Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

wars. As lecturers, our status was not much higher than that of senior students. There were no departmental meetings or social gatherings such as shared tea-time where we could discuss history as a discipline. The professors did all the senior departmental work. We were later instructed to mark the third-year students’ assignments, but the professors themselves wanted to decide on the topics.

      I expressed the desire to lecture on South African history as well, but my request was rejected. I had to continue with courses on American and European history. In 1976 I suggested that the department admit Henry (Jatti) Bredekamp, a coloured lecturer at the University of the Western Cape with whom I had become acquainted, as a doctoral student. Van der Merwe’s reply was that we should not “dirty our hands” with this matter.

      I ran into a brick wall when I wanted to tackle a fairly recent topic for my doctoral dissertation. Van der Merwe, in particular, was unwavering. It was impossible, he declared, to be “scientific-objective” when writing about the recent past. I tried to persuade him, but he was adamant and did not give me much chance to argue my case.

      His standpoint was completely in line with the official stance of the time. In the archival depots, the government records for the preceding fifty years were closed. In 1965 the Joint Matriculation Board’s history curriculum excluded political events in South Africa between 1910 and 1965. As Van der Merwe put it to me, there were “insurmountable objections to contemporary history”.

      Frustrated, I sat down and wrote an academic article on Van der Merwe’s “insurmountable objections”. It appeared in the February 1969 issue of Standpunte, a journal that covered both the arts and the humanities. I had sufficient ammunition at my disposal. In 1966 I had obtained a credit in a subject called contemporary history at the University of Amsterdam. The major part of the course consisted of a case study of Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany during 1933-34, just more than thirty years earlier.

      I wrote that a great urge had arisen among the leading historians in Europe to write the history of their own times as a result of the horror evoked by the mass slaughter in the two world wars, and especially the extermination of the Jews and other minority groups. It was no longer advisable to wait until the time was supposedly ripe before taking up the pen to deal with particular historical events. The great disillusionment on the part of Westerners in particular and the moral confusion of the time demanded that historians provide answers to the question of why European civilisation had lost its way to such a degree.

      Regarding the Afrikaners, I wrote: “Has there ever been, with the exception of Germany, a greater impulse or a stronger motivation for a nation to account for its history, and especially its recent history, to itself and to the world?” I also asked: “Does the Afrikaner, in the light of all the allegations about the nature and essence of his character, not also have a duty and calling to search for the answers in the past century?”43

      The writing of contemporary history did not require any new skills, I argued; it did, however, bring the huge challenges of historiography into sharp focus. No one in the department reacted to my article. In all likelihood my modest revolt never came to the attention of the professors. I wonder if Van der Merwe would have deigned to discuss the article with me if he had read it.

      In turbulent times

      With no possibility of writing on a contemporary topic, I accepted the professors’ suggestions. My master’s thesis dealt with the first years after the second British occupation of the Cape in 1806. For my doctoral dissertation, the professors proposed that I write on the period 1795-1803 when the Cape was occupied by Britain for the first time, after having been governed by the Dutch East India Company for 143 years.

      In the end, it turned out to be a very good exercise for me to write about an entire society in a time of crisis. In fact, the British seizure of power in 1795 was not a mere change of government but a regime change that was accompanied by radical changes in the form of government, the economic system and social values. I was surprised and thrilled to discover how challenging the history of turbulent times could be.

      After 1795, as in the case of South African society after 1994, the population within the colonial borders – officials, burghers, slaves, Khoikhoi, San and Xhosa – had to adjust to sweeping changes and new ideas. To them it seemed as if the world had been turned upside down. Whereas, prior to 1795, there had been a hierarchy of legally defined groups consisting of officials, burghers and slaves, each with its respective status and different rights, there were now only “British subjects”, who had to be put on an equal footing before the law in due course.

      In many respects, the state of mind in the colony in the early 1790s resembled that in South Africa in the early 1990s. In the early 1790s, the burgher JF Kirsten encapsulated the spirit of the times as follows: “The government has lost the respect of the people; everyone wants to command and no one wants to obey.”44

      In 1972 I obtained my doctoral degree, and thereby formally completed my apprenticeship in history. But this was not the time to sit back complacently. Stellenbosch was decidedly not at the cutting edge of developments in Western historiography.

      A momentous meeting

      While doing research for my doctoral dissertation at the Cape Archives in 1968, I happened to meet Rick Elphick, who was working on his doctoral study on the Khoikhoi. He was a Canadian citizen and a student of Leonard Thompson at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1969 Thompson became professor in African Studies at Yale University and had Elphick’s enrolment transferred to that institution.

      My chance meeting with Elphick would prove to be of crucial significance to my career. Elphick is one of the most subtle and innovative historians who write on South African history. My friendship with him and our professional collaboration have been among the most formative influences on my career.

      In the course of his archival research Elphick also visited Stellenbosch, where I introduced him to several local academics. He recalls that I was optimistic about radical reform. The Afrikaners were not monolithic, I told him, and a younger generation was starting to shake the pillars of Afrikaner power. He writes that I assured him I had no intention of becoming an anglicised Afrikaner or volksvreemd (alienated from my community).45

      On completion of his research in Cape Town Elphick travelled to Maseru, where he joined Thompson, who was working on a biography of Moshoeshoe. Thompson reacted negatively when Elphick told him about the fruitful conversations he had had with me and other Afrikaners in Stellenbosch. He hinted that Elphick might have been infected with racism, which was absurd. Never­theless, Elphick’s relations with Thompson improved to the extent that he could persuade him to invite me to Yale as a postgraduate fellow.

      Thompson, too, would play a huge role in my career. Born in England in 1916, he was first educated there and then in South Africa, to which his parents had emigrated. He fought in the Second World War and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. After his studies he lectured in history at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for just more than ten years. As a member of the Liberal Party, he was actively involved in the fight against the removal of coloured people from the voters’ roll.

      Thompson and Monica Wilson, an anthrolopogist attached to UCT, were the co-editors of the Oxford History of South Africa, the first volume of which appeared in 1969 and the second in 1971. The book could well be described as revolutionary. For the first time, eminent scholars from various disciplines collaborated on a work that depicted South African history as African history, with black people as the principal actors instead of bit players in a white-centric history. Whereas earlier historians, like Eric Walker, had seen the Great Trek as the central event in this history, this work portrayed the trek as an invasion to which the Zulu in Natal and the black polities on the Highveld had to react.

      The second volume of the Oxford History of South Africa was less controversial. Notably the chapters on agriculture and urbanisation, by Francis Wilson and David Welsh respectively, approached the history in a fresh way. Chapters on Afrikaner nationalism by René de Villiers, a journalist, and on African nationalism by Leo Kuper, an anthropologist, were less successful. They confirmed the old rule that liberals find it hard to write about nationalism with insight and understanding.