South African Social History and the New Non‐Fiction

Abstract

The paper comments on Hedley Twidle’s argument which attributes the present vigour of South African non-fiction writing to the influence of the social history movement that flourished in South African academia in the 1980s. The paper supports Twidle’s view, but stresses the need to understand the specific political genealogy of the social history movement. It came out of a very distinct current of Marxist-derived intellectual endeavour, one which did not share many of the triumphalist, teleological and determinist characteristics of other forms of Marxism. In contrast to the views of another contributor to the debate, Rob Nixon, who tends to absorb social history into the broader leftist culture, the paper suggests that it was exactly where social history departed from other forms of Marxism that it proved most productive, and that it was these departures made it available for its present productive engagement by non-fiction writers. The paper especially focuses on the role of the University of the Witwatersrand’s History Workshop within social history, and responds to the criticisms of it by Andile Mngxitama. It suggests that Sarah Nutall’s notion of ‘entanglement’ is a particularly useful bridge between the concerns of social historians and literary scholars.