Academia: History 8B The History of South Africa (Shifting Themes Edition)
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go
After a summer of going back and forth, I think I’ve finally settled on my syllabus for my survey course on South African history.
Surveys are one of the standard curricular artifacts for college-level history. They’re usually seen as introductory courses, but often also are seen as “service” classes suitable for third and fourth-year students who are not majoring in history but who have an interest in a particular place or time, perhaps because of something they’re studying in their major or because of study abroad plans.
U.S. specialists often break their survey into a sequence of two or three courses—one colonial to the Civil War, and then Civil War to present or perhaps Civil War to World War II and then a post-1945 course. European specialists if they have the staff and the enrollments might break their surveys into the classic medieval, early modern, modern (and the modern sometimes into 1750-1914 and then 1914-present, or something along those lines). European specialists also typically favor Western Europe in the survey unless the person teaching is a specialist in Eastern Europe or Russia. (A medieval specialist may jump around more and try to cover more places; it depends a lot.) Pre-medieval Europe is typically covered in a classics department or by a classicist who is in another department. There are well-understood conventions of periodization and students are at least slightly familiar with some of the major terms of art that will come up, even if the professor means to subvert or challenge them. (e.g., the Enlightenment, the Gilded Age, industrialization, the Renaissance and so on.)
For folks like me who are teaching in a field other than U.S. or European history, we struggle with a basic dilemma of how to structure a survey course or courses. We’re mostly teaching students who have no prior experience with our subject matter, in fields where the common periodizations and conceptual frames are not only not known to them but are highly contested within the field. Try talking about “medieval Africa” at a meeting of the African Studies Association and you’ll see what I mean.
I think for my first try thirty years ago, I did attempt to do a “from the beginning of time to now, all of sub-Saharan Africa” survey. I hated it. I could see that almost nothing would stick, and what did stick was just going to reinforce ideas like “Africa is a country”—it blurred everything together. It also reinforced a sense of intellectual and conceptual inequality between US/Europe and “the rest”, in the sense that the surveys in the more familiar fields were digging more deeply into details and were built around choices made by the professor that were substantially legible to the students. I didn’t like it any better when the next time, I did a sequence of “modern Africa” and “precolonial Africa”: these are terrible conceptual frames for a variety of reasons.
So I broke my survey into three parts that were much more regional, thematic and limited, which meant giving up some of the teachable history of parts of the continent. The typical three have been West Africa from the 1200s to 1850, focused on the Atlantic world; South or Southern Africa from the 1600s to present; Central Africa from 1850 to present. I tried an East Africa survey twice and I don’t think it works as well, because the point in the others is to figure out a theme or central question, and East African history I think necessarily forces a further subdivision between the Horn of Africa and the coast-and-hinterland from present-day Kenya south to Mozambique in order to get that kind of thematic—or an expansion to something like “Africa and the Indian Ocean”, which I’m not really confident about in terms of that wider body of scholarship.
Southern Africa is my own area of specialization, which you would think makes things easier, but instead, I find that I tend to wildly overstuff the syllabus on first draft because there are so many things I want to teach, and there are so many issues where I fret about excluding them. That’s one reason I eventually gave up on trying to include the whole region and settled on a more conventional national framing focused on South Africa, even though I think migrancy after 1860 alone undercuts the validity of that framework. (Lesotho and eSwatini at the least belong ‘inside’ the frame, but so does the southern half of Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe.)
