The History Workshop in South African context

In order to understand why the writings of E.P. Thompson found resonance in the South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s, the reader will need to know something of the political context of South African intellectual history and of the institutional shape of South African universities in that period. The late 1960s saw the apparent triumph of a completely racialized social order. The main oppositional movements, the African National Congress (ANC), its ally, the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), were dismantled by the state, their leaders in prison, under house arrest, or in exile. But there were signs at the beginning of the seventies of renewed resistance from new forces. The Black Consciousness Movement emerged amongst students, and there were demonstrations and signs of radicalization amongst small numbers of white students. A new movement of independent black trade unions started up, and in 1973 there was a spectacular strike wave. In 1976, a mass school pupil revolt began in Soweto and spread across the country, while the state responded with massive violence. New independent black trade unions became a significant force and in 1979 the militant Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) was formed. Small community activist groups started to spring up. These movements owed very little to the exile organizations, which were obsessively focused on their (not very successful) strategy of guerilla warfare. The ANC and the Communist Party were, in the late 1970s, actively hostile to the new trade unions, which they saw as a diversion from their militarist approach, and quite unfairly labelled as collaborationist. But they slowly came to recognize the potential of above-ground organization. By the start of the 1980s the ANC and SACP were successfully rebuilding their internal networks, and began to hegemonize the new internal movements. This culminated in the foundation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983, an umbrella group that was broadly aligned with ANC ideology, but which placed somewhat greater emphasis on questions of mass participation and of non-racial ideology than the ANC had historically done.Footnote ⁹

South African social historians of the time were involved in, or supported, organizations across the whole of this political spectrum. A few individuals were drawn into the underground ANC. Early History Workshop member David Webster clandestinely joined the movement; tragically, he was assassinated by a government hit squad.Footnote ¹⁰ But generally, the scholars who were attracted to a Thompsonian style of social history were sympathetic to the emerging black trade unions and community organizations, and felt a mix of wariness and sympathy towards the ANC. In particular, they often disagreed profoundly with the ANC’s antagonistic view of the new unions. Amongst the early History Workshop group, Phil Bonner and Eddie Webster were deeply involved in the FOSATU labour movement, while Luli Callinicos, who in earlier life had been a member of the ANC-aligned Congress of Democrats, became engaged in union education. Many of the graduate students drawn to the Workshop participated in student, community and political campaigns. Some of the initial Workshop group – especially Van Onselen – were very sceptical of the organized left in general. The activists and the sceptics alike, though, tended to view the SA Communist Party in ways that resonated with Thompson’s critique of Stalinism. For all its undoubted heroism, the SACP remained ideologically one of the most unreconstructed Stalinist parties in the world. It was proud of its support for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and in the 1970s and in the 1970s added its unwavering backing for the murderous Mengistu regime in Ethiopia and the USSR’s intervention in Afghanistan. It also treated the Soviet version of “historical and dialectical materialism” as received wisdom, adding only a slight nationalist gloss.Footnote ¹¹ Thompson’s attempts to re-examine the basic assumptions of his early, Communist Party political and intellectual life were likely to appeal to those who were not convinced by the SACP’s line (but, in varying degrees, might have once sympathized with it or were still moving in its spheres of influence). The social historians were almost all critical of Stalinism’s lingering influence on the South African oppositional movements. To this extent, their work can be considered part of the global “New Left” in which Thompson’s thought played such a vital role.Footnote ¹²

