“History at Rhodes, 1911, 1969, 2011 :
some random comparative reflections”
Paul Maylam
Department of History
Rhodes University
Paper delivered at the Rhodes University History Department
Centenary Colloquium
16-17 September 2011
Winnie Maxwell’s inaugural lecture, delivered in 1956, was entitled ‘Random Reflections on
the Study of History in South Africa’. So fifty-five years later I also propose to offer some
random comparative reflections. It has been said that many novels, especially first novels,
are disguised autobiographies. This paper is a not-so-disguised semi-autobiography –
about two-thirds of it based on my own experiences in the Rhodes History Department,
first as a student in the late 1960s, and second as a staff member for the past twenty years.
I am by no means a Foucauldian – certainly not an admirer of Foucault’s historical
writing – but I am receptive to some of his ideas and concepts, one or two of which have
been helpful in putting this talk together. For instance, he writes about the conditions that
make certain kinds of knowledge possible – the conditions enabling various systems of
thought to be thought at all. Using the concept of the archaeology of knowledge, he has
tried to outline the existence of various systems of thought, making the point that “the
history of knowledge can be written only on the basis of what was contemporaneous with
it.”1
Foucault goes on to stress the discontinuities and ruptures that characterise the
history of knowledge systems over the years.
So in this talk I propose to consider the different kinds of historical knowledge that
have been taught and transmitted in the history department over the past hundred years –
the conditions of possibility, the discontinuities and shifts. It is easy now to be disparaging
about the history written and taught a hundred or fifty years ago, but one has to take into
account the constraints of the time and the contexts in which historical knowledge was
produced and conveyed in the past – such as the limited extent of secondary sources and
the narrow focus of that material. So Foucault’s notion of contemporaneity demands that
my reflections show some humility and empathy.
What possibilities of knowledge were open to W.M. Macmillan when he started
teaching history at Rhodes in 1911? What books were available to his students, and what
kinds of content, interpretation and ideology could be found in these books? To what
extent was he shackled by a particular paradigm or knowledge system? What possibilities
of knowledge were open in the late 1960s, and then in the early twenty-first century?
What have been the ruptures, shifts and discontinuities between these three moments in
the history of history at Rhodes?
1
Michael S. Roth, ”Foucault’s ‘History of the Present’”, History and Theory, 20, 1981, p.36.
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After arriving at Rhodes (University College) Macmillan was worried that the history
syllabus gave too much attention to the history of colonisation. He wanted more British
and European history. Aware that this would open him to the charge of eurocentrism, he
would later justify his position in his autobiography: “I do not want it to be thought that I
wished to force Europe upon Africa, but there was at that time no question of working on
African history”2 – the sources were simply not there. Macmillan believed that his most
successful course was the one he taught on the Middle Ages: this, he said, “had the most
effect in preparing my students for a new view of their own history.”3
Macmillan would in later life make clear why he had this preference for European
history:
What passed for South African history when I started my teaching
career was the tale of the conquest of a new country by lonely and
scattered white men, with no regard whatever for the interests or the
fate of ... [indigenous people]. History was the triumph of white power
in crushing all these peoples.4
This wariness was well justified. Among the prescribed history texts at Rhodes in 1911
were C.P. Lucas’ Historical Geography of the British Colonies, and J.R. Seeley’s The
Expansion of England.
This is how Lucas viewed this country’s past: “South African
history,” he wrote, “consists largely of wars and treaties with Boers and natives.”5 Today a
laughable assertion, but stated in all seriousness over a hundred years ago, and the kind of
view transmitted to Rhodes history students at the time – such were the extreme
limitations on the possibilities of knowledge. All the old stereotypes and howlers are to be
found in Lucas: indigenous people readily described as “savages”; Shaka deemed
responsible for “wholesale extermination”; the “Transvaal Boers ... held in low estimation”;
the eastern Cape eventually becoming “settled and civilised by incomers of British race.”6
Another prescribed text for Rhodes history students a hundred years ago was J.R.
Seeley’s Expansion of England, first published in 1883. Seeley’s approach was informed by
his own firm sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority, by an unabashed Whig view of history, and
by a notion that the proper focus of historians should be on the state. So students would
2
3
4
5
6
W.M. Macmillan, My South African Years (Cape Town, 1975), p.114.
Ibid., p.115.
Ibid., p.162.
C.P. Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies (Oxford, 1900), iv, p.225.
Ibid., pp.15, 136, 191, 271.
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have read that “slowly but surely England has grown greater and greater,”7 and been told
more particularly of the country’s “maritime greatness” and its “industrial greatness”.8 All
this was very much in keeping with the founding ethos of Rhodes University College,
established in 1904 with the clear purpose of extending and strengthening the imperial
idea in South Africa, and, as John Darwin has put it, making Rhodes “the engine room of
English cultural ascendancy in South Africa.”9
This Whig view of history would have been reinforced by other texts on the 1911
reading list. Books on English constitutional history by Stubbs, and on seventeenth-century
England by S.R. Gardiner – both serving to instil in the minds of young students in the
colonies that the British constitution, as it had evolved over the centuries, should be the
model for any emerging nation.