Each time I’ve taught the class, I’ve tried to avoid a simple chronological march from Iron Age settlements like Mapungubwe to the current government. (The first time I taught this as a survey, the ink was still drying on the new constitution.) So I’ve picked out central questions to drive the class while also covering some of the important ground otherwise in terms of events, periods, historiographical debates and so on. Early on, I often favored a focus on the causes of segregation and apartheid, and about the character and development of racial capitalism. I also built one or two versions of the survey around the “race-class” debate and around the continuing historiographical turmoil around the origins of white supremacy in South Africa (e.g., was it a kind of ‘original sin’ with deep roots in Afrikaner culture and the early history of the Western Cape, or was it an ideology that was functionally tied to racial capitalism?) That conversation was more or less how I came into the field as an undergraduate, studying with an American professor who was one of the major ‘liberal’ hold-outs against the prevailing radical historiography, and how I was anchored into the field by a set of brilliant South African colleagues that I was fortunate to study with in graduate school.
As the years went on, I shifted somewhat, building several versions of the syllabus around the question of how—or whether—apartheid came to an end. As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the 1994 general elections, it seems to me that the emphasis ought to switch to making sense of why the post-apartheid state’s outcomes bear some depressing resemblance to postcolonial political outcomes in much of sub-Saharan Africa (and to much of the neoliberal world-system in general) despite some of the differences, including the careful construction of a democratic constitution.
But as I built the syllabus, I also took note of some interesting historiographical activity around questions of how to name or understand South African history in relationship to the post-1993 constitutional state and its civil society. Underneath the dogmatic intensity of the demand for decoloniality—a resurgence of the thought of Steve Biko, in many ways—I feel as if there’s something else bubbling up that I want to attend to in this version of the survey, but it’s a very difficult kind of scholarly conversation to integrate into an accessible overview of the subject. Essentially, the question I want the students to at least get a sense of has to do with how to imagine the historical roots of contemporary racial, ethnic and cultural identities in South Africa in a way that begins to move off of the intensity of focus on whiteness and white supremacy. In a way, I want to read some of the scholars and intellectuals who take the prospect of decolonizing South African history more seriously than some of the activists who demand it, which involves among other things pursuing what Dipesh Chakrabarty called “provincializing the West”, of putting white settlers and European imperialism into a less central place in the history. It also involves a problem that haunts the modern world generally, which is how to undo what both nations and empires did to history, which is to name groups and classes of people in a way that aligned with nation-making and imperial maintenance but which made it nearly impossible to unthink that naming. In the case of South Africa, that means highly reified names like “Zulu”, “Xhosa”, and yes, “Afrikaner” or “white”—but it’s not enough to simply say these are “constructions” and to favor some kind of multiracial nationhood that forbids the saying of those names (the way, for example, that Rwanda’s authoritarian state has tried to compel the making of a single national personhood).
I am almost thinking of a “maybe course” in the near-term future on historiographies of migration, mobility and “group identity” in southern Africa where I could really dig in deep on this issue with advanced students. If I did that, I might also assign a few works from other fields to show some similar rethinking—I keep mentioning to colleagues in the field that Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians engages the historiography of Germanic ethnogenesis in a way that intensely reminds me of the new wave of work in southern African studies.
In my career as a historian, I’ve seen this historiography unfold in a series of stages:
Apartheid-era history and ethnography that was tasked to reifying “tribe” as a concept; “liberal” historians working similarly to section off and critique Afrikaner history and culture as a source of apartheid’s illiberalism. (e.g., white supremacy being a kind of cultural and ideological malformation that prevented liberal reformism from emerging in the mid-20th Century.)
Scholars aligned with African nationalism and radical scholars setting out to demolish both of these schools of thought by writing about the “invention of tribalism” (e.g. seeing ‘tribe’ as a wholly fictitious instrumental creation of the apartheid state) and by arguing that Dutch-speaking communities in the Western Cape frontier were muddled, complex and not at all straightforwardly racist, and that the process by which Afrikaner identity became militantly committed to racial segregation largely had its roots in post-1913 white politics and was driven by the development of racial capitalism.