Thus, new movements stimulated intellectuals’ interest in better understanding working class history and culture. And the participants in these movements – students, trade unionists, community activists – were a potential audience for their work. At the same time, Thompson’s approach to social history provided a number of young South African academics with a template for a new kind of engaged scholarship, not only in general but also vis-à-vis other Marxism-inspired intellectual perspectives. At least a part of the success of Thompson’s work in the mid to late 1970s came because a group of intellectuals reacted against the influence on radical South African thought of Thompson’s great antagonist, Louis Althusser, and other Francophone Marxist structuralists. In the 1950s and 1960s, anti-apartheid scholarship had been dominated by liberals. From the early 1970s they faced a Marxist challenge. This took a form in which Althusserian ideas were central. A South African Communist exile in Britain, Harold Wolpe, published a series of articles that explained apartheid as a system based on the exploitation of ultra-cheap migrant labour, made possible by the way in which family subsistence production in the rural areas subsidized migrants’ wages. Basing himself on Althusser and on the anthropology of Claude Meillasoux, Wolpe delivered an analysis of the “articulation” of modes of production underpinning the South African social order.Footnote ¹³ The ideas of some of the South African intellectual left over the next couple of decades were substantially shaped by Wolpe. Moreover, the influence of Althusser was reinforced via that of one of his followers, Nicos Poulantzas. In the mid-seventies, a group of South African graduate students at Sussex University began applying Poulantzas’ analytical device of “fractions of capital” to understanding the South African state.Footnote ¹⁴ The work of the “Sussex School”, as it became known, was widely read by South African leftists. Two features of the structuralist literature are worth noting. Firstly, while the Althusserians and Poulantzians put forward complex analyses of capital and the state, they had much less to say about working-class and popular movements. Where they did write about strikes and revolts, their analyses were often somewhat economistic and instrumental. Secondly, their writing was often characterized by stylistic obscurity.Footnote ¹⁵

For South African scholars who were uncomfortable with structuralism, Thompson’s work offered an alternative. He provided a model of a sensitive and flexible way of thinking about the mass movements as they were actually emerging on the ground, and about their historical predecessors and antecedents. His demolition of Althusser and his cohorts, most famously in his Poverty of Theory,Footnote ¹⁶ was an intellectual foundation for a new approach. And his clarity of style contrasted attractively with the turgidity of the Sussex School. Not all the History Workshop members took this pro-Thompson, anti-Althusser position; but it was to become the most influential one within the work of the group.

The South African university system changed during the late 1970s and early 1980s, in a way that was favourable to new kinds of critical scholarship. There were three types of universities. First, the Afrikaans universities were all white, and firmly supportive of the apartheid project. Second, a series of segregated black universities had been set up by the government. Although they became hotbeds of student protest, they were largely dominated by pro-government Afrikaner professors and administrators. Finally, there were the so-called liberal universities, dominated by English-speaking whites, and this was where social history took root. In the late 1970s, this latter group of universities began to increase their black enrollments. At Wits, black student numbers increased rapidly, from a handful at the end of the 1970s to about a quarter of the student body at the start of the nineties. Moreover, this demographic change was concentrated in the humanities and social sciences, so that some classes in these disciplines were largely black by the end of the eighties. This shift brought a generation of students on to the campuses of Wits and the other universities who came out of high schools and townships where they had been involved in political mobilization and often in conflict with the army and the police. They had often been exposed to Marxist ideas, albeit usually in the formulaic version of the SACP. At the same time, white students at the liberal universities produced an increasingly leftist leadership in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Campus life was characterized by a relentless political activism; confrontations with the police were common and tear gas often hung in the air.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, campuses were also somewhat protected environments. Their status as institutions and their international connections, the high level of media coverage of events there, even the strange deference of Afrikaner nationalists to the professoriate, meant that they were somewhat safer spaces than the streets of South Africa in general. In this context, critical scholars were able to bring their ideas to classrooms of exceptionally responsive students and to wider audiences. Thus, during the 1980s and 1990s a whole generation of undergraduate history and social science students at Wits, Natal, Cape Town, Rhodes, and Western Cape universities heard in at least some of their classes about Thompsonian ways of thinking about labour, culture, and politics.Footnote ¹⁸ Some of these students went on to do graduate work and to publish work in a similar vein. Others, who did not go into academia, took some of the ideas into other spheres of cultural life.

