Materials Necessary for the Formation of a Correct Knowledge of the History of Colonialism in South Africa? Reassessing the Historical Productions of Donald Moodie and Their Implications

Abstract

ABSTRACT The contribution of the Rev. Dr John Philip and Donald Moodie to South African historiography has received some attention from historians, but the extent and duration of Moodie’s attempts to challenge Philip’s version of South African history have not been quite so fully explored. Nor have Moodie’s subsequent publications. This article examines Moodie’s dispute with Philip and their conflicting conceptions of history, and what Moodie’s less well-known publications reveal about his notions of the history of South Africa. In the process, it rediscovers Moodie’s mysteriously lost only full-length historical narrative and examines what the contestations around the colonial archive in the first half of the nineteenth century reveal about the challenges of the colonial archive and South African historiography today. It suggests that Moodie’s works can be located against a backdrop of conservative British intellectual thought in South Africa and that understanding the influence of Moodie’s publications is important in historicising the development of colonial knowledge systems in South Africa.