This chapter considers the evolution of South African historiography from the ‘settler’ school of George McCall Theal and George Cory to the ‘revisionist’ consensus of the present day. Particularly close attention will be paid to the notion that there has been a ‘historiographical revolution’ over the past generation, separating modern historians from their predecessors. The presentation will consider the claim as it pertains to the categories of subject matter, methodology and interpretation, and will consider how the iconic historians of the last century plus (Theal, Cory, Macmillan, Walker, De Kiewiet, the ‘liberal Africanists’, the ‘neo-Marxists’) have defined and tackled these fundamental questions of history writing. Both similarities and differences in their approaches will be identified. On the basis of the differences identified, the chapter asks whether a revision of our present historiographical classifications is required. Meanwhile, considering the similarities that unite the schools, the chapter seeks to define what the paradigm is that historians of South Africa as a whole share, transcending the divisions of the schools.

This chapter examines the philosophy of Congolese intellectual, V.Y. Mudimbe, through a close textual reading of his preface to his 1971 collection of poems, Déchirures.

This chapter analyses the Pan-Africanism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah within the controversial 1966 debate by Kenyan scholar, Ali Mazrui, that Nkrumah will be remembered more as a great Pan-African than a great Ghanaian.

This chapter examines the Pan-African contributions of Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney, a pioneering member of the Dar es Salaam School of Political Economy, who in his famous 1972 treatise How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, traced the roots of African underdevelopment to European colonialism.

This chapter examines the activism of African-American writer, poet, singer, and actress, Maya Angelou through her autobiographies which described her three-year sojourn in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana between 1962 and 1965, and her time in Egypt between 1961 and 1962.

This chapter interrogates the ideas of Ghanaian-British philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, about Pan-Africanism, including critiquing what Appiah regarded as the racist essentialism of early Pan-Africanists such as Alexander Crummell.

This chapter analyses Jamaican sociologist and cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, who was one of the pioneers of the “Birmingham School of Cultural Studies”. She assesses how Hall incorporated issues of race, gender, and hegemony into cultural studies, and how culture, race, and ethnicity contributed to creating the politics of Black Diasporic identities.

This chapter examines the career and contributions of Trinidadian thinker, George Padmore, to the Pan-African movement, and his activism in the Communist International. Duggan assesses Padmore’s enormous intellectual and organisational contributions to Pan-Africanism.

This chapter examines the work of a pioneering Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta, on women’s liberation and themes of the Diaspora that she explored through novels that drew heavily from her own life experiences.

Race and class have been intertwined throughout much of South Africa’s modern history, and continue to play a central role in shaping contemporary South African politics. Yet, in a country in which one cannot speak about race without speaking about class, historians have effectively ceased to do so when it comes to the white population. While there is vibrant scholarship on white workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they are neglected as historical subjects beyond this period. This chapter argues for the extension of the study of white working-class lives, politics and organisation to the apartheid and postapartheid periods. It draws on emerging new scholarship to demonstrate how revisiting this particular race–class nexus can revise existing understandings and open new perspectives on the processes, structures, societies and experiences which have shaped contemporary South Africa. First, it demonstrates how attention to white workers in the decades following 1948 opens new perspectives on the apartheid state, on its relations with and regulation of white society, and on the limitations of race-based ideology, experience and identity during this period. Second, it shows how a focus on white working-class politics and experience in the late-apartheid period facilitates the revision of existing understandings of class formation and reveals alternative chronologies of change in South Africa embedded in broader global processes. Finally, it contends that a focus on white working-class lives in the post-apartheid present reveals the emergence of new social strategies, political tactics and subjectivities with transnational resonance.