What is striking about this conjuncture is that, because of the quasi-revolutionary upheaval that South Africa was going through in the 1980s, left intellectuals were, by and large, much less beset by doubts about Marxism than were their contemporaries in Europe and North America. In a sense, in South Africa, the 1970s lasted until the early 1990s, as far as the vigour of Marxist academic work was concerned.

History Workshop – Issues and Debates

A selection of papers from the first History Workshop conference in 1978 were rapidly edited by Belinda Bozzoli, the first History Workshop book coming out from Johannesburg’s radical publisher, Ravan, in 1979. There was some representation of the more structuralist tendencies of the time in the volume, but Bozzoli’s Thompsonian proclivities were already showing. In her introduction to the book, she explained the purpose of the conference in this way:

It is worth noting here a certain vagueness about exactly how academics might be able to adopt the “point of view” of the oppressed. What is most striking, though, is the desire to apply the example and politics of the then current British style of social history in the South African context. There was a clear congruence between the way Bozzoli understood the Workshop’s project and Thompson’s critique of economistic, base-and-superstructure Marxism. Bozzoli wrote of the conference:

Bozzoli implicitly acknowledged the new history’s debt to Thompson’s famous re-definition of class. She pointed out that some of the papers in the book examined the processes whereby the black working class “makes itself, through its own action, the formation of alliances, the creation of cultural forms […]”.Footnote ²¹

Bozzoli identified the lack of studies of the townships, the grim residential areas created by segregation and apartheid, as “the great unwritten history of the South African working class”.Footnote ²² Closing that gap has remained a central focus of Wits social historians up to the time of writing, especially in recent years through a programme of producing township local histories, based on oral history interviews, under the direction of Phil Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien.Footnote ²³

The conference also seems to have helped form an insight that would be very important to the work of the Wits History Workshop in subsequent years: In the 1890s, Bozzoli observed, “[r]acial, skill and ethnic differences which divided those early workers from one another were not as rigidly institutionalized as they came to be”.Footnote ²⁴ Previously, scholars had tended to project the very rigid racial boundaries characteristic of apartheid back into the South African past. What the research generated by the new thinking showed was that, in fact, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa’s cities had been places where racial difference was often very blurred. It had subsequently taken an enormous amount of ideological and political work by those who held power to create the tightly policed racial divisions of apartheid South Africa.Footnote ²⁵ This view challenged not only the state’s racial ideology, but also the essentialist arguments of some African nationalists.

Bozzoli shared Thompson’s belief that working-class agency required a multi-layered and complex explanation, and that it could not be reduced to structural factors. With a jibe at the Althusserian concept of “overdetermination”, she observed:

With views like that, Bozzoli was almost the ideal reader for Thompson’s newly-published The Poverty of Theory. When, in 1983, Bozzoli produced a collection of papers from the second History Workshop conference, held at Wits two years earlier, she presented in her introduction a confident defence of the value of social history. The Poverty of Theory became something of an intellectual charter for Bozzoli’s hostility to excessive theoreticism in general and to the influence of Althusser and Poulantzas on South African historiography in particular. Citing two contributions in the edited volume, one on the life of a western Transvaal sharecropper and one on Indian flower sellers in suburban Johannesburg, she commented that “[w]hen E.P. Thompson talks of class as ‘experience’ it would seem that these are two examples of what he meant”, and went on to quote directly from Poverty of Theory: “experience […] arises because men and women […] are rational, and they think about what is happening to themselves and their world.”Footnote ²⁷

The Thompsonian category of “experience” became perhaps the central idea in the South African social history writing of the 1980s and beyond, in large part through Bozzoli’s mediation. It was pervasively used, even by those who had not read much of Thompson. Its employment clearly marked the followers of social history as distinct from the structuralists.

