Summary in English

Older version. For an updated description of the book project, see elsewhere on the website.

Original project title: The discussion about South Africa: An analysis of the research debate on apartheid with special focus on the paradigmatic dispute between liberal and radical historians.

Research in the contemporary history of South Africa reflects the deep conflicts in this country. As a result of the unequal access to education, the historiographical tradition is characterised by the absence of black historians, and the education and communication of history on university level has been distinguished by the liberal tradition's long-standing predominance, although this has been challenged during the last 40 years.

The presentation of the problem

The aim of this book is to bring renewed focus on a main problem in South African historiography: The research in basic links between politics, economics, and ideology in South Africa's most recent history. The relations between race and class, and between state power and the sphere of production. Or more precisely, the argument among historians about segregation/apartheid as determining element in the political economy of South Africa.

This work represents a further development from a Ph.D.-degree, which was conferred by the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen. The book deepens, broadens and actualises the analysis.
It is the purpose of the continued project to enable a thorough rewriting and analytical elaboration of my own research in South Africa’s contemporary history. The Ph.D.-study itself took several years and has resulted in a work, which is careful and analytical, however somewhat ambiguous and cryptic. The academic evaluation included some critical remarks, which the book project intended to meet. The ambition has been to give the work real weight in the ongoing the discussion on South African historiography. This required additional topical text analyses, extension of the field of study, plus some rewriting to increase readability.
My own commitment to the work comprise an obligation to utilise research results both in relation to the new South Africa and in correlation with the Danish, domestic debate about NGO-participation, transitionary aid, and the increasing interest in the topic in media, high school teaching etc.
Of various reasons, the work is written in Danish to begin with, however the idea is to publish the results also in English both in full shape and in the form of articles.

Numerous attempts have been made to isolate and characterise the basic elements in the specific South African social order during apartheid. Several of those on a highly professional level. From the beginning of the 1970s, these attempts took the shape of a scientific discussion, whose participants split into two principal camps; the liberal school and the radical-revisionist school. Historians inside and outside South Africa have had a considerable role in this scholarly debate, which, due to the emergence of milieus of exiled researchers, quickly got a strongly international profile.
Both the conventional English-liberal school and the radical school of historians have tried to reconstruct a historical reality with relevance to present problems. Both schools have used a practice, where the past is comprehended in the light of the present and the present is altered based on historical knowledge. The ardent questions in the immediate situation of the historians claimed for detection of correlations in the reality of history. And it is precisely this coherence that has made the research debate around South Africa’s history so committed and usable. However, it was only from approximately 1970 that the connection between the political dominance of the white population through the apartheid system and the developments in South Africa’s political economy were seriously taken up in the historiographical debate.
Roughly simplified it is the liberal stance, that apartheid has injured the free potentialities of modern capitalism in South Africa and has thereby limited both economic growth and political freedom. The bearing of the radical school is, basically, that the race system has been beneficial to the ruling class, the South African capitalists, and that it has operated with economic functionality and with political rationality over a long period of time.
My book does not set itself the task to clarify this question, but merely to uncover the major positions in the dispute between the historians, to explore the prerequisite and the course of this debate, and to clarify to which extent the paradigms are respectively converging or inconsistent.
It is, however, the author's hope, that additionally the investigation will further a wider insight in the nature of the apartheid society, as it developed and, despite of its official liquidation, in some extent still operates.
The working title of the book, therefore, was limited to:
The discussion about South Africa: An analysis of the research debate on apartheid with special focus on the paradigmatic dispute between liberal and radical historians.
This formulation of the problem does not imply a narrow professional history angle. The research discussion around South Africa's way of development is clearly interdisciplinary and represents some of the best examples on genuine integration of arts and letters and social studies. Anthropologists, development researchers, economists, sociologists, professional politicians, theologians and political activists participate in this debate with equally great enthusiasm, and in practice, it is not possible to isolate historians as having a certain, clearly defined role. In the dealing with the question, however, this book mainly focuses on the historians’ scholarly contributions to the research debate.

