Li Pengtao: The University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop and the Rise of South African Social History Research
In the 1970s, against the backdrop of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, "history from below" (social history) gradually emerged, with the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand playing a major driving role in this process. Deeply influenced by the development of British Marxist historiography and African historiography, the History Workshop largely reshaped the fundamental landscape of South African historical research and continues to exert a profound influence on the developmental trajectory of South African historiography today. While the Chinese academic community has paid considerable attention to the general state of South African historiography, specialized research on the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand remains absent. This article primarily discusses the background of its founding, its main activities, and its academic contributions, aiming to gain a deeper understanding of the evolution and latest progress of South African historiography.
I. The Founding Background of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand
In the evolutionary process of African historiography, South African historiography exhibits a high degree of particularity, which is closely related to the uniqueness of South Africa's developmental path. Historical research in South Africa has a relatively clear developmental thread, with the Imperialist school, the Colonialist school, the Afrikaner Nationalist school, the Liberal school, and the Radical school appearing successively. Consequently, South African historiography is relatively mature: "In the study of African history, South African history has almost become an independent branch of the discipline." Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when historical research in many African countries suffered serious setbacks, South African historiography continued to develop in depth. During the 1970s, South African society underwent drastic changes; while the apartheid system was increasingly consolidated, the anti-apartheid forces were also growing in strength. Against this backdrop of turbulent social change, South African historiography also underwent profound transformations.
The founding background of the History Workshop primarily includes the following points:
First, the anti-apartheid struggle. The rise of South African social history, represented by the History Workshop, was closely linked to the South African labor movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. In the mid-1960s, anti-apartheid forces faced brutal suppression by the apartheid government; the African National Congress (ANC) and its political allies—the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Pan Africanist Congress—suffered persecution, with their main leaders arrested or exiled. In the 1970s, anti-apartheid forces grew strong once again, with the Black Consciousness Movement emerging among Black students. Simultaneously, independent Black trade unions arose and conducted several strikes. In 1976, the Soweto Uprising [1] broke out and spread nationwide. Although the Black union movement was severely suppressed by the apartheid government, it demonstrated that the newly emerged independent unions had developed into a significant political force. In 1979, the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) was established. In the early 1980s, the ANC and the SACP began coordinating the domestic anti-apartheid struggle. In 1983, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed, calling for a coalition of all possible social forces to resist apartheid and provide support for the ANC. In the 1980s, South African trade union forces grew rapidly, with membership increasing from 17,000 to 1.2 million. During this period, South African urbanization proceeded rapidly, with the urban population growing from 15.7 million in 1980 to 24.4 million by 1991. Accompanied by the collapse of apartheid urban infrastructure, new forms of urban resistance appeared, eventually leading to the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, taking power.
From the late 1970s to the 1980s, the apartheid system faced increasingly severe challenges. According to the Bantu Education Act promulgated by the apartheid government in 1953, "Bantu education" specifically targeted at Black students was intended to keep them in a permanent state of dependency. Therefore, the anti-apartheid struggle needed to educate and awaken the Black masses, enabling them to understand the history of their own dispossession. Historiography became an important weapon in the South African anti-apartheid struggle. The History Workshop was founded precisely against the backdrop of the 1973 Durban strikes and the 1976 Soweto Uprising. The Soweto Uprising in particular made South African scholars realize that the anti-apartheid struggle would primarily unfold in the cities; thus, it was necessary to focus on the daily lives of the urban Black masses. Along with the History Workshop, South African social history research at the time focused on critical social realities—such as the construction of race and ethnicity, Black reserves, rural-to-urban migration, urban culture, and gender power relations—research that eroded the political legitimacy of the apartheid regime. Furthermore, some social historians actively supported or even participated in the anti-apartheid struggle. David Webster, a member of the History Workshop, secretly joined the ANC and was subsequently assassinated by the apartheid government. Philip Bonner was actively involved in the labor movement, and Luli Callinicos had been a member of the Congress of Democrats (closely allied with the ANC) in her youth and participated in trade union education activities. The History Workshop was born out of the anti-apartheid struggle, and the practical needs of that struggle shaped its research interests. In its 1980 edited volume, the Workshop stated its mission clearly: "The History Workshop attempts to write the history of ordinary people, regardless of race, gender, creed, or origin. We attempt to propose a brand-new historical explanatory framework."
