Introduction: Repairing the Legacies of Harm

South African Historical Journal

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Introduction: Repairing the Legacies of Harm Cynthia Kros & David Wilkins To cite this article: Cynthia Kros & David Wilkins (2017) Introduction: Repairing the Legacies of Harm, South African Historical Journal, 69:1, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2017.1295646 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2017.1295646

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South African Historical Journal, 2017 Vol. 69, No. 1, 1–11, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2017.1295646

Introduction: Repairing the Legacies of Harm CYNTHIA KROS and DAVID WILKINS* University of the Witwatersrand

The focus of this component of the South African Historical Journal arises from a project called ‘Repairing the Legacies of Harm’ initiated in 2014 at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) by Cynthia Kros and David Wilkins. It took its title from the latter’s newly completed PhD thesis on the legacies of transatlantic slavery and the questions posed about how to repair damage that is still deeply felt in communities of slave descendants, and which, arguably still has a major deleterious impact on the political economy of African countries.1 Wilkins had begun his consideration by entering into the deeply contested field of reparations. Essentially he had argued for reparations being organised in the form of recognising the hurt that was and continues to be done by deeply entrenched racism and structural inequalities, and moving towards an attitudinal amelioration through particular representational and pedagogical strategies. Terming this process historical truth telling, Wilkins’ argument was informed by the approach of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and explored developments in museums and educational curricula concerning transatlantic slavery in Britain, the US and the international trends illustrated by the UNESCO Slave Route Project. Collaborating with Cynthia Kros on a project which explored the legacies of slavery in South Africa offered an opportunity to further explore the reparative potential of processes of historical truth telling.

In South Africa it has been evident for some time that the teaching of apartheid inaugurated by the post-1994 schools curriculum as part of a conscious effort to educate learners about the injustices of the past and to be sensitive to their legacies has proved challenging.

Information from participants in the teachers’ workshops hosted at Wits by the History Workshop, and research conducted by Chana Teeger for her doctoral thesis suggest many teachers fear its potentially divisive impact in classrooms where painful racially based feelings lie just below the surface.2 This anxiety seems to hover over the teaching even of more distant histories, like that of Cape slavery.

The ‘Repairing the Legacies of Harm’ project sought to stimulate dialogue within the humanities at the university about the history and legacy of slavery at the Cape, as well as forms of coerced labour further north. The hope was that ultimately we would be able to take a productive discussion about the lasting impact of the harms originating from deep history (that is pre-apartheid) into a more public sphere. Our sense of the urgency of this task was heightened * Corresponding author. Email: davidjameswilkins@gmail.com 1.

2.

D. Wilkins, ‘Repairing the Legacies of Transatlantic Slavery’ (PhD thesis, University of Hull, 2013).

C. Teeger, ‘Ruptures in the Rainbow Nation: How Desegregated South African Schools Deal with Interpersonal and Structural Racism’, Sociology of Education, 88, 3 (2015), 226–243, scholar.harvard.edu/files, accessed 10 July 2016.

ISSN: Print 0258-2473/Online 1726-1686 © 2017 Southern African Historical Society http://www.tandfonline.com

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by the student protests that commenced in the early part of 2015 with the spectacle of the #RhodesMustFall campaign dramatising the cry for ‘decolonisation’ of the curriculum which, although it had a déjà vu ring for older colleagues, still merits being taken up again.

