Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger
Keywords: 1948–1994; apartheid; Saul Dubow; Hermann Giliomee; C. F. J. Muller; South African autobiographies; South African history; University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop; F. A. van Jaarsveld; H. F. Verwoerd; David Welsh;
Apartheid, literally meaning apartness, and pronounced apart‐hate, was the name for the policy and practice of white supremacy through which the National Party ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994.1 The origins of the policy – and its implementation – have been highly contested, and the consequences for South Africa since 1994 even more so, but always in separate conversations, racially and ethnically distinct, reflecting the profound impact of institutionalized racism on South Africa past and present.
When Hendrik Verwoerd made his first speech to the South African Senate in 1948, he linked apartheid in theory and practice to the previous policies of segregation that had been enforced nationally since the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910:
there is nothing new in what we are propagating, nor have we made any claim that there is anything new in it. The claim we have made is that we are propagating the traditional policy of Afrikanerdom, the traditional policy of South Africa and of all those who have made South Africa their home … whether it is called segregation or by the clear Afrikaans word apartheid.2
The laws underpinning segregation that he would have had in mind would have included the South Africa Act of 1909, which racially restricted elected members of Parliament (House and Senate) to “British subject[s] of European descent”; the Mines and Works Act of 1911 which restricted all skilled jobs in the mining industry to whites; the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which limited ownership of 93 percent of the land area of South Africa to whites (who made up 22 percent of the population); the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which required that Africans live in segregated sections of all urban areas and not be allowed to purchase freehold property therein; the Native Administration Act of 1927, which established administrative (rather than civil) law as primary in all areas inhabited by Africans and made it a criminal offense punishable by heavy fine or a year in prison for anyone (though no whites were ever prosecuted) who “utters any words or does any other act or thing whatever with intent to promote any feeling of hostility between Natives and Europeans”; the Immorality Act of 1927 which made sex between whites and Africans a criminal offense (again, only Africans were ever prosecuted); and the Representation of Natives Act of 1936, which placed the few Africans entitled to vote on the basis of their property holdings on a separate roll from that of all other voters.
Despite the fact that all of these laws were still in force when we first visited South Africa in the mid‐1970s, the government claimed that apartheid was over, a thing of the past, and that the essential divide in the country was between “first‐world” and “third‐world” societies. What then explained the elaboration of the segregation laws into rigidly enforced separate amenities by race, the different entrances to post offices, the separate busses, the separate trains, or, in the case of Cape Town, the separate carriages depending on which suburb you were traveling to? And, above all, what explained the geographic separation of landownership, with African possession of any land outside certain strictly circumscribed rural areas legally prohibited, and the lack of voting rights for any person of color? Apartheid had indeed, in Verwoerd’s own words, constructed “something new” on the foundation of segregation.
Many of the individuals in power in the mid‐1970s – people like John Vorster, prime minister from 1966 to 1978 and state president from 1978 to 1979, born Balthazar Johannes in 1915 but who preferred to go by the English version of his name, and P. W. Botha, born Pieter Willem in 1916, Vorster’s minister for defense from 1966 to 1978, and then successively prime minister from 1978 to 1984 and state president from 1984 to 1989 – had been instrumental in developing the legislation that underpinned apartheid. Such legislation included the 1949 self‐explanatory Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act; the 1950 Population Registration Act, which established mechanisms for classifying all residents of South Africa as either “Whites,” “Coloureds,” or “Natives” and allocating or removing legal rights (to the vote, most importantly) on the basis of those classifications; the 1950 Immorality Act, which made it illegal for people from different races to have sex with one another (not just whites and Africans as under the Immorality Act); the 1950 Group Areas Act, which retroactively defined spaces within South Africa as belonging to one or other classified group and in practice excluded Africans, or Natives in the then contemporary usage, of owning and being entitled to legal permanent residence in any urban area; and the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act, which banned the South African Communist Party, made being a communist subject to criminal prosecution, and defined, among a variety of ways, being a communist as including any person who engaged in an act
which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts or omissions or by the threat of such acts or omissions or by means which include the promotion of disturbance or disorder, or such acts or omissions or threat
– which could, but did not necessarily, include “the encouragement of feelings of hostility between the European and non‐European races of the Union.”3
The practical measure used to enforce these and many other laws introduced in the 1950s and operative throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s was the enforcement of the pass laws, regularized nationally in 1952 by the Native Laws Amendment Act and the Orwellian‐titled Abolition of Passes and Co‐ordination of Documents Act. Under these two acts, and various subsequent revisions, every day in every part of South Africa, which we like everyone else witnessed, tens of thousands of black South Africans were stopped by the police and asked to show their passes, documents which listed their racial classification as well as their employment history, and identified whether they had permission, based on their employment status, for being where they were. Those without the documents, or without proof of current employment, were arrested, sometimes whipped, often imprisoned, and exiled back to where they were “supposed” to live until their labor was needed by the migrant system that underpinned South Africa’s rural and urban economies, with their endless need for a constant supply of cheap and compliant workers – ultimately a pipe dream and the most fundamental contradiction for state efforts to create permanent white supremacy. What we want to do in this chapter is to discuss how, since 1994, apartheid has been written about in South Africa, how it has been remembered, and how it has been forgotten, who has done the remembering, and who has done the forgetting. Because of the continuing relevance of the historiography of apartheid to around the early 1990s, we shall start with a survey of that work, focus first on the forgetting, and then on the remembering, and talk about the ways in which the separateness of apartheid, inherited from and perpetuating colonialism, continues to divide South Africa and South Africans.
