Settler Colonialism and Social Science in South Africa

Abstract

Anthropology as a discursive practice ‘encodes and reproduces the hegemonic process of colonial settlement' (Wolfe 1999: 3). In South Africa, the discipline was formalised within the transatlantic movement and networking of philanthropists, missionaries, and academics between South Africa, the British Empire, and the United States in the early twentieth century. Some key moments in this historical drama include the work of C. T. Loram on ‘The Education of the South African Native' (1917), based on a doctoral dissertation completed at Columbia University, the appointment of English anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe Brown as the first chair in Anthropology at the University of Cape Town in 1921, and the advent of the Inter-University Committee for African Studies in 1932. The advent of the Native Affairs Commission in 1920, followed by the 1927 Native Administration Act, and the creation of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) in 1929 constituted different iterations of and nodes within this developing schema of racial liberal praxis in South Africa. This schema was interrelated, ideologically, intellectually and financially, within a broader transnational network of imperialism and white supremacy across the Atlantic. The SAIRR, a liberal research institute based in Johannesburg, together with the newly established Bantu Studies Department at the University of the Witwatersrand constituted social scientific iterations of liberal colonialism. This paper will consider the ways in which the advent and development of the social sciences, in the form of the Wits Bantu Studies Department and the SAIRR, in early 20th century Johannesburg depended on the silencing of the processes and structure of conquest in South African history, and the production of a scientific racial liberal discourse on the ‘Native Question'. In doing this, I will explore a particular ‘intimacy' of empire (Lowe 2015) through which imperialism was made ‘legible' across the Atlantic through social scientific production. The paper will also offer some reflections on the longue duree interconnections between the advent of settler colonial social science and research, and contemporary social science pedagogy and praxis in South Africa.