Thompson’s use of (a fairly unproblematized notion of) “rationality” would have struck a chord with leftist South African scholars for particular local reasons. Conservative, and even to some extent liberal, social scientists in the country had often portrayed African workers as driven by irrationalism; migrants came to the mines because of “the bright lights of the city” and so forth. For the new historians, part of their task seemed to be to insist that black workers acted as rationally as anyone else. Thus, Van Onselen’s book on labour migrants in Zimbabwe, for example, is in part a passionate defence of the rationality of the miners.Footnote ²⁸ This way of thinking clearly glossed over the question of wherein “rationality” inheres. It tended to have the negative effect of leading to an avoidance of exploring the “irrational” (which, in any case, might again have its own rationality); workers’ religious and magical beliefs, for instance, tended to be off-limits to the early Workshop historians. But this stance was not only understandable in the context of the time, it was also an important achievement, both intellectually and politically, in relation to prior views.

Bozzoli also followed Thompson in attacking “evolutionary and teleological narratives” of resistance. In doing so she was also taking a swipe at the practice of the South African left. She quoted Thompson’s observation that “judgmental Marxism” tends to mathematically deduce from class analysis “the class consciousness which [the working class] ought to have (but seldom does have) if ‘it’ was properly aware of its own position and real interests”. Basing herself on Thompson, Bozzoli condemned a politics that she saw as blaming the real political inadequacies of leaders on the supposed “failure” of the working class to develop the correct “consciousness”.Footnote ²⁹ (She was probably here criticizing the whole range of more conventional Marxist political activists rather than any particular political faction).

In 1983, Bozzoli published an influential article in the Journal of Southern African Studies advocating the need for a feminist turn in scholarship in South Africa.Footnote ³⁰ Interestingly, given Thompson’s fraught relationship with feminism, Bozzoli’s argument has clear links to Thompson’s thought. She accused Wolpe and the structuralists of failing to recognize women’s agency, because of their reliance on modes of arguments that were, ultimately, functionalist. Bozzoli’s position resonated closely with Thompson’s idea that the mainstream American version of social science associated with Talcott Parsons, and Althusser’s Marxism, were mirror images of each other. For Bozzoli, as for Thompson, both were accounts of society in which institutions operated in a machine-like fashion; they just reversed each other’s political values.Footnote ³¹

In the last of her History Workshop edited volumes, based on the 1984 conference and appearing in 1987, Bozzoli sought, like Thompson, to nuance an understanding of class through an exploration of its relation to culture.Footnote ³² She questioned simplistic versions of the concept of community. In the political discourse of the time, the term “community” was often used on the left, approvingly but unreflectively. Bozzoli wanted to point to the cleavages of gender, class and skill within communities that South African left politics tended to overlook.

There is no doubt that Bozzoli, through the introductions to her three edited books, set much of the direction of South African social history in general, and the Wits History Workshop in particular, and that that direction was a broadly Thompsonian one.

The work of Charles van Onselen represents perhaps the strongest substantive body of historical writing taking inspiration from Thompson in the South African scholarship. He made an extraordinary contribution to South African social history, following his early book on Zimbabwean labour history with a classic work on the early years of Johannesburg.Footnote ³³ His magnum opus, published in the 1990s, was an enormously elaborate biography of an African share-cropper, Kas Maine. In the book, Maine’s life becomes a lens through which the whole history of rural South Africa during the Twentieth Century is read.Footnote ³⁴ Later, Van Onselen turned his attention to the Jewish gangsters and Irish bandits of early industrial South Africa.Footnote ³⁵ He seldom explicitly invoked Thompson, but the Thompsonian stamp of his work was evident: in the desire to recover forgotten lives; the emphasis on the way in which pre-industrial obligations shape the working class; and in the stress on informal types of social resistance.Footnote ³⁶ A distinguished American Africanist, Luise White, describes Van Onselen’s book on Johannesburg as “pure Thompson” and the author as being “far and away the most Thompsonian” of the South African scholars.Footnote ³⁷

The American scholar Martin Murray took Van Onselen to task for not emulating Thompson, as he did not tell a tale of the formation of a working class.Footnote ³⁸ And indeed, Van Onselen has certainly been attracted to the study of those who resisted the process of proletarianization in individualistic ways; the share-croppers, the self-employed and the criminals. But this focus does resonate with Thompson’s concern for the casualties of industrialization. And it could be argued that it is a virtue of Van Onselen’s work that he ultimately does not yield to a teleology of class formation.

