreign Minister, 

Maraviov. It is not pointed out that 

neither Boer republic was invited to the 

conference for fear of offending the British 

government. 

154 

The visits during the war of two very 

different groups of Boers to Russia are 

succinctly discussed. In the section on the 

visit to St Petersburg of the Boer delegation 

in August 1900, W J Leyds's Derde 

verzameling correspondentie has been 

utilised together with Russian sources. 

The authors do not, however, appear to 

have consulted Lynette van Niekerk's 

biography of Leyds, Kruger se regterhand. 

On the other hand, in relating the adventures 

of the five escaped Boer prisoners-ofwar 

who came to St Petersburg in 1901 

from Ceylon via a Russian ship, good use 

has been made of Johan Barnard's Die vyf 

swemmers. 

The authors reveal facts about approaches 

made to St Petersburg after the 

South African War at the time of the 

Russo-Japanese War of 1904±5 to obtain 

Russian help for a Boer uprising. Russian 

authorities did not react to the wild and 

impractical proposals made. Davidson and 

Filatova understandably did not consult 

British archival sources; these reveal that 

Milner and other British observers in 

South Africa reported at the time that à 

wave of excitement passed over the country 

districts in consequence of the outbreak 

of war between Russia and Japan'. 

The work is structured in a somewhat 

fragmented way and in some respects 

creates the impression of a number of 

separate articles and papers assembled in 

book form. It is nevertheless the most 

reliable balanced and readable treatment 

of the topic that has been published to date. 

S B Spies 


Bryan Davies & Jenny Day, Vanishing 

waters (Cape Town, University of 

Cape Town Press, 1998), xiv + 487 

pp, illus, maps, appendix, index. ISBN 

1 919713 11 5 

More than ten years ago (in 1986) a little 

book of 167 pages, written by the same 

authors and bearing a very similar title,


appeared. Sponsored by the Wildlife Society 

of South Africa and the Zoological 

Society of Southern Africa and published 

through the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies 

at the University of Cape Town, The 

biology and conservation of South Africa's 

vanishing waters was the first publication 

to focus directly ± at a time of 

unprecedented drought in the mid-1980s ± 

on matters related to South Africa's inland 

waters. Davies and Day's first book, 

despite now being described by the 

authors as an àmateurish attempt to 

provide a suitable textbook for our students', 

was widely used and the success of 

the venture is borne out by this new 

improved edition which ought to find a 

place on the shelves of every South African 

home. 

Since the first Vanishing waters, the 

debate about water supply in South Africa 

has matured. Water Affairs, under Minister 

Kadar Asmal, is perhaps the most 

dynamic and innovative of our Cabinet 

posts. I very much doubt whether in 1986 

anyone could have foreseen just how much 

progress would be made with water conservation 

measures ± and how improved 

the new water legislation is, thanks to 

Asmal. It is nothing short of revolutionary 

and Davies and Day explain why. The 1986 

book called for rational water conservation 

measures in `the country as a whole': 

this prayer has been answered. 

The foreword of the new book was 

written by Kadar Asmal, and once again 

he commits himself to a `fundamental 

change to the supply and use of water in 

South Africa'. His initiatives are regarded 

as wide-ranging and creative, indeed they 

are hailed as ùnprecedented in terms of 

[their] approach and effectiveness, anywhere 

in the world'. 

The authors of this book are extraordinarily 

well qualified in their field. Both are 

members of the Department of Zoology at 

the University of Cape Town. Professor 

Bryan Davies has worked in Mozambique 

on Cahora Bassa Dam and in South 

Australia on the Murray-Darling River 

system. He has studied the ecology of the 

lakes in the Wilderness area of the southern 

Cape, written a doctoral thesis about 

heavily polluted Loch Leven in Scotland, 

and acts as a consultant on water issues to 

the Cape Town City Council. He thus has a 

very wide experience of different water 

systems and their problems. Dr Jenny Day 

is a freshwater biologist with a particular 

interest in semi-arid areas (the Namib 

Desert is her field of study), and while 

Davies specialises in permanent lakes, 

dams and the like, streams and temporary 

water bodies are Day's specialisation. 

Vanishing waters is an extremely 

informative and useful book. It is divided 

into four sections. Part 1 (two chapters) 

outlines the issues which are pertinent to 

water supply and conservation in South 

Africa. Part 2 (four chapters) is called 

`The way things were' and describes the 

natural systems of standing waters, 

rivers, wetlands and coastal lakes and 

estuaries. Part 3 (three chapters) analyses 

the effect of humans on South 

Africa's water systems, by way of pollution, 

damming, etc. Part 4 (two chapters) 

is entitled `The future' and explains 

conservation measures and various ways 

in which inland waters can be studied. 

In South Africa, historically, water has 

been artificially cheap and little incentive 

has been given to curtail wastage. Vanishing 

waters puts the South African situation 

into global context and it is clear that 

the problems of being a semi-arid country 

with a history of water wastage and only 

engineering solutions by way of dambuilding 

(rather than attitudinal change) 

are impacting negatively on society. No 

one who lacks an adequate supply of fresh 

water and a healthy riverine or aquatic 

ecosystem generally can be economically 

or politically empowered. There can be no 

development while there is poverty, water 

waste and a lack of appreciation of the 

scarcity and vulnerability of the most 

basic of natural resources. It is unlikely 

that people waste water maliciously, it is 

ignorance and lack of understanding which 

are to blame, and Vanishing waters aims 

to supply that education. 

