Academia: Once More Into the Breach (Textbook Edition)

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I’m rarely in the position to assign anything like a textbook in the conventional sense. The only time I might would be in teaching my survey courses in African history.

I haven’t done a general survey of African history since my earliest years as a professor. It never made much sense to me, even with the qualifier of “Sub-Saharan Africa”. It’s a huge continent whose regional histories only begin to be profoundly connected as a consequence of its integration into the modern global system dominated by Europe and the racial imaginary of Europeans. Go back before 1600 CE and jumping from the East African coast to Western Africa to Southern Africa to Equatorial Africa is really asking students to keep four (or more) different histories in mind. In any event, if I wanted to teach such a class again, there really wouldn’t be a great single textbook to use. The closest would be a series of short, punchy, well-written and thematic African history textbooks called African World Histories published by Oxford University Press—you could make a fair go of teaching a one or two-semester African history survey using those.

So I broke my survey up into separate regional surveys, each highlighting a different time frame (rather like the strategy behind the African World Histories series). Not all of them match a textbook—neither the West Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade nor my East Africa 800-1800 survey really have a match. But my South Africa survey that I’m teaching again this fall definitely does, especially when it comes to the period from 1880 to the present. So with that survey I do always face the choice: do I want to use a textbook?

This time I’m thinking about Thula Simpson’s History of South Africa, which covers 1902 to the present. I’m reading through it now. It’s a fine example of the genre, and in this case, there’s been quite a few other textbooks covering exactly this period. I’m also thinking a bit about John Laband’s The Land Wars, which surprised me some by being very engaging and readable in setting out the 18th and 19th Century conflicts in Western and Eastern Cape. But both present the same pro and con as any other of their kind.

I’m generally teaching these surveys to students who have no prior familiarity at all with the history in question. They will have heard the name Nelson Mandela and heard of the concept of apartheid. That’s about it. So I have a lot of ground to make up. I always do. The difference in the case of South Africa is that I think about a textbook because paradoxically the historiography is so dense and richly readable but also because the history is so thick with incident, because the history offers so much teachable narrative, so many events that are knowable in highly granular and specific ways.

This is not straightforwardly a good thing: it is a sign of the violence of settler societies. The history is full of events because it is full of witnesses who create textual archives that both attest to and conceal what they have done and to whom. Scholars who study South African history wrestle with the problem of archival research for this reason, to not see the availability of an archive merely as an opportunity for knowledge production but also as evidence of processes of domination that make and use archives.

So for one in this survey class I have to try to attend and meaningfully represent the histories that are not pinned neatly to a linear narrative of events, that do not rise up out of the documents that settlers, conquerors and bureaucrats create about their subjects. Students typically struggle as much as I do to join the ragged seam between the two different kinds of historical representation and knowledge, and once we hit the period between the rise of diamond and gold mining and the present day, to cope with the intense inrush of details.

That’s why I sometimes turn to a textbook, in much the same pedagogical style that faculty teaching introductory courses in other disciplines do—as a sort of backstop, a repetition of what I will otherwise tackle through lectures. Surveys are the only courses where I lecture a fair amount. I actually think I’m pretty good at it in the sense of explaining things fairly clearly and memorably, but I do it largely because I feel like I can’t assign anything that will do the explanation more compactly and legibly.

That’s the question about textbooks—not just for me, but maybe everybody. Do students actually read them as backup? And do any textbooks explain their subject clearly while being readable, e.g. rewarding enough that a student will voluntarily read through them? I’ve just come off an academic year where a lot of what I assigned got read, partly because I think it was interesting. So I’m in no rush to go back to “this is good for you and has valuable information in it”. Or even “I’m asking you to have this book as backup reading for my lectures”. That seems to be at once asking too much and too little.

What makes me hover over the decision is just that sense that here’s this history that I know so well where I’d feel bad if and when students walked out of the classroom not knowing the particulars—the distinctive moments , the warp and woof of the history’s textures, the personalities. I think that is in the end one of the devil’s worst temptations to a teacher: a subject you love where you can hardly bear to leave anything out. That inclines me against a textbook, which caters to that encyclopedic impulse. And yet more than ever we know that the best inoculation against bullshit is to actually know the details about a subject. Perhaps I am less tempted to a textbook and more tempted to a multi-course sequence: a taster and then a feast.

Image credit: Photo by Lewis Keegan on Unsplash