If I have concentrated here on the work of Bozzoli and van Onselen it is not because they were necessarily the most “typical” of the History Workshop scholars. Indeed, their intellectual and political trajectories were somewhat unusual ones. Most of the 1970s and 1980s generation of social historians have maintained political positions of critical support towards the trade unions or the ANC or socialist groupings, or at least have continued to occupy a kind of post-Marxist leftist position. By contrast, Van Onselen came at an early stage to a position of hostility to the ANC, which he saw as mindlessly nationalist, and to the organized left in general. Bozzoli, equally critical of the ANC, has recently become a member of parliament for the broadly liberal Democratic Alliance. However, the focus of this article is less the History Workshop itself than Thompson’s influence, and in this regard their work is the most significant. Nobody made a more systematic attempt than Bozzoli to draw out the implications of Thompson’s ideas for the South African context, and nobody made a more notable and influential attempt to apply those ideas than Van Onselen.

A broader Thompsonian impact

The influence of Thompson has, however, diffused much more widely through South African historical writing. Dunbar Moodie deployed the notion of “moral economy” to brilliant effect in analyzing the 1946 Witwatersrand African mineworkers strike on the basis of his interviews with elderly participants.Footnote ³⁹ History Workshop member Peter Delius and Oxford historian Stanley Trapido also invoked “moral economy” in their work on rural social relations in the Transvaal.Footnote ⁴⁰ Paul La Hausse acknowledged Thompson’s part in the “specifically English debates about culture and history”, which shaped the finely researched series of studies of African working class history and culture in Durban that he produced.Footnote ⁴¹ Bill Nasson, as a young South African student in England in the 1970s, attended a Thompson lecture at Hull, and was also present when, as he recalls, Thompson “shredded” his critic Richard Johnson at Oxford.Footnote ⁴² Nasson acknowledges the influence on Thompson’s thinking, especially concerning liberties and the rule of law, on his influential book about men of colour in the Cape who fought for the British in the Boer War.Footnote ⁴³ Durban-based American Bill Freund, who became a major historian of the African city, got to know Thompson personally while living in England, and was deeply impressed by him.Footnote ⁴⁴ And numerous graduate students were influenced by Thompson in the remarkably high quality graduate thesis work produced under Bonner and Delius’s supervision at Wits in the 1980s.

There was a danger, though, that the dominance of the local version of Thompson amongst the social historians could lead to a closure of theoretical discussion.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is true that, under Phil Bonner’s leadership after 1987, the History Workshop were building increasingly sophisticated understandings of urbanization, of generation, and of rural and urban political cultures. But right into the early 1990s, there was relatively little interest amongst South African social historians in engaging with the proliferating new international debates on post-structuralism and post-colonialism. A striking contrast is with the Indian Subaltern Studies school, which emerged in that period out of a not dissimilar social history group, but which attained a huge international impact through addressing major theoretical debates and by advancing novel approaches. History Workshop did not have an interest in engaging with theory in this way. Their dominant mode of research was strongly empirical. And there was a tendency to see current developments in theory as a modish distraction from politics. There was also an element of parochialism: South Africans were overwhelmingly preoccupied with their national situation and, in the eighties, were academically isolated, internationally, by the cultural boycott of South Africa.