The most detailed and powerful analyses of apartheid and its introduction and impact were written by those most affected by the new laws, just as had been the case under the preceding policies of racial segregation enforced nationally since the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Most of this speech took place in the public and political sphere, since South Africa’s universities were racially segregated in the 1950s, just as they had been since their inception, and academic analyses were almost without exception white‐authored (the exceptions mainly related to linguistic analyses of African languages). There was a vibrant periodical and newspaper culture in the 1950s through which black authors could express their views about a wide range of topics, from sport to music to detailed analyses of the harshest impact of apartheid laws breaking up families and forcing people, including especially children, to work under onerous conditions. Drum magazine was particularly prominent, employing a range of talented authors such as Henry Nxumalo, Todd Matshikiza, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, and Es’kia Mphahlele, and the photographer Peter Magubane. There were also newspapers targeted at black audiences like the World and the Guardian (later renamed the New Age). But the most powerful speech came in the form of the political statements, sometimes made from the dock, by leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) such as Nelson Mandela (especially his presidential speech for the Transvaal Branch in 1953), Oliver Tambo, and Albert Luthuli, as well as by the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) Robert Sobukwe and by Moses Kotane of the South African Communist Party, banned since 1950. The PAC‐organized Sharpeville demonstration of March 21, 1960, which was violently repressed by the police, and the subsequent banning by the government of the ANC and the PAC, together with censorship restrictions placed on individuals, organizations, and print media, largely removed black voices from public discourse about politics in South Africa. All the individuals mentioned above were, by the mid‐1960s, either in prison, in exile, or dead and their speeches and writings were banned in South Africa. Banned meant they could not be read or quoted. The extension of such censorship over a wide spectrum of writing meant that even the works of insightful critics of white racism in South Africa prior to apartheid, like Sol Plaatje and A. T. Nzula,4 among others, could not be read by South Africans throughout almost the entire period of apartheid.5
The absence of these individuals from what was deemed by the state to be legitimate discourse within South Africa meant also the absence of a core argument – the role of race, specifically white supremacy, in propelling and underpinning apartheid – in debates about politics and history during the apartheid era. The ANC Youth League in its 1944 manifesto noted that “The White race … had invested itself with authority and the right to regard South Africa as a White man’s country” (ANC 1944). Mandela linked the struggle against apartheid in South Africa with that against colonialism in the rest of the world when he argued in 1953 that “there is nothing inherently superior about the herrenvolk [master race] idea of the supremacy of the whites” in South Africa, it was the same as had been used to rule “in China, India, Indonesia, and Korea, American, British, Dutch and French Imperialism … [now] completely and perfectly exploded” (Mandela 1953). For Sobukwe the problem for South Africa in 1959, as it was for all still colonized societies, was “the ruling White minority,” but he expected that would be overcome, “by 1963, or even by 1973 or 1984,” in South Africa as in the rest of the African continent (Sobukwe 1959: 48).
Many white South Africans now, and then, claimed that they did not know of apartheid’s worst policies and practices, or that, even if they did know a bit in passing, they did not know of the worst excesses of the police state – the government death squads in particular, which assassinated opponents of apartheid from the early 1970s (and perhaps earlier) right up to the beginning of majority rule in April 1994. Claims of not knowing ring hollow, especially because of what people could witness on a daily basis in the streets, unless they chose not to look or to see, and because of what they could read even in a strictly censored press, where stories critical of the government were literally blacked out (as with a black permanent marker pen), or left with empty newsprint by editors showing what official censors had required of them. But what of white scholars who were more intent than the average citizen on analyzing the historical trajectory of twentieth‐century South Africa?
The academic scholarship written about apartheid within South African universities reflected the views of white scholars, especially after the removal of the few blacks with appointments in South African universities. The 1959 Extension of University Education Act (referred to by Afrikaner scholars more accurately as the 1959 Separate Universities Act), prohibited “open universities,” such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town (universities that had admitted some black students) from admitting students labeled “nonwhite”; the latter would now be educated in separate universities set up on a racial basis for African, Colored, and Indian students but employing primarily Afrikaner faculty: at Ngoye in Zululand for Zulu speakers, at Durban for Indians, at Turfloop in Northern Transvaal for Sotho and Tswana speakers, at Belleville in the Cape for Coloreds, and at Fort Hare for Xhosa speakers.6 With the establishment of these separate institutions, the few black scholars who had found academic employment, primarily teaching African languages and literature, were excluded. A. C. Jordan, who had taught African languages at the University of Cape Town since 1945, left South Africa on a one‐way exit visa in the early 1960s; Robert Sobukwe, who had lectured in African languages at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1954 onward, was imprisoned in 1960 and spent the rest of his life in detention or under house arrest; Archie Mafeje, whose appointment to a post at the University of Cape Town in 1968 was rescinded under pressure from the government, spent almost his entire career in exile from South Africa.
The most prominent writer on South African historiography in the early years of apartheid, F. A. van Jaarsveld, noted in his 1964 collection of essays, The Afrikaner’s Interpretation of South African History, that “the advocates and apologists of ‘apartheid’ on historical grounds” were sociologists and theologians (van Jaarsveld 1964: 151).7 He divided white historians between those who wrote in Afrikaans (and taught in Afrikaans‐language universities: Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Potchestroom, and the Free State) and those who wrote in English and taught in English‐language universities (University of Cape Town, Rhodes, Witwatersrand, and the University of Natal, Durban and Pietermaritzburg campuses). Their historical writing in terms of choice of topic and interpretation reflected their political differences: the Afrikaners focused on the history of the Great Trek in the 1830s, when thousands of Afrikaans speakers, accompanied by their black servants, sought to escape British colonialism by moving into the interior of South Africa, and the South African War of 1899–1902, when the British conquered the two internal states resulting from the trek, interpreting both events from the viewpoint of people who considered themselves persecuted on the basis of their nationality and who in the twentieth century had built a nationalist movement that culminated in political victory in the 1948 election and the establishment of the apartheid state.
The English speakers by contrast, in van Jaarsveld’s analysis, adopted a tone of blame and regret in their analyses of what had gone wrong in twentieth‐century South African politics. The blame lay on Afrikaners and what were seen as their nineteenth‐century frontier attitudes being extended into a twentieth‐century modernizing economy, to the detriment of the latter. The regret lay in the failure of British imperial authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to rein in and control Afrikaner nationalism. Van Jaarsveld’s English contemporaries, he wrote, “confronted with the Afrikaner’s nationalism and racial policies … [sought] to explain who the Afrikaner is and what one may expect of him.” Their work was full of “disappointment at the present” and “visions of impending catastrophe” (van Jaarsveld 1964: 146). It still is.
Looking to the future of South African historical writing, van Jaarsveld wrote that the “main field of study will be ‘causes of the South African Revolution’”: “If the somber predictions of internal revolution and external pressure are realized,” “if the optimistic belief in the success of apartheid should become a happy reality then no doubt the praises will be sung of the Afrikaner’s far‐seeing vision and sacrifices” (van Jaarsveld 1964: 154).
