Historians know remarkably little about the lives of white people in twentieth-century South Africa, or how they reproduced, maintained, and negotiated successive racial regimes. There is a large and diverse historiography on the effects of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid on black people. However, similar intensity and rigour has not been brought to the everyday histories of whites. Moreover, knowledge is scantiest for the period from the advent of the apartheid state in 1948. The main aim of this essay is thus to investigate how to approach the task of writing “new” social histories of apartheid-era whites, especially of those described in some historiographic traditions as “working class”, of whites who broke their way into the “middle class”, of those separated from the mainstream of oordentlike (respectable) white society, as well as of those who were plainly destitute.
Why, then, when history is full of lacunae, whites? To Frederick Cooper’s generation educated in American universities during the late 1960s and steeped in the “Ibadan School”,Footnote 1 pre-colonial history or resistance to colonialism constituted genuine African history, while a focus on the colonial state or society risked the label of a “throwback to imperial history”.Footnote 2 Terence Ranger made a similar point in 1978, detecting uneasiness that studies of whites might mark a return to “historiographic colonialism”.Footnote 3 From today’s point of view, however, this once apparently esoteric interest in histories of whites has value. Postcolonial studies, interested in the often paradoxical continuities between the colonial and postcolonial, has considerably reduced squeamishness of the sort observed by Cooper and Ranger.Footnote 4 The point, however, is to acknowledge that whites were not homogenous, were historical agents in their own right, and could be part of a postcolonial African history (and, in the case of South Africa, post-apartheid history); beyond that, there are compelling historiographic reasons for including them. As Ann Stoler and Cooper have argued, in identifying and interpreting non-western reactions to political and economic dominance, historians and anthropologists have tended to overestimate the coherence of the colonial state, neglecting its tense, ambiguous, and contested internal topographies.Footnote 5 For these authors, failure to carefully scrutinize the complexities of colonial power is a significant omission that hampers the understanding of colonial and postcolonial African histories.
Such arguments also apply to the history of South Africa under apartheid. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was vigorous enquiry into the lives and experiences of black South Africans,Footnote 6 but there was no equivalent attention to whites.Footnote 7 One task in providing a more substantial account of those groups of whites identified above is to understand more generally how white society under apartheid was organized, its fault lines and contradictions, and the extent to which it cohered around certain taken-for-granted ideas. This entails more comprehensive knowledge of the ideologies that legitimized and reproduced apartheid, of how the state that privileged whites also disciplined and regulated them (while they were themselves often agents of a highly authoritarian bureaucracy), as well as of the ethnography of whites. I will argue that Subaltern Studies, a perspective that had its starting point in India in the 1980s in a Marxism-inspired historiography “of below” venturing into new theoretical and methodological terrains, represents a useful theoretical and methodological entry point into this history, albeit not without its problems (discussed more substantially below).
Research efforts founded on these questions may speak to African historiography more generally. The late 1990s saw growing interest in the postcolonial African state; yet, the nationalist movements in power, which have marked so many of these states, were seldom examined critically: as Miles Larmer notes, they tended to be seen in ahistorical “normative” terms.Footnote 8 Furthermore, there was a lack of comparative endeavours, including attempts to compare dissimilar “nationalist movements”, like those of liberation nationalists with those of white settlers. In 1948, the National Party (NP) came to power in South Africa, a force which saw itself as determined defender of Afrikaner Nationalism. How histories of African nationalist movements in power may be read against those in South Africa, black and white, has never been seriously explored.Footnote 9 The study of whites during apartheid leads inevitably to what happens when nationalist movements occupy power, how party and state were integrated, and the extent to which the population, or sections of it, were incorporated into, and disciplined by the movement and then the ensuing state. Such questions historicize and problematize nationalist movements, transformed into post-independence ruling parties.
There may also be political and pedagogic value in an expressly “radical” history of whites situated within a broader African historiography and with whiteness a central historical, political, and ethical problem. The notion of “radical” as a stance in historiography is, of course, intricate and has varying meanings according to place and time. In many contexts worldwide it has meant some affiliation with Marxism (which, again, is a very diverse phenomenon). The same has been true for South African intellectual circles where “radical history” for a long time implied both historical analysis and a political vision inspired by a specific adoption of a Marxism that emerged in the 1970s in critical dissidence towards older orthodoxies.Footnote 10 As historian Geoff Eley points out, however, “radical history” does not necessarily have to be equated with Marxist approaches. For Eley, an open definition of “radical history” primarily involves linking scholarly practice to a contemporary politics of social change.Footnote 11
The notion of “race” is similarly ridden with complexity. As Robert Young insists, any history that claims to be “postcolonial” must be grounded in analyses of the historical and contemporary effects of colonialism – including racism.Footnote 12 White people, particularly Afrikaans-speakers, were and are besieged by scholarly and popular Afrikaner nationalist narratives targeted to inspire, mobilize, and remove doubt, scripting them as sturdy, steadfast, and diligent, and sometimes as “victims” of post-apartheid political, economic, and cultural transformations. These accounts approximate Leonard Thompson’s “political mythologies of Afrikaner nationalism”.Footnote 13 To Jonathan Jansen, these historical narratives and their contemporary corollaries contribute to “bitter [racial] knowledge […] learned reliably in closed circles of influence through parents, teachers, coaches, peers and dominees [ministers, usually of Dutch Reformed Churches]” and passed down the generations.Footnote 14
I will explore the extent to which a historiography that transcends the analytic boundaries of the specific blend of Marxism that crystallized in South African social history in the 1970s and 1980s can still be “radical”. I will then suggest that if there is to be a new radical history of whites under apartheid it should repudiate the idea, common in some sociologically inclined whiteness studies, of “whiteness” as a category in and of itself. Instead, it ought to reveal how whites during apartheid were, in turn, products of complex histories of power, privilege, incorporation, and exclusion thus demonstrating how apartheid society has been constructed historically (including a measured degree of contingency). I will propose some directions for a historiography of these “non-elite” whites by considering approaches of comparative historiography, appropriate angles of investigation, and the most fruitful methodologies to utilize. I argue that South African historiography has tended to disregard the ideological, cultural, and disciplinary construction of whiteness, and often treated whites as monolithic – most notably, as either “Afrikaners” or “English-speakers”. This relates partly to the lack of systematic ongoing theoretical engagement of South African social history with more recent conceptual debates in historiography. I will propose a “new” history of whites, shaped by some of the achievements of Subaltern Studies, but retaining South African social history’s abiding strengths, especially its attention to class and relations of production, its methodological vitality, and self-conscious insurgency. Finally, I will address some of the ethical, political, and pedagogic implications of attempting such a history.
