apartheid in South African historiography¶

Literature › Works

Tatham, Kirsten (1990). Interpretations of racism/segregation/apartheid in South African historiography. History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February 1990. University of the Witwatersrand, History Workshop.


Type	conference paper
Scope	Wider apartheid literature
Method	synthesis review
Period studied	1900–1990
Regions	South Africa, Witwatersrand, Transvaal, Natal/Zululand, Pondoland
Themes	origins segregation, politics ideology elections, comparative theory, mining migrant labour, agriculture land, business and state, unions strikes, resistance social movements, methods data sources
Citation key	`tatham1990`

Argument¶

The essay surveys how successive schools of South African historians have explained racism, segregation and apartheid: Afrikaner Nationalist, early and post-1945 liberal, amateur African historians, early Marxist, second-generation structuralist Marxist, and the 'humanist materialist' social and Africanist historians. Each interpretation is tied to its political and intellectual context, including the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the 1970s labour upsurge, French structuralism and the Sussex collapse, and the move of Marxist scholars back to South Africa. The liberal view saw racial prejudice as irrational and as in tension with economic growth. The Marxists saw segregation as functional to capital, through cheap labour and the reserves. Social historians stressed African agency, ethnicity and 'real historical processes'. The paper concludes that these differences must be read against their wider economic, political and scholarly context. It ends by flagging a concern about 'creeping empiricism' that motivates the workshop theme.

Evidence and method¶

Secondary historiographical literature (Macmillan, De Kiewiet, Wolpe, Johnstone, Legassick, Morris, Williams, Keegan, Beinart, Delius, van Onselen, Marks and others), plus interviews the author conducted in 1989 with Morris, Marks, Delius, Bonner and Iain Edwards, among others. Footnoted but not statistical.

Place in the debates¶

Liberal vs revisionist/Marxist on apartheid and growth (dysfunctional vs functional) (see Liberal vs revisionist: was apartheid functional or dysfunctional for capitalist growth?). Reports both sides as paradigm-bound. Liberals saw racism as irrational and as retarding market-driven growth. Marxists saw segregation as functional to capital accumulation. The author is critical of the structuralist Marxists' politicism and neglect of struggle, and she sympathises with the social historians' emphasis on agency.
Cheap labour thesis and the reserves (Wolpe's articulation of modes of production) (see Cheap labour thesis and the function of the reserves). Describes Wolpe's argument that the reserves subsidised labour costs and that apartheid responded to the decline of the reserves' reproductive function. She notes that later Africanist work (Harries, Delius, Beinart) qualified the view that migrancy and segregation were simply capital's creation.
Agrarian transition to capitalism (Morris vs Keegan, Bradford and the social historians) (see Agrarian transition to capitalism and the fate of the African peasantry). Reports that Morris's 'Prussian path' thesis of an entirely capitalist agriculture by 1920 was challenged and 'proved wrong on empirical grounds'. She sides with Keegan's view that fixing a point of transition does violence to real historical processes.
Structure vs agency in Marxist historiography (see Historiographical approaches). Traces the shift from state-centred structuralism (fractionalists and capital logicians) to history from below. She registers the criticism that this risks becoming apolitical or fragmented empiricism.

Findings¶

Liberals attributed apartheid to irrational Afrikaner racial prejudice that merely delayed an inevitable market-led rationalisation. (p. 4)

These liberals advocated that irrational racial prejudices in the form of Afrikaner Nationalism were temporarily hindering the inevitable process of incorporation and rationalisation.
The context of Witwatersrand proletarianisation and urban resistance shaped early liberal historiography. (p. 4)

The rapid proletarianisation of Africans on the Witwatersrand and the very dramatic increase in black urban resistance after 1917 also had an impact on the work of the early liberal historians.
An early challenge to the liberals (Marquard 1943) located segregationist policy in the cheap labour requirements of mines, industry and farms. (p. 6)

one motive above all is seen to dominate our Native policy - the maintenance of that cheap labour supply on which the profits of mine owners, industrialists and farmers depend
Johnstone's early Marxist account made racial powerlessness the basis of cheap labour for the gold mines. (p. 9)

They capitalised on the fact that 'non-whiteness equalled rightlessness equalled powerlessness equalled cheapness'
Wolpe argued that the reserves subsidised mine labour costs by partly funding the reproduction of migrant labour. (p. 9)

served to subsidise the labour costs of the mining industry by providing, 'a portion of the means of reproduction of the migrant labour force'
In Wolpe's account apartheid was the political expression of capitalist development, responding to the decay of the reserve economy. (p. 10)

Apartheid was thus explained as the political expression of capitalist development in South Africa.
Second-generation Marxists tied apartheid to the post-1945 hegemony of manufacturing capital and its labour-market demands, such as influx control. (p. 11)

Morris and Williams saw Apartheid as the product of the rise to hegemony of the manufacturing sector of capital after 1945
The fractionalist school periodised racial legislation by which fraction of capital held hegemony. (p. 12)

a dominance of foreign (mining) capital in the early 1900s; the seizure of hegemony by National capital (manufacturing or agriculture) in alliance with the white workers in 1924
Van Onselen's Chibaro kept the cheap-labour argument but foregrounded African mine workers' resistance. (p. 14)

it was the intense exploitation of cheap African labour throughout the history of the industry that made the greatest contribution to establishing its profitability
Africanist studies showed that labour migrancy pre-dated capital's demand and that African chiefs shaped segregation. (p. 15)

labour migrancy, which had been explained as being the result of the need of capital for cheap labour, actually pre-dated this period
Beinart found that Mpondo chiefs backed the 1913 Land Act to secure their control over land. (p. 15)