Two iconic texts first published in 1969 reflected clearly the white dichotomy identified by van Jaarsveld: Five Hundred Years: A History of South Africa, edited by C. F. J. Muller, which recounted “the activities and experiences, over a period of nearly five hundred years, of the White man in South Africa” (Muller 1969: ix8) and the two‐volume Oxford History of South Africa whose “central theme of South African history is interaction between peoples of diverse origins, languages, technologies, and social systems, meeting on South African soil” (Wilson and Thompson 1969: v).9 Muller described South Africa as “a white power in a black continent,” “guided by white intellect and enterprise but for a long time … dependent on non‐white labour,” where “the main concern now is whether less than four million white South Africans [counting Afrikaans and English speakers together] can maintain their supremacy against the more than 300 million black inhabitants of Africa who are supported by many other nations” (Muller 1969: xi). B. J. Liebenberg (1969) ascribed the success of the allied Herenigde Nasionale Party (Reunited National Party) and the Afrikaner Party in 1948 to its taking place in a context in which “racial integration would inevitably cause the White minority to lose power,” where “the idea of apartheid or separate development … attracted the White electorate,” and was “a victory for Afrikaner nationalism” (Liebenberg 1969: 426). He considered the “social legislation” (Population Registration Act, Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Group Areas Act, etc.) introduced in first decade of apartheid as an extension of previous attempts “to solve the colour question”:
Apartheid in public spaces was naturally not new because there had been separate buses, separate railway coaches, separate benches in public parks and separate bathing facilities and beaches for the different races long before 1948. The innovation was that what had previously been custom had now become a written law. (Liebenberg 1969: 428, 429)
More contentious, in Liebenberg’s view, were the laws to enforce “political apartheid” by putting Colored voters on a separate roll from whites. Steps taken to eliminate any representation for African voters in South Africa – the few enfranchised because of their property ownership had been allowed to vote for whites to represent them – and to lay the basis for self‐governing states in the small rural areas set aside for them (Transkei, Ciskei, etc.) were “a positive aspect” of “apartheid as a policy of separate development” (Liebenberg 1969: 430). Apartheid was, for Afrikaner politicians like J. G. Strijdom, “synonymous with ‘white domination,’” though Verwoerd, whom Liebenberg considered “more than anyone else … the architect and driving force behind the policy of apartheid,” was also “more than anyone else … responsible for transforming this policy of apartheid from a merely negative policy of domination and repression (baaskap) into a positive policy of separate development which aimed at ‘fairness to each and justice to all’” (Liebenberg 1969: 427, 428).10 Muller, like van Jaarsveld, foresaw two opposed futures for South Africa: either going “the same way as ancient Carthage” and disappearing “completely after seven hundred years of progress and prosperity,” or “develop[ing] into one of Africa’s chief spreaders of Western ideas, at a time when Western powers had declined in Africa and elsewhere” (Liebenberg 1969: 478).
Despite or perhaps because of their reference to “interaction” – a process and noun which seemed to have no actors or action – the contributors to the Oxford History, especially volume 2 which focused on the period 1870–1966 (Wilson and Thompson 1971), fitted van Jaarsveld’s description of English‐language scholarship. The author commissioned to write the chapter on the period including apartheid, an Afrikaner and not an academic (he was a newspaper editor), believed the political victory of Afrikaner nationalism in 1948 was due to its race policies, that is, white supremacy, and added that apartheid “had its positive side as well, and it was the achievement of Dr. Verwoerd … that he gave to the theory a philosophic basis and content,” most clearly reflected, it seems, in his vision of “the ultimate emergence of some sort of commonwealth of states in South Africa” (de Villiers 1971: 402, 414).11
The one variant on van Jaarsveld’s account of English speakers’ interpretations was the essay by the sociologist Leo Kuper who argued that “the implementation of apartheid which dominated political action and race relations after 1948 was in the nature of a counter‐revolution by whites.” Still not a revolution by Africans as the actors, but rather “to the increasing mobilization of force against opposition … The counter‐revolution was directed to the control of social change, in the interests of white domination, by monopoly of the constitutional means of change” (Kuper 1971: 459). In other words, Kuper alluded in a somewhat opaque manner to growing African resistance to the strictures of both segregation and apartheid. Apartheid censorship, however, prevented all South Africans, white and black, from reading Kuper’s analysis of the actions of black critics of apartheid. Oxford University Press, ultimately supported by the editors of the Oxford History, though opposed by Kuper himself, removed his chapter from the South African edition on the basis that
Legal opinion on the chapter by Leo Kuper … was to the effect that it infringed South African law in many respects, mainly by references to books and articles dealing with African Nationalism, policy statements of the African National Congress, and statements by African leaders. (Wilson and Thompson 1971: v)
Under these accepted “rules” of apartheid, or acquiescence, Africans could not be written about for a South African readership, or write about themselves because, as the Oxford History editors noted about themselves and their contributors:
We live, or have lived, in a caste society, and we are all white. This last imbalance occurs because in South Africa today few Africans, or Asians, or Coloured people have the opportunity for unfettered research and writing; and those who have the training and opportunity are for the most part occupied with other commitments … Analysis … by African and Coloured historians, economists, and anthropologists … are long overdue. (Wilson and Thompson 1969: vi, xiii)
The historiography of apartheid began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, through the influence of interpretive approaches that stressed the role of economics in general and capitalism in particular in determining the way in which white supremacy developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In these analyses race was not absent, indeed practically all the texts focused primarily on black actors, but the emphasis was on showing how policies that had a core racial component – conquest, segregation, and apartheid – served the needs of big business in mining and farming, especially for cheap labor. Three key texts written in the 1970s marked out distinct approaches for the next two decades. Rick Johnstone’s Class, Race and Gold (1976), which analyzed the development of the gold industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in terms of its dependence on cheap black labor to produce enormous profits; Colin Bundy’s The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (1979), which examined the ways in which initiatives taken by African farmers in the late 1800s were defeated by white industrialists and farmers intent on turning them into migrant laborers; and Charles van Onselen’s two‐volume set of essays, Studies in the Social and Economic History of Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (1982), which focused on the social history of urban areas. These works were the tip of the iceberg, with an enormous number of studies being published in the 1980s, many of them elaborations of work which first saw print in a series of key collections coedited by Shula Marks: Economy and Society in Pre‐industrial South Africa (Marks and Atmore 1980), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (Marks and Rathbone 1982), and The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth‐Century South Africa (Marks and Trapido 1987).