Second, the influence of British Marxist historiography. The rise of the History Workshop reflected a drastic transformation in the trends of South African historiography within the context of the anti-apartheid struggle. In the 1950s and 1960s, Liberal historiography held a dominant position in the academic anti-apartheid struggle. Liberal historians believed that the historical roots of South opposition racism lay in the 19th-century Great Trek of the Boers, thereby denying the link between British imperialism and South African racism; they also emphasized that the apartheid system severely hindered the development of South African capitalism. Representative figures of Liberal historiography included Leonard Thompson, Richard Elphick, and J.D. Omer-Cooper, with the two-volume Oxford History of South Africa as their representative work.
In the 1970s, the "Revisionist school" (also known as the "Radical school") emerged through a critique of Liberal historiography. Early revisionist historiography was deeply influenced by structural Marxism and was also known as Structuralist revisionist historiography. Several white South African historians living in the United Kingdom, such as Martin Legassick, Harold Wolpe, Stanley Trapido, Frederick Johnstone, and Shula Marks, challenged the then-dominant Liberal historiography and were thus labeled "revisionists." At the time, the South African labor movement was at a low ebb, and racial capitalist hegemony seemed unbreakable. Consequently, the revisionist school urgently needed to analyze the specific forms of white rule, especially the development of South African racial capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The revisionist school focused its discussions on the relationship between capital and the state, emphasizing that apartheid was necessary for the operation of capitalism and that capitalism could not be sustained without it. Revisionist historiography provided an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the South African state, capital, and labor organizations in the first half of the 20th century, seeking to analyze the reasons for the failure of the cross-racial alliance in the labor movement and the role played by white labor in constructing and maintaining racial capitalism. Revisionist scholars refuted the Liberal view, denying that South African racism was a product of the encounter between Boers and Bantu in frontiers; instead, they emphasized that the rise and consolidation of apartheid were closely linked to the mineral revolution of the late 19th century, the penetration of British capital and imperialism in Southern Africa, and the accompanying development of the migrant labor system. Revisionist historiography also stressed that in the early stages of South African capitalist development, indigenous reserves sustained the cheap migrant labor system. As the economy of these reserves decayed, the original model of segregation became unsustainable; thus, the apartheid system that appeared after 1948 was an adjustment and reinforcement of the previous segregation patterns. Revisionists emphasized that apartheid was compatible with post-WWII capitalism, thereby challenging the Liberal belief that economic development would dissolve racial rule. Revisionist historiography was deeply influenced by Western Marxism [2], particularly the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. By the 1980s, the revisionist school gained the upper hand in debates with the Liberal school and became increasingly dominant in South African historiography. The revisionist school focused on grand theoretical questions, emphasizing especially that apartheid was largely shaped by capital; they paid less attention to specific production processes and African social agency, and rarely focused on the strikes and resistance sweeping South Africa at the time.
The social history represented by the History Workshop also belongs to the revisionist school, but it emerged based on reflection and critique of Structuralist revisionist historiography and was deeply influenced by British Marxist historiography. British Marxist historians such as E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Eugene Genovese criticized "top-down" theoretical explanations for ignoring the agency, consciousness, and experiences of ordinary people. They advocated for "history from below," emphasizing the complex links between economy, culture, experience, and consciousness, and called for attention to marginalized groups—all of which provided a theoretical framework for South African social history. The influence of British Marxist historiography on the History Workshop is specifically reflected in the research of Peter Delius and Charles van Onselen. Delius applied the concept of "moral economy" to study the history of the rural Transvaal; van Onselen sought to reveal the history of overlooked people, emphasizing the role of pre-industrial social relations in shaping working-class identity and researching informal social resistance.
The History Workshop drew on the experience of the British History Workshop movement. Its two founders, Belinda Bozzoli and Charles van Onselen, had attended meetings of the British History Workshop, which is a clear manifestation of the profound influence of British Marxist historiography. The British History Workshop movement emerged under the influence of the "Communist Party Historians Group," widely distributing pamphlets and the History Workshop Journal. It aimed to promote "history from below" and was widely popular in the UK during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Third, the African national independence movements and the development of African historiography. In the 1960s, the rise of African national independence movements and the establishment and development of African history as a discipline exerted a massive influence on South African historiography, particularly in orienting South African historians toward the history of the country's Black population. Along with the rise of African nation-states, African history was established as a formal discipline; the research of Jan Vansina regarding oral tradition played an especially important role in this process. Influenced by the study of oral tradition in African historiography, researchers of South African social history also sought to "give a voice to the voiceless" by collecting oral materials, intending to demonstrate the experiences of the African masses during the course of 20th-century South African social transformation. Oral history research became a key factor in the rise of South African social historiography, the most typical example of which is the research of Charles van Onselen. For instance, he conducted in-depth interviews with a sharecropper named Kas Maine, attempting through his life experiences to reveal the transformations in rural production and social relations in the Transvaal, South Africa, from 1914 to 1966.