The idea of popularizing historical research in a context of political and social struggles of course predated the work of E.P. Thompson. In the UK there was a long history of such work, by both Labour Party and Communist historians and activists. Thompson was not therefore the direct inspiration for the History Workshop’s initiatives in popularizing historical research. Nevertheless, there was at least an elective affinity between the work of History Workshop in this field and the ideas of E.P. Thompson, the sometime Workers’ Education Association tutor. In 1981, Luli Callinicos produced a book, Gold and Workers, aimed at bringing the new research on the history of South African industrialization to a working-class audience.Footnote ⁴⁶ This book was extremely successful in its aims. It was widely used in trade union educationals in the 1980s, and was serialized in the newspaper of the powerful new National Union of Mineworkers. Explaining her intentions, Callinicos cited Thompson, in suggesting that “historical consciousness” might help us to realize the “possibilities of transformation”.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is noteworthy that the book includes a brief section drawing explicit parallels between industrialization in South Africa and the Industrial Revolution in England. Callinicos used this comparison in an attempt to show how the racial attitudes of upper-class whites in contemporary South Africa worked in a similar way to the contempt of the nineteenth-century English bourgeoisie for the working class. This kind of parallelism, which would certainly be rejected by later post-colonial theorists, was quite appealing to South African social historians. Though they had seen too much of the problems of postcolonial Africa to entirely share Thompson’s early 1960s confidence that “[c]auses which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won”,Footnote ⁴⁸ they certainly saw the processes of industrialization and urbanization in eighteenth-century England and twentieth-century South Africa as alike in crucial ways.

If Scott Hamilton is correct to say that one of Thompson’s core ideas was “the essential unity of political, scholarly and imaginative work”, then History Workshop certainly laboured in that spirit.Footnote ⁴⁹ Well-attended public cultural festivals, drawing in trade unionists, students, community activists, and students, accompanied all the History Workshop conferences during the first decade and a half. At these events there were numerous performances by workers’ choirs, dance and drama groups, concerts and exhibitions by sympathetic musicians and artists, screenings of political films, and public lectures by scholars. For the first conference this “public day” was held on a small scale in the industrial town of Benoni. The festivals subsequently were moved to the Wits campus and steadily grew in size. In 1984 about 3,500 people attended the event, and in 1987 5,000, a large proportion of them in both years trade unionists.Footnote ⁵⁰ At the 1990 conference, held shortly after the government had unbanned the liberation movements, a roaring University Great Hall greeted a rousing speech by Ahmed Kathrada, an ANC leader recently freed after a quarter of a century’s imprisonment on Robben Island.Footnote ⁵¹

With the transition to democracy, the opening of many other political spaces meant that there was no longer an audience for this type of jamboree. Thus, when the workshop held a conference on the concept of Democracy in 1994, the academic event was a great success, attracting scholars from many African countries, Europe, and North America. But the cultural festival was a flop. Phil Bonner astutely turned the workshop towards new modes of public history, appropriate to the new times. Perhaps his most notable achievement in this sphere was the creation of Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum, which has become a landmark for visitors to the city, and which presents a distinctly History-Workshop-inflected account of South African history. The narrative focuses – some might say disproportionately – on the black working-class on the Rand, looking at daily life and culture, as well as repression and political movements. The core of the overview of South African history presented in the museum is conceived in a recognizably Thompsonian manner. And this approach is not surprising – most of the text panels in the exhibition were written by History Workshop-linked academics.

Around the time of the transition to democracy in 1994, however, the tides of opinion amongst the South African radical intelligentsia turned strongly against Thompsonian social historians. One issue was the rhinoceros in the room: race. The History Workshop committee was mainly white. The proportion of black paper presenters in History Workshop conferences steadily increased, but still constituted a minority. Perhaps surprisingly, these problems had not really been a subject of conflict in the previous decade (at least, not of publicly visible conflict). The oppositional public culture of the time tended to deflect attention away from such issues. In the 1980s, at Wits and the other universities, there had been remarkable unity between left academics and students, who had, on occasion, faced off against police together in campus demonstrations. Both FOSATU and the UDF organizations had a strong commitment to playing down potential racial divisions amongst the anti-apartheid forces. But the 1990s saw a change in these political dynamics. Black students became increasingly confrontational towards university authorities over racially defined issues, in ways which were often resented by even leftish professors. And a more overtly African nationalist position began to be articulated by sectors of the ANC, which was to become especially strong under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki. In this context, the Workshop was bound to be criticized for its racial make up, and it was. More generally, white social historians came under scrutiny for the racial politics of their professional practice. Some critics particularly questioned the employment by white social historians of black research assistants, arguing that the assistants had been exploited or given inadequate credit for their intellectual contributions. The lack of proficiency in African languages of most white social historians was deplored. It was also claimed, especially by activists from a Black Consciousness background, that the social historians’ analytical emphasis on class was a way of avoiding the question of race.