Several relatively commonplace arguments (but new for South African historiography) constituted the core of the revisionist approach. First, mining, manufacturing, and farming were capitalist enterprises whose owners sought to maximize their profits. Second, central to the maximization of profits in all sectors of the economy, but especially in mining and farming, was the need for cheap labor. Third, in workplace struggles race was used intentionally by employers to divide workers and to create hierarchical systems of production in which whites were guaranteed privileged access to ownership and to supervisory and skilled positions. Fourth, in order to secure a constant supply of cheap labor over and above minimum needs so that in cases of worker strikes extra supplies would always be available, Great Britain engaged in a massive process of colonial conquest in the late nineteenth century aimed at meeting the labor needs of the diamond and gold industries, in the course of which Africans were deprived of most of their land and subjected to onerous taxes in order to produce a constant supply of black migrant workers. Fifth, the combination of these economically based processes underpinned the development of segregation in twentieth‐century South Africa and, by extension, of apartheid. Above all, the revisionists stressed the importance of local struggles, between employers and workers, colonizers and colonized, in accounting for the specific forms of racial rule and oppression in South Africa. And in these struggles blacks – Africans, Coloreds, and Indians – took very active roles.
The natural progression of this work led to an examination of the social costs and struggles of communities under apartheid. Interest in social history gained momentum in the 1980s, stemming from the pioneering work of van Onselen and fueled by the conferences held at the University of the Witwatersrand organized by the History Workshop. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, and geographers sent students and research assistants into the townships and the countryside of South Africa to excavate the history of those who had been silenced. The transcripts of many of those interviews (well over 1,000), under the auspices of the African Studies Center, today are held at the Wits university library and formed the basis of many important studies including those by van Onselen (1996), Bonner (1983), Keegan (1988), Bozzoli (1991), Moodie (1994), and others. Their work uncovered the many strategies employed by Africans to survive during apartheid and before; they rendered Africans as actors rather than as objects, and opened up exciting avenues for further research.12 Unfortunately, since 1994 much of this work has been abandoned, with the exception of Bonner’s longstanding study of Johannesburg’s townships (see Bonner and Segal 1998; Bonner and Nieftagodien 2001, 2008; and Bonner, Nieftagodien, and Mathabatha 2012). In the grip of the democratic transition, the voices of these actors had presumably been heard and many social historians turned away from the apartheid past.
Still, for all the intellectual excitement of this work, which effectively dominated academic discussion about South African history for two decades and left the works of white liberals and Afrikaners alike largely unread for a generation, there were still (with one or two exceptions) no black contributors, and much of the work rendered Africans as people to be studied and perhaps engaged as research assistants because of their language skills, but not as potential colleagues to be welcomed to the profession (see especially Worger 1991; Desai and Bohmke 1997).
But what happened to historical analysis of apartheid after the end of National Party rule and the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994? Did van Jaarsveld’s 1964 prediction that “If the somber predictions of internal revolution and external pressure are realized,” then the “main field of study will be ‘causes of the South African Revolution?’” (1964: 154). Did the Oxford History editors’ concern that the long overdue “analysis … by African and Coloured historians, economists, and anthropologists” get resolved (Wilson and Thompson 1969: xiii)?
To start with the last question first, the simple answer is no. Twenty years after the formal end of apartheid, black scholars (meaning African, Colored, and Indian scholars from South Africa) of history employed in South African universities constituted well under 10 percent of professional historians in the country. The professoriate remained much as it had been for the past century, overwhelmingly white males whose academic training and specialization were in researching and teaching South African history (see Worger 2014). There was not a single South African‐born African full professor of history in the country. What this meant for the practice of history was the near complete absence of university scholars who had experienced life under apartheid and who had the language expertise to fully utilize the vast amount of sources available in indigenous languages.
What about the other question – the main field of study being the causes of the South African revolution? In some ways one might have expected that the biggest contribution of the revisionist scholars to the postapartheid history of South Africa would have been to utilize their analytical approaches and research skills to investigate the origins and development of apartheid in much the same revealing ways as they had the history of industrial development, manufacturing, and race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After all, the government and private records for the apartheid period that had largely been off‐limits to researchers during the apartheid era were now much more accessible in the postapartheid period. The state archives reduced their closed period from up to 100 years or more to just 20 years. All the records of the National Party and of most of its leaders became publicly accessible for the first time. And mining company records, available in partial and inconsistent ways during the apartheid years, could potentially have been opened up to broad examination if the scholarly demand had been there. But in a strangely appropriate way – since it had been the Oxford History editors and contributors who had initially borne most of the wrath of the revisionist critique of white liberal history – the comment of Wilson and Thompson about black scholars in the 1960s – that “those who have the training and opportunity are for the most part occupied with other commitments” (1969: vi) – applied to the revisionists in 1990s South Africa. Many hoped to influence government policy in South Africa but found few opportunities in the black majority ANC, and instead aligned with the Democratic Alliance Party, which was always likely to be the perpetual opposition party much like the Progressive Federal Party before it.13
The social historians who had worked hard to study the repercussions of apartheid on South African society approached the question of the “revolution” with greater effort. Many of the township studies of the 1980s continued, especially with a focus on resistance and the efforts and contributions of Africans outside of the organizational structures of the liberation movement. As these studies demonstrated, the effort to dislodge the government was primarily driven by the South African population, although the ANC eventually brokered the change.14 Unfortunately, as the hopes of the transition have soured, the focus of much of this work has turned away from an examination of the popular movement against apartheid and toward denunciations of the ANC and the ANC liberation narrative.15 In an especially strange twist, the chair of the History Workshop, Noor Nieftagodien recently called for greater access to government records from the apartheid period, not to learn more about apartheid but rather because “archived documents might reveal more about “what happened in transition,” including any “dirty deals” that took place behind the scenes and whether these established a template for what came after. There has been much speculation, he continued, about whether Nelson Mandela “sold out” in meetings with state officials; “whether economic deals were struck that allowed existing powers to remain intact”; and whether and how far the security apparatus managed to infiltrate the ANC. It is also sometimes assumed that one reason why current politicians get away with so much is because they know the secrets of their rivals. Scholars should now get a chance to test the truth or falsehood of all these claims: “understanding transition can help us understand South Africa today,” said Professor Nieftagodien” (Reisz 2017). In some recent work, apartheid has even come to be seen with some nostalgia for a system that was “well organized”! (Dlamini 2009: 4).