The Wits History Workshop [3] was also directly influenced by African historical studies in the United Kingdom. During the British Imperial period, cultural ties between the British mainland and South Africa were close; Britain was the preferred destination for South African students studying abroad, and the British academic environment greatly influenced the Wits History Workshop. More than half of the early members of the Wits History Workshop graduated from British universities. Influenced by the independence of African nation-states, African historical studies rose in Britain with a high degree of focus on African historical agency. For example, at that time, the Department of History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London—the primary institution for African historical studies in the UK—focused on issues such as African resistance, Black national self-determination, and pre-colonial state-building. British African historiography profoundly influenced the Wits History Workshop. African historians Leonard Thompson and Shula Marks supervised many students from South Africa, many of whom became the backbone of South African social history research, such as William Beinart, Peter Delius, Deborah Gaitskell, Jeff Guy, Heather Hughes, Tim Keegan, Sheila Meintjies, Susan Newton-King, Kevin Shillington, Rob Turrell, and Brian Willan.
Fourth, the transformation of South African universities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, drastic changes occurred in South African universities, providing conditions for the development of anti-apartheid thought. At that time, there were three types of universities in South Africa: Afrikaner universities, which firmly supported the apartheid system; government-founded, segregated Black universities, which, despite becoming "hotbeds" for Black student protest activities, were dominated by pro-government Afrikaner professors and government officials; and British-descended white-dominated universities, which is where social history research emerged. In the late 1970s, English-speaking white universities expanded their enrollment of Black students. The number of Black students at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) increased rapidly, reaching one-quarter of the total student body by the early 1990s. Furthermore, the surging number of Black students was mainly concentrated in the humanities and social sciences; they had been active in political activities during high school or in their home townships and frequently clashed with white military and police. Meanwhile, in white-dominated universities, white students also formed the left-wing National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). In such a campus atmosphere, undergraduate curricula in history and social science departments were deeply influenced by Marxism, especially Edward P. Thompson's theories regarding labor, culture, and politics. This was the case at Wits, the University of Natal, the University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, and the University of the Western Cape; it was precisely in this university environment that the Wits History Workshop was born.
II. Major Activities of the Wits History Workshop
In 1976, historian Philip Bonner and sociologist Eddie Webster chaired the first academic conference on South African labor history, laying the foundation for the creation of the Wits History Workshop. The Wits History Workshop was formally established in 1977 and held its first academic conference in early 1978. The collected papers published from this conference reflected how the struggle against apartheid profoundly shaped the research interests of the Wits History Workshop. In the introduction to the collection, Belinda Bozzoli articulated the academic mission of the Wits History Workshop: "[We] seek to present the history of the Witwatersrand region from the perspective of 'the people,' such as factory and mine workers, domestic servants, hawkers, or the unemployed 'proletariat'... we are attempting to rewrite the history of the Witwatersrand from a popular perspective."
Although the members of the Wits History Workshop had vast differences in academic thought, diverse disciplinary backgrounds, and wide-ranging research interests, the core personnel were mostly historical researchers, some of whom had studied under the supervision of Shula Marks at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, and Stanley Trapido at Oxford University. Belinda Bozzoli was responsible for the work of the Wits History Workshop until 1987, after which she was succeeded in turn by Philip Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien. In the thirty-plus years since its founding, "the Wits History Workshop has developed into the most important group of historians in South Africa." The Wits History Workshop is an interdisciplinary research network responsible for organizing academic conferences, seminars, and exhibitions. It primarily focuses on 19th and 20th-century history, advocating for the study of South African history over a longue durée, involving topics such as proletarianization, urbanization, migratory mobility, cultural activities, labor organization methods, and leisure and entertainment. Interdisciplinary research was common in African studies programs in European and American universities at the time, but it was a pioneering endeavor in the fields of South African humanities and social sciences.
