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The Writing of C.W. de Kiewiet's A History of South Africa Social and Economic*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Christopher Saunders
Christopher Saunders*
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
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Extract

C.W. de Kiewiet's A History of South Africa Social and Economic, published by Oxford University Press in 1941, remains one of the most-used general histories of that country. No other single work by a professional historian on South Africa has been so influential, so often cited and quoted. Yet few readers of the book have known anything about its author's career or about the circumstances under which it was written. “Before you study the history,” advises E.H. Carr in What is History?, “study the historian,” to which he adds: “Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment.” In this short paper all that can be done is to say something of the historian, and of how he came to write his book. This is, then, the history of A History.

Born in Holland in 1902, C.W. de Kiewiet was taken by his parents to South Africa the following year. He grew up in Johannesburg and attended the University College, which from 1922 was known as Wits. There he studied under W.M. Macmillan, the Professor of History, who was then working on the papers of the missionary John Philip and beginning to prepare what would become his two classic works, The Cape Colour Question and Bantu, Boer, and Briton. Macmillan supervised the thesis on the Cape northern frontier which de Kiewiet completed for his M.A. degree in 1924.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 13 , 1986 , pp. 323 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1986

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Oxford University Press, Copyright Department, for their permission to quote from their archives.

References

Notes

1. Carr, E.H., What is History? (Harmondsworth, 1961), 44.Google Scholar

2. For fuller biographical information see Saunders, C., C.W. de Kiewiet, Historian of South Africa (Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, Communications, 1986).Google Scholar

3. The degree was awarded in April 1925, but no copies of the thesis appear to have survived.

4. These draft chapters are to be found in the De Kiewiet papers, Cornell University Library.

5. The South African volume in that series had appeared in 1897.

6. Mulgan to de Kiewiet, 21 September 1937, Oxford University Press Archives.

7. For details see Saunders, De Kiewiet.

8. De Kiewiet to Mulgan, 12 October 1937, OUP archives.

9. Mulgan to de Kiewiet, 25 October 1937, OUP archives.

10. Published as “The Frontier and the Constitution in South Africa” in Read, C., ed., The Constitution Reconsidered (New York, 1938).Google Scholar

11. Macmillan, M., Champion of Africa. W.M. Macmillan The Second Phase (Long Wittenham, 1985), chapter 5Google Scholar, “The London Lobby.”

12. Mulgan to de Kiewiet, 26 November 1937, OUP archives.

13. Mulgan to de Kiewiet, 25 February 1938, De Kiewiet papers, Cornell University.

14. De Kiewiet to Macmillan, 14 March 1938, Macmillan papers, Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire.

15. Ibid.

16. De Kiewiet to Mulgan, 16 January 1939, OUP archives.

17. De Kiewiet to Macmillan, 14 March 1938, Macmillan papers.

18. De Kiewiet to Mulgan, 16 January 1939, De Kiewiet papers, Cornell University.

19. De Kiewiet to Mulgan, 8 April 1940, OUP archives.

20. Ibid.

21. The original handwritten draft, entitled “An Economic and Social History of South Africa,” is now in the De Kiewiet papers, Jagger Library, University of Cape Town.

22. Sisam to de Kiewiet, 24 April 1940, OUP archives.

23. De Kiewiet to Sisam, 11 May 1940, OUP archives.

24. Die Kiewiet to Sisam, 12 July 1940, OUP archives.

25. Sisam to de Kiewiet, 16 August 1940, OUP archives.

26. De Kiewiet to Sisam, 8 July 1940, OUP Archives.

27. Ibid.

28. Sisam to de Kiewiet, 30 October 1940, De Kiewiet papers.

29. De Kiewiet to Sisam, 21 March 1941, OUP Archives.

30. Ibid.

31. De Kiewiet to Sisam, 1 September 1941, OUP archives.

32. For this information I am much indebted to Miss A.M. Williams, archivist of the Oxford University Press.

33. Mulgan to de Kiewiet, 14 February 1939, OUP archives.

34. For assessment of the History see Saunders, De Kiewiet, chapter 2.