155


Chapter 2, an overview of South Africa's 

inland waters is particularly useful. There 

are good maps of all the lakes, estuaries, 

wetlands, running water systems, rivers, 

catchments, etc. As an overview of the 

subcontinent's water resources it is an 

excellent reference. Part 2 ± the four 

chapters which are grouped under the 

heading `The way things were' ± is very 

much in textbook style. This section will 

be most appreciated by students needing 

scientific terminology and expla-nations of 

the geography and hydrology of natural 

standing waters, rivers, wetlands and 

coastal lakes and estuaries. These chapters 

are technical explanations of how 

these water systems work. 

Part 3 will be of value to historians 

because the three chapters involved explain 

the human impact on the water 

systems and analyse the current water 

situation. Pollution is treated in some 

detail, but perhaps the most worthwhile 

discussion from a historian's point of view 

is the impact of damming rivers to create 

storage facilities for water. The politics of 

water supply is understudied in South 

African history and these chapters provide 

a really good starting point. The politics of 

Californian water is a well-developed field, 

and South African historians of regional 

development and agricultural or rural 

history would benefit considerably from 

a study of this section of Vanishing 

waters. Essentially, the discussion revolves 

around the change from a river to 

a lake through dam construction; the 

artificiality and vulnerability of industrialisation 

based on vast water-manipulation 

schemes, including the Lesotho Highlands 

Water Scheme, which is supposedly the 

`saviour' of the highveld industrial hub. 

South Africa may, in fact, be heading in 

quite the wrong direction (as did India) by 

building massive dams. An indication of 

our dependence on artificial water supplies 

is evidenced by the fact that South 

Africa is 13th in the world in terms of dam 

construction (p 252). Apart from dams, 

there is considerable discussion in this 

section on invasive aquatic plants and 

156 

diseases such as malaria and bilharzia 

which are water-related. 

The last part of the book discusses the 

conservation and rehabilitation of water 

supplies and the final chapter, `You and 

water', is designed for teachers and 

students and explains how to study inland 

waters and suggests projects, including 

tips on saving water. Water law is dealt 

with from page 361 onwards. Minister 

Asmal is in the process of changing our law 

away from our Roman-Dutch legal heritage 

(Holland has never had a water shortage 

problem) and also in disentangling water 

rights from property rights. 

The final part of the book provides keys 

for the identification of water organisms 

and there are also good lists of acronyms, 

changes to the names of dams and a 

detailed glossary of terms. Although each 

chapter ends with a reading list, I was 

sorry that there was not a full bibliography. 

The authors explain that space and 

cost prohibited its inclusion, but that a 

bibliography is available (at cost) if one 

writes to (or telephones) the authors at the 

University of Cape Town. 

Jane Carruthers 


W A Edge & M H Lekorwe (eds), Botswana: 

politics and society (Pretoria, J L 

van Schaik, 1998), xxii + 508 pp, 

photos, notes, refs, index. ISBN 0 

627 02231 6 

Hailed as Africa's greatest success story 

yet, Botswana has attracted enormous 

attention in the past two decades. In this 

collection of papers the editors, Edge and 

Lekorwe, have set themselves the task of 

contributing to a greater understanding of 

the economic and political fortunes of 

contemporary Botswana. The present 

study is a welcome addition to, inter alia, 

the more modest forerunner, Politics and 

society in Botswana, edited by Dave 

Cohen and Jack Parson in 1974.


This volume, which is divided into eight 

parts and 31 chapters, constitutes a fairly 

comprehensive overview of some of the 

major socio-historical, economic, political 

and legal issues on Botswana. It brings 

together the work of researchers from 

different academic disciplines and a variety 

of theoretical perspectives. The majority 

of the contributors are accomplished 

senior academics and leading researchers 

based at the University of Botswana. 

Part I provides an overview of the precolonial 

era, focusing, inter alia, on the 

development of democratic structures and 

practices. The first five chapters seek to 

provide an outline of historic continuity. 

They offer a fascinating glimpse of the 

nature of traditional government and 

interesting interpretations about local polities. 

They also discuss the place and role 

of dikgosi (chiefs), who constituted the 

pre-colonial ruling class and have, in 

recent years, been turned into civil servants. 

The institution of the kgotla (village 

assembly), specifically, is described engagingly 

as a forum where a culture of 

resistance against colonial rule was nurtured. 

The contribution by Dachs constitutes 

a discussion of the activities of 

European missionaries of different denominations 

and provides some understanding 

of Botswana's Christian past. It 

also serves to underscore, arguably, the 

significance and persistence of Christianliberal 

values in the political culture of 

Botswana. In chapter 5 Ramsay discusses 

the establishment of the Bechuanaland 

Protectorate. He describes the new colonial 

entity as a product of the interplay 

between local and regional socio-political 

dynamics, and British imperial interests. 