Another more promising area of historical inquiry has blossomed since 1990: cultural history. As with the historical discipline generally, many historians have moved away from political and economic concerns entirely and are borrowing from sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists to study the cultures that arose under apartheid. Studies of sports, movies, leisure, religion, language, and music have provided a much richer view of South African life and generally introduce Africans as actors rather than as the objects of culture. Nevertheless, in most cases, because of the quotidian nature of these studies, there is little analysis of the overall impact of apartheid on culture. With the exception of works on protest songs or art, much of this work isolates culture from politics.16
In practice, academic historical analysis of apartheid post‐1994 largely reverted to the two groups of historians whose work had been overturned in the 1970s and 1980s – the Afrikaners and the English liberals. In postapartheid South Africa whites by and large are the only people who have enough money to buy books, and so it was not surprising that the works that most appeal to this audience are those which, for the Afrikaner section, suggest that apartheid was not all bad and had positive ideals and outcomes, and for English‐speaking whites, suggest that they were not to blame in the past nor should they be held responsible in the future for the clear economic advantages held by whites in postapartheid South Africa. For this audience, forgetting is a very appealing feature of the historical texts that they buy.
The most prolific Afrikaner historian, Hermann Giliomee has also been one of the most influential in current historiography. He has, in his own account, moved from being an enthusiastic supporter of apartheid in his youth to being perceived as a “snake in the grass” by National Party‐supporting historians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, to his current role of leading Afrikaans‐language proponent for formerly white universities, Stellenbosch in particular (Giliomee 2016). In his historical accounts of apartheid he has emphasized Afrikaners’ search for “white survival and justice,” most clearly in a multiauthored text written for university students (Giliomee 2014). Instead of the emphasis on “white supremacy” as the driving force behind apartheid found in Giliomee (2016), we have a mix of ahistorical arguments, false binaries, and imagined idealistic origins. With regard to the ahistorical, Giliomee argues that apartheid must be
weighed up in light of how people viewed it in the years 1948 to 1958, when the policy was in place … [and] not what most political leaders and commentators have done since 1994 … to judge apartheid according to the liberal values which only began to find acceptance on a wide basis in the 1990s. (2014: 434)
Leaving aside the odd dating (1948–1958 – a typo?), and the general problem of moral relativism, to make the argument as Giliomee does, one must ignore everything written and spoken by critics of segregation and apartheid, especially by members of the ANC Youth League in the 1940s and by Nelson Mandela and others in the 1950s (all quoted earlier). Giliomee also presents the reader with curious and ahistorical binaries such as: “Rapid racial integration could have taken place, or the country could, for the greatest part of 25 years, have experienced a reasonable measure of stability. There is no way, however, that both these two things could have happened” (Giliomee 2014: 446). Here the key word is “stability.” Stability for whom? What form of stability? Are political assassinations and police death squads part of stability? Giliomee does refer somewhat generally to black suffering under apartheid but it is all very generic and very impersonal, with his reference to the damage done to the country (whose?) rather than to individuals:
Apartheid cost the country dearly, especially in the form of poor quality education for black, coloured and Indian children; an unproductive labour force; a lack of skills; and a large turnover of workers as a result of the enormous scope of migrant labour. (2014: 444–445)
As with the earlier work of Afrikaner historians, blacks remain largely objects of history, not people who through their own struggles helped create the course of events. And, just as Verwoerd argued that apartheid was an attempt to create separate development, not a way to enable whites to rule blacks, Giliomee in his stress on the origins of apartheid as tied up with religious ideas of justice in the 1930s, and with the development of separate political institutions for Africans (the bantustans being a way to compensate them for having lost political rights in the 87 percent of South Africa under white rule), provides an intellectual cover for both the rise and the expansion of white supremacist rule post‐1948.17
Whereas Giliomee harks back to the National Party defenses of apartheid in the 1960s, David Welsh (1971) disinters the English‐speaking liberal scholarship of the 1960s to which he had himself contributed with his first book on the origins of segregation in nineteenth‐century Natal. As Giliomee notes approvingly and without irony in a blurb for Welsh’s 2009 book, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, “This is liberal history at its best.” The first two chapter titles signal the core argument: “Afrikaner Nationalism and the Coming of Apartheid” (i.e., it’s all about the Afrikaners); “The Black Experience: A Prelude to Apartheid” (where again blacks are objects, people who suffer, because of the impact of “three interrelated issues … security, land and labour,” essentially imperialism and farming). What about a reverse order – labor, land, and control – as suggested by the revisionist historians, nearly all of whose work is absent from Welsh’s bibliography? There is in Welsh’s index no reference to De Beers Consolidated Mines or to the Anglo‐American Corporation. There is no discussion of the impact of apartheid on the economic and social life of ordinary people. It is as though nothing had been written, or at least read, between 1969 and 2009 (Welsh 2009).18
Like the work of Giliomee and Welsh, Saul Dubow’s recent study Apartheid, 1948–1994 (2014) focuses primarily on politics to the exclusion of economics and social history, deals primarily with white actors, and engages with some dubious “what if” theories reminiscent of Giliomee’s flawed binaries. Dubow aims to be more provocative, however, rather than apologetic. For example, he speculates that if the ANC had not committed to the violent overthrow of the government in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the Nationalist Party government might not have outlawed all protest organizations and initiated the construction of a police state (Dubow 2015). Raising the question of whether the ANC was somehow responsible for the subsequent creation of the South African police state completely ignores Mandela’s famous speech at the Rivonia trial where he carefully laid out the history of ANC activities and their failed attempts to initiate peaceful change. And, like the other liberal historians, Dubow lays the blame for apartheid squarely on Verwoerd (read Afrikaners); but, rather than resurrecting the old arguments about the Afrikaner “frontier” mentality and religious justifications, he argues that apartheid was the by‐product of Verwoerd’s ambition to create an empire of his own within the Native Affairs Department (Dubow 2014: 60). There is no mention of the economic benefits for whites – Afrikaners and English alike – of apartheid policies. Dubow’s critique, speculative and unconvincing, has nevertheless gained popularity among white South African historians.