It is hoped that this feature in the South African Historical Journal will serve as a first step in broadening both the audience for, and the scope of the dialogues around the impact of slavery (and other pre-industrial histories), and that it will provide food for thought and further discussion. Some of the articles in this issue reflect presentations and interactions that have taken place at Wits within the ambit of the project, whilst others are the result of broader conversations that got underway, especially in the course of, and aftermath of the biennial meeting of the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) at Stellenbosch in 2015. The project was based in the Wits School of Arts and was most visible as a series of seminars attended by members of the academic staff in which recent publications concerned with slavery in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean contexts were discussed. Nicola Cloete from the School of Arts presented some of her own doctoral work to the forum (see her article in this issue). The seminars also attracted academics from the humanities more generally with scholars such as Stacey Sommerdyk and Zimitri Erasmus contributing ideas from their work on slavery in other regions of Africa or on creolisation and identity.3 Colleagues from the School of Education, including Siobhan Glanvill-Miller whose work is also represented in this issue, described the difficulties of teaching slavery to university student teachers and their school learners whose racial sensitivities are heightened by their personal encounters in daily life as well as the often ill-considered outbursts about race in social and other media. By the time the biennial meeting of the Historical Society was convened in mid-2015 those who were associated with the project had a sense of the major obstacles that confront historians in writing and teaching a history that is often elusive in terms of existing sources and, almost in inverse proportion, still capable of enflaming emotions and inflicting pain. The project was represented on two panels at the meeting of the SAHS. Wilkins, Kros and Cloete presented drafts of the papers that appear here on one panel and Glenvill-Miller on another. Subsequently, Samuel North was asked to contribute a paper from his forthcoming PhD thesis. In this introduction, we aim to provide more insight into the motivations behind ‘Repairing the Legacies of Harm’ as well as reflecting on how it is positioned in relation to various literatures, and to the school curriculum.

Many of the scholars who wrote about slavery at the Cape in what was then a new wave, dating from the end of the 1970s with the publication of Elphick and Giliomee’s Shaping of South African Society, seem more interested at present in documenting the development of a fluid society with viable connections in other parts of the Indian Ocean world and beyond.4 3.

4.

See S. Sommerdyk, ‘Trans–Cultural Exchange at Malemba Bay: Voyages of Fregatschip Prins Willem V, 1755 to 1771’, in D. Richardson and F.R. da Silva, eds, Networks and Trans–Cultural Exchange: Slave Trading in the South Atlantic, 1590–1867 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 195–220; Z. Erasmus, ‘Recognition Through Pleasure, Recognition Through Violence: Gendered Coloured Subjectivities in South Africa’, Current Sociology, 48, 3 (2000), 71–85; Contact Theory: Z. Erasmus, ‘Too Timid for “Race” and Racism’, Journal of Social Issues, 66, 2 (2010), 387–400.

R. Elphick and H. Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979); N. Worden, ed., Cape Town. Between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2012). The authors would like to thank Nigel Worden for a conversation in which he pointed to some of these new directions.

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The school curriculum, however, lagging behind the academy because of the many constraints under which its authors labour, still retains some of the essence of the older historiography (see Kros’ article). That historiography is characterised as having a primary focus on trying to unearth the experiences of, as well as the tactics of resistance pursued by the enslaved at the Cape over the more than century-and-a-half between its inception and de jure abolition. Old-fashioned in terms of its rigid classification of society at the Cape, and frustratingly parochial as it may be, the particular orientation of the present school curriculum in the section that covers Cape slavery is not entirely regrettable. We argue that there is much to commend in the attention it intends to focus on the subjectivities of people who were enslaved.

It is standard practice now in some quarters to blame the TRC for a kind of once-and-forall failure to settle racial grievances. Common criticisms are that it dealt only with gross human rights violations and those only within a curtailed time frame, thereby overlooking the substantive structural and everyday harms of apartheid and their deeper historical roots.5 But as Madeleine Fullard and Nicky Rousseau have argued persuasively, the TRC was actually one of the more successful projects of the transition period, which was let down more by the government’s failure to follow up on its recommendations and findings than any of its own deficiencies, although the Commission was necessarily constrained by prevailing circumstances, including the brittleness of the transition itself and the Commission’s parliamentary mandate. Fullard and Rousseau maintain that despite a fairly widespread perception that the TRC disappointed victims, it is their voices and images that are ‘the most lasting’.6 In approaching our project, we believe that the TRC offers a process worth furthering, specifically as regards a fuller understanding of, and increased capacity for addressing the problems facing South Africa today, recognising that they are the product of a long history that extends much further back than apartheid. We would like to point out, however, that we believe oversimplification to be undesirable, not only in the interests of our disciplinary ethos, but also because we maintain that it limits productive social understanding and consequently, appropriate action. Our project necessarily stands at the interface between the academy, which is hopefully becoming more alert to the dissatisfaction of some of its significant constituencies, and a society that seems wracked with confusion and pain, apparently occasioned by a past that stubbornly refuses to go away, while often remaining illegible.

