Re-Examining Experience: The New South African Historiography

Abstract

In two recent published, edited works, a series of papers is brought together to demonstrate the explicit attempt to rethink and reconstruct the theoretical and methodological foundations of South African historiography. The editors point to the important impact the “new school” of radical historiography had in challenging and establishing a “break” with the racial and implicated “ruling class” perspective of the liberal paradigm over the last decade and a half. While acknowledging the further importance and advances made by this new radicalism in emphasizing class analysis and enriching and expanding the understanding of South Africa's capitalist development, there have also been certain crucial limitations. Marks and Rathbone argue that…it has been more concerned with the problems of capital accumulation and the state, with so-called “fractions of capital” and the white workers, than with black class formation and consciousness. The impact of Althusserian structuralism on radical writing in the seventies reinforced this trend: blacks are relegated to being no more than a silent backdrop against which the political drama is enacted, as much “dominated classes” in these texts as their authors see them in reality.This, together with what Bozzoli has called the “dominant Philistinism and anti-historical character of the culture” also prevalent in the radical historiography, prevented the generation and development of an ‘alternative’ conception of history in South Africa. If this alternative is to be developed, the stronghold of structuralist method of analysis with its “antihistorical bias” and concentration of objective tendencies needs not only to be countered, but abandoned.