Historical
Research and Higher Education
in Southern Africa
This historiographical research project examines
different views of historians and social scientists on the South African
society before, during and after Apartheid. Various notions of history and
divergent opinions on those structural elements, or historically
conditioned mentalities, which have been decisive for the race policy, are
scrutinised. Diverse judgements on the reasons for the development of
apartheid and for its later breakdown, including explanations on the
creation of racist identities, the defence of social privileges,
industrial interests and popular mobilisation, will be compared.
The project seeks to
uncover the major positions in the discussion between scholars, to explore
the preconditions and the course of this debate and to clarify to what
extent the different paradigms are respectively converging or
incompatible. It is, however, the hope that the investigation will also
further a wider insight into the nature of the apartheid society, as it
developed and which, despite its official demise, to some extent still
operates. One intention is to find out why some basic structures of the
past have proved to be rather resistant to change, and to what extent the
heritage of apartheid can be eradicated under the ongoing transition
process.
Fieldwork in Southern Africa has been carried out and early
results of the research have been presented at academic seminars and in
more popular form as lectures at Danish folk high schools.
Simultaneously Stolten
is working on a study on higher education in Southern Africa. So far this
study has resulted in papers on the enforcement of university apartheid in
the 1950s and on the transformation process inside higher education in
South Africa in the 1990s. Academic power relations in the international
research on Southern Africa will also be surveyed.
Hans Erik Stolten
is a historian from the University of Copenhagen, where he has worked as
lecturer and research fellow at the Centre of African Studies. He also
works with the Great Danish Encyclopaedia as author and reader on Southern
African topics. Previously he was employed by the Danish Public Record
Office. He has written articles, reviews and reports for several
periodicals and he was editor and co-author of two books on the
anti-apartheid movement. His M.A. examined the history of the South
African trade union movement and his Ph.D. dealt with the writing of
history in South Africa. He was appointed Research Fellow for Denmark at
the Nordic Africa Institute in September 1999.
For enquiries and further information, please
contact:
Hans Erik Stolten,
(Hanserik.Stolten@nai.uu.se)
Tel: +46 18 56 22 19 (direct)
Stolten's own
website:
http://home3.inet.tele.dk/hstolten/page2.html
Nordiska
Afrikainstitutet
P O Box 1703
SE-751 47 UPPSALA
Sweden
Tel: +46 18 56 22
00
Fax: +46 18 56 22 90
|