Authorship and position As we have said above, one of the demands that emerged from nation-wide student protests over the course of 2015 to 2016 was for ‘decolonisation’, which included curriculum transformation. For us, this intensified perennial questions about what history we should be 5.

6.

See, for example, F. Meintjes, ‘The TRC and CODESA Failed South Africa: It’s Time We Reflected on This’, The South African Civil Society Information Service, sacis.org.za/site/articles/1783, accessed 10 December 2016.

M. Fullard and N. Rousseau, ‘The Imperfect Past: The TRC in Transition’, in J. Daniel, A. Habib and R. Southall, eds, State of the Nation, 2003–2004 (Pretoria: HSRC Press), 78–104, 83.

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writing and teaching, and how to democratise the ownership of, and practices associated with the writing of history. Not for the first time we asked how we think of ourselves in relation to the discipline, recognising, perhaps with a new sense of urgency, the importance of being self-reflective and open about our own positions as scholars and authors of deeply unsettling and potentially hugely divisive histories. We decided to ask the authors to reflect on themselves in relation to contemporary society, and what it was that had drawn them to the study of slavery. In particular, we asked the authors to reflect on the reasons for their conviction that an institution that was abolished nearly two centuries ago still had relevance for an understanding of present inequalities as well as deeply entrenched feelings of pain reported by those who consider themselves to be the descendants of the enslaved.

Kros and Siobhan Glanvill-Miller spoke about a resilient idealism that had survived many years of history teaching, fortified by the seasonal influx of ‘young people’, which against all odds had allowed Kros and Glanvill-Miller to keep their faith that discussions about pressing issues in the present could take place through the mediation of the past.7 To a degree all the authors represented in this component of the journal agree that the affective dimension of the study of slavery has to be recuperated. Nicola Cloete remarked that she was: interested in how we come to understand and learn about what is left out of the official historical record of slavery and what other locations (such as literature) can bring to the conversation, especially in terms of communicating the affective dimensions of the institution of slavery in South Africa.8

Cloete gestures towards the need to reach beyond what even historians themselves often grumble about being the rigorously patrolled borders or the parochial domestication of the discipline of history.9 Her observation about the omissions in the ‘official record’ would also be vigorously supported by historians of slavery, as well as scholars who have written more generally about the archive’s tendentious complicities and ghostly silences.10 Yet, the silence of slave voices in the eighteenth century at the Cape is not quite as pervasive as it once was. In a recently published collection edited by Nigel Worden, we have two instances where the voices of the enslaved may be heard at some length, although they say much less about the condition of slavery than we might have hoped.11 Another of our authors, Samuel North, commented in the course of his self-reflection: ‘The absence of this voice [of the enslaved] from the historical record makes it all the 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Personal communication with the editors, January 2016.

Personal communication with the editors, January 2016.

J.E. Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); N. Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century (Athens: Ohio University Press & Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005).

N. Worden, Forgotten People: Indian Ocean Slavery in South Africa (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2004); C. Hamilton, V. Harris, M. Pickover, J. Taylor, G. Reid and R. Saleh, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002); A. Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), see esp. Burton’s introduction, 1–24.

The two instances are discussed in: R. Shell and A. Dick, ‘Jan Smiesing, Slave Lodge Schoolmaster and Healer, 1697–1734’, in Worden, Cape Town, 128–152, and S. Newton-King, ‘Family, Friendship and Survival among Freed Slaves’, in Worden, Cape Town, 152–175.

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more enthralling, or all the more sombre, depending on which way you look at it.’12 North felt moved to question himself, as he reflected on why he had decided to embark on a PhD, the subject of which is museological representations of slavery: ‘As a British person, maybe it was guilt?’ He went on to say: I am certainly fascinated by the knowledge that the people we write about were human beings with feelings and social relations, whatever the extent to which these were stymied by the dominant interests of the day. If you will forgive the self-indulgence, I believe that my writing is at least partially motivated by an interest in fairness, tolerance, and equality. We live in troubled times in which bigotry is often the stock response to uncertainty, and I feel that the study of historical wrongs can inform and steer debate today.13