The Workshop did change its racial composition, gradually, and then quite dramatically after Phil Bonner gained funding for a large group of black graduate students in the mid 2000s. But the racial relationships under which some of the classic Wits Social History work was produced have continued to be used by critics to cast doubt over its validity.

Overlapping with the racial issue was the increasing challenge to a Thompsonian social history from scholars influenced by poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. This was perhaps most forcefully articulated, from the late 1990s, by Ciraj Rassool and others from the University of the Western Cape.Footnote ⁵² These scholars argued that the South African social historians had been blind to issues of representation and institutional power in their academic practice. Social historians were accused of presuming to speak for the working class. The History Workshop was criticized for treating workers simply as an audience and not as interlocutors. The social history literature was portrayed as mindlessly empiricist and its authors as crassly averse to theoretical engagement. It was suggested that the apparently impressive achievements of South African social historians using oral history interviews were fundamentally flawed, because they had naively treated interviews as sources of evidence about the past, when they should have heard them as statements about the present. At their most extreme, these positions tended to suggest that it was only possible to work with representations of history, and that it was therefore quite impossible to say anything substantive about the past. This latter point resonated in a striking way with the development of a post-apartheid heritage industry. In the transitional years after 1994, considerable resources, from both the state and the private sector, became available for commemoration and memorialization of past political struggles and many historians and history graduates became involved in the resulting initiatives. Unsurprisingly, these critics of social history had no interest in engaging Thompson’s work. For them, it was hopelessly tainted by its History Workshop associations.

Practitioners of the Thompson-derived brand of social history were not deaf to criticisms based either on racial politics or on theoretical grounds. Phil Bonner acknowledged a degree of validity in some of them in his keynote speech at the History Workshop’s thirtieth anniversary conference in 2009.Footnote ⁵³ But the question really was whether to view the work of the Thompsonian social historians as flawed but valuable, or whether, as Rassool and his supporters seemed to think, it needed to be totally abandoned. Yet surely, as Geoff Eley has argued for the British and American social history of the 1970s, it should be possible to recognize the limitations of a body of historical work, while still valuing what was creative and innovative about it.Footnote ⁵⁴

However, scholars who had come up through the activities of the social history movement did continue to keep some direct interest in Thompson alive. For instance, Thompson continues to figure prominently in teaching, as anecdotal information indicates: I taught Thompson’s essay on time to hundreds of Wits undergraduate Sociology students during the 1990s. Keith Breckenridge taught the chapter on Methodism of The Making to students at the University of Kwazulu Natal in the same period. Peter Alexander included the “class” section of The Making in his courses at the University of Johannesburg over many years.Footnote ⁵⁵ Bill Nasson currently teaches The Making to students at the University of Stellenbosch.Footnote ⁵⁶