This book examines in which way influential historians have contributed to historical understanding and the build-up of scholarly knowledge, for instance on the importance of the black majority's contribution to the development of the country. The investigation uncovers attitudes among the historians to the maturing of the relationship between the black and the white over time, and to the relationship between labour, peasant, commercial interests and politicians, it also attempts to examine some of the various models which the historians have suggested to explain the South African way of development.
To what extent have historians seen race prejudices, or more or less indifferent racist attitudes, as the decisive factor for the institutionalisation and legalisation of racial discrimination? To what extent have they considered conflicts between labour and capital, or class struggle, as the crucial component in the apartheid system? In what way have they justified their point of view as historians? These are some of the questions my book takes as its starting points.
Modifications in the more or less deliberate positions of the historians to the relation between class and race have had fundamental importance to South African history writing ever since the 1870s, but since the beginning of the 1970s the discussion about the substance of this relation became quite central in the research debate.
This book poses the question: Why did the South African historians write as they did, and how does the history views of the 1970s and the 1980s generation differ from those of previous generations? The analysis of the historians' understanding of the race/class-problem concentrates on their specific writings which is contemplated in the light of the historical age they were created in.
The book deals more with interests and positions than with individuals and is the expression of the author's personal analysis and not written on the basis of neutralism. On the other hand, naturally it has been attempted in the examination to select a reasonably representative part of the works of the history schools of thought.
The author's personal point of departure is the historical materialism, and to some extent this stance characterises both presentations and conclusions.

The relevance of the problem

Unquestionable there is a need for historiographical research in South Africa. Despite of many short articles with partly historiographical content, less than a handful of syntheses in book length are available.
Even today, many of the provocative contributions to the debate which opened the historiographical controversy appear persistently present due to their fundamental, theoretical and methodological approach. Yet they seem unsatisfactory and call for new attempts on historical syntheses. This is not only due to the remaining disagreement on basic positions. In the middle of the 1970s, when many of the works were written, the dispute between the historians was not fully developed and some of the works appear to be theoretically immature. From the beginning of the 1990s, the debate seems to be decreasing. Converging tendencies can be traced, and the classification of the historians into ideological boxes seems a little artificial and random. Some of the most recent participants in the debate even consider, that the controversy is no longer a controversy, and that the discussion has rendered itself superfluous. The point of reference for this work is, on the contrary, that the ideological debate is far from concluded, but will, in spite of inclinations to some kind of new harmony, continue to stimulate dialectics and dynamics inside South African historical research and encourage interaction with the surrounding society. This belief has been a considerable incentive to the work with the project.

The handling of this problem falls somewhat outside the prevailing trends in Danish historical research. Not just because of a generally small interest in non-European topics among Danish historians. The collapse in the socialist East bloc and the triumph of western liberalism has lead to an acceptance of "the fall of the models" among historians, even within social history. Some aversion against political economy, broadly orientated social science analyses, in fact any kind of structurally orientated historical research seems to spread among scholars. The genuine, ideologically committed, research debate is having a hard time. To the author of this thesis it seems that any historian must experiment with models, since even an isolated subset of the historical reality is too manifold to describe in full. Historical understanding requires the course of events to be placed in a structural context. Accordingly, the decline of structural theories sets the requirement for the development of improved historical models.
The book takes form as an examination of the work of deviant history movements on various combinations of economical and sociological conceptions and models for a highly particular social development.
The optimistic predictions of the definitive liquidation of racial discrimination have once more brought the political economy to the centre of South African historical research. The relationship between the South African state's social and race-related policy and the economic development of the country has a future as a cardinal area of interest for historians, who accentuate interchange between the past and the present. The history debate on the connections between apartheid and capitalism are clearly relevant during the elaboration of strategies for economic growth and the distribution of wealth in a post-apartheid situation. The ability of the free market economy to give rise to improved social conditions across colour bars will prove decisive to its future in South Africa within a reasonably short space of time.