Wilkins, responding to North, mentioned the sort of guilt that sometimes comes from being British and knowing about the empire and slavery, although, he observed, many AngloBritish people do not know about the connection, and continue to feel proud about the empire.14 Many of those British people who do not see Britain’s history of empire as a source of pride have a sense of obligation to try, as far as they are able, to help address the injustices of the history of empire. Whilst an important step towards this includes understanding and acknowledging the harms of empire and its legacies, it is also necessary to address how the values and practices of empire shaped and defined the information and voices upon which understanding of empire and its legacies has been built. This, of course, has been the argument of postcolonial theorists; however, how do we bring such processes and criticisms into the everyday public discussions of history? For Wilkins, the approach of the TRC to public hearings and testimony offers a potential insight into how this could be encouraged. It is not only necessary to explore what has happened in the past and what impact this has had, but also to make space for the previously silenced to speak and for others to listen to voices they have not heard in the past. Decolonisation is not just for the colonised but also for decolonising the coloniser. Challenging Eurocentric historiography and how history shapes national identity and the understanding of social justice is therefore an important part of how historical study and education can contribute to overcoming the legacies of the past. This is particularly the case for former imperial powers that have often glossed over the crimes of their imperial pasts and emphasised what can be presented as positive intentions or legacies of colonial interventions (for example, Britain’s past celebration of abolition and white abolitionist men and forgetting of centuries of practising and profiting from slavery). To overcome the damage of Eurocentric historiography, and to deal with antagonistic perspectives on the past, something that is illustrated by the battle over the calls made for reparations for transatlantic slavery, a process of engaging in critical analysis of, and dialogue about history, we argue, would be beneficial. This argument is further expanded on by Wilkins with reference to the ideas of the TRC in his article.

12.

13.

14.

Personal communication with the editors, January 2016.

Ibid.

D. Olusogu, ‘Wake up, Britain. Should the empire really be a source of pride?’, The Guardian, 23 January 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/23/britain-empire-pride-poll, accessed 13 February 2016.

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Historiographies The literature on Cape slavery between the end of the 1970s and the early 2000s, influenced by new international ways of reading slavery, and, to some extent the same intellectual movement that produced the local revisionist social history that was most evident in the work produced in those years by members of the Wits History Workshop,15 impresses on its readers the horrors of slavery, or in the case of Nigel Penn, of the remorseless persecution of the Khoisan on the expanding northern frontier.16 As in Penn’s work, the landscape of desolation and sanctioned violence is very vivid. These historians were clearly appalled by the atrocities they encountered. Despite being committed to exposing the wretchedness of slavery, consonant with contemporary social history’s resolution not to present members of the underclasses simply as passive victims, these historians were also vigilant about crediting slaves and the Khoisan with different kinds of, often very creative, agency. Most explicitly and extensively, John Mason argued that the enslaved did not accept the sentence of ‘social death’ (after Orlando Patterson)17 embodied in the condition of slavery.18 These scholars were sensitive to the multi-dimensional aspects of the archive, including its often punitive austerity;19 the ways in which it exercises surveillance over its users; the fact that the archive’s origins lie with the creation and sustainability of the regimes that it represents most vocally; and, consequently, its glaring deficiencies in terms of representing the ‘victims’. The historians of South African slavery asked themselves conscientiously how one should read documentary evidence that had been created by officials of the state or members of the dominant classes, including the ‘gaps’, which would have been where the enslaved or coerced labourers or victims of imminent genocide expressed their unmediated feelings had such a thing been possible.20 But the authors we are referring to here published this kind of work a decade or more ago, after which, it appeared to us that there was a hiatus. We launched our ‘Repairing the Legacies of Harm’ project fortuitously on the eve of the major student protests of 2015–2016, in which demands for a more African-centred curriculum were articulated, and were then led to wonder why the revisionist slavery historiography was not held up as exemplary or indeed what had happened to it. We sensed that the historians of slavery had turned to different kinds of studies, confirmed when we looked at Worden’s reference a few years ago to what he represented as the novel attraction of the ‘cultural turn’.21 He wrote quite emphatically: ‘we have turned away from the principles that underpinned South African historical revisionism in the 1980s and replaced it with the less cogent ideas and methods that have emerged out of the “cultural turn.”’22 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Although it may be that they were both subject to the same international influences.

We had originally hoped to include a consideration of frontier Khoisan history in this issue.

O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Boston: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1982).

Mason, Social Death and Resurrection; see also Ross, Cape of Torments for an influential study of slave resistance.