Ordinary whites in South Africana
Much has been written on whites, but it has never cohered as a major focus within South African history. History-writing in South Africa has often been highly charged politically, and, at times, prevailing ideological and political concerns have prompted some historians to concentrate on whites, usually with particular intellectual or political aims, while other historians have neglected this group almost entirely. The diversity of South African historical writing, and the density of scholarship on whites, makes the task of a comprehensive literature survey difficult. I will try, however, to identify how ordinary white people are depicted in some major South African historical traditions, teasing out some of the unevenness and excessive generalization that characterizes their treatment by historians.Footnote 15
As white Afrikaners were drawn into the economy of industrializing South Africa during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, their social, political, and economic struggles attracted the attention of the local intelligentsia.Footnote 16 Studies motivated by political, social, and moral concern for newly urbanized, often unemployed “poor white” Afrikaners were undertaken by clergymen and scholars close to the Dutch Reformed Church. Poor whites, at the same time, threatened the stability and logic of segregated society. In the early 1930s, Dominee J.R. Albertyn articulated these anxieties, warning: “If the more privileged European grudges and refuses the poor his patronage, the latter will associate with non-Europeans if he finds no member of his own race to consort with.”Footnote 17 Perhaps the most significant study in this genre is the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry.Footnote 18 This literature reveals contemporary reactions to the economic and psychological conditions of poor whites, and illustrates how South Africa’s rough-edged capitalist development shaped the fears, and intellectual and ideological agendas, of white elites.Footnote 19 Although poverty never disappeared completely, large sections of the white population became increasingly prosperous from the mid-1920s as governments extended economic protection to white workers and farmers, and welfare to all whites. By World War II “poor whiteism” had subsided as a moral, cultural, and political problem for the state, churches, and press, and it also slipped from the gaze of contemporary scholars. Following these intellectuals, later historians seldom attempted to track over time and generations those disparaged as a “problem” earlier in the century, while Afrikaner historians writing between the two World Wars were more interested in the Great Trek and the Second Anglo-Boer War, tending to concentrate on political and military leaders, and portraying Afrikaners as monolithic.Footnote 20
The most substantial historical studies of the white poor came from W.M. Macmillan and C.W. de Kiewiet. Writing initially during the First World War, Macmillan drew heavily on economics and sociology to examine links between the mineral revolution, rural dispossession, and white urbanization. He described how the transition to capitalism devastated the lives of the rural poor, emphasizing the impossibility of separating the study of the white from the black poor. He argued that the economic relations underpinning everyday lives, not political history, were the crucial fields upon which to focus.Footnote 21 De Kiewiet elucidated the structural and cultural factors inhibiting success of rural Afrikaners in cities and towns, who assumed they were entitled to the material and social privileges of whiteness, but could not afford a “white” urban lifestyle. Lacking the necessary economic and cultural means, they were largely limited to unskilled manual jobs, which, for the white poor, were synonymous with degrading “kaffir work”.Footnote 22 As a Marxist historiography of South Africa emerged in the early 1970s, it developed, in some respects, against so-called liberal scholarship. Macmillan and De Kiewiet were sidelined, and, despite their empirical richness and analytical sophistication, historians these days seldom cite their works on early twentieth-century South Africa.
From the 1930s, with the publication of Ian Douglas MacCrone’s Race Attitudes in South Africa,Footnote 23 whites, particularly Afrikaners, featured in the scholarship of a small group of liberal white historians, psychologists, and economists interested in the causes of increasingly entrenched and institutionalized segregation. Their major argument, which became known as the “frontier thesis”,Footnote 24 was that racism was an anachronism stemming from Afrikaner interaction and conflict with African societies on the frontiers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 25 This “irrational heritage”Footnote 26 was inappropriate for a modern industrial state and the liberals’ hope was that economic growth, understood as colour blind, would erode segregation.
Poor whites featured prominently in liberals’ explanations of everyday racism and segregation. The apogee of this scholarly tradition was the publication in 1971 of the second volume of the Oxford History of South Africa, particularly two chapters that dealt substantially with ordinary whites.Footnote 27 As a critic indicated already at the time, the authors tended to “filter out many of the very real complexities […] through a liberal moral screen”Footnote 28 and like the liberal school generally, were “didactic and oversimplified”.Footnote 29
By the early 1970s, a wave of scholars inspired by Marxist theories began to make inroads into the South African academy.Footnote 30 Influenced by major currents of Marxism in Western Europe at the time, especially the work of Althusser and Poulantzas, their approach was highly structuralist.Footnote 31 Writing at a time when worker organization in South Africa was at a low point, and the bastions of white capitalist hegemony seemed impregnable, it seemed imperative for these radicals to examine the precise forms of white dominance. Scholars like Rob Davies, David Kaplan, Mike Morris, and Dan O’Meara were thus concerned, above all, with the development of racial capitalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa.Footnote 32 While some of this cohort did focus on white workers, their top-down theoretical approach meant that their interest was generally limited to highlighting the privileged role of white workers within a racist set of productive relations, and a segregated state.Footnote 33
By the late 1980s, this structuralist iteration of Marxism had been displaced by another kind of Marxist-inclined social history, inspired by British and North American Marxist historians like E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Eugene Genovese, which became synonymous with the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, commonly known as the “Wits History Workshop”.Footnote 34 As Dan O’Meara – himself from an earlier cohort of South African Marxists, most of whom worked outside the country, and a proponent of the structuralist brand of social history – has observed, the trend towards this “Thompsonian” brand of social history rapidly accelerated from the mid-1980s and paralleled the turn towards heterodox Gramscian versions of Marxism by many of the intelligentsia on the European left.Footnote 35 In South Africa, some historians, most famously Charles van Onselen,Footnote 36 reacted against heavily theoretical “top-down” explanations devoid of human agency, consciousness, experience and, at times, regional and chronological specificity, in favour of an empirically oriented “history from below”. O’Meara attributed this to the influence of the “British cult of the ‘Poverty of Theory’”.Footnote 37 The group was interested in the elusive links between economy, culture, experience, and consciousness, and focused mainly on “marginalized” groups that had not hitherto been thought worthy of investigation. Many of the social historians were committed intellectually and politically to the overthrow of the apartheid regime, and in the popular struggles of the 1980s championed history as a mobilizing tool. This agenda tended to lead them to disregard the history of ordinary whites.Footnote 38 They were interested in the plight of the most oppressed and in the revolutionary or potentially revolutionary classes, and the racist and reactionary character of most whites, including the white working class, seemed obvious.