Moving on to the late 1960s, my own student days at Rhodes - what were the limits
and possibilities of historical knowledge at this time? What could be taught, given the
available literature? For my sins I am an inveterate hoarder of notes and papers – so I still
have my third-year lecture notes, bibliographies, and exam papers. Without wishing to
embarrass Rodney – in fact, I hope to do the opposite – I will focus on the post-1860 South
African course that he taught in 1969. We were given a pretty exhaustive 34-page
bibliography, carefully subdivided into sections. There was a section on African societies –
nearly all the texts listed here were by anthropologists (Monica Wilson, Isaac Schapera,
Eileen Krige, Hilda Kuper) – testimony to the underdeveloped state of African history in
South Africa at the time – although the list did include books by D.D.T. Jabavu and J.H.
Soga. A student wanting to read about black political opposition in the twentieth century
would have had to rely on Eddie Roux’s Time Longer than Rope. The Simons’ Class and
Colour only appeared in 1969, and Walshe’s Rise of African Nationalism in 1970.
Rodney did, though, have enough material to give informative lectures on twentieth
century African resistance – the Bambatha rebellion (Shula Marks’ book was not yet out,
but I do remember Shula coming to Rhodes and giving a lecture on the rebellion), the
Bulhoek massacre of 1921, and the 1896-97 chimurenga. I recall Rodney giving us copies of
7
8
9
J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1911), p.162.
Ibid., pp.95, 100.
Paul Maylam, The Cult of Rhodes (Cape Town, 2005), pp.54-65.
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unpublished papers by Ranger on the Shona-Ndebele uprisings – this, at the time, was the
latest work, at the cutting edge.
In the field of political economy none of the fresh revisionist work of the 1970s, by
Legassick and others, was yet out. I recall Rodney urging us to read one pioneering article
– Blainey’s “Lost causes of the Jameson Raid”, offering some kind of materialist analysis of
the raid. I remember being stimulated by the article, but the wider historiographical
significance of the piece was rather lost on me. I also wrote an essay on the industrial
colour bar, following Doxey’s line that the colour bar was a product of white prejudice and
market forces. I had a far too unoriginal, uncritical mind to challenge this orthodox view.
In my honours year in 1970 I took, among others, the course on seventeenth-century
England, by now run by John Benyon – a field of history that had generated a particularly
rich literature – a literature which had grown and broadened significantly since 1911. No
longer was the focus centred on relations between crown and parliament, as had been the
case with Gardiner and others. Now there was the stimulating work of Christopher Hill,
who was moving out of his vulgar Marxist phase of the 1940s and into a more nuanced
analysis of politics, ideology, religion and popular struggle. It was in this course that I first
discovered the Levellers and Diggers, perhaps England’s earliest genuinely democratic
movements – discovered through the work of social democrat activists like Eduard
Bernstein and H.N. Brailsford. This was a field I enjoyed, and taught for some years in
Durban, but have not kept up with during the past twenty years.
Looking back over the past forty years or so there is a clear picture of the remarkable
expansion and broadening of the discipline of history during those four decades, with the
emergence of branches or sub-disciplines that were little known in the 1960s. This is
particularly true of South African history. There are now many themes that students can
engage with, themes that it would have been very difficult to teach over forty years ago.
The historical literature on South Africa has burgeoned – some might say to too great an
extent, so much so that there is a crisis of overproduction and underconsumption, with
some work being published but read by hardly anybody.
I spend a term teaching South Africa in the industrial era to second-year students. I
have compiled over the years a lengthy bibliography comprising over 600 items – it could
well be five times as long if I were to make it a comprehensive list of published work on
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South African history since the 1880s. I find that there are only two items on my list that
were also on Rodney’s 1969 list – Doxey’s book on the colour bar, and Hunter’s collection
of essays on industrialisation and race relations – both there for historiographical reasons.
I build up a course of lectures around what I call three ‘I’s – inequality, identity and
ideology. Why is South Africa the most unequal country in the world? Why have certain
kinds of identity – racial and ethnic – become so ingrained in the South African psyche?
What have been the ideologies and practices of domination and opposition? Just take the
second of these – ethnicity and nationalism – a theme not on the agenda of historians and
social scientists in South Africa forty years ago. Now there is a vast literature on Zulu
nationalism, Afrikaner nationalism, and coloured identity, and a growing body of work on
English and Indian identities.
There is enormous scope to explore other themes and topics. Urban history was
hardly developed at all in the 1960s – now it is a vast field. So I can set an essay on District
Six or Sophiatown, and direct students to at least ten texts on each; or on gangs on the
Rand, for which there is extensive published work. There is gender history (taught by my
colleagues, Julie and Carla), environmental history (taught by Alan), the history of health
and dis-ease (taught by Carla), film and history (taught by Gary Baines), the history of
popular culture (taught by Vashna). I can set essays on the social history of cricket (thanks
to Bruce Murray), or rugby. And so it goes on.