See e.g. Penn’s introduction to Forgotten Frontier which provides a feeling summary of archival travails.

Penn, Forgotten Frontier, 3.

N. Worden, ‘After Race and Class: Recent Trends in the Historiography of early Colonial Cape Society’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 3 (2010), 589–602.

Ibid., 590.

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As is probably evident by this stage, there was much we admired in the old historiography.

One of its main problems may have been that much of it has never reached the public sphere on a significant scale. The late Robert Shell, among the most eminent of the historians of slavery, endeavoured to bring some of the products of scholarly work into more public realms (as have Worden and others), but observed that the ‘esoteric’ nature of academic work had serious consequences: ‘The subjects of the history do not recognise themselves […] The people are therefore cheated of their own past and, ultimately of their identity.’23 Worden’s thoughtful appraisal of contributions made by more recent research initiatives at the Universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape is fundamentally that they have allowed for more tentative and multiple identities, and a much more autonomous performative idea of identity for a wide range of historical subjects. The relaxation of the ways in which identity is defined has gained for these subjects a respite from what he calls ‘broad generalising categories such as legal classification, racial descriptors or class’.24 Worden’s desire (and that of many of his collaborating authors) to enhance the sense of the agency of historical actors – their own convictions about being able to alter their lot no matter how lowly, and to be able to live their lives as fully and meaningfully as we do ours – does not appear to be very far removed from the motives behind E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class whose golden anniversary was recently celebrated by social history revisionists.25 Worden acknowledges the latter as kin, but holds their work at an analytical distance, asserting that ‘issues of political economy have never been dominant in the writing of pre-industrial Cape history’.26 Yet his expression of impatience with the restraints of an objectively defined idea of class sounds a lot like Thompson’s famous formulations: By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasize that it is a historical [his emphasis] phenomenon. I do not see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.

More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure […] The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.

Thompson goes on to lament extensive misreadings of Marx’s work as scholars succumb to ‘an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing’.27 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

Robert Shell quoted in ‘Robert Carl-Heinz Shell’, South African History Online, www.sahistory.org.za/ people/robert-carl-heinz-shell, accessed 14 February 2016.

N. Worden, ‘Introduction’, in Worden, Cape Town, xi–xxii, xii.

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Classics, 2013, originally published by Victor Gollancz, 1963). For international reviews that assess and praise the lasting value of Thompson’s classic see e.g. R. Colls, ‘Still Relevant: The Making of the English Working Class’, Times Higher Education, 21 November 2013; E. Griffin, ‘EP Thompson: The Unconventional Historian’, The Guardian, 6 March 2013. For example, there was a small conference held under the auspices of the Sugarman collaboration between Wits University and the University of Michigan (UM) in the USA, titled ‘History after EP Thompson’ held at UM the end of 2015.

Worden, ‘After Race and Class’, 591.

Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 9.

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But Worden et al. seem to hold off on conjectures of when specific classes were ‘made’, even in Thompson’s qualified sense of the aggregation of a cogent class consciousness or sense of shared identity. Defending the cultural turn from a trenchant critique by Nicole Ulrich, a member of the History Workshop who was concerned about the tendency of the turn to divert historians of the pre-industrial Cape from the major questions of political economy into the ‘narrow’ by-ways of ‘micro-historical analyses’,28 Worden turned the tables. He argued that if the social historians were right about the determining role of industrial capitalism in shaping contemporary configurations of race and class, then logically pre-industrial history could not be held responsible for them to any significant degree.29 Reading Worden’s 2012 edited collection30 is like being able to view eighteenth-century Cape Town through a miraculous magnifying glass, which brings out the individual details of people striving to better or to prove themselves in a bustling port city that – as you move the glass – you see has a multitude of resilient overseas connections. One of the authors, Susie Newton-King, analyses the extensive correspondence found in the estate of Arnoldus Koevoet, some of which was addressed to him while he was still a slave in the Lodge. Letters found in his estate had come to him from a sibling and an ex-slave correspondent whom he had never met then living in Batavia. Among the correspondence were also letters from friends, including women whom Newton-King surmises were members of her former owner’s family resident in Amsterdam and Colombo, that had been written to Anna Rebecca of Bengal, the woman Arnoldus married after he had achieved emancipation.31 How can it be, we ask with Newton-King, that the Koevoet correspondents maintained such affectionate and resolute contact over so many thousands of miles over 30 years of the early eighteenth century without seeing one another? How can we fail to be moved by their evident concern for one another’s well-being and the expression of joy at the news of Arnoldus Koevoet’s manumission – especially rare for a Company slave – or the sense that death was never far away that necessarily pervaded the consciousness of people in the early eighteenth century, slave or free – all of which Newton-King brings to our attention? We cannot regret the cultural turn or whatever it is that has brought these and other voices to us in such a sensitively mediated and unobtrusively translated way. The turn extends an embrace that includes many more members of those located in the ranks of the underclasses than merely the enslaved. It seems, in a pleasing inversion, often to reduce the masters to shadowy figures or the objects of strategies for upward mobility, and it makes of Cape Town a vital, global city. But do we lose anything by taking the cultural turn, especially if it is conceived as a turning away as well as towards – a question historians who have associated themselves with this particular cultural turn seem open to considering?32 Has it taken us definitively away from what Worden 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

N. Ulrich, ‘Time, Space and the Political Economy of Merchant Colonialism in the Cape of Good Hope and VOC World’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 3 (2010), 571–588, 572.

Worden, ‘After Race and Class’, 591–592.

Worden, Cape Town.

Newton-King, ‘Family, Friendship and Survival’.

See Worden, ‘After Race and Class’; Laura J. Mitchell and G. Groenewald, ‘The Pre-industrial Cape in the Twenty-First Century’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 3 (2010), 435–443, which appears as an introduction to the articles including Worden’s and Ulrich’s as cited above.

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described as the ‘large scale approaches, political economy and key ideas of imperialism and capitalism’?33 Sometimes, as is the case where Worden responds to Ulrich’s critique (as above), it seems there is a constitutional reluctance to engage with the big issues because of the author’s conviction of the inherent difficulties of making eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cape history explain the lineaments of contemporary South African society. But in other instances it seems to be a matter of not wanting to reach premature conclusions. The latter is the sense conveyed by Laura J. Mitchell and Gerald Groenewald in their introduction to a special issue of this journal in 2010 dedicated to reviewing developments in the field of studies concerning the pre-industrial Cape. For these authors it seems that the large analyses based on the integration of micro studies are still to come.34 In an initial attempt to think through the consequences of staying with the micro studies of the cultural turn, let us go back to Newton-King’s riveting account of the Koevoet correspondence. She tells us what became of Arnoldus’s young daughter, rescued from the Slave Lodge through her father’s patient accumulation of capital and probably patronage, who was then thrown into destitution by his presumably unexpected death, and a conniving husband who robbed her of her inheritance. Since the evidential trail peters out, Newton-King must perforce resort to reasonably argued conjecture. Despite her optimism, about the safety net which might have been afforded by the community of friends and relatives revealed in the Koevoet correspondence, as we lose sight of her, things look irredeemably bad for Diana/ Johanna Koevoet. If the records bear no trace of what happened to her, we can hardly blame the historian for not providing a conclusive ending, but it feels as if we are lowering the magnifying glass and allowing the eighteenth century to return to itself. Newton-King’s is an invaluable portrait of a network of family and friends who, even if only transiently, triumphed over grim adversity. Her rendering of their correspondence makes it possible for them still to speak to us over hundreds of years, which is why we feel a certain wrench when we are compelled to put down the magnifying glass. The question is do we have to keep on putting it down? Do we, in effect have to accept that the undoubted benefits of the cultural turn and, ironically, deference to Marxist principles that prioritise the explanatory power of modern history, mean that we should accept that pre-industrial history possesses only a kind of – if we take the argument to its extreme conclusion – curiosity value?

These are big questions and perhaps the value of the exercise lies in keeping on at them rather than hoping for a neat resolution. In their introduction to a recent special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies that boldly reimagines the Indian Ocean World featuring both Cape Town and Durban as port cities, Isabel Hofmeyr, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie and Preben Kaarsholm contemplate what they convey through a weaving metaphor to be the half-finished cloth on the old historiographical loom. How will the ‘mining-capitalmigrant labour historiography’ be woven into the fragile but tenacious warp threads of 33.