Scholars questioning the simplifications of the “invention of tribalism” model by arguing that many constructions of contemporary ethnic belonging did have deep roots in the real history of the 18th and 19th Centuries, while also realizing how deeply complicated those histories were. (This is where the intense debate in the 1990s over the history of the “mfecane” and the formation of the Zulu state fits into the picture—something I used to teach centrally because it was such a rich example of what scholarly debate looks like.) At the same time, scholars recognizing that some of the content of white identity—both Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking—were not just by-products of highly instrumental nationalist political mobilization in the 20th Century and that the intellectual and administrative influence of the British imperial state in the Western Cape and Natal were far more powerful and iterative than the first wave of radical historians had been prepared to appreciate.
And now I think we have a wave of scholars and intellectuals who are taking another stab at writing about pre-19th Century sociopolitical formations outside the Western Cape with the goal of finding new ways to talk about and name those formations that doesn’t just make them the prologue to the names and identities that took shape after 1850 or so—and that in turn is lending new perspective to thinking about the Western Cape and its links to regions to its north, northeast and east. Scholars aren’t just “untribing” the archive in the mode of the “invention of tribalism” people, or trying to provide a kind of pre-tribal ethnonym the way than names like “Nguni” essentially stayed inside the structures of feeling associated with ‘tribes’, they’re trying to describe substantially different ways of living in communities and groups that have their own conceptual frameworks. At the same time, there’s a conversation sparked partly by the demand for decoloniality that emerged in the #RhodesMustFall movement that is adroitly re-reading (once again) the archives and knowledges that might compose a history that speaks to South Africa as it is, and that begins to rise to providing the “new names” that Mbongiseni Buthelezi and others have sought. I think in turn, this history is producing the capacity for new readings of the history of apartheid, segregation and their political opponents, which makes the disappointments of the post-apartheid era more historically legible and rooted.
This last wave of work was really hard for me to work into the syllabus. As a kind of introduction to this re-evaluation, I’m using one chapter from the new anthology Archives of Times Past and Mbongiseni Buthelezi’s essay published in Tribing and Untribing the Archive. I’m hoping that the cumulative effect of the first chapter of Paul Landau’s Popular Politics in the History of South Africa and journal article versions corresponding to books by T.J. Tallie and Hlonipa Mokoena will open up some of this. (I am also hoping that the relatively ‘clean’ chronological narrative of John Laband’s Land Wars will let the students suss out some of the underlying complexity of sociopolitical formations and their relations in the Western Cape in a way that aligns with those later readings.)
Whether this helps students see how my later readings also try to make some of the familiarities of apartheid and post-apartheid histories seem ‘strange’ again is maybe too much to hope for, or will rely on the cogency of my lectures. Anyway, once more into the breach, though I suspect I’ll do one last fine-tuning of this over the weekend.
History 8B History of South Africa
Fall 2023
Professor Timothy Burke
MWF 10:30-11:20
This course is a survey of the history of South Africa, focusing primarily on the period from the 17th Century onward to the present. We will focus particularly on the seizure of land by several waves of European settlers and imperial administrations, the construction of a racially segregated industrial society in the first half of the 20th Century, and the rise and fall of the apartheid system. The course concludes with an examination of South Africa’s complex and often disappointing history since the new constitution took hold in 1993.
The required work for the class is a 3-4 page paper due on October 9th that will focus on issues raised by John Laband’s book Land Wars, which we will read over three weeks; an end-of-semester “poster session” and accompanying short paper in which each student will pick a highly specific event or historical individual and set out to explain the importance and meaning of their topic to the rest of the class; and a final exam that will be broken into two parts, the first four identification questions to be answered within the class time on December 13th and the second a take-home essay that is due December 20th.
In addition, students are required to attend class regularly and to engage in discussion. Lecture content will definitely show up on the final exam, as well as shared insights developed during discussions. Our reading load will vary between 30-150 pages total most weeks, with two heavier assignments at the end of the semester. (Sizwe’s Test and The Inheritors).
I am always willing to grant extensions for work that is due but I ask that you plan ahead and let me know that you will need an extension. The one exception to this is the take-home final essay, which will be due no later than 5pm December 20th.