Starting from 1978, the Wits History Workshop held an academic conference every three years to promote "bottom-up" social history research, focusing on the history, culture, and ideological concepts of ordinary people in rural and urban areas. The theme of the 1978 conference was "Labor, Townships, and Patterns of Protest in the Witwatersrand," advocating for the rewriting of the region's history from a "grassroots" perspective. The 1981 conference theme was "Town and Countryside in the Transvaal"; the 1984 theme was "Class, Community, and Conflict: Local Perspectives"; and the 1987 theme was "The Making of Class." The scope of the Wits History Workshop's conferences continued to expand, gradually extending to the whole of South Africa. Since the 1990s, the Wits History Workshop has become more theoretically diverse; for example, the 1990 conference "Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid" focused not only on "bottom-up" popular history but also on state institutions. The 1992 conference theme was "Myths, Monuments, and Museums," focusing on the cultural politics of nationalism. The number of forum participants also gradually increased from the initial twenty or thirty to over a hundred. A series of papers, monographs, and collected volumes published by Wits History Workshop scholars greatly promoted the development of South African historiography.
The abolition of the apartheid system profoundly influenced the development of South African historiography; the social function of history in the New South Africa became the primary concern for South African historians. The Wits History Workshop advocated for historiography to play an active role in the nation-building of the New South Africa. In 1994, the theme of the Wits History Workshop’s annual conference was "Democracy: Popular Precedents, Popular Practice, and Popular Culture," which focused not only on nationalism and nation-building but also highlighted issues of power and the state. In 1999, the workshop's academic conference focused on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, concentrating on the issue of historical memory, reflecting the deep influence of the "cultural turn." In 2001, the Wits History Workshop’s annual conference took HIV/AIDS as its theme, exploring the relationship between sexuality and social power while focusing on the disease. In the same year, the Wits History Workshop and the newly established Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) jointly held a seminar entitled "The Burden of Race? 'Whiteness' and 'Blackness' in Modern South Africa." This was the first academic conference in South Africa specifically dedicated to discussing racial issues, reflecting the Wits History Workshop's increasing engagement with the political and social challenges facing the New South Africa. The Wits History Workshop also established close ties with international labor history organizations in Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna, and held international academic conferences in 2006 and 2008 to promote the study of South African labor history from a global history perspective.
As previously mentioned, the Wits History Workshop emerged on the basis of inheriting and criticizing structuralist revisionist historiography. It criticized structuralist revisionist historiography for appearing too crude when compared to empirical research, for unrealistically transplanting European theories to Africa, and for overemphasizing the decisive role of economic factors in South African history, thereby severely erasing the historical agency of the people. Compared with structuralist revisionist historiography, the Wits History Workshop focused more on the important role of factors such as culture, consciousness, and identity in the South African historical process. The historiographical concepts of the Wits History Workshop include the following:
First, regarding the relationship between capital and the state, it emphasized that the apartheid regime was not "monolithic" [4] but rather contained serious internal divisions. Structuralist revisionist historiography emphasized that the South African state operated according to the interests of the bourgeoisie to ensure a cheap and easily controlled labor supply, focusing on interest groups uniting to compete for state power. The Wits History Workshop, however, emphasized that the apartheid regime had serious internal divisions; conflicts often existed between municipalities and the central government or between different government departments, which frequently implemented contradictory policies that did not always follow the expectations of the dominant class. To maintain the illusion of social stability, the apartheid government needed to maintain a certain degree of balance among capitalists, the white working class, regional and ethnic interests, influential intellectuals, religious lobby groups, and some Black leaders. Governments at all levels in South Africa could not merely suppress Black resistance; they also had to adopt policies of appeasement.
Second, regarding the formation of the migrant labor system, it argued that race and class are fluid and constantly changing with shifts in historical conditions. Structuralist revisionist historiography emphasized that the migrant labor system was the foundation of the South African capitalist system, and that this system was imposed "from the top down" by white rulers to create an extremely cheap labor supply. Harold Wolpe proposed the "cheap labor power hypothesis," emphasizing that the indigenous reserve system subsidized the modern capitalist economy by providing basic subsistence and kinship-based social welfare networks. According to this theory, the South African migrant labor system needed to maintain a certain balance: it had to keep the population of the reserves poor enough that they had no choice but to seek employment within the capitalist economy; at the same time, the reserve population could not be so poor as to impair the reserve’s function of subsidizing the capitalist economy. As productivity within the reserves declined, the apartheid government increasingly relied on repressive means to maintain this system. Deeply influenced by British Marxist historiography, the Wits History Workshop criticized the serious limitations of the structuralist class analysis framework; while acknowledging the subsidizing function of Black indigenous reserves for the capitalist economy, it also emphasized that the formation of the migrant labor system was driven by the needs of the reserve peasantry. They also emphasized the "making" of the South African working class, focusing more on the agency and daily lives of Black laborers, attempting to write a more complex cultural and social life history.
