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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | The Great Debate and the Origins of South African Historiography |
| Author: | Bank, Andrew |
| Year: | 1997 |
| Periodical: | The Journal of African History |
| Volume: | 38 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 261-281 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | race relations historiography Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) History and Exploration Bibliography/Research |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/182824 |
| Abstract: | Standard studies of South African historical writing date the origins of historiography in South Africa and its central preoccupation with race to the late 19th century. This article locates the roots of South African historiography in a Great Debate about race and racial politics in the Cape Colony in the 1820s and 1830s. The major protagonists in this debate - Cape liberals, Cape Dutch conservatives and British settler conservatives - each constructed their own versions of colonial history to justify their respective positions on race. For the liberal missionary and abolitionist campaigner John Philip, the colony's history was cast as a narrative of the dispossession of Khoikhoi indigenes by oppressive Dutch settlers and the British colonial State. In direct reaction to Philip's accusations, Cape Dutch settlers provided their own reconstruction of Cape history. Here the colonists were recast as heroic bearers of civilization and Christianity to degraded and ignoble Africans. Conservative British settlers locked in military conflict with the Xhosa on the eastern frontier likewise projected Cape history as a narrative of the progress of European civilization in a benighted continent. These histories had a formative impact on the late 19th-century settler historiographical tradition that the standard overviews take as their point of departure. Notes, ref., sum. |