34.

Worden, ‘After Race and Class’, 590. See also G. Eley and K. Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007). The questions raised here were part of a bigger debate constituting what Eley and Nield call ‘the general crisis of social explanation’, 10.

Mitchell and Groenewald, ‘Pre-industrial Cape’. Worden does also express a similar sentiment in his ‘After Race and Class’.

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slavery?35 We should take comfort from what happened when distinguished scholars recently brought together by the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) based at Wits and the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) under the leadership of Dilip Menon and Peter Vale, respectively, revisited the history of capitalism from a southern perspective. Although they agreed on the multiple and regionally diverse origins of capitalism and the principle that it had assumed many different forms, they struggled to reach a consensus about how all the pieces fitted together or even how capacious the definition of capitalism should be.36 Note on the articles The articles in this special section all speak to the importance of exploring the history of Cape slavery, and argue or take as their foundational premise that this history has shaped present-day realities in South Africa. In so doing the articles engage and owe a debt to those historians who, in the 1970s and 1980s, looked to the history of slavery in explaining the origins of, and exposing the cruelty of the underpinnings of apartheid. The authors of the articles in this section of the journal do not entirely agree with one another on what the legacies of slavery are in South Africa. Indeed the editors are still struggling with questions about the extent and character of the continuities in the present with the past. Whilst writing from the academy, all the authors articulate a belief that questions about the legacies and how they might be ameliorated cannot be successfully resolved by the academy in isolation from the broader society. The articles adopt differing approaches on how this might be achieved, and sometimes their authors write from, or advocate disciplinary approaches other than history.

A few years ago Jessica Murray read Yvette Christiansë’s novel Unconfessed37 which is based on an archival fragment about an infanticide committed by a slave mother, set in the early nineteenth century. Murray commended Christiansë’s novel for its ability to fill ‘in the blanks’ left by the archive’s indifference.38 Cloete’s reading of Unconfessed constitutes a different exercise. By contrast with Murray’s, there is an insistence in Cloete’s article that silences and omissions should remain elusive. Thus they serve both as testimony to the complexities and depths of the thought processes and mental survival strategies of the enslaved, and as a necessary way of depriving contemporary audiences of easy resolutions through Hollywood-style catharsis.

North’s and Wilkins’s articles overlap with some of the arguments made by Cloete, but are written from the perspective of outsiders observing developments in South Africa. North’s article considers the potential role of museums in facilitating discussion about this difficult 35.

36.

37.

38.

I. Hofmeyr, U. Dhupelia-Mesthrie and P. Kaarsholm, ‘Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: Reconsidering South African Studies from the Indian Ocean’, Journal for Southern African Studies, 43, 3 (2016), 375–387, 378. Note that Nigel Worden has an article in this special issue.

‘Revisiting the History of Capitalism’ hosted by the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), Wits University and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies (JIAS), University of Johannesburg, 14–15 June 2016, Humanities Graduate Centre, University of the Witwatersrand.

Y. Christiansë, Unconfessed (Michigan: Other Press, 2006).

J. Murray, ‘Gender and Violence in Cape Slave Narratives and Post-Narratives’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 3 (2010), 444–462.

INTRODUCTION

11

shared history and its legacy. Wilkins meanwhile draws upon the theories of the TRC concerning multiple truths and the importance of listening to different perspectives in order to envision how schools and museums could help increase awareness of these histories, understanding of their continuing impact and empathy between those who are divided from one another by this history.

Kros and Glanvill-Miller explore the teaching of slavery (and other difďŹ cult, controversial topics) in schools. Kros poses questions about how the aims of the curriculum might be better realised through a more dedicated focus on slavery at the Cape. Glanvill-Miller relates the experiences of her students in her university teacher education programme as they struggle to teach controversial topics in classrooms that have not remained isolated from the broader tensions in South African society, and analyses some of the exercises she has used in her programme to work through the students’ own emotional turmoil.

In dividing these articles into three types we are, however, creating artiďŹ cial boundaries.

All the articles explore how the history of slavery in the Cape has a legacy that continues to impact upon society to this day and causes communal and personal harm. They all emphasise a need to make known this history and to invite democratic participation in discussions of its legacies.