So far I have stressed the discontinuities – centred on the changing nature and
broadening scope of the discipline, and how these shifts have impacted on the content of
courses offered in the department.
It is, though, also important to highlight the
continuities in the practice of the History Department. I will mention four.
First, there has always been a firm commitment and dedication to undergraduate
teaching. This was Winnie Maxwell’s central focus and major concern. I am sure that
many benefited from this careful, sometimes brusque, attention and nurturing – I certainly
did – Winnie and her colleagues making something of a historian out of not very promising
material. Such was her influence and impact that there was a time in the 1980s when the
chairs of history at Wits, UCT, Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Rhodes were all held by her
former students.
And Rodney maintained this emphasis.
He has remarked on the
attention paid to detail in the teaching of undergraduates, and how the department “spent
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quite a lot of [its] time ... turning third-class minds into second-class results, or seconds into
firsts.”10 I believe, too, that we have continued this tradition over the past twenty years.
My colleague, Julian, in particular has dedicated himself to first-year teaching for the past
ten years – with remarkable results which have benefited the department as a whole.
During the crisis years of the late 1990s we had a total of just over 100 students in the
department, and we feared for the future. After Julian introduced his now famous History
102 course our numbers shot up – about 400 registering for 102 alone in 2001. For myself I
can say that the richest rewards and greatest gratification that I have gained in my time
here have come from the many wonderful undergraduates I have taught – some of whom
are here today – more gratifying than any of the publications I have put out.
My second point is that the department has consistently leant more in an empirical
direction than a theoretical one – not that one can take theory out of history – there are
always premises, assumptions underlying any historical work, even if they are more implicit
than explicit. In his autobiography W.M. Macmillan admitted that he never developed a
capacity for abstract reasoning,11 and as a sharp observer his method was clearly more
inductive than deductive. This, too, was Michael Roberts’ approach. And Rodney shared
Winnie Maxwell’s “very, very strong insistence on not reaching historical conclusions
without producing the evidence.”12 This, too, has generally been my approach. I consider
myself to be a soft materialist, but like my predecessors I prefer to work inductively rather
than deductively – which has sometimes got me into trouble on the Higher Degrees
Committee where social scientists complain that history thesis proposals are inadequately
theorised.
Third – interdisciplinarity. History is, of course an inherently interdisciplinary subject,
involving as it does the study of every dimension of the human experience. Macmillan was
appointed in 1911 as a lecturer not just in history, but also in economics. And much of his
research, particularly in the eastern Cape, fell into the realms of sociology and economics.
The courses, we now offer, and the research interests pursued in the department, link up
with many other fields – political economy, ecology, psychology, medicine, film, literature,
and cultural studies. And looking around this room I can see people trained as historians
10
11
12
“Interview with T.R.H. Davenport”, by Nicholas Southey, South African Historical Journal, 26, 1992,
p.26.
Macmillan, My South African Years, p.24.
“Interview with T.R.H. Davenport”, p.23.
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who have moved across disciplinary boundaries – into education, sociology, development
studies, health research, and statistics.
My last point concerns the link between the past and the present. In her eulogy at
Macmillan’s funeral in 1974, Lucy Sutherland stated that Macmillan used “all his powers of
historical imagination to recreate the past, relate it to the present, and apply it as a guide
for the future.”13 I like to think that this is still our approach in the department. We hope
that through the study of history our students will make better sense of the world we live
in today, and be better equipped to cope with what threatens to be a difficult future. Our
assumption is that one cannot properly understand any present-day issues – whether it be
the global financial crisis, rising militarism, environmental decay, terrorism, gangsterism –
without looking at these phenomena historically. So, yes, we tend not to teach history ‘for
its own sake’, and we have something of a presentist agenda which is much disliked by
many historians. It is significant that most of our best students of the past ten years have
not become historians, but have become involved in contemporary issues – land reform,
farm labour, HIV/AIDS, water provision, and other development-related concerns. In some
ways I regret that we are not training a new generation of historians, but I have enormous
admiration for these students’ commitment to addressing contemporary issues in South
Africa.
Some final words.
I have spent over a third of my life associated with this
department – four years as a student, twenty years as a member of staff. My life has been
much enriched by this association. The greatest surge in my own personal development
came in my student days here. For the past twenty years I have found the department, the
university and the town – with all their shortcomings – to have provided a wonderful
working environment. When Winnie Maxwell retired at the end of 1974 she said “This has
always been a good department and I have merely built onto sound foundations.”14 Having
inherited from Rodney a good department built on solid foundations, I would like to be
able to say the same when I retire at the end of next year.
13
14
Foreword to My South African Years, p.vii.
J.A. Benyon, C.W. Cook, T.R.H. Davenport, K.S. Hunt, “Winifred Maxwell, Historian”, in J.A. Benyon et
al (eds), Studies in Local History: Essays in Honour of Professor Winifred Maxwell (Cape Town, 1976).
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