The methodology

The commitment to the project lies in the historical analysis of the political and economical functionality, the complexity and the basic constituents of the apartheid society. The main methodological problem in the original thesis has been to maintain this broad approach within the more thorough, detailed study for a Ph.D.-dissertation. Therefore, the field of interest has been approached from a historiographical angle.
The book deals with bearings of history and ideological views. That includes references to a great deal of differing academic conceptions, but also, that I myself take a stand to the investigated history books and conceptions of history. Accordingly, the book will present itself as a debating, personal analysis and will not necessarily fulfil a criterion of strictly neutrality. The book is written based on proper, basic research and commonly accepted, source-critical principle. It attempts to involve a representative selection works in the investigation of the history paradigms and the argument between them and to handle this material on a fair and comprehensive manner.
To make out a statement of affairs for the writing of history in South Africa, which in a way is, what the book is about, calls for some reflections on possible research methodologies. Periodisation confronts for instance the historiographer with the question of, how to describe theoretically and conceptualise the process of alteration and the switches inside the milieu of history research.
The methodology, used for historiographical differentiation, does not build on readymade, exactly formulated criterions of identification. It is hardly possible to identify historiographical directions without concrete criteria laid down for the occasion. In reality, it is difficult to locate clearly, internal, scientific guidelines, which could give precise distinctions between historical schools, as many methodological and analytical problems runs completely across paradigms. It is possible in South African historiography to detect both analytical problems, syntheses and guides for action, which moves transversely to the main paradigms. Never the less the book will try to isolate two modern, main paradigms, plus a number of variants in South African historical research, separated by reasonably clear dividing lines. What, makes this possible, is to a considerable extent, that the schools differs distinctly in the view on their own present and in their use of history for external purposes. It has consequently been a point of departure, that the distinction of paradigms to some degree must be seen from considerations external to science. Furthermore, a critical historian does not need to be worried by this coherence between paradigms of history and movements in the contemporary reality. A great deal of the most outstanding history writing has been written out off a concurrent commitment.
As a starting point, I have an understanding of the divergent historical schools in the South African context as being to some degree history-ideologies, more or less openly reflecting interests and political thinking of the contemporary society. The products of the historians therefore will be appraised with regard to external influences from the surrounding community.
The investigation of the historians’ diverse conceptions of the relations between race, class and economy concentrate on their concrete works, which, as all historical documents should, is viewed in the light of the story and time of their creation. Some consideration will be laid on the authors’ treatment of key problems such as:

• Correlations between race attitudes, class relations and culture.
• Rationalities of growth, economical dysfunctions and criteria of success.
• The transition from pre-capitalistic to modern agriculture.
• Processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and proletarisation.
• Statutory, white, political domination. Obvious, official racial segregation in institutions, laws and procedures.
• Backgrounds for popular protest and other social forms of expression.
• Identification of underlying, societal essential features.
• Principal historical methods and bearings of theory.
• Plus a great deal of other textual elements, which are difficult to classify generally.

The source material

Principal reference works, which fully cover the topic for the book, do not exist. It has been necessary to create a broad basis for research from a large number different sources and contributions to the research debate. The scientific debate constitutes in itself a large, but nevertheless limited source material. As a basis for the research project, a database with more than 3300 references to history and social science studies around South Africa has been built up. Approximately 600 of the most substantial contributions to the research debate have so far been scrutinised in the course of the investigation. They include scientific dissertations, unpublished university working papers, conference papers, personal archives, interviews, periodical articles, monographs and several others types of sources.

The composition of the book

The actual structure of the book is quite simple. Following the introductory chapter, the liberal and the radical historiography are separately examined through chapters 2 and 3, which are both divided into three subsections each. In order to create a historical point of departure, the history of the schools prior to respectively 1965 and 1970 are examined in the first of these subsections, followed by an investigation of more current developments. The last subsection of these chapters attempts to construct a synthesis round the two school's point of view on the South African society. Chapter 4 analyses some of the major issues in the dispute between the two principal paradigms through six subsections, and finally chapter 5 tries to draw some conclusions on the positions, weaknesses, potentials and dilemmas of the schools. Since the method of the work is thematic, several subsections contain elements of conclusions, which are not necessarily summarised in the closing chapter.
To relate the academic debate and the question of political and economical rationality to historical reality the work includes online appendices on university structures and a national- and socioeconomic surveys, followed by facts-related appendices containing surveys of chronology, employed concepts and expressions, and race legislation.

The liberal school is portrayed in the first main section of the book. From the beginning of this century, the liberals built their expectations for a colour-blind future on the economic evolution. Their logic was as follows: The growth of the manufacturing industry created need of skilled workers. The limited white workforce necessitated training of a larger part of the black workers. The migrant labour system was not able to fulfil this requirement, and a growing part of the Africans was bound to be permitted permanent settlement in the cities. They must also be given some education, a certain level of social security and possibly even political rights. The new manufacturing industry would blossom in an expanding domestic market, and this would call for all South Africans to be admitted and integrated into the society, not just as manufacturers, but also as consumers. Accordingly, South Africa would work herself out of racism's obsolete patterns within a comparatively short space of time. Most liberal historians always believed that apartheid was an economically dysfunctional product of outdated ethnic and ideological factors; race prejudice coupled with derailed Calvinism and Afrikaner nationalism. Economic class interests hardly entered into their causal explanations.