Some scholarship within this tradition did explore the complexity of white society and the struggles of poor whites – against mine owners and Johannesburg planning authorities (Van OnslelenFootnote 39), and meneeren, rural notables (Tim ClynickFootnote 40) – or explored white working-class life (Lis LangeFootnote 41). Jon Hyslop added a local perspective to the trend of whiteness studies emerging from American labour history when he linked, with his notion of “white labourism”, class formation with the invocation of white privilege in the development of a self-consciously white imperial working class.Footnote 42 And in his magnificently textured social history of the 1922 Rand Revolt, Jeremy Krikler teased out the “tragic paradoxes” of the Revolt, where white workers “fought against […] despotic employers, economic insecurity, a state bent to the interests of their masters”, just as they fought for “white privilege”.Footnote 43 However, generally absent was and still is a broader account of how ordinary whites related to the production, organization, and maintenance of a racist society. The very precision and empirical focus of these studies perhaps makes it difficult for them to see their subjects not only as part of the rural poor, the “army of the unemployed”, or even the “aristocrats of labour”, but simultaneously as elites, bound to segregated society by the privileges of whiteness, however contested its terms often were. Some of these studies, particularly those of Hyslop and Krikler, do, in American historian of whiteness David Roediger’s terms, join race and class.Footnote 44 They do, however, see whiteness essentially as an “effect” of capitalist development and fail to connect the racism of a class to that of a society as a whole. Robert Morrell’s work on settler masculinity in colonial Natal is a significant exception, as he demonstrates how the production of particular styles of whiteness, masculinity, and middle-class identity were joined at every point.Footnote 45
The starting point of these social historians in Marxist theory and historiography may account for some of the mentioned blind spots. Linking race and class demands confident theoretical engagement as the work of Roediger and the ensuing debates have shown. While Marxism offers some foundation for this, the variations favoured by South African social historians, drawing on E.P. Thompson’s Poverty of Theory,Footnote 46 iconoclastic and deeply critical of the structuralist variant of Marxist theory, has often generated a marked lack of enthusiasm for “theoretical heavy breathing”.Footnote 47 At the same time, the analytic and political primacy they attributed to class meant that they were less able to address adequately the culture and history of ordinary white people in a society where power and society were racialized, and for whom “being white” was central to identity and everyday experience.Footnote 48 It was not surprising, then, that, when a History Workshop conference with the theme “‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ in modern South Africa” was organized at the University of the Witwatersrand in July 2001, few papers offered any novel historical analysis of whites or whiteness.Footnote 49 Up until today, the history and ethnography of ordinary whites in modern South Africa has witnessed few theoretical, methodological, or empirical innovations from the domains that are associated with a social history à la Wits History Workshop.
Some qualifications to this assessment are needed, however. Already, in the early 1990s, when Marxist social history was at its most commanding, a group of South Africanists, some from this movement, whose methods if not theoretical and ideological commitments coincided with those of the “history from below” social historians, turned their attention to the study of poor whites. Some essays by this group demonstrated impressive attention to fine-grained micro-history. Footnote 50 John Bottomley was one of the few historians to grasp the fact that despite growing affluence, poor whiteism represented an ongoing spectre that shaped public policy towards whites – well into the apartheid years.Footnote 51 The project, however, was not able to sustainably revive the history and anthropology of poor, working class, and other “non-elite” whites.
Other interesting studies of whites in apartheid society have begun to emerge more recently. For instance, Clive Glaser is researching how immigrant Portuguese, though marginalized by Afrikaner nationalist conceptions of racial purity, eventually managed to blend into the whiteness conjured up by successive waves of Afrikaner nationalists.Footnote 52 Then, Lucien van der Walt has explored, in his research into anarchism and syndicalism, the history of some of these whites who defied the system that gave them their privilege.Footnote 53 Whites were well-represented in local anarchist and syndicalist circles, and Van der Walt draws on transnational perspectives to show how their identities and consciousness were forged more in relation to international political circuits than local variants of whiteness. The study of protagonists like Van der Walt’s anarchists and syndicalists is thus an important empirical counter-balance to the generalization that all whites were – necessarily – implicated in the reproduction and maintenance of a racist social order in twentieth-century South Africa. Moreover, by investigating how anarchists and syndicalists struggled to “unmake” whiteness, and the ideologies and political economy that sustained it, work like Van der Walt’s represents a substantial contribution to “denaturalizing” histories of whites.
Some recent studies are clearly challenging both conceptually and historically the dominance of class as well as the idea of whiteness as homogenous and unproblematic. However, they do not yet comprise a definite historiographic trend. In addition, though while ordinary whites do feature in disparate historical traditions, the analyses they employ tends to cast ordinary whites in “large” categories, as “poor whites”, heroic “volk”, or “workers”, thus failing, with some exceptions, to connect macro-processes of production, ideology, discipline, and politics with the intimate histories and ethnographies of white everyday life.Footnote 54 Mapping these smaller everyday zones is important if we are to comprehend the underlying cohesion of white society during apartheid, despite tensions, ambiguities and contradictions, manifest most obviously in acts of transgression, defiance and permissiveness.
South African social history in an age of post-Marxism and post-apartheid
The Wits History Workshop was a loose amalgam of historians and scholars from cognate disciplines, bound by a broad theoretical and methodological consensus (and by old friendships). Through seminars, workshops, and conferences, over nearly three decades, along with several volumes of essays, each with a substantial thematic, theoretical and methodological introduction,Footnote 55 the Workshop became the most important group within professional South African history in general. Without doubt, the Workshop’s vision of social history is central to imagining a new radical history of whites under apartheid. At the same time, the ways the Workshop started to flounder during South Africa’s postcolonial daybreak in the late 1990s and early 2000s should be considered if some of this innovation and energy is to be incorporated in future perspectives. By the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of post-structuralism and the onset of the “culture wars”, Marxist-inspired approaches internationally encountered profound crises of credibility and relevance. Several of the bottom-up Marxist historiographies experienced renewal in response to these political and intellectual upheavals.Footnote 56 These challenges and ripostes testify to fundamental questioning of the theoretical, empirical, and political dimensions of the discipline, especially to social history as it had crystallized in a series of countries in the 1970s.
The evolution South African social history with its closely linked historical and political concerns differed considerably from the above mentioned pattern, as Marxism remained the major reference point of critical academia for much longer than in Western Europe or North America: It only started to lose impetus in the post-apartheid 1990s. Once the global reaction against the confident claims of Marxist theory and historiography also arrived in South Africa, with a “delay” of five to ten years, its social historians seemed little prepared to respond adequately to the challenges of history-writing in post-apartheid South Africa.Footnote 57
This inertness would last for the years to come. Attending a 2009 colloquium on the thirtieth anniversary of the Wits History Workshop, I was struck by the absence of engagement with more recent theory and historiographic approaches, including comparative ones, necessary to plot a “life after thirty”.Footnote 58 A penetrating, yet sympathetic critique of this kind of social history written by Deborah Posel, a Workshop historian and sympathizer, came to similar conclusions. Most of this research, she says, was “associated with the Marxist version of social history that had captivated the northern academy”.Footnote 59 She adds, however, that while this work used the language of class, there was little attention to its conceptual and epistemological underpinnings; indeed, after its “early theoretical positioning […] it largely became a matter of consensus, as if the theoretical work had been done and settled”. The 1990s saw “theoretical unsettling” but no explicit theoretical debate.Footnote 60
Any radical historiography of whites shares many intellectual and political ambitions with the older traditions of Marxism-inspired South African social history. These reside in, amongst others, the claim for a radical approach, i.e. tying the writing of history to a politically and theoretically emancipatory project. Such emancipatory ends, however, might be smaller-scale today than they were in the past, when Marxism imbued history writing with a grand vision. The most important purpose of creating a radical historiography of whites might be to render their histories problematic, to challenge and destabilize whiteness as a taken-for-granted, essentialized, and homogenized category. Marxist social history, embedded within local South African conventions and adrift from the theoretical anchors that might have enriched and renewed it, no longer provides all of the tools to write such a history.
Searching for starting points and theory
History in a racial state
Existing historical scholarship has limitations in understanding the dynamics of power, ideology, and race in modern South Africa. The search for conceptual starting points for a “new” history of whites leads to other literature, generated by black South African commentators, generally produced outside the academy. This is similar to the situation in the US where, as Roediger writes, some of the most compelling insights into the “souls of white folk” in America come from African Americans like James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, and bell hooks, whose “secret” knowledge of whites comes from seeing “without being observed”.Footnote 61 The same, as I will illustrate below, applies in South Africa where black critical commentary goes back to at least the early part of the twentieth century, offering perspectives useful in understanding the role of ordinary white people in modern South Africa. For instance, in the early twentieth century, Solomon T. Plaatje, a black South African who worked for the British colonial authorities and was a founder of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress), identified colonialism, segregation and attendant racist ideologies and practices as the “white problem” in South Africa.Footnote 62 He hoped that Cape liberalism, which promised some amelioration to educated Africans like himself, would prevail in the new Union of South Africa. However, with consolidation of the Union after 1910, Plaatje, with others from the black Christian elite of the time, became increasingly aware that the political struggle between Cape liberals and conservative Boers from the interior had little relevance for most Africans. He detected a fundamental consensus among these different groups on white dominance that seldom needed to be made explicit. At the height of apartheid, Steve Biko, intellectual, activist, and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, made a similar point, describing an essential unity among whites, even professed liberals.Footnote 63 While this article argues for a non-essentialized view on whites, which does not assume its a priori unity, essayists like Plaatje and Biko still point to a fundamental factor of South African society during long periods of the twentieth century, namely its racialized segregation. If we hope to understand something of the interior lives of ordinary whites, we must first acknowledge their location within this segregated society.
While these insights indicate that for a new radical history of whites the starting point should not be class, but race, it does not automatically imply which of the numerous conceptual avenues might be suited best for understanding “race” in this context. Here, I suggest incorporating the concept of a racial state, elaborated most substantially by David Goldberg.Footnote 64 According to Goldberg, a racial state is one where race is integral to the conceptual, philosophical, and material emergence of a state and its ongoing management. The notion of “racial state” also links to one of the major concerns of recent scholarship on colonial and postcolonial societies, namely the role played by the colonial state.Footnote 65 Recognizing the role of the colonial and racial state, including genealogies of racial ideologies, tensions, and circulations of racial thought and practices and techniques of rule, represents a critical advance in re-imagining a history of ordinary white people in segregationist and apartheid South Africa in which class figures, but is not necessarily at the centre of every point of analysis.
Lessons of Subaltern Studies
Subaltern Studies emerged within Indian historiography in the early 1980s. Like South African social history, it was a politically inspired “history from below”. It was driven by scholars energized by the intellectual and ideological problems of history-writing in a postcolonial society, dissatisfied with both older, orthodox Marxist and conventional nationalist accounts of India’s liberation.Footnote 66 This movement offers some interesting pointers towards a new radical historiography of ordinary white people in South Africa (and elsewhere). While not reading Subaltern Studies too literally, lessons may be drawn from its postcolonial, dissident location, from its particular historiographic and methodological positions and the theory that informs these, and from its eclecticism, bound by a common focus on subalterns. This has permitted an ongoing conversation with Marxism (with positions ranging from the critically appreciative to the dismissively critical), borrowing from diverse theoretical and disciplinary sources, what Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as “generative mistakes”, and the building of a strong, dynamic, although never homogenous, historiography.Footnote 67
Initially, scholars within Subaltern Studies were influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism. They also drew theoretically and methodologically from other Marxist-oriented social histories, including that being developed in South Africa,Footnote 68 and their intellectual agenda, at least at the beginning, was by no means a substantial break from the cultural Marxism of the day.Footnote 69 A major difference from Marxist social history, however, and arguably a reason for the early vitality of Subaltern Studies, was the re-definition of “the political” by one of its founding figures, Ranajit Guha. He was not willing to be bound by the primacy of class, and was guided more by ethnography than theory in considering “tradition” and such arrangements as kinship or friendship groups as structures and strategies invoked in colonial and postcolonial India. Advocates of Subaltern Studies have tended to present the movement as an intellectual orientation rather than a body of theory; and the movement’s common “theory” became increasingly difficult to discern. But it was always more than a local variant of “history from below”. As Guha wrote (in what was to become a refrain in postcolonial critical theory), capitalism in India developed differently from the West, and “conventional” Marxist narratives about modernity and the development of class thus did not necessarily apply to that context. Most particularly, the landed classes in India were not overthrown, so just as subaltern people resisted domination, they did not necessarily do so in the language of class common in modern European politics.
From the end of the 1980s, as the focus of Subaltern Studies shifted from the everyday lives, experiences, and consciousness of ordinary people to the ideologies, institutions, and loci of power of the state, so its theoretical foundations moved from Gramsci to Foucault and Said. And although the annual volumes of Subaltern Studies still published essays on “history from below”, there was, in practice, an increasing concentration on textual analysis and the ways in which major groups of the population were marginalized through these texts (which were written by and instrumental for those with privilege, economic means, and power).Footnote 70
Subaltern Studies never pretended to offer a fully-fledged alternate historiography within Indian history-writing, rather emphasizing the critique of dominant views as its main objective. The intense debates and contests within Subaltern Studies meant it never settled into orthodoxy. Theoretical restlessness, pragmatism, and the absence of a “total” narrative are approaches appropriate not only for those interested in hidden, insurgent histories of specific groups, but for any historiography. However, these traits are particularly useful in writing histories of apartheid-era whites where there are not only different constellations of both domination and subalternity, but also deeply-entrenched conventional wisdoms among both contemporaries and subsequent historians.
Chakrabarty, one of the group’s leading proponents, already in the mid-1980s emphasized its continuity, writing that through dissent and debate and various phases of theoretical orientation, the core interest of Subaltern Studies remained “the composite culture of resistance to, and acceptance of domination and hierarchy”. Although Chakrabarty was, as later turns in the theoretical outlooks of Subaltern Studies would show, perhaps somewhat premature in his point about continuity, this is probably the closest approximation to a definition of subalternity.Footnote 71 He has highlighted three major historiographic thrusts that have remained abiding features of Subaltern Studies.Footnote 72 Each of these are, in my view, relevant to a new historiography of ordinary whites. There is, firstly, the separation of histories of power from universalist histories of capital. In that sense, the critic Vivek Chibber is correct in asserting that Subaltern Studies constituted a critical theoretical departure from Marxism from the onset. While Marxists understood politics within political economy, Guha redefined the “political” and emphasized that, just as subaltern politics drew on class consciousness, it drew equally on such areas as kinship and experience. While this view represented a shift away from Marxist understanding of power, it coincided more with Foucault’s ideas of discipline, biopower and governmentality (to which Guha added domination and subordination): “Traditional European Marxist political thought, which fused the two [capital and power], would therefore always be relevant but inadequate for theorizing power in colonial-modern histories”.Footnote 73 This broader conception of politics yields enormous analytic flexibility. When studying ordinary whites in South Africa, the organization and techniques of power that Guha sought to comprehend are particularly useful for examining small-scale politics that take non-class forms, and which break the analytic and methodological tendency towards homogenization and large-scale analysis inherent in conventional Marxist categories.
Secondly, Guha challenged the taken-for-granted “nation”. In a stance critical of statist nationalism and its historiographies, which marked Subaltern Studies from the outset, Guha argued that colonialism and nationalism in India instituted “domination without hegemony”, and there was no unitary “nation” to speak of, which thus becomes a fiction and a political project.Footnote 74 For David Ludden, the “originality of Subaltern Studies came to be its striving to re-write the nation outside […] state-centered national discourse”.Footnote 75 In apartheid South Africa, where the production of the (white) nation, as opposed to the other “nations” living on the territory, represented perhaps the major political, ideological, and disciplinary project of the official state and the whites represented by it, this seems an obvious and essential line of enquiry.
Thirdly, the Subalternists saw the archive as the subject of analysis and methodological challenge, as ethnographic rather than extractive.Footnote 76 There are few written sources for peasant India, and, from the outset, Guha not only aligned himself closely with the work of anthropologists, but also emphasized the need for historians to develop strategies to read the archive beyond the biases of elites. This hermeneutic is also essential if we are to track how genealogies of the “nation” fused with the state in apartheid South Africa and how they were contested, disrupted, and influenced by the counter-discourse of certain groups of ordinary whites (apart from the massive contestations by those oppressed through the apartheid regime, which had multiple effects on the intra-hegemonic tensions among groups of whites). These multilayered lines of conflict are very amenable for including the “archive” as a major dimension of analysis in the history South African ordinary whites.
Reorientation from trying to reveal “the true form of the subaltern” to “how the subaltern is represented”,Footnote 77 with the growing ascendancy of literary theorists, prompted a reaction from some Subalternists aligned to the political left. A number left the collective. Historian Sumit Sarkar was a prominent advocate of a broader materialist dissent that emerged not only in Subaltern Studies, but postcolonial studies in general. Lamenting the drift towards analyses of representation and power, he wrote: “Radical Left-Wing social history […] has been collapsed into cultural studies and critiques of colonial discourse and we have moved from Thompson to Foucault and, even more, Said.”Footnote 78 The pervasiveness of the power–knowledge complex, he argued, raised the academically and politically debilitating possibility of reifying the subaltern. Elsewhere he wrote that
the moods stimulated by Edward Said’s Orientalism which have been transplanted to later volumes of Subaltern Studies have provided for many intellectuals an overall framework that combines the virtue of apparent radicalism with a satisfactory distance from the radicalism of yesteryear, now widely assumed to be finally and deservedly dead.Footnote 79
Subaltern Studies has always claimed not just to be the study of colonial history, but to enable and inform political practice; yet, for Sarkar, homogenizing “colonial-western” cultural hegemony and presenting it as all-pervasive and virtually irresistible meant “abandoning any quest for immanent critique through the possibility of conflict and groups taking over and using in diverse and partially autonomous ways elements from dominant structures and discourses”.Footnote 80 There was a danger, in short, of fleeing a radical history to which social critique is inherent and reducing the intellectual foundations of political insurgency to a “dull hagiography of the subaltern”.Footnote 81 Adding to this point of political domestication, Vivek Chibber points to “blue ribbon reception” in western academies by that strand of Subaltern Studies more interested in representation – a reception that contrasts it with the way Marxist-oriented South African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern “histories from below” have been seen (or, rather, overseen).Footnote 82
Like Chibber, Ileana Rodriguez, a member of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group was deeply critical of the political impotence of the later versions of Subaltern Studies that became so fashionable, especially in the North American academy. In asserting a necessary alliance between historiography and insurgency, she argues that, despite the political defects of the left, and the recognition that orthodox Marxism was no longer adequate, there should be no retreat to the theoretical tendency of Subaltern Studies and, instead, a renewed interest in subaltern consciousness and agency, acknowledging all their contradictory complexity. Further, she says there should be a “way of thinking the political within the academic, of wondering through which kinds of articulation could theory be political and contribute to the elucidation of oppression […]. Could [subalternism] come to occupy the place of Marxism as the new liberatory theory of practice?”Footnote 83 Presumably, she meant that variant more closely aligned with radical and left-wing oriented social history. If we hope for a new radical history of ordinary whites associated with a politics of change, this concern must be remembered.
Towards a new radical history of ordinary whites
Themes
As Deborah Posel has stressed, a history “of” below does not necessarily have to be a history “from” below.Footnote 84 In light of the historiographic lessons from Subaltern Studies, its trajectories, tensions within the movement, and criticism from without, a new, radical historiography of ordinary whites under apartheid may be shaped by two fundamental historical concerns.Footnote 85 The first concern is the racial state. Given its centrality in shaping white as well as black lives, its evolution is a logical starting point. Consequently, the work undertaken in the 1970s on the history of racial capitalism and the successive hardening of racial categories since the late nineteenth century should not be neglected, for it reminds us of the position of all whites within South African capitalism and the South African state. Questions arising from a focus on the lives and experience of ordinary whites should thus include enquiries on how elites sought to “make” them into racialized citizens, on the ideologies and discourses produced, and on the methods of discipline and the techniques of governance drawn upon to inscribe these into daily routines. It is clear that such enquiries must go beyond conventional intellectual history or a deep reading of texts by apartheid intellectuals. Two fields of study might offer particularly stimulating models in this regard: First, historiographies of other authoritarian societies, especially when these had a component of racialized and/or ethnicized segregation; second, colonial history. In the case of South Africa, an essay by John Comaroff offers a useful example of how questions might be drawn from this field by focusing on issues about the exercise of power and the working of the colonial state.Footnote 86
Thus, enquiry could consider carefully how the legislative and administrative apparatus of the apartheid state shaped, organized, and controlled the lives of white people. Similar questions have been widely posed for the black experience but are absent in the historiography of whites. The first major legislation of the apartheid government, installed in 1948, were laws prohibiting whites from having sex with, or marrying, people of other races; that, in its early years, the state concentrated as much, if not more, on whites than blacks is an indicator of the significance of such a focus. It could include analysis of particular legislation, submissions, and debates, and how, or whether, such legislation set parameters for the ways whites lived their daily lives. In addition to laws on sex, the Population Registration and Group Areas Acts also deeply affected whites.Footnote 87
The second fundamental historiographic concern is nationalism, more precisely Afrikaner nationalism. Like any nationalist movement, it consisted of a coalition of class, regional, ideological, and other interests, often structured by gender. Some of the better-known movements and institutions of Afrikanerdom, like the Broederbond, the Suid Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (South African Academy of Science and Arts) have received close scholarly attention.Footnote 88 These studies (positioned rather outside the South African historiographic mainstream) could be re-read fruitfully in the light of new questions. The work of scholars like Lindie Koorts on Afrikaner professors promises to add to our understanding of tensions and debates within the upper reaches of Afrikanerdom.Footnote 89
Ideology, science, and the role of intellectuals must feature prominently in questions on how elites tried to constitute whiteness. This could extend to ways that ideology was “made real” for ordinary whites through, for instance, the state’s intellectual, bureaucratic, and technocratic cadres. In the early apartheid years, social sciences became increasingly important within Afrikaner nationalism, and anthropology of blacks and sociology of whites assumed a significant role in underpinning and organizing state policy. Intellectuals at the Afrikaans universities, like Geoffrey Cronje, a University of Pretoria sociologist and technocrat, exercised considerable influence within the state, as members of boards, advisors, and appointees to senior civil service posts. They often wrote and published extensively and their published work has been assessed critically by scholars of intellectual history and the history of knowledge like John Coetzee, Saul Dubow, Mark Sanders, and most comprehensively, Aletta Norval.Footnote 90 However, if we begin by examining how the nation was engineered, a more ethnographical approach is needed to investigate how the ideas of intellectuals like Cronje penetrated the ideologies, routines, and disciplines of whites in everyday life. Posing these questions leads to a history of bureaucracy (and its interactions with the forms of knowledge of the broader white population) more than to a mere intellectual history of certain actors. As I have argued elsewhere, Cronje’s career may illuminate our understanding beyond vague ideas about the “mind of apartheid” and offer instead a specific ethnographic understanding of how a particular bureaucratic intellectual set about formulating the nation, and of the bureaucratic and administrative channels he used in creating legitimating ideology.Footnote 91
Apartheid medicine, particularly psychiatry, offers the opportunity to study the ways in which “abnormality”, and thus “normality”, were understood in the defining of whiteness. Tiffany Jones’ work is valuable and timely in this regard.Footnote 92 It would also be interesting to understand if, and how, psychopathologies were “provincialized” and whether, as Will Jackson has shown for colonial Kenya, apartheid itself “caused” particular psychoses among whites.Footnote 93
As the National Party tried to broker consensus among Afrikaner groups, commissions of enquiry became an important technique of governance. While Adam Ashforth did a fine job of demonstrating how such commissions generated apartheid’s “legitimating” ideologies,Footnote 94 gaps remain in what we know of how anxieties and concerns about whites featured in their deliberations and recommendations.
“Space” is another possible field of enquiry. Following an interesting study on the ways that space figured in the imagination and planning of both colonial and postcolonial elites in India, similar questions might be raised in a South African context: How did apartheid elites imagine space, and how did they deem some space white and others black?Footnote 95 My own study on work colonies for whites, for instance, has highlighted that careful attention was paid to ensuring that white towns and cities became solidly middle class, with concomitant efforts to “sanitize” these landscapes of people who undermined the mythology of whites as middle class, respectable, God-fearing, sober, and straight.Footnote 96
Other questions necessary for a radical history of apartheid society involve asking how ordinary white people responded to these ideological and governmental initiatives, and by what means, and in what roles, did they become part of apartheid culture and the apartheid state. Footnote 97 Historians and anthropologists of whites in apartheid society must acknowledge that the “resistance” trope does not help in understanding work, life, and culture among whites under apartheid. Popular complicity, collusion, and co-optation are more apt. However, as Gyanendra Pandey and Gautam Bhadra remind us, idioms of domination and subordination are always intertwined, and this “contradictory complexity” must be interrogated if we are to understand something of the ways in which white consciousness formed.Footnote 98 These simultaneities have methodological implications to which I will return below. From such a perspective we might ask about the material, ideological, and cultural grounds for accommodation, taking care to identify gender, ethnic, class, or other differences, and how these were deployed in particular contexts at particular times, and whether ordinary whites defied (even if only symbolically) citizenship imposed from above, thus co-shaping its evolution. We might investigate the fate of whites who transgressed the terms of whiteness imagined from above, remembering that such transgression was unlikely to have constituted resistance to apartheid itself. In this respect, German Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life, with its interest in sociologies of work and the ways that compliance was produced among ordinary Germans under Nazism, offers some useful comparative examples.Footnote 99
Historiography on Germany, however, might also be useful in other ways when identifying questions on the historical and moral condition of whiteness in apartheid society. In particular, Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on nationalism and totalitarianism are pertinent, as is her notion of the banality of evil, developed in relation to the “personally insignificant and inconsequential” Adolf Eichmann, who nonetheless derived enormous destructive power from his “participation” in the totalitarian system.Footnote 100 Does such a focus on the individual in “power” adequately explain how ordinary whites were bound into, and acted within, apartheid society? Another possible starting point could be Daniel Goldhagen’s argument, drawing on Immanuel Kant’s idea of “radical evil”,Footnote 101 which posits total moral collapse fuelled by anti-Semitism as an explanatory framework for the Holocaust.Footnote 102 There are, of course, substantial differences between the attempt at systematic annihilation of a certain racialized and/or ethnicized group and a regime of racialized segregation as in South Africa, also when it comes to gaining legitimacy and collusion by those belonging to the dominant group. The theoretical and empirical endeavours about ordinary Germans under Nazism nevertheless offer stimulating examples for shedding light, from below, on the nature of apartheid society and the organizing racial state.
In considering techniques of accommodation the staatsdiens, the civil service, promises to be a particularly fertile area for historical investigation and theoretical explanation of the apartheid state. In the twelve years after 1948 the number of whites, mainly Afrikaners, in the civil service expanded by 112 per cent.Footnote 103 The state and National Party archives provide ethnographic texture to those who worked on the staatsdiens. Preliminary analysis suggests that ideas about gender, respect for authority, and an almost fetishized regard for rules and regulations were instilled in new white civil servants.Footnote 104
Work in the staatsdiens and the allocation of benefits like housing subsidies to civil servants also cultivated patterns of consumption underpinned by racialized privilege and concomitant pressures for compliance. Collectively, these measures represent what Roediger has called the “wages of whiteness”, a very useful concept for explaining inter-class solidarity among whites. They also laid the material foundations for accommodation, and their pervasiveness in early apartheid South Africa contributed to similar conditions to those described by several authors for Nazi Germany.Footnote 105
Even as a racial state and bureaucracy were being elaborated, gratuitous acts of racial violence by white workers were generally frowned upon. Thus, in one episode, from the records of a disciplinary hearing, a white clerk rode his bicycle down an office corridor and knocked down a black messenger. The clerk was severely censured and had his pay docked for three months. Racial violence was institutionalized in the state, rather than ceded to the individual.Footnote 106
Another fruitful area of enquiry might be to ask how voluntary associations, formal or informal, that evolved around identities, helped to mediate white accommodation to an Afrikaner nationalist state. These places of belonging could emerge from neighbourhood to national scale, and could evolve around diverse identities including religious, cultural, ethnic, sexual or – in a case I studied – comradeship among white male World War II veterans. Through the Memorable Order of Tin Hats (MOTHs), veterans could enjoy the benefits of whiteness guaranteed by the apartheid state (and the NP) while registering their disdain towards a political culture insensitive to their status as veterans and to the memory of their fallen comrades.Footnote 107
Part of this broad area of enquiry, and another step away from the theoretical and empirical focus of Wits History Workshop-inflected social history, would be to venture into what Derek Hook calls the “psychic life of power”,Footnote 108 i.e. the moods or affective components of apartheid society at different stages of apartheid history. Hook tells us that psychical time and chronologies of the social are not necessarily synchronized, and consideration of some of the psychic waves that rippled through white society – anxieties, panics, fads, topics of public interest and debate – might yield new clues to the coherence of whites in apartheid society, or alternatively, conflicts, fractures, and moments of stress.
Transgression is hard to find, and certainly this aspect of white life does not feature much in the research literature on the period. One topic that has received some attention is deviant youth sub-cultures, from “ducktails” to “hippies”.Footnote 109 Another topic is the history of apartheid-era work colonies, labour camps in out-of-the way places for white men, designed to punish, rehabilitate, and recycle as petty subalterns of the state drunkards, homosexuals, men in mixed-race unions, and those who, in the opinion of social workers, failed to care properly for their families. These unfortunates were sent to work in colonies for three years, not by judicial conviction but on the fiat of a social worker. The regimes they encountered in the camps, with the parallel surveillance and regulation to which their wives were usually subject, tell us much about the moral and cultural codes of respectability that informed apartheid-era whiteness, as well as the racialized anxieties about sexuality and drunkenness that agitated the political, intellectual, and bureaucratic elite.Footnote 110 Reminding us of Pandey and Bhadra’s points about the simultaneity of subordination and collusion, the men defied the discipline that came with their committal to the work colonies: they ran away, smoked dagga, and, in the words of one superintendent, “carried on with native women”. In the course of my own research, however, I have found no evidence of any of them repudiating the privileges of whiteness.
Methodologies
As John Comaroff has written, methodologies are determined not by the intrinsic nature of an academic discipline, but by prior theoretical considerations.Footnote 111 Questions central to a new history of whites relate to the ideological and disciplinary make-up of apartheid society, to governance and the privileges that held it together, to ways that white people responded to these, and to how white people constructed meaning, as men, women, civil servants, military conscripts, or other. We might also attempt to identify flickers of insurgency, however muted and limited. These questions are neither primarily event-related, nor overtly concerned with chronologies. Despite caution about too easily matching disciplines and methodologies, they are, like Subaltern Studies, propelled by a more “anthropological” approach to history.Footnote 112
Concerns with knowledge, ideology, and representation in colonial and postcolonial India are, as Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, what make Subaltern Studies a postcolonial historiography distinguished from English Marxist “history from below”.Footnote 113 Thus, to understand modes of representation and the ideologies from which these derive, critical reading of texts, inspired by literary studies and theorists like Foucault and particularly Said, must be part of a new history of whites. To ensure that this history is also radical, it needs to go beyond a reading of published and unpublished texts and the conventions of even as sophisticated an intellectual history as that of the later Subalternists.
The danger within aspects of Subaltern Studies of reifying or “fixing” the subaltern has been indicated by Sumit Sarkar already at the end of the 1990s. Frederick Cooper highlights the methodological implications: Noting empirical difficulties with the Foucauldian formulation of power, especially assumptions about how it diffuses through society, he writes that in colonial societies, “power was more arterial than capillary – concentrated spatially and socially”. “Can the theorist listen?”, he retorted wittily to Spivak and those Subalternists inclined to textual analysis and discourses of power and representation, rather than a social history of power.Footnote 114 Indeed, he wrote, the tenuous and contested essence of power
should be a theoretical rallying point for historians: they have the tools (and often the inclination) to analyze in specific situations how power is constituted, aggregated, contested and limited, going beyond the poststructuralist tendency to find power diffused in “modernity”, “the post-enlightenment era”, or “western discourse”.Footnote 115
Commenting on how a historiography tracking “flickers of insurgency” and other instances of subaltern consciousness, agency, and action will yield, at best, a fragmentary history, Gyanendra Pandey put forward a strong defence of local analysis. For historians of India the advantage is that this demands resisting any shallow homogenization. It is especially useful for “foreground[ing] state-centered drives to homogenize and normalize the deeply contested territory of nationalism” and for pointing to alternative political communities and potentially new notions of “the nation”.Footnote 116 Indeed, to the extent that Subaltern Studies is concerned with fragments of everyday life, its methods are closely aligned to those of social history, except that the former is less constrained than the latter by proscriptions of class. Oral histories, ethnographic techniques, and the observation of practice all shape the methodologies of Subaltern Studies. These methodologies permitted the “elaboration of a new kind of cultural essence for India […] found in the iconic residues of hidden identities, expressions of difference and misunderstood mentalities”.Footnote 117 They should inform as well a new history of ordinary white life in apartheid South Africa, although, as Bill Sewell points out, such a preference for local analysis needs to be approached with care regarding how we seek to link large-scale social and political structures and accounts of the local and particular.Footnote 118
Pandey’s point about scales of analysis and the worth of the fragment applies equally to the value of seeking individual histories and their nuances and “contradictory complexities”. This is where we will find the “souls undressed”Footnote 119 of whites, and these complexities may conceivably dent the structures of essentialized whiteness. Such intimate studies do not entail definitive sociological statements about apartheid society, but they offer examples of how it may have functioned, and, at their best, can suggest doubts, intricacies, and anomalies and pose further questions.
