New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa, 1977-1994

Abstract

To appraise the influence of the History Workshop (based at the University of the Witwatersrand inJohannesburg, South Africa) both on the study of history in South Africa and on popular understandings of the past is a hazardous and perhaps foolhardy venture. Most historians of the subcontinent would agree that a revolution occurred in the writing of the history of South Africa in the later 1970s and 1980s, but to isolate the role of the History Workshop from other local and international influences is difficult and almost certainly controversial. Assessing the impact of the History Workshop on popular perceptions of history is even more problematical, through want of data or ways to measure it. All that will be attempted here is to indicate what parts of the wider public the History Workshop has succeeded in reaching, since the popularization of South African history is so centrally a part of the History Workshop project that even the strictly academic side of its activities cannot be understood in isolation from it. The History Workshop was founded in 1977 by a group of academics drawn from the social sciences and the humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand. The date was not without significance; both the discipline of history and the wider society in South Africa were then in turmoil. Since the late 1960s, and more particularly the early 1970s, a radical critique of liberal and conservative South African historiography had been underway. Spearheaded by South African scholars based at university centers in England, this radical critique had been making a growing impact on younger academics and undergraduates in South Africa. Outside the universities, South Africa in general, and the Witwatersrand in particular, had been convulsed by student insurrection in Soweto, which began on June 16, 1976, and rumbled through the first half of 1977.1 One consequence of the insurrection was that the parents and teachers of Soweto students who either were boycotting school or had been expelled began to seek an alternative education. Classes by academics and teachers from the University of the