Third, focusing on black urban culture. The Wits History Workshop [5] focuses on urbanization, the liquor economy, black gang culture in towns, the working-class quest for respectability, and the emergence of an educated elite, seeking to demonstrate the complexity of black urban culture. These studies emphasize that black townships were not merely residential areas for black laborers and their families, but also created the conditions for the rise of a distinct black urban culture. This research also attends to the cultural links between urban and rural populations, a facet overlooked by structuralist revisionist historiography. For example, van Onselen's influential research on the early history of the Witwatersrand towns, particularly his work on the liquor economy, banditry, and informal trade, has shaped subsequent urban history research.
III. Academic Contributions of the Wits History Workshop
In the South African historical community of the 1970s and 80s, the Wits History Workshop was not alone in its commitment to social history. For instance, the University of Cape Town held academic conferences centered on Cape local history, and the University of Natal actively promoted research into Natal's history. Simultaneously, South African historians abroad were also advancing South African social history. Figures such as Shula Marks, Richard Rathbone, and Stanley Trapido, who were teaching in the UK at the time, held joint conferences and co-published essay collections with the Wits History Workshop. The significance of the Workshop lay in its role as the primary bastion of South African social history at the time; by gathering researchers from different disciplines around the study of South African social history, it developed a social historiography with distinct South African indigenous characteristics. Broadly speaking, the academic contributions of the Wits History Workshop can be summarized in four points.
First, an emphasis on local history research. Before the emergence of the Wits History Workshop in the 1970s, local history had not received much attention in South African historiography. At that time, local history literature was largely published by municipal authorities, aimed at glorifying the history of white towns, with Black people appearing only as marginal social forces. The outbreak of the Soweto Uprising [6] led many South African scholars to realize that the anti-apartheid struggle would primarily occur within urban environments. This differed from anti-colonial struggles in many other parts of Africa; hence, it became necessary to conduct in-depth research into the nature of conflict and inequality in South African towns and to explore possible solutions. By focusing on the local, the Wits History Workshop brought local history—and the Black history it reflected—into the mainstream of historical research. Although scholars at other South African universities also began writing local history, the Workshop's unique contribution was achieving the synthesis of local history and social history. The local history perspective was particularly suited to the "history from below" approach emphasized by social history, aligning with its advocacy for the lived experiences of ordinary people. Belinda Bozzoli pointed out at the Workshop's founding that black townships were products of the apartheid system and were closely linked to the many social problems facing South Africa today; research into these towns should be "the most noteworthy aspect of the neglected history of the South African working class." Urban history has since remained a core focus of the Workshop.
During the 1970s and 80s, social historians also focused on how women newly arriving in towns struggled to make a living in slums, on black teachers and nurses attempting to join the urban elite, and on how urban youth creatively shaped a new popular culture. In these social history studies, ordinary people were no longer seen as anonymous figures in the historical process but as individuals shaping their own history. Simultaneously, the Workshop’s scope gradually expanded beyond the urban areas of the Witwatersrand. While the city remained the center of concern for these social historians, rural areas and urban-rural relations began to receive attention. These studies highlighted the agency of ordinary people and contributed to a deeper understanding of class formation in black residential areas.
At the beginning of the 1990s, when the New South African government was established, the influence of the Wits History Workshop reached its peak. Members were actively involved in discussions regarding urban reconstruction in the post-apartheid era and were commissioned by the government to write a series of semi-official township histories. For example, the Workshop focused on the black urban settlements of Soweto and Kathorus. While exploring "perspectives from below," these studies also began to attend to influences "from above," consciously "incorporating the state into the historical picture and emphasizing that the anti-apartheid struggle was a combination of struggle from below and intervention from above." The writing of urban history became a significant contribution of the Wits History Workshop to urban reconstruction, epitomized by the "Alexandra Social History Project." Alexandra’s geographical location was suitable for black laborers seeking employment; after the government relaxed controls on black laborers entering cities in the mid-1980s, the town's population grew rapidly, and the problem of lagging infrastructure became increasingly prominent. In 2001, the Alexandra municipal government planned to invest 1.3 billion Rand over seven years in municipal facilities to achieve urban renewal, with heritage conservation as a key component. Noor Nieftagodien and Philip Bonner’s book Alexandra: A History was completed based on this project.