The ongoing debates that emerged after the 2015–17 student protests raised several questions with historiographical implications. However, they have also raised questions about the challenges of teaching at this historical moment for young black women historians. This chapter argues first that student ‘wokeness’ in the aftermath of these protests has combined with the rise of consumer-based education to reproduce black women’s illegitimacy in the classroom. Second, it argues that student wokeness converges with the antiblackness of South African universities and South African history writing. Manifesting itself through the gatekeeping of senior white scholars, the antiblackness has not only resulted in the paucity of black female historians but also had implications for historiography. To make these arguments the chapter draws on the experiences of black academics to sketch the everyday encounters with antiblackness in the classroom and their manifestation through ‘woke’ vocabulary. Among these sources are two volumes that capture the experiences of black academics across a variety of institutions in the USA and South Africa, and Paul Gilroy’s reflections on how wokeness shows up in ways that undermine the very political project that students seek to cultivate. The second set of sources grapples with antiblackness in South African historiography. There the chapter focuses primarily on the work of Premesh Lalu and Windsor Leroke to highlight how the production of South African historiography often continues to be shaped by its colonial origins and has therefore reproduced forms of black subjection, engendering forms of racial domination in the field.

This chapter examines the civil rights struggles of Malcolm X and his latter efforts to promote Pan-African unity through his travels to Africa with his Organisation of Afro-American Unity.

Whiteness as a form of identity and power is founded on discrimination, exclusion and violence. Yet as an academic field, whiteness is often met with hostility and the presumption that it is a bogus field of enquiry. In South Africa, these sentiments coincide with a major concern expressed by activist-intellectuals, that white people can no longer be at the centre of history. This chapter acknowledges and seeks to address these contradictions. Particularly, it asks whether it is possible to write antiracist histories of white people that also contribute to the decolonial turn. The chapter draws largely on South African history writing, although it does also include instances where South African whites and whiteness have featured in accounts from other disciplines. It begins by mapping how whites feature in South African history – especially the social history movement – and in the more culturally oriented ‘whiteness studies’ undertaken outside of the discipline. Challenging dominant South African approaches to studying whiteness, it then proposes a ‘new’ history of whites, positioned as part of a social history of race and racisms. The new approach should draw on some of the innovations and turns that have shaped social history more generally – for instance, towards agency and affect. It should be self-consciously insurgent in both its antiracist orientation and its commitment to writing against the moral and historiographic certainties of South African history. And it should be situated closely to the politics of the day – notably, decolonisation.

This chapter examines the Pan-African peacemaking of Africa’s first UN Secretary-General, Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali between 1992 and 1996, including his conflict management efforts in Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Rwanda, and his landmark 1992 An Agenda For Peace report.

This chapter asks what historians can do in the global crises of the Anthropocene and the sixth extinction. It rethinks the presentism of our human–animal relationships and argues that at least one way forward is to take the multispecies entanglements of the past seriously. Thus it adopts the lens of the relationship between baboons and humans. In examining how this relationship changed over millennia, it tries to reconstruct a ‘more-than-human history’ as ‘useable past’, using the Armitage and Guldi approach. Environmental histories of southern Africa have neglected the longue durée and local/vernacular ecological knowledge, so this chapter tries to suggest possible new approaches drawing on cognate disciplines like ethnoprimatology, palaeontology, palaeoecology, archaeology and the study of rock art, hitherto largely overlooked by historians. In using these new sources it does two things: it offers a sample card of possibilities for other environmental histories of human–animal relations, especially over long time periods, and it argues that history can be useful in conservation efforts in the Anthropocene. In presenting a synthesis of human sociocultural history and baboon ethology/ecology, it builds a conceptual bridge between conservation biologists and environmental historians, crossing disciplinary boundaries. It argues that this kind of analysis of the past should be included in understanding human–wildlife conflict. The chapter makes the case that historians can be particularly useful by drawing on various disciplines and synthesising them critically to produce a narrative that explains change over time, while being deeply embedded in the specificities of the idiographic context.

This chapter assesses the activist career of Trinidadian scholar, C.L.R James, who was a pioneering voice in post-colonial studies. James was also a political activist who focused centrally on subaltern studies. His 1938 Black Jacobins - a classic of the Haitian revolution – is examined.

This chapter analyses the activism of African-American civil rights lawyer, Randall Robinson, who used the TransAfrica Forum to wage the anti-apartheid struggle in the US in the 1970s and 1980s (pushing for economic and other sanctions), as well as to oppose military rule and to restore democracy in Haiti in the early 1990s.