T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa; A Modern History, (University of
Toronto Press, 1979)
The 1970s have been years of rapid and profound change in Southern
Africa. The long anti-colonial wars have been fought to a successful
conclusion in Mozambique and Angola, despite formidable imperialist
attempt to derail FREL1MO and particularly MPLA. In both of these
countries, the fight for national liberation has given way to the struggle
for socialist reconstruction. In Namibia and Zimbabwe, the wars of
national liberation have reached a crucial phase. The rapid intensi-
fication and increasing successes of these struggles have led to
desperate attempts by the Western Gang of Five to confine these
revolutions within the well-worn constitutional strait-jacket of "majority
rule".
    In the Republic of South Africa itself, the apparent political quiescence
of the middle to late Sixties was progressively shattered as the new
decade unfolded. The strike of contract workers in Namibia in late 1971
heralded a massive wave of strikes which shook South African mines and
industry in 1972 and 1973. Out of these has emerged a new and militant
African trade union movement. The Black Consciousness Movement r e -
awoke and crystalised the political militancy of the youth, further galvanised
by the victorious Mozambican Revolution. Early successes for Vorster's
 "Detente" policy were wrecked on the defeat of the South African army
in Angola, finally shattering any myths about the invincibility of the South
African armed forces. And in the worst recession in South African history,
the mass uprisings of "Soweto" in June 1976 - taken to new heights by the
political general strikes of August and September of that year - terrified
the regime into slaughtering hundreds of unarmed children, clearly
 exposing the extreme repression on which capitalism rests in South
Africa. These gathering political storms have produced the first series
 of armed confrontations within South Africa between the state and the
 guerrillas of Umkhonto We Sizwe      - the military wing of the banned African
 National Congress.
     The ivory towers of academia have not been unshaken by the intensification
of these struggles. The past decade witnessed an assault on the prevailing
liberal mythology of South African history by a growing band of Marxist
scholars.    The issues here are relatively cl.ear. On the one hand, the
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   liberal   view explains      almost all aspects    of social relations      in S ol1th
   Africa in terms of a perceived         contradiction    between narrow,       backward
   racist  ideology and the inherently rational         and colour- blind imperatives
   of a capitalist    market economy, in which'the latter         is distorted    by the
   former.    The Marxist writings on the other hand, argue that it is only
   possible to analyse the development of the South African social
  formation through an understanding           of the specific imperatives       of and
   struggles   generated     by, the process    of capitalist   accumulation in the
  region.    The political conclusions       which flow from these different
  approaches      are diametrically    opposed to each other.
      In this context of intensified mass struggles          against the systems       of
  exploitation,     and the intense theoretical     and ideological struggles        these
  have given rise to, the appearance          of a new, single-volume       "modern
  history"    of South Africa is a significant      event. Davenport makes no
  modest claims for his book. It is described           as a "major history",
  designed to "fill the void" left by the obsolescence           of the existing
  single~volume histories        by Eric Walker and C. W. de Kiewiet. The
  author is also highly conscious of the struggles            within South African
  historiography,      and devotes the final chapter to "the current          debate".
  He is likewise keenly aware that what he terms the "rival interpretations
 of historians"      are no simple disinterested      intellectual   scuffles,    but have
 direct and significant political consequences           (p. xiv). Thus,     it is in
 these terms which the book should be assessed.               Does it fill this void?
 Where does it stand in the current debate? And what are the political
 implications of the history presented         here?
      The book cuts a wide swathe through "the whole of South African                   history,
 from the late stone age through to         1976". The approach adopted is des-
 cribed as that of "the liberal Africanists".          The author seeks neither         to
 predict lJ.orto justify,     but to look at the South African past in the light
of "tested standards"        and so "provide a sound basis of organised            factual
information" (p. xiv and blurb). These "tested             standards"    are clearly
those of bourgeois empiricism in which the writing of history                is a
simple cataloguing of supposedly neutral and innocent "facls" by a
"neutral"     observer    _ as Davenport describes       himself (p. xv).
      The resulting     text is a narrative   of events in which a .~re81 de8I is
described but virtually nothing is explained.           We <lre 10Id (some) of what
happened, but left very much in the dark as to ~               it did so. T he purely
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descriptive approach persists even into the more self-consciously
analytical Section 111 of the book, on "The Problem of Perspective".
The chapter on the crucial issues of "Segregation and Apartheid", e.g. ,
fatuously declares that ever since the l65Os "there have been people
who wished the races to live together and people who wished them to live
apart" (p. 331). The history of what the author would label "race
relations", thus simply involves a description of the different ideas and
their implementation in practice. There is a feeble attempt to link the
notorious 1913 and 1936 Land Acts to "undesirable squatting" by
Africans, but to ask simple question why seems not to have occurred to
the author. Why did people have such different and opposing ideas? Why
were African squatters regarded as "undesirable", and by which
interests? How and why did these different interests arise?
These questions are precisely defined out of consideration by the
empiricism and idealism of bourgeois historiography. Because all
social agents interpret social reality through ideas, a leap is made into
the absurd position that ideas (or ideologies, or cultural values)
explain social reality. Yet whilst these ideas, ideologies and cultural
values are aspects of social behaviour, they are hardly its explanation.
Davenport's history, like those it seeks to replace, takes as given
precisely that which requires explanation.
    Each section of the book suffers from this fundamental flaw. To give but
one further example. The very first Chapter deals with the populating of
South Africa "from the dawn of history" to the great social eruptions of
the Mfecane in the early years of the 19th Century. Here the author is
very much concerned with the South African obsession of origins. He
rejects the long discredited official myth that white and blacks arrived
in what is now South Africa at the same time, but then falls into the
trap of taking the official cultural categories as given. Thus such questions
are posed as who were the original Sotho speakers, rather than
enquiring into how these definitions and categories themselves arose out
of a sustained process of social interaction and struggle. Recent
research on the cultural categories which have so long been the major
tools of South African historiography would indicate that these categories
 are themselves highly dubious. None other than the leading "official"
 South African Ethnographer has declared that the major such category,
                                                   o
 thai: of "the Nguni" is an entirely arbitrary one. Once again, the author
                                        259


uncritically accepts as given precisely that which requires explanation.
   In the opinion of this reviewer, Davenport's "modern history" in no
sense fills the void he sought to occupy. The only advance the book makes
over works such as de Kiewiet's A History of South Africa: Social and
Economic? is an extension of the temporal perspective, and the inclusion
of a few more "facts", particularly relating to the forms of mass resis-
tance to the system of exploitation and oppression. But the author has in
no way extended the parameters of South African history beyond the
empiricist and idealist limits laid down by de Kiewiet in 194-1, and
regurgitated without question in the two-Volume Oxford History of South
Africa, (1969 & 1971). In all important respects, his book is as obsolete
 as those it seeks to replace. The sad fact remains that there as yet
 exists no satisfactory general history of South Africa. Though far less
ambitious in scope (and itself suffering from a large number of problems),
by far the best existing single work on some of the broad themes of South
African history is H.J. & R.E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa,
 1850-1950(1969).
     Finally, since the author himself directly raises the question of the
political implications of any interpretation of history, it is important to
assess those of his own work. In commenting on the varying "solutions"
to South Africa's problems put forward by the (white) bourgeois parties, -
 "political democracy vs. pluralism" ( i . e . Apartheid) - the author adopts
the classically non-committed pose of the "neutral" academic. However
 when it comes to the question of mass revolutionary struggles against the
 exploitative system, this studied neutrality is hastily replaced by a stern
injunction against the violent overthrow of the existing system. Such
 action is deemed undesirable because:
           "Revolutions set a premium on power, whereas civilised (?!)
           government demands the taming of power. There are too
           many lions and foxes in the world and not enough people of
           compassion" (xv, emphasis added).
     Here we have in updated and suitably literary form the ideology by which
 generations of exploiters have sought to prevent the exploited from throw-
 ing off their chains. According to Davenport the problems of South
 Africa are simply those of a dearth of subjectively "compassionate"
 people, rather than the objective social relations of exploitation and
 oppression in their particularly brutal apartheid form, Apartheid, and
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the imperialism on which it rests, will not disappear from South Africa
simply through the turning of the other cheek and loving one's neighbour
- or even less, one's exploiters and oppressors. This is a formula to
maintain the existing order of things. By trying to harmonise and recon-
cile the antagonistic and irreconcilable, Davenport objectively wills the
South African people to passivity in the face of exploitation and
oppression. For all his subjective dislike of what he terms "an avowedly
unjust and violent society", objectively the entire thrust of his book and
his approach to history places him squarely on the side of those who, in
the final analysis, defend this brutal society. One can only be thankful
that the South African masses no longer seem to accept such unctuous
advice.
                                                   DAN O'MEARA
NOTES:
1. A collection of some of the earlier of these Marxist writings will be
    published in M. Legassick & H. Wolpe (eds), Class, Race and Develop-
    ment in South Africa, (Heinemann, 1979?).              ~
2. N.J. van Warmelo, Preliminary Survey of the Bantu Tribes of
    Southern Africa, (Pretoria, 1935), part 3 p. ^9.               ~
                             UT A FIT 1 NOTES
    One of the most striking features of the campus at the beginning of
the first term of the 1979/80 academic year was the presence of many
more women students than had been the case during previous years. There
was a 100% increase in first year women students in 1979/80 compared
with 1978/79, a very encouraging development, but as yet unexplained.
    Women's issues came to the fore, as well. BRALUP held a workshop
on women's studies and development from September 24-th to 28th. The
participants numbering over 50 (men also) included three categories of
people: firstly, those who had done research on any of a number of women's
issues; secondly, those who worked directly with women in a service
 capacity or were instrumental in influencing policy-making with regard to
women; and thirdly those who were interested in eliminating the subordi-
nation of women who had one of another creative talents or worked in
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