Around 2010, the Workshop's research areas expanded from major urban centers to small towns and rural areas in inland provinces, extensively carrying out local history projects in Gauteng, Free State, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, and North West provinces. The rise of these local history projects was closely related to the widespread protests occurring across South Africa. These protests primarily took place in the poorest and most marginalized areas, reflecting a lack of full understanding by the government and academia of the dynamics and complexity of local politics, particularly regarding the violent xenophobic events that broke out in several South African towns in 2008. Furthermore, the Workshop’s research on small towns possesses special theoretical significance. In the early 1990s, the mainstream historical discourse in South African historiography regarded the founding of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912 as the starting point of the anti-apartheid struggle and the ANC’s accession to power in 1994 as its culmination. This historical narrative overemphasized national party organizations like the ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the Pan Africanist Congress, while neglecting the vital roles played by towns, schools, and factories in the anti-apartheid movement.
In 2007, the National Research Foundation (NRF) provided funding for Philip Bonner’s research project "Local Histories and Present Realities." In 2012, the NRF continued to support Noor Nieftagodien in conducting urban history research. Besides this, the Wits History Workshop collaborated with the Center for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES) and the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Additionally, the Centre for Social Change [7] at the University of Johannesburg and the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal have also been engaged in urban history research. The activities of these research centers indicate the increasing prosperity of South African urban and local history, while also reflecting the profound influence of the urban history research pioneered by the Wits History Workshop during the anti-apartheid struggle.
Second, advocating for a public history oriented toward the people. From its inception, the Wits History Workshop focused on labor history and worker education, later gradually developing a strong interest in mass resistance movements and school education. The 1976 Soweto Uprising and the large-scale anti-apartheid struggles in South African towns in the 1980s led social historians to incorporate culture into their research paradigm, thereby deepening the understanding of class formation. Eddie Webster and Philip Bonner, long-term participants in the trade union movement, realized during the actual struggle the need to provide support for the black trade union movement through public history education. Simultaneously, the Wits History Workshop maintained close ties with the United Democratic Front (UDF), which also presented an urgent demand to the Workshop for the compilation of historical teaching materials. Furthermore, key members such as Charles van Onselen and Belinda Bozzoli had participated in the activities of the History Workshop in Britain; deeply influenced by it, they were actively committed to promoting the development of public history.
First, the Wits History Workshop promotes its research findings to the public. It takes the experiences of dispossessed populations, the working class, and the lower strata of society as its research subjects and links historical research to political activism. The Workshop attempts to disseminate historical knowledge by providing accessible, non-academic publications. Luli Callinicos compiled the three-volume A People's History of South Africa, covering themes such as the formation of the black working class, the emergence of migrant labor, and the lives and urban socio-cultural history of workers. The first volume, Gold and Workers, 1886–1924, circulated widely among the South African public and became a textbook in the 1990s. Callinicos's subsequent two works focused on the industrialization and urbanization processes in mid-20th century South Africa. The second volume, Working Life: Factories, Townships, and Popular Culture on the Rand, 1886–1940, won the 1988 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. The third volume, A Place in the City: The Rand on the Eve of Apartheid, discusses South Africa’s industrialization process, working-class struggles, and the rise of apartheid in the 1940s. Philip Bonner and Lauren Segal's Soweto: A History provided a detailed account of the establishment and development of this famous black community and was later adapted into a documentary. Additionally, from 1986 to 1990, the Wits History Workshop published a series of articles on South African history in the New Nation newspaper, providing a new framework for Black people to understand and analyze South African social conditions under apartheid, thereby bolstering the morale of the mass anti-apartheid struggle. These articles were later collected and published as the book New Nation, New History.
Second, the Wits History Workshop established Open Day activities. Since its founding, it has attempted to integrate with ordinary people, holding Open Day events alongside its annual academic conferences. This activity continued for over a decade, attracting workers, students, and social activists to participate in public cultural events. Activities included organizing worker choirs, dance troupes, and theater groups, as well as holding concerts, exhibitions, and public lectures by scholars. With the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, the public gained more channels to express their demands, and the meaning of public history underwent a profound change. The Wits History Workshop no longer viewed the society outside the university as "occasional visitors" but as "partners" in the writing of history. The Wits History Workshop has played an active constructive role in the New South Africa, building communication platforms for academics and social activists, public intellectuals, policy researchers, and government officials. It provides a historical perspective for understanding the pressing practical problems facing South Africa, such as historical truth, national reconciliation, HIV/AIDS, and racism. The Workshop has innovated in public history by directly participating in and advocating for it, providing critical information for museums, monuments, exhibitions, and commemorative days—for instance, promoting the establishment of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. The historical narrative presented in the museum focuses not only on the apartheid government's repression of Black people but also showcases the daily lives and culture of black laborers, reflecting the distinctive characteristics of the Wits History Workshop. The museum has since become one of Johannesburg's tourism landmarks. In 2016, its "Everyday and Public History" project received funding from the National Research Foundation.