Although South African academia has failed to develop that coterie of “African and Coloured historians, economists and anthropologists” who could provide a different context for our understanding of apartheid, scholarship in the twenty‐first century has nevertheless expanded through different mediums, giving voice to a broader population than that within the academic community. Life stories, in particular autobiographies, have blossomed through new outlets for publication including online publications, blogs, and even Facebook posts. As one review of the field states, “Individual’s stories have become a legitimate aspect of making new national history” (Jayawardane 2008). These voices are no longer silent and they remember their own apartheid experiences.
Since 1990, many South Africans have described their own apartheid experiences through their autobiographies. Especially prominent are those of politicians including Nelson Mandela, F. W. de Klerk, and many others who focus on the political intrigue and present justifications for their actions (Mandela 1994; de Klerk 1998; Heunis 2007; Eglin 2007). As Tom Lodge (2015: 687) has noted, however, we get very little of their personal lives or the context in which they made their decisions; instead most of these works are heavy on justification with a touch of insider gossip. There are also the works by South Africa’s journalists, noteworthy for their style and their ability to tell a story but often gliding over the gritty realities of daily life in favor of the more sensational aspects of apartheid (Pauw 1997; Sparks 2016). Memoirs by the military combatants on both sides abound, along with what Neelika Jayawardane calls the “My Apartheid Boyhood” genre, in which mainly white male authors recount their innocent childhoods free from the knowledge of apartheid (Manong 2015; Van der Walt 2008; Coetzee 1998; MacRae 2012). Nevertheless, what is strikingly different in the autobiographies as opposed to the academic postapartheid scholarship is the shift of focus away from the motivations of whites in implementing apartheid to the impact and effect of apartheid on communities and individuals. While Giliomee, Welsh, Dubow, and others focus on explaining the intent and actions of white politicians, primarily describing Africans as the objects of these actions, the autobiographies reverse the lens and give us a microscopic view of the painful consequences of apartheid’s policies and actions.
While the form of autobiographical narrative is rapidly changing, including online blogs, Facebook pages, auto‐ethnographies, oral recordings, and so on, South Africans in the postapartheid era have eagerly embraced the genre and their stories have been published through old and new avenues. The most interesting – and least touted – are the stories told by the unknowns recounting their everyday experiences. Although these stories are obviously subjective by definition, and they can only present an individual narrative rather than a comprehensive, contextual view of apartheid, they demonstrate a central truth of life under apartheid: their lives were defined by their race. And they explain the impact of apartheid on the totality of a life. Alongside a depiction of the grim realities and daily pleasures of a very difficult human existence, these stories demonstrate how the best efforts of hardworking Africans could be derailed by the smallest of injustices under apartheid.
The remaining discussion will focus on the life stories of five South Africans. Sindiwe Magona and Letitia Stuurman, both born in 1943, witnessed the beginning of apartheid and experienced the impact of its policies throughout most of their lives until the end of apartheid in 1994 (Magona 1990; Stuurman 1995). Tlou Setumu, Jamela Robertson, and Fred Khumalo were all born in the 1960s (Setumu 2011; Robertson 2007; Khumalo 2006). Some grew up in townships; most were moved from rural to urban locations and eventually to the townships. One family resided in a “homeland,” forced to renounce citizenship in South Africa. Some were lucky enough to grow up with their parents but few were able to keep their own families together as the pass laws and the Group Areas Act together conspired to keep them apart. Education was not the panacea for advancement in all cases, primarily because their families were often too impoverished to pay the fees. And, even with the proper training and qualifications, job reservation and lack of resources often stymied such plans.
How were these relatively “ordinary” South Africans affected by apartheid? Those who have been fortunate enough to be in a position to write and to publish their life stories are by definition already exceptional, and yet their stories can stand in for the less fortunate. There is little remarkable about their circumstances other than the fact that they survived those circumstances. To be clear, each author wrote of their childhood as happy: “childhood, by its very nature, is a magic‐filled world, egocentric, wonderfully carefree, and innocent. Mine was all these things and more” (Magona 1990: 4). This, despite the fact that few lived with both parents, or even with either parent. Either one or both parents worked in a city, to which they were not allowed to bring their families (Magona 1990: 15; Khumalo 2006: 33; Robertson 2007: 4; Stuurman 1995: 1). Later, when they became adults, the pattern would be repeated with their own children. In the cities, their mothers turned to selling prepared food or liquor “illegally as she did not have a permit for selling anything from her home” (Magona 1990: 26). In the rural areas, “without good rains and harvests, [mother] was literally left with nothing, absolutely nothing to live on” (Setumu 2011: 48).
Where they lived determined much about their lives, yet their residence was restricted by apartheid laws. As Tlou Setumu recounts, “A place to stay was an important factor that determined one’s fortunes in the big city. You couldn’t just go there without knowing where you would be put up” (2011: 76). And, even with residential rights, Africans were continually shifted from place to place. As a child, Sindiwe Magona first moved from a rural village to Blaauvlei, a “location” of corrugated iron shacks; then to a new location, Zwelitsha, where each plot holder built their own house; and, under the slum clearance policies of the 1950s, to one of the massive townships engineered by the apartheid government, Guguletu:
The windswept, treeless miles from anywhere township, they were told was their home. Our Pride, Guguletu, the powers that be would have the gall to baptize it, openly declaring to all skeptics their unwavering pursuit: the destruction of African family life, communal life, and all those factors that go toward the knitting of the very fabric of a people. (Magona 1990: 85)
When Jamela Robertson first traveled from her small village near Tzaneen to Mamelodi in Pretoria, she concurred: “Unlike in Dan Village where everyone minded everyone else’s business, in Mamelodi it seemed to be ‘a man for himself’” (2007: 34). Some were moved from the multiracial neighborhoods such as Butts Location in Aliwal North, as Letitia Stuurman remembered: “In 1958 we had to move. The government didn’t want white and ‘non‐white’ people to be mixing in the towns so they forced blacks to live in the locations” (1995: 22).