William Beinart showed how the Mpondo chiefs actually gave their support to the 1913 Land Act in an attempt to secure their control over land.
Morris read apartheid in the countryside as the victory of capitalist farmers over labour tenants, not a return to feudalism. (p. 16)

it signalled the victory of the capitalist farmers over the direct producers (labour tenants)

Evidence ledger¶

Sources used¶

Source	Kind	Period	How used
Interviews with historians (Mike Morris, October 1989; Shula Marks, Cape Town, July 1989)	interviews oral history	July-October 1989	Supply first-hand testimony on the political and intellectual context of the second-generation Marxists, used to explain their approach.
Interviews with Peter Delius (October 1989), Phil Bonner (October 1989), Iain Edwards (Durban, September 1989), and John Wright, Jon Hyslop, Paul La Hausse (October 1989)	interviews oral history	September-October 1989	Document the motives and institutional context of the social-history and History Workshop generation, including the turn to ethnicity and to regional history.
Early liberal historiography: Macmillan and De Kiewiet (e.g. A History of South Africa Social and Economic, 1941; The Imperial Factor in South Africa, 1937)	secondary literature compilation	1926-1941	Read as texts to characterise the early liberal explanation of racism and segregation (frontier prejudice, dual economy).
Afrikaner Nationalist historiography and school texts (Muller, Five Hundred Years; Van Jaarsveld; Joubert and Brits, History STD 10)	secondary literature compilation	1964-1984	Quoted to show that Afrikaner Nationalist history treated Africans as peripheral and explained segregation as cultural difference.
Christian National Education Manifesto, Article 6(6), reported in Weekly Mail 22 May 1987	newspapers periodicals	1987	Illustrates the ideological claim that God willed separate nations, which Afrikaner historians disseminated.
Newspaper items: Sunday Times 31 December 1989; Sunday Express 3 Feb. 1985; The Star cutting in De Kiewiet papers	newspapers periodicals	1985-1989 (De Kiewiet cutting undated)	Used for the opening anecdote, for the calls by Afrikaner historians for a more relevant history, and for a reviewer's view of De Kiewiet.
Marxist writings of the 1970s (Wolpe, Johnstone, Legassick, Morris, Williams, Davies, Kaplan, O'Meara, Innes and Plaut, Clarke)	secondary literature compilation	1969-1981	Read closely and quoted to reconstruct the early and second-generation Marxist explanations of segregation and Apartheid.
Social history and Africanist studies (Van Onselen, Chibaro and New Babylon; Beinart, Political Economy of Pondoland; Delius; Harries; Marks, Ambiguities of Dependence)	secondary literature compilation	1976-1986	Used as the evidence for how humanist-materialist historians explain segregation through agency and African societies' struggles.
Deacon, 'Marxism and History': Twenty Years of South African Marxist Studies, University of Natal MA thesis 1988	secondary literature compilation	1988	Leaned on repeatedly as an existing synthesis of the Marxist literature and for characterisations of it, e.g. the autonomy of race in early Marxism.
Saunders, The Making of the South African Past (1988) and Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience (1984)	secondary literature compilation	1984-1988	Used as historiographical syntheses for assessments of the liberal tradition, such as the omission of class.

New data¶

A small set of interviews with South African historians (Morris, Marks, Delius, Bonner, Edwards, Wright, Hyslop, La Hausse), conducted in 1989 and cited in the notes. They are not published or described as a dataset.

Inference¶

Quantification: None.

Historiographical survey: a chronological and school-by-school reading of published texts, supplemented by a few interviews, tying each school's explanation of racism, segregation and Apartheid to its political and intellectual context. No quantitative analysis.

Key claims¶

Claim	Basis	Strength
Interpretations of racism, segregation and Apartheid differ by paradigm and mirror the political positions and contexts in which historians wrote. (p. 1)	Reading of the published works of each school, linked to the political events of their periods.	Partial data
Liberal historians explained racial policy as irrational prejudice, rooted in frontier attitudes and Afrikaner Nationalism, that economic growth would eventually erode. (p. 4)	Quotations from Macmillan, De Kiewiet, Welsh, Le May, Horwitz and Houghton and the dual economy theory.	Partial data
Early Marxists (Johnstone, Legassick, Wolpe) treated racial discrimination as functional to capital accumulation, with the reserves subsidising mine labour costs, but could not fully dispense with colonial or racial domination. (p. 9)	Quotations from Johnstone, Wolpe and Legassick, with Deacon's commentary.	Partial data
Second-generation structuralist Marxists explained Apartheid through the inner logic of capitalism and the hegemony of fractions of capital. They neglected class struggle and resistance. (p. 12)	Works of Morris, Williams, Davies, Kaplan and O'Meara, an interview with Morris, and Marks's comment.	Partial data
Rising trade union activity and popular resistance in the 1970s and 1980s, together with new European and American scholarship, pushed Marxists toward labour and social history and an emphasis on agency. (p. 13)	Chronology of labour conferences, the work of Van Onselen and others, and interviews with Delius.	Illustrative or anecdotal
Morris's thesis that agriculture was fully capitalist by 1920 has been challenged on empirical grounds by social historians such as Bradford and Keegan, who see a more complex transition. (p. 16)	Morris's articles, Keegan's critique and Bradford's A Taste of Freedom (cited, not analysed).	Asserted

Gaps in the evidence¶

The argument that historiography follows its political context rests on selective quotation and a few interviews, with no systematic sampling of the literature, for example by counting publications, citations or institutional affiliations. A fuller test would use the full interview transcripts, publication and citation data, and conference programmes, much of which existed and could still be assembled. The empirical challenges to Morris on agrarian capitalism are asserted rather than demonstrated, which would require engaging with the underlying agricultural and tenancy evidence.

Replicability: Data poorly documented.