Furthermore, the Wits History Workshop played a significant role in the planning of secondary school history curricula. As early as the 1980s, the Workshop began focusing on the vital role secondary school teachers played in the field of public history, specifically establishing an annual teachers' workshop. As South African society engaged in heated debates surrounding the crisis in the schooling system and "People's Education" [8], the history syllabus became a focal point. Two members of the Wits History Workshop, Susan Krige and Luli Callinicos, called on the historiographical community to strengthen communication with secondary school teachers to eliminate racist elements from history textbooks. Following the abolition of apartheid, South Africa’s secondary school history syllabus and educational policies underwent profound changes. The new syllabus listed oral history as a central component, yet it failed to provide operational guidelines. Leveraging its long-term experience in oral history research, the Wits History Workshop actively stepped in to fill this gap. It resumed the annual teachers' workshop, teaching educators the fundamental knowledge of oral history and specific methods for its application in classroom instruction.
Third, it emphasized the importance of oral history research. This emphasis was a major methodological contribution of the Wits History Workshop. A prerequisite for writing "history from below" was the application of oral history methods. South African social historians, including those at the Wits History Workshop, advocated for overcoming the limitations of written documents through oral history. They emphasized that the stories and voices revealed by oral sources were not merely "embellishments to the historical archive," but rather integrated issues of agency, experience, and consciousness into a profound understanding of class formation and capital accumulation. Under apartheid, Black South Africans were generally only permitted primary education until the 1960s, meaning Black experiences were rarely preserved in written form. Furthermore, Black activities were usually only recorded when the apartheid regime viewed them as a "problem"; consequently, much of Black productive life went undocumented. Because of this, oral interviews constitute a vital source for researching the social and political history of Black South Africans. South African social historians applied oral history methods to the study of factories, mines, and rural areas to reveal many facets of social change, such as the formation of the Black proletariat, working-class life and culture, the living conditions of Black laborers, the "moral economy" of urban miners, the consciousness and political associations of migrant laborers, and criminal activity under urban apartheid. Beyond the Wits History Workshop, other entities engaged in oral history included the Oral Documentation Project at the Wits Institute for African Studies, the Cape Town Oral History Project, and the Natal Worker History Project.
Fourth, it promoted the study of gender history. In the 1980s, a group of social historians, including Belinda Bozzoli of the Wits History Workshop, actively advocated for gender history. They called for attention to cross-class forces such as gender and ethnicity, critiqued structuralist revisionist historiography for its serious neglect of African women's historical agency, and opposed simplifying the social role of women under the oppressive system of racial capitalism to a mere issue of the social reproduction of labor. They challenged previous schools of South African historiography, criticizing the tendency of both nationalism and liberalism to focus primarily on white or Black South African men. Although previous research on trade unionism had touched upon African women, the analytical framework emphasized by feminist historians focused not only on women's identity as workers but also on their social identity as women. Research on rural households, migrant labor, patterns of urbanization, and urban culture involved extensive discussions on gender and intergenerational relations. Driven by these social historians, gender history became increasingly popular within South African academia.
IV. Fundamental Evaluation
The 1980s and 1990s marked the period of greatest influence for radical historiography in South Africa. As the most influential radical historical research network of the time, the Wits History Workshop was "the core institution that propelled 'history from below' to a dominant position in South African historiography." Social history, represented by the Wits History Workshop, emerged in the process of challenging the structuralist Marxism that was then mainstream in South African historiography. Against the backdrop of the anti-apartheid struggle, the Workshop paid particular attention to the history of ordinary people and urban history, using historical research and the dissemination of knowledge as tools for the struggle. It focused intensely on African agency, advocated for "history from below," and attended to the conflicts and reconciliations in the daily lives of different classes and groups, emphasizing that these seemingly mundane changes formed the basis upon which South Africa's specific class, cultural, and ideological patterns were shaped. Following the abolition of apartheid, it adapted to the trends of the times to contribute to the reconstruction of the New South Africa. The social history represented by the Wits History Workshop greatly expanded the scope of modern South African historiography, making South African history one of the most dynamic and innovative fields of African historiography.
