Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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Historian of the South
I was particularly fortunate in getting to know C Vann Woodward, the most eminent historian of the American South. His influential study The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which dealt with the evolution of American race relations, was at one stage considered the best-known historical work in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr called it “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement”.
Though Woodward, like the later president Bill Clinton, hailed from the southern state of Arkansas, he was nonetheless unflinching in his insistence on liberal values. Woodward’s studies of the emergence and mutation of segregation in the southern states of the United States after the abolition of slavery were of great help to me in understanding race relations in South Africa. In both cases one had to do with a dominant white community that refused point-blank to incorporate black people in their political and social system.
I had several conversations with Woodward over lunch at Mory’s, the popular faculty club. He could become extremely annoyed with the northeast elite (particularly that of the New England region) who were, in his view, hypocritical about the race question and labelled the South as backward, dumb and myopic without being conscious of their own racism.
Woodward told me of the formative influence Niebuhr’s books had had on him. As a Southerner himself, Woodward highlighted the contrast between the New Englanders and the Southerners in a way that immediately reminded me of the differences between Afrikaners and the English-speaking whites in South Africa. Like the “New Englanders” in the US northeast, the English-speaking community in South Africa had a shared experience of economic prosperity. This went in hand in hand with their protestations of innocence on any charge of black exploitation and oppression.
The history of the Afrikaners, on the other hand, corresponded largely to that of white people in the American South. In both cases there was an era of slavery and later a devastating defeat in war (the American Civil War and the Anglo-Boer War), followed by another century of segregation. (South Africa took the term “poor white” as well as “segregation” from the South.) Like those of the Southerners, Afrikaners’ hands were stained in respect of both slavery and apartheid – the two great moral issues about which the West had developed an obsession. But Woodward did not feel that whites had the duty to pay off their debt in perpetuity.
In 1976 Thompson and Woodward travelled together to South Africa to attend a conference on apartheid in South African universities held on the UCT campus. This was just after the first wave of uprisings in Soweto and other black areas. Along with many others, I wondered whether we were heading for a full-blown civil war over the race question. I hosted Woodward at Stellenbosch, where I showed him separate entrances, separate residential areas and schools, and the other manifestations of apartheid.
We subsequently exchanged letters on a number of occasions. In 1998 he referred to the “black carpetbaggers” in the United States of that time, black people who sought to benefit personally from affirmative action even though they had not suffered under segregation themselves. To him, this was proof that advocates of white supremacy were correct in their assumption that skin colour was the overriding factor in the white-black conflict. On 15 June 1998 he wrote that it seemed to him as if racial rhetoric in America had been much worse than in South Africa:
The racial rhetoric here [in America] was framed in terms of hatred, bitterness, contempt, and personal violence. It appeared in these forms among the courts, the police, the militia, prisons and mobs. Was there anything in South Africa comparable with the Ku Klux Klan, the lynching mobs, the mass brutality in the South?
Once I asked Woodward a question that had long preyed on my mind. Would the white people in the American South have been able to abolish segregation if those states had been independent? He pondered it for quite a while and then replied: “No, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
Unintended consequences
In the course of 1973 Rick Elphick and I decided to compile a book of essays on the early shaping of Cape society, about which so many conflicting theories existed. We wanted to obtain contributions from young historians who had focused on the early colonial history of the Cape in their doctoral dissertations. Rick himself had written on the Khoikhoi at the beginning of the VOC era, while I had written on the last decades of the eighteenth century, of which the first white-black conflicts on the eastern Cape frontier were such an important facet.
Our pool of authors and their doctoral research topics included Leonard Guelke on the burghers, Gerrit Schutte on the Cape Patriots, Robert Shell and James Armstrong on the slaves and free blacks, Martin Legassick on the Griquas and Southern Sotho on the northern frontier, and William Freund on the transitional governments from 1795 to 1806. All of them accepted the invitation to contribute to the volume. I ended up being the only contributor who was still based in South Africa. It was a striking illustration of the migration overseas of the historians who were engaged in a radical reinterpretation of our early history.
We started our work on the book in a time before electronic communication. During the planning and editing stages of the manuscript, streams of letters made their way across the ocean. Rick still has a 30cm-high pile of correspondence between the two of us and between us as co-editors and the various authors.
Gradually we realised that our book had the potential to challenge the views of historians on the early colonial era fundamentally. With a friend, Mike Peacock, at the helm of Maskew Miller Longman, we were assured of a sympathetic publisher and an effective marketer. The book was published in 1979 as The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820. An Afrikaans version in collaboration with Karel Schoeman, who had translated a large section, appeared in 1982 under the title ’n Samelewing in wording: Suid-Afrika, 1652 tot 1820.
The reviews were generally positive, but Anna Böeseken, the historian who had introduced me to Elphick in the Cape Archives in 1968, called it a “presumptuous book” in Die Burger. She stated that it reflected the modern obsession with racial differences which resulted in scant attention being paid to interpersonal differences, and added: “Thus theories are constructed and conclusions drawn on the basis of insufficient data.”
Böeseken, an authority on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, evidently felt that we as young scholars were still too wet behind the ears to mount the radical reinterpretation to which the book laid claim. Nevertheless, the book sold very well. The University of South Africa prescribed it for their students, and within a few years several other universities followed suit. By the end of the 1980s the total sales exceeded 50 000.
We then embarked on a substantially revised and extended second edition which took the analysis up to 1840. The new edition, which appeared in 1989, comprised more than 600 pages and included essays by new contributors such as Candy Malherbe, Nigel Worden, Robert Ross and Jeffrey Peires. This work, too, sold well, but it went out of print when Pearson took over our publisher ten years later. In 2015 the Wesleyan University Press made it available as an electronic book.
Rick and I consider our most significant contribution the synoptic final chapter in which we posed the question: How did white control and black exclusion become entrenched while at the same time there were large-scale interracial sexual relations outside wedlock?
Up to about 1775, the government and the burghers virtually never used the terms “race” or “white people”. Laws did not differentiate or discriminate on the basis of race or colour. A racist ideology did not exist. The word “black” was used very rarely except in the formal term “free blacks”, which referred to former slaves who had been freed by their owners. The police force consisted of black men who were called “kaffirs”. They were colour-blind in the execution of their duties and arrested people without making any distinction based on colour.
How did it come about that the Afrikaners developed the system of apartheid from such a pioneer history? It was a question one could indeed ask oneself. Liberal historians and social scientists enthusiastically offered explanations. According to some, the blame for white racism had to be laid at the door of the burghers’ “primitive” Calvinism with its doctrine of predestination. The problem with this interpretation was