Towards a people's historical geography for South Africa

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Jonathan Crush (1986). Towards a people's historical geography for South Africa. Journal of Historical Geography 12(1). Academic Press.

Type	journal article
Scope	Wider apartheid literature
Method	theoretical or conceptual
Period studied	not specified (refers to 1652 as the conventional starting point)–1980s (contemporary)
Regions	South Africa, Witwatersrand
Themes	methods data sources, comparative theory, origins segregation, mining migrant labour, resistance social movements
Citation key	crush1986

Argument

This short editorial introduction to a special issue criticises the Eurocentric tradition of South African historical geography, which centres white settlers, mining magnates and politicians and leaves the dispossessed in the background. Crush says the new historiography of the early 1970s, which draws on historical materialism, offers an alternative. He argues that geographers must go beyond a vague 'African contribution' to landscape formation. They should treat landscapes of control as the product of struggle between black and white, labour and capital, and set the experience of the dominated against both pre-capitalist rural societies and capitalist work regimes. The special issue's essays on diamond mining, migrant labour, urban segregation and survival on the Witwatersrand illustrate this 'people's historical geography', which he hopes will inform present struggles for liberation.

Evidence and method

No primary data. It is a programmatic essay that cites historiographical and geographical literature (Grove, Christopher, Thompson, Johnstone, Crush and Rogerson, Mabin, Harvey, Bozzoli) and previews the issue's essays.

Place in the debates

• Liberal/settler-centred vs revisionist (materialist, 'from below') historiography of South Africa (see Historiographical approaches). Firmly on the revisionist side. It rejects the Eurocentric, 'antiseptic' tradition and calls for a historical-materialist, class-based geography of racial capitalism.
• How to incorporate African agency in historical geography (see Historiographical approaches). Rejects an undifferentiated 'African contribution' approach. It argues for a contextual analysis of class and racial conflict and of the interaction of pre-capitalist societies with capitalist production.

Findings

• Crush cites Grove's review as typical of Eurocentric writing in South African historical geography. (p. 1)

  history in southern Africa started in 1652 when the first permanent settlement was founded at the Cape of Good Hope

• The existing historical geography is dominated by white elites, with the dispossessed marginalised. (p. 1)

  White settlers, pastoralists, mining magnates and politicians, and their impress on the landscape are the raw material from which the country’s historical geography has been fashioned.

• A new historiography emerged in the early 1970s to challenge the dominant interpretation. (p. 1)

  A new assault on the South African past, inaugurated in the early 1970s

• South African landscapes of control are products of conflict between racial and class groups. (p. 2)

  South Africa’s landscapes of social control and domination are imbued with a history of interaction and struggle between black and white, labour and capital, class and class.

• Ignoring this conflict produces a sanitised, conflict-free past. (p. 2)

  Failure to recognize this central reality produces a past devoid of conflict, contradiction and nuance and leads inevitably to the antiseptic landscapes of much existing historical geographic writing.

• The central task of the discipline is to explain how brutal landscapes were created through subordination and struggle. (p. 2)

  The task which confronts the historical geographer is to understand how South Africa’s brutal landscapes were forged in subordination and struggle

• Scholarship should link analysis of racial capitalism to those who experienced it. (p. 2)

  The first step must be to narrow the gap between those who write about racial capitalism in the present and those who have borne the brunt of it in the past.

Evidence ledger

Inference

Quantification: None.

Programmatic editorial introduction to a special issue. It argues historiographically and conceptually, setting a 'people's historical geography' against an Eurocentric tradition and drawing on the 'new school' of historical materialist scholarship. It presents no primary data, archival material or statistics.

Key claims

Claim	Basis	Strength
Existing historical geography of South Africa is Eurocentric and centred on white settlers, mining magnates and politicians, and treats the dispossessed as background figures. (p. 2)	Rests on a single quoted review remark by Grove (1978) and a general characterisation of the literature. No survey of the literature or other data is offered.	Asserted
A new historiography since the early 1970s, deploying historical materialism across disciplines, has challenged the dominant interpretive tradition, and historical geographers are beginning to contribute to it. (p. 2)	Cited to secondary literature (Johnstone 1982; Crush and Rogerson 1983; Mabin in the same issue). No primary evidence is used.	Asserted
South African landscapes of control must be understood as products of interaction and struggle between black and white, labour and capital, and as the product of capitalist production processes overriding pre-capitalist rural societies. (p. 3)	Conceptual argument grounded in the historical materialist framework. The special issue essays are only gestured at, with no empirical evidence presented here.	Asserted
The special collection's essays on diamond mining, the migrant labour system, urban segregation and the survival of marginal groups on the Witwatersrand exemplify the new people's historical geography. (p. 3)	Refers to the essays in the collection by theme only. Their sources are not described in this introduction.	Asserted

Gaps in the evidence

As a programmatic introduction, it offers no empirical test of its claim that the historical geography literature is Eurocentric. A systematic content analysis or bibliometric review of published historical geography in South Africa would test it, and that could have been compiled then. Any substantive claims about migrant labour, segregation or mining are left to the essays in the issue, whose archival and statistical sources would need separate auditing.

Replicability: Not applicable.