After the abolition of apartheid in the 1990s, South Africa entered a new period of development. The intellectual and cultural spheres became increasingly pluralistic; in particular, post-colonialism and postmodernism posed challenges to the Wits History Workshop and the social history it represented. In this context, social history needed to prove its continued legitimacy in the post-apartheid era. More seriously, not just social history but South African historiography as a whole showed signs of decline. Broadly speaking, the Wits History Workshop faced criticism in three areas.
First, the Wits History Workshop paid relatively little attention to theoretical exploration. Some critics argued that most research at the Workshop's inception was organized around class as the main thread—focusing on urbanization, intergenerational relations, and rural-urban political culture—but rarely elucidated its conceptual or epistemological foundations. In the 1990s, South African social history research seldom engaged in international academic discussions regarding post-colonialism. This stands in stark contrast to "Subaltern Studies" in India. Subaltern Studies also developed out of social history but, while summarizing the Indian experience, actively participated in international theoretical debates and exerted a massive influence. The Wits History Workshop did not show much interest in similar theoretical inquiries, focusing more on empirical research, which to some extent limited its academic influence.
Second, the participants of the Wits History Workshop were predominantly white scholars. Although the number of Black scholars in the series of academic conferences held by the Workshop gradually increased, they remained a minority. This issue did not receive much attention in the 1980s because leftist scholars and students from Wits and other universities were united against the apartheid system. In the 1990s, Black students clashed with university authorities over racial issues, a development that white leftist professors were reluctant to see. The Wits History Workshop increasingly faced criticism that its research remained dominated by whites who rarely engaged with historical discussions from other parts of the African continent; that they focused too much on local history while lacking generalization and synthesis; that the social historians' analytical framework overemphasized class while avoiding the issue of racial oppression; and that they failed to fully draw on the methodologies of other disciplines. Detractors also criticized the fact that most white social historians were not proficient in African languages and had to rely primarily on Black assistants to conduct research, while the academic contributions of these Black assistants were ignored in the process.
Third, the research methods of the Wits History Workshop were also questioned. The post-colonialism and postmodernism that have risen in recent years oppose the isolated study of South African towns, criticizing the urban history advocated by the Workshop as being "history in the town" rather than "history of the town." They advocate for understanding the history of South African towns in conjunction with the process of globalization, viewing them as "proving grounds" for African modernity and as manifestations of globalism in Africa, emphasizing that African towns can be studied in the same way as international metropolises like New York or London. The oral history methods advocated by the Workshop were also criticized for failing to pay sufficient attention to the issue of historical memory, instead purposefully searching for data useful to their own research while neglecting the power relations inherent in the oral interview process.
Some researchers from the Wits History Workshop have responded to these criticisms. For example, Workshop member Isabel Hofmeyr advocated for a cautious approach to the "orality" in oral sources, viewing it more as a "genre of history" rather than a "repository" of memory. Belinda Bozzoli also emphasized that oral sources as texts "cannot perfectly reflect life and thus cannot accurately reveal 'myths in a cultural and psychological sense,'" advocating for the treatment of life histories as texts and the use of literary analysis methods to study them. Moreover, since obtaining funding from the South African National Research Foundation, the Wits History Workshop has been dedicated to training a new generation of historical researchers, particularly Black scholars.
In recent years, South African historiography has become increasingly diversified. A series of research achievements emerging in fields such as gender history, intellectual history, historical memory, Afrikaner society, the South African state, and art history indicate that research themes and methods are expanding, while traditional social history has seen a decrease in attention. Nevertheless, the contribution of the Wits History Workshop to the development of South African historiography cannot be ignored: the social history research it advocated in the 1980s greatly transformed the basic face of South African historiography and contributed to the anti-apartheid struggle; after the abolition of apartheid, it actively participated in the construction of history curricula for South African secondary schools and provided historical information for museums, monuments, exhibitions, and anniversaries, thereby contributing to public history; it also provided an important historical perspective on social problems facing the New South Africa, such as historical truth, national reconciliation, and AIDS. In an era where new perspectives and methods for historical research emerge incessantly, the Wits History Workshop's persistence in oral history and local history research is particularly valuable. To this day, the practical concern [9] exhibited by the Wits History Workshop continues to profoundly influence the writing of South African history.
(About the Author: Li Pengtao is a researcher at the Institute of African Studies, Zhejiang Normal University)