The radical school's critique of capitalism is dealt with in the second main section of the work. The high economic growth rate, which in long periods of time has characterised South Africa, occurred simultaneously, and in close interaction with, a rigorous and all-embracing implementation of the race segregation policy; straight from a perfection of petty apartheid in its most humiliating appearances, such as separated buses and public toilets, to grand apartheid's bantustan policy and the forced removal of more than three million people to segregated settlements.
On this background a new generation of younger exiled academics unfolded in opposition to the pragmatic liberal tradition. They developed an explanatory model for the actual and recognisable concordance between the exclusive race system and the high grade of economic vitality. The radical school saw apartheid as a rational policy whose superior purpose was to block for black social ascent. By keeping the educational level for blacks down, by deterring them from pursuing their interests on the labour market, and by precluding them from accumulation of capital, the system was able to consolidate the recruitment, distribution and reproduction of very inexpensive manpower. The basis of white South Africa’s economical prosperity was precisely the cheap labour system with its mechanisms of overexploitation. Race system and economical growth depended on and supported each other. They were not incompatible components. On the contrary, they were inseparable and reinforced one another interdependently. Race oppression was a condition for rapid growth, and white economic prosperity simultaneously strengthened white supremacy. The radicals revealed migratory work as the key to the development of the cheap labour system in South Africa. By taking advantage of reserves/bantustans and neighbouring countries, capital exploited the precapitalist societies in southern Africa in a kind of internal colonialism.

The third main section of the book analyses some central elements in the discussion between the two principal schools including the countercriticism opposing the radicals, the radical allegation of a superior explanatory model, the argumentation on the relationship between capitalism and apartheid, and the relationship between race and class, the application of the theory of colonialism of a special kind, the internal radical-revisionist disagreements over structuralism and reductionism, and the claim for a new converging hegemony in South African historical research.

Finally, some conclusions are drawn on the positions of the schools. The research during the last 20 years clearly shows that the relation between economics and race system was, neither so simple, nor so static over time as the radical historians imagined around 1970. The liberal viewpoint: That economic growth has always and under all terms been hampered by race segregation may however be regarded as disproved by the new thinking and highly qualified research of the radical historians. The race segregation system advanced economic development in the early phases of industrialisation, when a compound, unskilled and only partly proletarianised work force were disciplined and socialised for wage labour.
The development in recent years undeniably can be interpreted as if the liberal argumentation in the long run has proved itself as the historical truth. That the consideration for economic growth has finally forced the South African society to end white race hegemony. On the other hand; in spite of economic growth the system did not bring better living conditions to the black majority of the people, and black political protest has presumably been the most important single reason for the turn to democracy.

The work contains a range of problems and recognised flaws. There is a conflict between the effort to create overviews and coherence by focusing on lines of development and the simultaneous attempt to work with concentrated, empirical text analyses. Too little emphasis is laid on social- and everyday life history, including descriptions of actual live and work conditions and consistent delineation of characters are neglected. History of mentality and culture and works on reserve/bantustan conditions are only dealt with sporadically.

The priority of the themes are occasionally somewhat unsystematic and because of time reasons it has been a problem fully to come “on top" of the treated material, which therefore has controlled the design too much.
Relevant, adjoining ranges of study are left out or unfairly treated. This applies to African writing of history, gender research, the discussion of fascism, the debate on oral and local history and quite a number of other fields of investigation.
The relationship between factual history and historiography should have been clarified in the book and a clearer thematic worked in, binding topics such as rural problems, proletarisation, legislation and cultural ideology together over the chapters to accentuate real history.
The perspectives for a new historiographical hegemony, which embodies a merger of political, liberal left and soft, radical-revisionist points of views should have been deepened.

Status

The inspiration for the work with this book on South African history has been derived from a prolonged work within international solidarity. The contact with the popular movements has been a steady motive power for the project and the breakthrough for the liberation struggle and the international anti-apartheid forces has been a persistent encouragement. The participation in Danish research seminars, research stays in South Africa, United Kingdom, and at the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies in Uppsala, Sweden, has contributed decisive to the qualitative development of the work.
Some time was used for constructing a base for the further development of the project and I hope it has resulted in an in-depth, worth reading publication, which will be able to contribute qualitatively to the discussion on South Africa’s past and future both in Denmark and in South Africa.
The project has been affiliated to Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, as arranged with head of centre, professor Holger Bernt Hansen and later on to The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala.