Founded in 1977 at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, the History Workshop was the product of intersecting impulses that coursed through the academy and society in South Africa and globally in the 1970s and 1980s. Its name was inspired by the History Workshop based at Ruskin College, Oxford in the UK. Several of the founders of the Wits History Workshop had been postgraduate students in the early 1970s at UK universities such as SOAS, Warwick and Oxford, where they were influenced by Marxist historiography and social history. The Ruskin-based History Workshop’s emphasis on human agency and the social, political and ideological character of class appeared to the Wits academics to offer ‘many superior tools to understand the explosion of popular resistance’ across South Africa.
These founders were academics from various disciplines at the university who were influenced by New Left politics, the development of social history especially in Europe in the 1960s and the anti-colonial struggles that had swept across the African continent from the 1950s. They were revisionists who challenged the dominant conservative and liberal historiographies that marginalised and erased black experiences. Their counter-hegemonic narratives instead emphasised African history, including of precolonial societies and ‘histories from below’. Their work aimed to uncover ‘hidden histories’ of the black majority in the connected spheres of production and reproduction, with particular attention given to socio-political and cultural experiences in order better to comprehend the making of social groups and their agency.
In 2009, the History Workshop hosted an international colloquium – ‘Life After Thirty’ – to reflect on its past and present and to consider future directions. In his keynote address, Phil Bonner, the director and one of the founders, offered a useful periodisation of the development of the History Workshop since its founding. The first spanned the years from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when the organisation experienced robust growth and established itself as one of the main centres of social history in the country, which coincided with the upsurge in popular struggles against apartheid. The second phase took place across the 1990s, during which, he averred, the History Workshop experienced a hiatus and even a loss of direction in a context of transition from mass resistance to a constitutional order. The third period began in the late 1990s, when the History Workshop experienced a sharp increase in activities and charted new directions in its research endeavours.
Politically, the revival of radical trade unions and black student movements in the early 1970s re-energised the black liberation struggle. By the mid-1980s, mass popular movements had sprung up in almost every part of the country, punctuated by key moments such as the 1973 and 1982 strike waves, the 1976 and 1980 student rebellions and the establishment of major local and national organisations. It was no accident that the History Workshop was launched a year after the historic Soweto uprising of 1976. Its social history was oppositional and influenced by Marxism, thus echoing the intellectual and political dispositions of its global counterparts. Its research was suffused with histories of resistance, from indigenous societies’ struggles against dispossession to the movements of workers in mines, factories and racially-segregated townships in the rapidly developing urban centres of the twentieth century. The recovery of these histories was largely achieved through the collection of oral histories that over the years resulted in the creation of an impressive archive.
From 1978, the History Workshop convened triennial conferences where path-breaking research was presented, which influenced the development of history and cognate disciplines across universities. Major publications emanated from these conferences, whose titles highlighted the central concerns of social history: Labour, Townships and Protests Labour: Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand (1979); Town And Countryside in The Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Responses (1983); Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (1987).
In 1990, as the country pivoted towards a negotiations process to formally end apartheid, a conference on the ‘making of apartheid’ was organised to bring research on the state and economy into conversation with local and social history studies. These events and the ensuing volumes were high points of the History Workshop’s contribution to scholarship. But as the 1990s unfolded, it confronted headwinds from at least two directions. Having grown up in a milieu of political resistance, the History Workshop struggled to re-orient itself in the new political dispensation. This moment also coincided with mounting critiques of social history and oral methods, which belatedly reached the shores of the South African academy but with considerable ferocity. Among the charges levelled at social historians were that they paid insufficient attention to theory and produced new master narratives, and that their use of oral history failed to engage critiques of memory and merely mined oral sources for information. These critiques engendered self-reflection that opened pathways for new intellectual engagements.
From the late-1990s, the History Workshop turned its attention to how historical scholarship could contribute to debates on critical issues confronting the new democratic order. Following the completion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it partnered with civil society organisations in 1999 to convene a conference (‘Commissioning the Past’), which critically examined issues such as memory, memorialisation and the politics of archiving. Two years later, it mounted another major conference focused on HIV/AIDS, a disease that caused illness and death of alarming numbers of people in South Africa and elsewhere, the denial of which by the government generated intense public controversy. The conference was energised by the hugely successful civil society campaign, led by the Treatment Action Campaign, for access to affordable anti-retroviral medication.
History Workshop also co-hosted perhaps the first academic conference in the country that explicitly centred the issue of race: ‘The Burden of Race? “Whiteness” and “Blackness” in Modern South Africa’. At the same time, liberation historiography experienced a sharp increase in popularity, creating opportunities for the History Workshop to re-invigorate its long-standing commitment to histories of resistance. There followed conferences and publications on histories of global labour movements, the United Democratic Front (the leading national front of popular organisations in the 1980s), the underground and military struggles, the African National Congress and the Communist Party.
From the mid-2000s, the History Workshop was inundated with requests from communities and local government to produce township histories. These initiatives were arguably driven by a resurgence of local popular struggles, emerging disenchantment with grand national narratives that seemed to exclude local experiences, and the growth of local development programmes that generally included heritage projects. Being immersed in these projects engendered reconnections with and advancement of three important foci that had shaped our research agenda from the 1980s: the local, the everyday and public history.
This renewed emphasis on local history allowed us to contend with the complexities of the relationship between the past and present-day realities, using the ‘local’ as a prism through which larger questions could be illuminated. Drawing on theoretical contributions by radical geographers, our research engaged questions about the meanings of the local, the social production of place and space, and articulations between different geographic scales in the making of state and emancipatory politics. Importantly, we shifted attention to medium-sized towns and their rural hinterlands, which remained almost completely neglected in the extant scholarship.
A whole new body of original interdisciplinary research was produced on numerous places, from streets and hostels to bantustans – areas used to segregate the black population of South Africa under apartheid – as well as former and emerging mining towns. Research on bantustans examined how their economic and political elites, developed under apartheid, often played crucial roles in the new democratic state and local economic initiatives, including new mining ventures supported by multinational companies. An emphasis on the production of local emancipatory spaces highlighted women’s central role in various social movements that have tended to be marginalised by the pre-occupation with formal, male-dominated political parties. Inspired by the Fees Must Fall movement, which began at Wits, several postgraduate projects focused on historic and contemporary student movements. Their research highlighted how race, gender and generation shaped the constitution, ideologies and repertoires of struggles of these movements.
History Workshop scholars deliberately cast a wide thematic net to incorporate youth politics, the local state, traditional authorities, identities (especially gender, sexual orientations and race), new social movements, migration, biography and the creation of new economic elites. As this research unfolded, several issues emerged that coalesced around the concept of ‘the everyday’. Although we had consistently interrogated quotidian experiences of ‘ordinary people’, it tended to be fragmented and addressed as an attendant issue to our primary focus on the local, rather than at the conceptual core of our work. Of course, the ‘turn’ to the everyday was rooted in and elaborated a long-standing commitment to social history. We also viewed this as an opportunity to interrogate the meanings and practices of political resistance and contentious movements by emphasising their affective dimensions. Additionally, concerted attention was given to the production of social, cultural and convivial spaces, and the constitution of subjectivities. In this respect, the yards in old black working-class locations were key spaces of social interaction and of the production of contentious politics. In the 1970s and 1980s, meanwhile, conflict between security forces and students often centred on control of spaces such as schools and streets.
Finally, public history re-emerged as a central area of our work from the mid-2000s. Its roots were in the proliferation of people’s history in the 1980s, when producing and learning histories of black resistance were integral to emancipatory politics. At the time, the demand for access to resistance histories resulted in the dissemination of popular histories as booklets, documentaries, regular features in the burgeoning alternative press and so forth. The History Workshop was one among several university-based units that collaborated with movements to produce these histories. For example, Luli Callinicos published the immensely popular trilogy – A People’s History of South Africa – which placed the exploitation and resistance of black workers at the center of a revised history of the Witwatersrand, the mining and industrial epicenter of the country. Leslie Witz’ Write Your Own History (a collaboration between History Workshop and the South African Committee on Higher Education) provided a roadmap for how communities and organizations could go about researching and writing their histories.
The nascent transformation of the heritage and museum landscape as part of the democratising process was signalled by the 1992 conference, ‘Myths, Monuments and Museums’. However, our involvement in the development of new museums really crystalised when members became involved in, among others, the Apartheid Museum, Constitution Hill and the Alexandra Museum. From the early 2000s, research in black working-class townships around Johannesburg (Soweto, Alexandra and Tembisa) shifted to the co-production of histories with local organisations, as well as the creation of community archives.
Public history programmes expanded quickly to include collaborations on histories of trade unions, student organisations, the non-racial sports movement, alternative education movements and the Black Consciousness Movement. Despite its prominence in the liberation struggle, there remains a dearth of histories of the country’s largest and most well-known township: Soweto. Recently, the Soweto History and Archives Project was established as a partnership between the History Workshop and community-based groups including museums, heritage societies, art and music organizations, and individuals interested in local and family histories. In addition to undertaking collaborative research, the project is also creating archives, comprising oral histories and material collected from organizations, families, and individuals.
The rich inheritance of earlier iterations of the History Workshop continues to inform our work today and its future directions. Since 2007, much of our research has been driven by a small group of established scholars and cohorts of postgraduate students. Close to 130 postgraduates have undertaken research in more than 80 locales spread across the northern provinces of the country and in the process deepened and extended our research agenda. Importantly, many of them are early career black women who have produced new and critical histories of women, often drawing on black feminist traditions. The articles in this series offer a glimpse into some of the innovative research emanating from the History Workshop in recent years, which are inspired by the intellectual foundations established by earlier generations.
Select bibliography:
Arianna Lissoni, Noor Nieftagodien, and Shireen Ally, ‘Introduction to Special Issue: ‘Life after Thirty’ – A Critical Celebration’, African Studies 69 (2010).
Phil Bonner, ‘Keynote Address to the ‘Life after Thirty’ Colloquium’, African Studies 69 (2010), 13–27.
Special issue ‘Let’s talk about bantustans’, South African Historical Journal 64 (2012).
Arianna Lissoni and Maria Suriano, ‘Married to the ANC: Tanzanian Women’s Entanglement in South Africa’s Liberation Struggle’, Journal of Southern African Studies 40 (2014)
Noor Nieftagodien, ‘Public History and Emancipatory Politics in Transition: From the Anti-Apartheid Struggle to Democracy in South Africa’, International Public History 7 (2024).