Week 1
Wed Sept 6th: Intro to class, syllabus overview
Fri Sept 8th: Discussion: Cynthia Kros and John Wright, “A Young Woman’s Journey of Discovery”, in Archives of Times Past
Week 2
M Sept 11: Lecture: How to talk about South Africa’s deep history
W Sept 13: Discussion: A “paralysis of perspective”
Mbongiseni Buthelezi, “We Need New Names Too”
F Sept 15: Lecture: The Western Cape and Western Europe, 1450-1650
Week 3
M 18 Lecture: Khoikhoi and Dutch in the Cape
John Laband, Land Wars, p. 9-54
W 20 Discussion: Krotoa/Eva
Julia Wells, “An African Woman at the Cape”
F 22 Lecture: The moving frontier, 1700-1805
Laband, Land Wars, p. 55-103
Week 4
M 25 Lecture: The British and the Western Cape to 1836
Laband, Land Wars, pp. 105-166
W 27 Lecture: Violence, collaboration and subjugation in the Western Cape
F 29 Discussion: Why do settler empires win out?
Laband, Land Wars, pp. 167-253
Week 5
M 2 Discussion: The cattle-killing
Laband, Land Wars, pp. 255-296
W 4 Lecture: The Great Trek
F 6 Discussion: Political Transformations and the Rethinking of the Mfecane
Paul Landau, “Eyewitness Engagements”, in Popular Politics in the History of South Africa
Week 6
M 9 Lecture: Diamonds and sugar: the opening salvo of racial capitalism
First paper due Friday Oct 9th by 5pm
W 11 Discussion: 19th Century Natal
T.J. Tallie, “Queering Natal”
Hlonipa Mokoena, “An Assembly of Readers”
F 13 Lecture: British Imperialism and the South African War
Fall Break
Week 7
M 23 Lecture: The Union of South Africa
W 25 Discussion: Sol Plaatje and Native Life in South Africa
Remmington, Willan and Peterson, Introduction, Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa : Past and Present.
Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Chapter 1
F 27 Lecture: The Creation of Migrancy: Racial Capitalism I
Week 8
M 30 Lecture: Compounds and Townships: Racial Capitalism II
W 1 Lecture: Between Union and 1948
Thula Simpson, “Union and Disunion”, The History of South Africa
F 3 Lecture: Apartheid
Week 9
M 6 Discussion: The follies and violence of apartheid
Rob Nixon, “Apollo 11, Apartheid and TV”
Keith Breckenridge, “Verwoerd’s Bureau of Proof”
W 8 Discussion: Moffie
F 10 Discussion: Come Back Africa
Week 10
M 13 Lecture: ANC and PAC; Defiance and MK
Paul Landau, Spear, pp. 27-60
W 15 Lecture: UDF and ungovernability
F 17 Discussion: The many ends of apartheid
Hugh MacMillan, Chris Hani
Week 11
M Discussion: The TRC and the Constitution
Jacob Dlamini, “Sins of History”, in The Terrorist Album
Elizabeth Stanley. “Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 39, no. 3 (2001): 525–46.
W NO CLASS
Thanksgiving
Week 12
M 27 Discussion: Sizwe’s Test
W 29 Lecture: Mandela to Zuma, Hope to Despair
F 1 Discussion: State Capture
Buthelezi and Vale, State Capture in South Africa, “Old Ways In New Days”
Mahajan, “How the Gupta Brothers Hijacked South Africa”, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/how-the-gupta-brothers-hijacked-south-africa-corruption-bribes
Week 13
M 4 Lecture: Zuma to Ramaphosa
Fairbanks, The Inheritors
W 6 Discussion: Fairbanks, The Inheritors
F 8 Discussion: South African Futures
Fairbanks, The Inheritors
11 POSTER SESSION
13 In-class examination: identification questions
Take-home essay due by 5pm December 20th, no extensions.