Of course not all experiences were horrible. Fred Khumalo remembers finally moving to his family’s own home in a brand new township in the early 1970s with “a palpable sense of joy in the air. Everything about the township – the neat rows of four‐roomed brick houses, the tarred roads – was new” (Khumalo 2006: 42). The catch was that the township – Mpumalanga – was within the KwaZulu homeland, was paid for by the South African government, and that “by moving here we had, by law, renounced our South African citizenship” (Khumalo 2006: 43). The township was built as a labor reservoir, adjacent to the South African town of Hammarsdale which employed cheap labor from Mpumalanga in the textile factories. This was part of grand apartheid, and the vision of “separate development” that would later result in the removal of over 3.5 million South Africans to the ethnically determined apartheid “homelands” (see Surplus People’s Project 1983).
But for those who could not survive in the countryside or find housing in the cities or in the homelands, the infamous single‐sex hostels housed workers for the mines, factories, and municipalities, and there were even female quarters for nurses and domestic workers. Tlou Setumu landed in one of the hostels in Pretoria as a last resort and described them as institutions designed to separate workers from the local communities:
The high walls that enclosed the hostels separated the inmates from the surrounding community both physically and socially. Besides the fact that almost all of the hostel dwellers came from the rural “homelands,” the hostels themselves completely isolated men from township life. As a result of this isolation, relations between the hostel dwellers and the township community were usually not harmonious … This type of tension fitted well into the plans of the National Party government, in which people had to be separated so that they could be hostile to each other. After all, the unity of the black people was the last thing the apartheid government wanted to see. (Setumu 2011: 78)
It is clear that Africans understood that the government created by design residences that undermined African communities, whether in one of the massive townships like Guguletu or Mamelodi, in an ethnically separated homeland like KwaZulu, or in the impersonal hostels of every white town or city. Apartheid’s grand design was thorough and transparent.
While these autobiographies can explain the comprehensive impact of apartheid, what they reveal even more clearly is how one incident or misstep could completely transform a life in which there was absolutely no margin for error. Being in the wrong place could land one in jail, or missing one rent payment could lead to years of homelessness. The turning points in these lives moved on an apartheid axis that was unforgiving.
For these authors, education was an important key to a better life, and all of them were able to excel in their schoolwork. Nevertheless, their success did not guarantee their future. Fred Khumalo, now a famous journalist and author, was given perhaps the greatest opportunity after graduation: a full scholarship to medical school. But this was not his goal. He had already become sensitive to his country’s political situation and sought a career as a journalist. Despite his high grades and qualifications, he was routinely turned away from journalism programs and was ultimately given no financial aid when he finally gained admission to Technikon Natal. It seemed that, while the government was ready to finance his career as a doctor, a career as a journalist was not a path it was going to encourage. After graduation, Khumalo struggled to find a publication that would hire him. But he was fortunate in that history overtook apartheid South Africa and he has since become one of the country’s leading journalists.
Others were not so lucky. Tlou Setumu’s family lived in the rural northern part of the country and survived on whatever his mother could grow on a small plot of land. Their home was built of mud; they literally had nothing. But when Setumu graduated from high school – at the top of his class – he was offered a temporary teaching position at a local school. The idea was that over a couple of years he would save his money, go to university, and qualify as a full‐time teacher. Yet, when his temporary position ended, he found that he had saved nothing: “the underlying poverty in my family meant that the few rands that I earned were reduced to nothing because each and every aspect at home needed to be taken care of by that meager amount” (Setumu 2011: 68). Nevertheless, he gained a scholarship to the University of the North and traveled there to register, only to be undone by the bureaucracy of apartheid education. There is tragic frustration in his account of the situation:
I joined a long queue outside the campus and slowly moved with my large bag, approaching the caravans where the officials did the registration… I took out the letter which indicated that I was a bursary holder… one of the officials just said: “Here we only want cash money.” … I went to the nearest public phone at the post office where I dialed the bursary section … The lady who answered said there was nothing she could do because the person who was dealing with the bursaries was in a meeting. I realized there was no way I was going to be helped and I dropped the phone with bitterness … There I stood motionless, not knowing what to do next. Time was moving on and I was increasingly becoming concerned about what was going to happen to me in the next few hours. I knew nobody in Turfloop, and if I was not admitted to the university, where was I going to sleep? That was the immediate problem. The bus [home] was leaving Polokwane at about two o’clock in the afternoon, so I had to take that into consideration in the process of deciding what I was going to do next … This led me to decide to go back home. Yes, indeed … the registration period at universities came to an end and my dream of being a university student evaporated like dew in the rising sun. (Setumu 2011: 75–76)
A simple misunderstanding and no legal place to sleep changed the course of a life. Although Setumu eventually completed a BA, MA, and PhD over the course of the next 20 years, he had to survive as an itinerant worker and teacher in the meantime, and was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown in his mid‐twenties. One phone call could have made a huge difference, but under apartheid Africans seldom had access to a second chance.
A combination of cruelty and poverty also ended Jamela Robertson’s education. After accompanying a friend to the hospital and thereby missing a two‐hour study period at school, she and her friend were flogged by the principal. Rather than continue with additional punishment, at the age of 16 she left school. She believed at the time that she could resume her education at another school, but a relative who had been paying her school fees died, and she had no resources to continue her final year of school (Robertson 2007: 86–92). What followed was an escape to Johannesburg and an attempt to continue her education through a clerical college in Johannesburg. But, after she graduated, “at each and every door that I knocked on asking for clerical work, I was told the jobs were reserved for whites” (Robertson 2007: 175). Women like Sindiwe Magona who had earned ther teaching credentials, were ultimately forced to work as domestic “servants” in white homes because they could not find jobs or qualify for urban residence because of the legal strictures of apartheid.
