with constant vigilance against an anachronistic treatment of the past. A historian wants to engage with the past as something that actually happened, not with the past as fiction.
Our inadequate theoretical training forced us to start doing our own thinking and reading about the value of history as a discipline. Aphorisms about the study of history abound, but the one that struck me most was a statement by GJ Renier, a Dutch historian who was influential between the two world wars: “The study of history is not just another field of study; it is a particular way of thinking.”
The essence of historical understanding lies in being attuned to complexity, context and causality, and to change over time. Historical reflection implies the obligation to take all sides of a matter into acount, but also assumes the adoption of a particular position. Like the novelist, the historian has to imagine that the characters in the “story” cannot foresee the future and the outcome of their actions. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga advises historians to constantly put themselves at a point in the past where the known factors will seem to permit different outcomes.37
Historians should ask themselves why there was ultimately a specific outcome instead of a different one, and what the decisive factors had been. In so doing, they will soon learn that the best-laid plans go awry, that the unexpected tends to be the norm, and that few things are as important as the character of leaders. There is something like thinking historically, which also helps one to understand the present better. History offers a particular perspective that is absent from other disciplines.
In the second half of my career, when I lectured in political studies at the University of Cape Town, I experienced a strong sense of the difference between political science and history as disciplines. In political science, one looks from the present at the past; in history, it is precisely the opposite – and there is a massive difference between these ways of looking.
The difference goes further. There is a tendency on the part of political scientists and sociologists to argue that what had occurred was inevitable, and that history could not have happened in any other way. Historians, on the other hand, endeavour to put themselves in a different era and place. They attempt to imagine that various possibilities are still open and that they are unaware of how the historical narrative would actually unfold. Their observations are inductive and tentative.
The major lesson I learnt at Stellenbosch is that the writing of history is only of value when one tries one’s utmost to establish the truth and does not attempt to put this truth at the service of a particular political ideal. I felt, however, that at Stellenbosch the “scientific-objective” method had become a fetish that created the illusion on the part of some that they were recording history impartially. According to the British historian AJP Taylor, the historian who believes in his own impartiality runs a greater risk of being biased than others do.38
While guarding against one’s own biases and ensuring that one’s facts are correct are both crucial, it is impossible to ever arrive at the full truth or to say the final word. Pieter Geyl, an eminent Dutch historian, referred to historiography as “a debate without end”. It is inevitable that one will write history from a particular ideological perspective. Verification of facts to ensure accuracy is the duty of any historian, regardless of which “school” he or she belongs to, and not an exceptional virtue.
I started asking myself more and more who I wanted to write for and how I should approach my target group. In 1943 HB Thom argued that the historian should search for the historical truth from within “the bosom of the volk” with the aim of serving “the spiritual welfare of the volk”. The problem with this approach is that the attempt to give a sympathetic interpretation of Afrikaner history became conflated with defending white supremacy, segregation and apartheid. My contemporaries included a number of historians such as Ernst Stals, Henning van Aswegen, Pieter Kapp and Johann Bergh who did not want to use their history writing in the service of the existing order, but instead wished to show how white, coloured and black had shaped one another. Like them, I was not a liberal historian but rather a pluralist who interpreted the country’s history as one of contesting communities in which group interests rather than individual attitudes were decisive.
Up to the early 1970s, everything I wrote was in Afrikaans and I addressed myself to an Afrikaner audience in the first instance. But I started believing less and less that separate development offered a solution to South Africa’s problems. From 1970 onwards I voted for the Progressive Party and its successors, despite having strong doubts about whether the classical liberal solutions were appropriate for South Africa.
I decided to write as someone who stood on the margins of the Afrikaner community. Though I would attempt to understand the Afrikaners in particular and explain them to others, I would be unsparing in my criticism where necessary.
I identified with NP van Wyk Louw’s dictum that one loves a nation because of its “misery,” and also with the words of William Faulkner, the great writer of the American South, who said that one does not love “because” but “despite”; “not for the virtues, but despite the faults”.
A liberal outlook
During the 1960s Afrikaner historians and their English-speaking counterparts, who had long worked in separate silos, started making closer contact, especially in the South African Historical Society and on the editorial board of the South African Historical Journal/Suid-Afrikaanse Historiese Joernaal. At Stellenbosch, however, the department still largely ignored the publications of liberal historians, all of whom wrote in English.
It was almost as if Van der Merwe thought that the Ranke school, to which he subscribed, was in opposition to the liberal school. Unlike the Ranke approach, the liberal historians advocated values such as individual freedom and equality. There was a tendency to interpret the past in terms of these values.
In our research, however, it was impossible to be indifferent to three eminent liberal historians who produced important work on South African history, namely CW de Kiewiet, Leonard Thompson and Rodney Davenport. Their studies challenged certain key views of Afrikaner historians.
Whereas Afrikaner historians had long regarded segregation as the only solution, De Kiewiet wrote that history showed segregation offered no solution to South Africa’s racial problem, and that any renewed efforts to intensify it were bound to fail.39 Thompson made the most significant contribution to the history of the constitutional development of South Africa. While the NP government contended in the 1950s that the sovereignty of Parliament was the only Afrikaner tradition, he pointed out that in the Republic of the Orange Free State the constitution had been sovereign, as in the case of the United States. Hence constitutionalism was not a foreign concept but part of the Afrikaner tradition.40
Davenport showed that between 1880 and 1910 the Afrikanerbond, the first political party in the country, did not stand on a platform of segregation but defined the term “Afrikaner” inclusively and eagerly sought allies, also across the colour line.41
On the other hand, anglophone historians tended to be blind to English chauvinism and the strong conservative element in the English-speaking community. A section of the anglophone elite accused the Afrikaners of various forms of racism, including their insistence on equality for Afrikaans within the context of the official policy of bilingualism. In the first two decades of the Union of South Africa this attitude was so pronounced that the writer, journalist and politician CJ Langenhoven asked in exasperation in a speech in front of an English audience: “Why do you always call our politics racialism, but your racialism you call politics?”42
Against this backdrop, a debate between history students from Stellenbosch and Cape Town would have been stimulating. On one occasion Davenport, then a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, proposed that one be held on the topic of General JBM Hertzog’s political thinking. The Stellenbosch professors were dismissive; “Davenport just wants to politicise history,” was their reaction. As if Stellenbosch did not politicise history.
“Insurmountable objections”
The department I joined at Stellenbosch had two professors and four lecturers. There was little collegiality in our departmental relations. The model was evidently that of the hierarchical