A comment by Chakrabarty is pertinent to methodologies of the intimate. Reflecting on the history of the Subaltern Studies group, he raised the idea of “generative mistakes”, which are methodological errors that nevertheless advance how questions are answered and how we understand history.Footnote 120 For instance, in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Guha incorporated the archaic and the modern, humans and gods.Footnote 121 Chakrabarty recounts Guha’s statement that he had relied on his own experience and “feel” when writing this “autobiographic” work. This kind of procedure, Chakrabarty says, falls precisely within the domain of “generative mistakes” that gave Subaltern Studies much of its original analytic richness.
Could similar “generative mistakes” be made for fostering a new radical history of ordinary whites? Two possible avenues spring to mind. The first, like Guha’s “autobiographic account” would be to attempt a sort of “biography of a people”.Footnote 122 Here, the historian is situated differently to the conventional anonymous, unobtrusive, objective scholar. It does, however, offer the writer some intuitive sense of where to look for irony, ambiguity, contradiction, and other conditions and dispositions that will texture a historiography of ordinary whites.Footnote 123 The second avenue would be using the substantial and diverse corpus of Afrikaner fiction. As some literary scholars in the Subaltern Studies group have demonstrated, fiction tends to respond faster to dramas of the everyday than history and anthropology, offering pathways into these worlds and the possibility of theoretical reflection.Footnote 124 Fiction is manifestly not history, nor does it represent a historical document such as an archival source; rather, it provides invaluable parables and markers, not least to the “psychosocial operations” identified by Derek Hook,Footnote 125 which underlie other material, political, ideological, and social conditions. These “generative mistakes” may also, of course, lead to analytic and ethical errors, related to problematic historical revisionism (a question to which I will return in the conclusion).
Finally, whites in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were generally not diarists, and personal letters have, so far, proven difficult to come by. Many who grew up and entered work during those decades are, however, still alive, making them a valuable, although challenging, source of oral history. The requirement is to understand their world on their terms, how they account for the ways they thought and lived, and simultaneously to avoid betraying their legitimacy while not too readily accepting retrospective justification of how they lived. This methodological balancing act requires strong appreciation of, and ethnographic sensitivity to, the related (but still too often disconnected) fields of oral history and memory studies.Footnote 126
Conclusions
Without abandoning the gains of a social history inspired by Marxist notions, the insurgent ethos of Subaltern Studies, its conceptual approach, scales of analysis, methodologies, eclecticism, and openness to debate, are all useful in shaping a new, radical history of “subaltern” whites under apartheid that incorporate some of the advances of the “cultural turn” to approximate Eley’s “new history of society”.Footnote 127 As Vivek Chibber points out in his wholesale critique of the Subaltern Studies project, historiographies that relinquish the centrality of class analysis do have (in his view, pernicious) theoretical and political implications.Footnote 128 But, as Axel Anderson wrote in a review of Chibber’s book, the tensions between class and cultural analysis are not necessarily a zero-sum affair.Footnote 129 Moreover, while Chibber offers a sweeping critique, there is a strand of postcolonial studies that is critical of its poststructuralist mainstream and suggests, at the same time, linking cultural analysis with Marxist conceptualizations.Footnote 130 Be it “post-Marxism” or a theoretically “renovated” variant of Marxism, a radical history of ordinary whites should enable historians to better comprehend the dynamics of apartheid culture. Beyond the South African context, this might also prompt comparative engagement and a renaissance of ethnographies of power and everyday life in broader reaches of African history.
Situating this new history of non-elite whites as a radical historiography demands that it be connected to a political or ethical project. A humbler pursuit than the grand visions of earlier radical histories, it is nevertheless deeply political. It involves identifying the elements of the compound that held together apartheid culture; and it implies accounting for agency among ordinary whites. While there are several possible approaches, such questions might be best elucidated by a historical ethnography of white folk. Methodologically, this perspective is usefully served by studies of the individual, intimate, and affective; by probing the interstices of white life in apartheid society. Following Roediger, I propose that the “souls undressed” of white folk are sometimes viewed with greatest clarity by those who “see without being observed”.Footnote 131 This suggests that histories of apartheid-era whites should take a cue from anti-colonial writing, and that, furthermore, these histories should not be written exclusively by white scholars.
Whites under apartheid were part of a system universally considered brutal, crass and evil, and this demands a heightened sense of ethical sensibility by historians studying them. While the dangers of “transferring theory” are always imminent (Subaltern Studies, for instance, was oddly silent on race), Subaltern Studies do, however, enable certain useful ethical entries into the history of whites and whiteness in South Africa. Firstly, it allows us to demonstrate that there were mechanisms to bind whites to apartheid society in ways designed to produce compliance, obedience, and acceptance of authority. This is not an apologia and, indeed, historians of apartheid need to avoid what the doyen of German Alltagsgeschichte, Alf Lüdtke, quotes as the perils of “boundless sympathy” when writing about ordinary people in Nazi Germany (or, indeed, any other period).Footnote 132 This means, among other things, that the material and cultural benefits of being white in apartheid society, Roediger’s “wages of whiteness”, should never be neglected.
Secondly, an approach informed by Subaltern Studies maintains an ethical imperative that has characterized not only its own efforts, but also those of earlier British “history from below”, of the South African Wits History Workshop historians, and indeed many other historiographical endeavours worldwide. It is epitomized in E.P. Thompson’s famous phrase about avoiding the “enormous condescension of posterity”.Footnote 133 It should, of course, include the history of whites in South Africa. In acknowledging the need to broaden the gamut of those eligible to enter this domain of condescension suspended, Subaltern Studies has made specifically valuable contributions in this tradition. This historiographic entry point enables us to recognize that people can simultaneously submit and resist. At best, it may reveal flickers of insurgency, even among those who belonged to groups that participated in or benefitted from domination. Admittedly, such flickers of insurgency among ordinary whites were few (aside from those heroic avant-garde milieus of whites who consciously fought against apartheid), but they were not only acts of defiance against the ideological, and, particularly, the bureaucratic and cultural regimes of apartheid but, perhaps more significantly, also acts of insurgency against the moral certainties of apartheid history. In turn, they provide foundations for a new radical history and perhaps space for pedagogies against essentialized whiteness.