Part II contains three contributions and 

focuses on the colonial administration and 

the struggle for political freedom. The 

dynamic interplay of interesting factors 

and forces, we are told, set the stage for 

dramatic changes which led to independence 

in 1966. In chapter 8 Ramsay and 

Parsons refer to the role of the founding 

fathers. The authors discuss the formation 

of political parties and the struggle for 

independence. 

Part III comprises six chapters and 

deals with the creation and development, 

through a relatively smooth process, of the 

public sector bureaucracy. Following independence 

from colonial rule Botswana 

established a strong post-colonial state 

and a broad array of democratic institutions. 

One of the hallmarks of the modern 

epoch was the establishment of constitutional 

democracy. In his careful examination 

of constitutional development in 

chapter nine, Otlhogile documents some 

of the critical and highly controversial 

issues of land and gender inequality and 

highlights areas for law reform. In chapter 

10 Mfundisi's discussion of aspects of the 

post-colonial bureaucratic experience provides 

a fairly astute analysis of problems 

in the two tiers of government, namely 

central and local. He discusses the duties 

and responsibilities of different branches 

of power. He concludes that the concentration 

of power at the centre tended to be 

detrimental to the effective functioning of 

local government and social cohesion. 

Part IV focuses on land reform, class 

struggle and aspects of the nascent cooperative 

movement. In his critique of the 

Tribal Grazing Land Policy (TGLP) in 

chapter 15, Fidzani argues that capital 

accumulation which had been generated 

on the basis of the policy had not been 

used to produce more profits. In chapter 

16 Edge traces the emergence and demise 

of Botswana's cooperative movement. The 

author attributes the collapse of the 

cooperative movement party to intervention 

by government. 

Part V consists of five rather diverse 

pieces which deal with macro-economic, 

urbanisation and population issues. Campbell's 

discussion of demographic trends 

and projections for the future is fairly 

insightful. However, the lack of attention 

to the epidemic of the human immunodeficiency 

virus (HIV) infection and Acquired 

Immune Deficiency Syndrome 

(Aids) in Botswana is singularly alarming. 

The socially and economically dis- 

157


ruptive nature of the epidemic has been 

tragically pronounced in southern Africa, 

yet Campbell and the other authors do 

not see fit to discuss the problem. In the 

following chapter Mosha investigates the 

impact of urbanisation. He notes that the 

Botswana government had achieved a 

relatively impressive infra-structural 

base of roads, health and educational 

institutions. He also discusses poverty, 

pollution and crime as some of the main 

problems associated with the phenomenon 

of urbanisation. 

The overlapping contribution by Jefferis 

furnishes a broad framework for understanding 

what has been described as 

Botswana's fine and strong economy. He 

deals lucidly with the centrality and 

impact of minerals on the broader economy 

and society. In this `Diamond age' 

Botswana shifted from an agro-based 

economy to one dominated by mineral 

resources and enjoyed consistent and 

accelerated economic growth. The fiscal 

prudence of successive administrations 

contributed to the much-admired record 

of economic growth. He also examines the 

place and contribution of public enterprises 

in Botswana. These pieces contribute 

to an understanding of the ongoing 

debates relating to Botswana's èxceptionality'. 

As in other countries in the region, the 

industrialisation process in Botswana has 

been capital intensive and dominated by 

South African capital. One of the significant 

responses to the twin processes of 

industrialisation and proletarianisation 

has been the emergence and prevalence 

of female-headed households. This phenomenon, 

which has not been covered in 

any significant manner in the book, is 

characterised by inequality and discrimination 

against women. 

The five chapters in part VI focus on 

institutions of governance and related 

issues. In discussing aspects of neo-liberal 

democracy specifically, the authors deal 

with elections, parliament, political parties 

and the role of the media. In essence, 

the idea of civil society as a central idea of 

158 

democracy is also put across in this part of 

the book. One of the outstanding features 

of Botswana's political system in the postindependence 

period is that it has been 

consistently stable and liberal-democratic 

in character. The resilience of the multiparty 

system, characterised by regular 

and free elections, amidst the strife and 

turmoil experienced in many parts of 

Africa, has been the subject of scholarly 

focus by some of the contributors to the 

present volume. Chapter 22 written by 

Molutsi, former coordinator of the Democracy 

Project based at the University of 

Botswana, revisits, in a refreshingly lucid 

manner, the acclaimed history of competitive 

elections in Botswana. 

Nengwekhulu's discussion of Botswana's 

relatively impressive human rights 

record includes the analysis of civil and 

political liberties and a range of rights. 

Against the background of the fundamental 

principles that underlie international standards 

of human rights, the author draws 

attention, inter alia, to the existence of 

`serious economic inequalities which have 

led to the establishment of a very narrow 

pyramid, of wealth'. The chapter by 

Nengwekhulu is somewhat disappointing 

in that significant blemishes to the otherwise 

excellent human rights record seem 

to have been overlooked. For instance, the 

plight of Basarwa (also known as San or 

Bushmen), the weakest and most destitute 

group in Botswana, has not been raised 

with respect to the gross violations of 

human rights. In addition, the highly

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