South Africa were equal.
As a result of the high economic growth in the 1960s, the black labour force and consumer market kept expanding. In spite of influx control, black people were urbanising rapidly, and fewer and fewer believed that this stream to the cities could be reversed. A need arose for an interpretation of history that was inclusive rather than exclusive.
When I joined the staff of the History Department at Stellenbosch in 1967, Geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika was no longer the frame of reference. A year later history lecturers from the University of South Africa published a new collective work, Vyfhonderd jaar Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis (Five hundred years of South African history). The history of the black ethnic groups before 1652 was covered in an addendum at the back of the volume. In this book, it was mainly white people that had taken the initiative in building the country.
For a period of about forty years, between 1930 and 1970, the battle between liberal and nationalist historians dominated historiography in South Africa. Numerous dissertations in Afrikaans were published in the annual Archives Year Book for South African History, which first appeared in 1938. After the NP assumed power in 1948, more and more Afrikaner historians received university training. The ideal was scientific historiography, but the question was: from what vantage point?
Members of my generation knew that we neither were nor wished to be liberal historians; at the same time, we did not want to write nationalist “volksgeskiedenis” as many of the previous generation had. As late as 1966 Prof. HB Thom still characterised the University of Stellenbosch as a “volksuniversiteit”. By implication, the history taught here would be volksgeskiedenis. It proceeded from the assumption that the Afrikaners were in the first instance the people who had historically taken responsibility for what Thom called “Christianity and civilisation, and specifically law and order and progress in history”.
However, there had increasingly been a shift from “volksgeskiedenis” to what was referred to at Stellenbosch as “scientific-objective” historiography. Piet van der Merwe was the personification of this new approach. By 1944, when he was still only 32 years old, he already had three excellent scientific studies to his name. (There was a fourth work, Die Kafferoorlog van 1793 (The Kaffir War of 1793), which, apart from the title, had other serious flaws.)
His focus was the trekboers, those pastoral farmers who had trekked away for non-political reasons from the southwestern part of the country that is now South Africa. But his major works had been written at a time when white domination still seemed unassailable.
Van der Merwe refused to practise any self-censorship. He told me once that he had stumbled upon something terrible in his research on the Voortrekkers and the Ndebele people, but would not elaborate on the matter. I wondered sometimes whether it was this incident that had kept him from sending the manuscript on the subject to the printers. A comprehensive work that dealt with the Voortrekkers and the Ndebele was published after his death in an Archives Year Book. It contained a detailed account of a massacre of the inhabitants of a black village that had been perpetrated by a Voortrekker commando under Hendrik Potgieter.33
What I as a historian was searching for in particular was a way in which to describe and analyse white-black interaction on the colonial frontiers at a time before the whites had consolidated their control over black people. My contemporaries as postgraduate students at Stellenbosch included Henning van Aswegen and Ernst Stals, who worked on white-black relations in the nineteenth century in the area between the Vaal and Orange rivers and in Ovamboland respectively, and Pieter Kapp, who critically analysed the liberal views of the missionary Dr John Philip on the Cape Colony’s eastern frontier.
Van Aswegen noted the major problem that confronted all of us: “The few available ‘non-white’ sources and the masses of available white sources constantly had to be interpreted and re-interpreted in order to arrive at a better understanding of the attitude of the non-whites.”34 In my work on inter-ethnic relations on the eastern Cape frontier, I became more and more convinced that the conflicts on colonial frontiers should be analysed as a struggle characterised by conflicting claims to a disputed territory where no generally accepted authority existed because of the inability of any one ethnic community to impose its will on the others and gain the upper hand.
Ranke, the founder
Piet van der Merwe was largely responsible for the esteem in which the History Department was held in both Afrikaans and English circles. He had stamped the approach of “scientific-objective” historiography on the department. The German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) is generally regarded in the West as the founder of modern source-based or scientific historiography. His standpoint was that the historian had to record the past as it had actually happened: “wie es eigentlich gewesen”, as he put it. He was not under the illusion that the historian could ever be completely neutral or objective, but insisted that the historian had to determine as precisely as possible what had really happened and be impartial in his treatment of conflicts and disputes.
The chief principles of “scientific-objective history”, as I was introduced to the concept, were derived from this approach. The first duty was that of verification, for which primary or documentary sources were usually the best. Second, every epoch had its own unique particularity, with people who had their own time-bound moral convictions, values and mindsets. The views of the present should not be imposed on the past. At the same time, however, every era posed its own questions about the past. The historian who did not want to be considered antiquarian had to present history as realistic and relevant to his or her readers.
Van der Merwe was a formidable instructor who went through all theses and dissertations with a fine-toothed comb. One could not fail to admire his thoroughness and devotion to the discipline. On the other hand, he was a poor lecturer and could bore his students stiff in class when he endeavoured to thrash out the history of his specialist field, the trekboer movement, in minute detail. We used to joke that history was actually about whether the Voortrekkers had trekked to the left or to the right of a particular koppie.
Van der Merwe put the stress on what had occurred and how it had happened, and less and less on why things had happened as they did and not in any other way. Though the critcism he levelled at theses, including my own, was sometimes excellent, it could also be so destructive that the entire process of getting a thesis accepted would leave a bitter taste and a wry smile.
Flagrantly absent in the department was any focus on the theory or philosophy of history as a discipline. While it is true that Prof. Dirk Kotzé lectured enthusiastically on nationalism and communism as historical phenomena in Europe, in terms of his remit he could not present courses on theory or on South African history. In the case of Van der Merwe’s offering, there was scant reflection on theory or philosophy. I think he realised that his lectures were poor but was loath to admit it. Once when I mentioned to him that a lecturer from another university had asked me to send him my notes on his lectures, Van der Merwe said he definitely did not consider this a good idea.
We received virtually no guidance on where we could go for further reading on our subject and especially what books or journals we as prospective historians needed to acquaint ourselves with. There was a course in early historiography, but it was never explained how this could broaden our perspective.
Van der Merwe also made no effort to introduce his students to the world of thought of the leading historical figures. There was no scope for students to come up with imaginative insights, to speculate creatively, and to bring historical characters and their worldview to life. As a redoubtable examiner he made a huge contribution to the training of future historians, but it was also due to him that the department stagnated.35
Worst of all, the poor offering we were given went hand in hand with what Van Aswegen has rightly referred to as “the self-satisfied Stellenbosch tradition”.36 St Elmo Pretorius was the only lecturer who encouraged us to read books and journal articles, and to do so critically. It was certainly no coincidence that he was the only lecturer who had not been trained at Stellenbosch.
“A particular way of thinking”
I am grateful that I received the technical side of my apprenticeship as historian in the Ranke methodology. Few qualities