This brings me back to Jacob Dlamini’s book. If some South African academics have hurled Thompson out of the front door, he may have returned through the back, via the work of a younger generation of writers in non-academic genres. The literary scholar Hedley Twidle has recently suggested that the remarkable current boom in South African non-fiction writing has an affinity as a genre with the strong social history tradition.Footnote ⁵⁷ I agree with him, but I would suggest that the connection is even more direct than he recognizes. The current generation of non-fiction writers were often influenced by, and drew on, the teaching and writing of the social historians. Dlamini was a student in the Wits history department and acknowledges its influence on his intellectual formation, which certainly helps explain his reference to Thompson.Footnote ⁵⁸ In opposing his own investigations of real diversity of black working-class experience to an official political narrative focused on repression and resistance, Dlamini was certainly proceeding in a thoroughly Thompsonian manner. And in his evocation of “reciprocity and mutual obligation” in township life, there is surely a sensibility at work that Thompson’s admirers would find sympathetic. There are other examples of this direct connection of the new South African non-fiction and social history: Xolela Mangcu, a foremost public intellectual and journalist, and author of a recent biography of Steve Biko,Footnote ⁵⁹ sees Thompson’s ideas as a useful starting point for thinking about Biko’s context in the history of the Eastern Cape. He says his reading in social history has given him “a better sense of the sub-political currents in our society”. And he comments that “Thompson’s use of ‘precedent’ always appealed to me – e.g. how Thomas Paine’s work set the contours for Radicalism in Britain a hundred years later”.Footnote ⁶⁰ The leading non-fiction writer Jonny Steinberg, a Wits student at the height of the social history wave, cites a number of social historians in his non-fiction works on contemporary South Africa. In his award-winning book about crime and imprisonment, The Number, Steinberg draws heavily on Van Onselen’s work on the history of prison gangs.Footnote ⁶¹ It does indeed seem that the intellectual and cultural influence of South African social history has diffused far beyond the boundaries of its own academic genre.

It can be speculated that one reason for this is that the mode of writing of the social historians provided non-fiction writers with usable literary models. An accessible, story-telling style was one of the features of the South African social historians. This came out of both the stylistic influence of authors like Thompson and Hobsbawm, and the desire to communicate with a non-academic audience. Many of the History Workshop contributors honed their popular writing skills on a long series of historical articles produced by the group for the UDF-aligned paper, the New Nation, in the 1980s. Van Onselen, Tim Couzens, Bill Nasson and Peter Delius are all exemplary writers in a “plain English”, Thompsonian manner. Of course, post-structuralists would claim that their apparent clarity is a discursive snare and a delusion. But it remains evident that the convoluted modes of poststructuralist self-expression were not transferable into writing intended for a popular audience, whereas those of the social historians were.

What, then, can be said of the future of Thompsonian thought in South Africa? For this, the state of the nation needs to be considered briefly. Nobody in their right mind would contest that South Africa is an infinitely better country than it was in the 1970s: the great crime of formalized racial oppression is gone for good. And yet, contemporary South Africa is a profoundly disillusioning place, marked by mass unemployment, political corruption, continued (although no longer exclusively racially defined) economic inequality, crime, and violent clashes between police and protestors.

What relevance might a local Thompsonian tradition have in these grim circumstances? I want to answer this question in a provocative way, by suggesting that the South African social historians were and are romantics. This is certainly a label most of them would hate, for they tend to see themselves as drawing on social science and as hard-headed and realistic in their political judgements. But for Thompson, romanticism was not a pejorative term; indeed, it marked a quality of mind essential to the practice both of social change and of radical history. Writing of his hero, William Morris, in 1976, Thompson suggested that what had often been seen as romantic failure in Morris was actually a positive alternative to the scientism that the left was to develop. Morris’s romanticism contrasted with mainstream Marxism’s “lack of a moral self-consciousness or even a vocabulary of desire, its inability to project any images of the future, or even its tendency to fall upon the Utilitarians’ earthly paradise – the maximization of economic growth”.Footnote ⁶² For Thompson, moral concern and utopianism were crucial values. For all its many undoubted deficiencies and inconsistencies, South African social history has had such profound moral and future-orientated purposes. It has sought to give the people of the past the respect they deserved, and in doing so to help imagine a different future South Africa. Thompson approvingly quoted Morris: “I have heard people miscalled for being romantic, but what romance means is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present”.Footnote ⁶³ We may now smile at the idea of a “true” conception of history, but if the social history tradition endures in South Africa, it may be because it provides just such a way of telling stories about the past which make that vital connection to the present. If South African needs anything now, it is moral dissent and a “utopian” envisaging of something different. It is up to a younger generation of South African intellectuals to see whether they can find any resources in the local legacy of E.P. Thompson that could help them in that struggle. Strangely enough, there are signs that they just might do so.