Mention should also be made of the long‐term impact of Bantu Education, Verwoerd’s attempt to curtail black aspirations. Sindiwe Magona, who was born in 1943, had already finished much of her schooling by the time Bantu Education was fully implemented, but she noted the change: “Those students who were from the old stream were faring much, much better than the products of this exclusively African system” (1990: 72). According to Bantu Education goals, students were taught such subjects as housework and gardening although with important limitations:
Incredible though it may sounds, it is the truth: in this urban environment, where a few students had electricity at home, we were being taught to use irons heated on the stove. The stove itself was a wood or coal burner. As far back as I can recall, mother has always had a Singer sewing‐machine. Granted, a manually operated one … and here I was, learning to sew a garment using needle and thread. Talk about “keeping the native in her proper place”! White and even coloured schools had modern appliances. (Magona 1990: 67)
While it has been argued that overall literacy rates improved under Bantu Education, this system also undereducated generations of Africans while directing a steady stream of racist invective at the students (Robertson 2007: 81–83).
Indeed, apartheid levied a heavy toll on African physical and mental health. While these authors escaped the worst dangers of apartheid, they were certainly aware of them. Almost anyone – and sometimes everyone – in their lives were the victims of police violence. As Fred Khumalo recounts, even obtaining the necessary passbook to allow his father to live and work in the city was a humiliating ordeal. His father was forced to undergo a genital “inspection” by a white official who “prob[ed] his penis and testicles with a stick” in front of all the other men in the hall: “Outside the hallowed confines of the Native Affairs offices, black men never spoke about their experiences at the Pipi Office as it was called … they couldn’t joke about what happened [there]” (Khumalo 2006: 27–28). This pass, gained through such humiliation, was thereafter used to effect continuing control over blacks. Police raids “with no other objective than to arrest people whose passes were ‘wrong’ or who had forgotten their passes at home” were commonplace, while “police presence in the township had absolutely no correspondence to the committing of criminal acts” (Magona 1990: 87). Blacks who were ordinarily granted rights to be in a city still could not be found outside after curfew “even if you were in a car you were not supposed to drive right through Aliwal North if you were black” (Stuurman 1995: 21).
Jamela Robertson’s experience of being arrested for not carrying a pass nearly ended in tragedy for her; it most certainly did for others. She and her schoolmates were arrested during lunch time in a park in Johannesburg for not having their passbooks. They were loaded into the police van, threatened with deportation to a “homeland,” and jailed in John Vorster Square for the weekend. While there, they learned that they would be held for the weekend “for the entertainment” of the guards. Although she was spared, she noticed that “every now and then a policeman out of uniform would open the cell and pick a girl or two … hours later the girls would be returned either crying or looking sheepish” (Robertson 2007: 149–150). Even worse, she heard people screaming in pain in the middle of the night, “flying from some storeys above us and crushed way down below … followed by a deadly silence” (Robertson 2007: 150). The worst of apartheid was the creation of a police state to enforce its vision.
The most subjective but perhaps most lasting legacy of apartheid was the psychological impact on society. As a small child, Jamela Robertson prayed every night to God to make her white. Indeed, she found the lesson in her own home:
It was a picture of heaven and hell… The queue for black people proceeded straight to hell: a pit of fire with the devil, a hefty naked black man with a tail and horns, standing right in the middle of the fire, holding a huge fork and grilling the poor black souls who were falling into the pit one after another. (Robertson 2007: 36–37)
By the time Sindiwe Magona was a teenager, she understood
my own impuissance … our voicelessness, meticulously designed by the powers that be; our forever being blamed for the untenable conditions others [had] imposed on us; and the squandering, the systematic extinguishing of the breath of a people by rank bigotry and evil incarnate. (Magona 1990: 79)
In some cases, the continual overall stress of apartheid and its unending frustration drove many South Africans toward mental illness and worse. Both Setumu and Robertson write of periods in which they could no longer cope and suffered breakdowns. Setumu was hospitalized for six months, suffering a nervous breakdown brought on by his inability to find work and therefore support his mother, and the guilt he suffered from these failures (Setumu 2011: 103–109). Robertson, having endured an abusive relationship and the loss of two children, also broke down. “I felt like a walking empty shell and often I’d find myself floating in and out of reality” (2007: 209). Both of these people had set forth with great hopes in life after enjoying happy childhoods and excelling in school, yet repeated frustration and discrimination laid them low. Khumalo writes of another affliction, criminal activity: “Gangsterism and crime are part of township life. Not because black people are inherently criminal but because they are driven to crime out of desperation” (2006: 100).
The danger of recasting history through the perspective of current feelings of disillusionment or resentment, is that the past will not only be distorted or forgotten but that it will be forgiven. While many South Africans today suffer deeply, they should not be led to believe that the country’s past was something other than unjust and cruel. The people who lived through apartheid persevered and led full lives in spite of apartheid. Yet the threat of the state, and the possibilities for arrest, harm, and worse were always present. Freedom from those fears is not inconsequential. As Letitia Stuurman wrote upon revisiting the township where she grew up:
I went back again this year – it’s 1994 – and there is quite a big change. The apartheid is finished … Blacks can buy houses now in town. It was really funny to see black children playing in the streets and going to cafes in the evening … The police are very friendly, not like before … Even the white police, they’re not like the olden days when it was really bad and you didn’t know what you did, right or wrong. (Stuurman 1995: 33–34)
To acknowledge such change, history must be truthful.
Some South Africans have suggested that a remembering/forgetting dichotomy is too crude, that “realities, of course, were a little more complex,” and have argued “that beyond the dynamics of remembering and forgetting, a more profound characterization of the struggle in social memory is one of narrative against narrative, story against story” (Harris 1999). We disagree and we agree. Arguing that a remembering and forgetting dichotomy is too crude is all too appealing to white South Africans who now, above all, want to focus their criticisms on the shortcomings of the ANC and to delete from memory what happened while white supremacy was in vogue.
But we do agree that the real future for history in South Africa lies in the stories told by those most heavily affected by apartheid. Few if any of these have been incorporated into the works produced by the historical profession in South Africa. Likewise, almost none of the stories told in the course of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings have been addressed despite the fact that the hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony available online provide historians with a resource richer than any available during the apartheid era. When historians use all these sources instead of complaining about the “failure” of the TRC to establish the full “truth,” as if that was ever its aim or that such a task could be accomplished, and instead of complaining about the supposed lack of materials documenting the apartheid years when vast amounts of written material are available that were not available 20 years ago and, more than that, there are millions of living witnesses to apartheid willing to tell their stories if anyone will listen, then we may well have a fundamentally new history of South Africa told and heard and written.