In 1991 the historian Saul Dubow declared that ‘in recent years our historical understanding of Afrikaner nationalism [in South Africa] has been transformed’ (Dubow, 1991: 1). ‘We now have’, he continues, ‘a much deeper understanding of the ways in which Afrikaner identity was forged from the late nineteenth century, and the means by which Afrikaner ethnicity was mobilised in order to capture state power in the twentieth century’ (p. 1). What remained, he suggests, were certain gaps in the historical record. These omissions were a result of a general amnesia about the place of racist ideas in Christian thought. They also reflected, he suggests, the pre-eminence of a Marxist scholarship fearful of ‘idealism’. Marxist scholars were not interested in questions of ideology and culture on their own terms. ‘The ideology of race’, Dubow observes, ‘has therefore tended to be discussed in terms of its functional utility: … the extent to which racist ideas can be said to express underlying class interests’ (p. 1). Dubow had in mind the tradition of radical political economy that announced itself so boldly in the mid-1970s.

In September 1976, just three months after the beginning of a massive student revolt in Soweto, the Review of African Political Economy published a special edition on South Africa. It contained several essays that would partly define the terms of South African studies for at least the next ten years. Of especial importance was an article on the state by Robert Davies, David Kaplan, Mike Morris and Dan O'Meara. Applying theoretical developments within French Marxism to a periodisation of the form of the state in South Africa, the authors explored what they called the secondary contradictions of the social formation. They argued that the form of the state was given, in addition to the primary contradiction between workers and capitalists, by struggles for hegemony between different fractions of capital itself (Davies et. al., 1976). Between 1920 and 1948, they argued, the critical division within the capitalist class was between imperialist/foreign capital(s) on the one hand and national capital(s) on the other (p. 29). At stake was whether ‘South Africa was to remain an economic chattel of imperialism or to generate its own national capitalist development’ (p. 29). The ‘unique’ feature of South Africa, they concluded, was the early hegemony that national capital exercised in the state.