Thompson on the highveld? Social history and humanist socialism in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This largely autobiographical essay tries to assess the impact of E.P. Thompson’s work on the South African social history movement during the politically turbulent 1980s. In particular it focuses on the University of the Witwatersrand, which was home to the South African History Workshop. Thompson, I argue, was only one of a number of equally significant figures who shaped the movement. Some of Thompson’s ideas were certainly embraced in the critique of structuralist Marxism, which had been enormously persuasive in the 1970s, and his concept of the moral economy was developed by some historians in South Africa. Thompson was also part of, though not central to, the British History Workshop, which had important connections to the South African offshoot. Yet post-independence Africanist scholarship, radical anthropology and the burgeoning oral history movement were probably more important intellectual influences. Politically, I suggest, Thompson may have been more influential in that he offered a humanist socialist alternative for leftists disillusioned with the Leninist tradition in South Africa. He demonstrated in his own work that democratic institutions and freedoms were central to any egalitarian project.