This "Special Topics" course examines a different debate in the historiography of South Africa each week, including the question of resistance and indigenous agency, the "colonization of consciousness," the contested status of Bushmen, feminist revisionism, and recent understandings of witchcraft as particularly modern, and provocative populist methodologies. The course is aimed at history graduate students of a comparative mindset, who want a comparative context for Latin American, U.S., Modern European or other colonial-related fields of inquiry. You will also master the basic outline of South Africa's history in current thinking and you need no prior knowledge of South Africa.

Your job will be to read the reading, take notes from it, and come to class ready to join in discussion. Another requirement is to contribute one Optional Paper, a historiographic review for your classmates' use and benefit. Lastly, you will do a brief review of a recent synthesis, Nigel Worden's The Making of Modern South Africa, on e-mail, as a reflector-list discussion featuring our various critiques, etc.

Your professor is an historian of southern Africa, with research experience in Botswana and South Africa, knowledge of African languages, with two books and several articles about African history, politics, culture and religion.

This syllabus, along with a brief introductory section for the material of the course, will be posted at: http://www.history.umd.edu/Faculty/Landau/

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7 required bks. for this course:

Hamilton, Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998. ISBN: 0674874463

Onselen, Charles Van. The Seed Is Mine. London, New York and Johannesburg: Hill and Wang, 1996. ISBN: 0809015943

James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the united States and South Africa. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-8078-4711-9 (pbk).

Comaroff, Jean L. and Comaroff, John L. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. ISBN:

Delius, Peter. A Lion Amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal. Portsmouth, NH and Johannesburg: Heinemann Social History of Africa Series, 1997. ISBN: 0-435-07415-6

la Hausse de Lalouviere, Paul. Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity and History in the Lives of Petros Lamula (c.1881-1948) and Lymon Maling (1889-c.1936). Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Univ. of Natal Press, 2000. ISBN: 0869809571

Worden, Nigel. Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation and Apartheid. London: Blackwell, 2000. ISBN: 0631216618

Class Schedule

Readings are in the reading packet for this course (also on reserve), or, where stated, they are only on reserve at McKeldin Library.

Week 1: South Africa: Introduction to the material.

Week 2: Mode of Production, Race, and State

Ken Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Athens: Ohio U. P., 1989), pp. 103-151.

Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, "The Imperial Factor in South Africa in the 19th Century: Toward a Reassessment," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 3, 1 (1974), 104-121.

Marks and Rathbone, eds., "Introduction," Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa (London: Longman, 1982), pp. 1-45.

David Welsh, "Democratic Liberalism and Theories of Racial Stratification," in Butler, Elphick et. al., Democratic Liberalism in South Africa (London: 1986), 185-203.

Week 3: On Slavery and the Cape

Robert Ross, Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Jhb.: Wits Press, 1994), pp. 69-110.

John Edwin Mason, Jr. "Paternalism Under Siege: Slavery in Theory and Practice During the Era of Revorm, c. 1825 through Emancipation," from Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais eds., Breaking the Chains (Jhb: Wits Press, 1994), pp. 45-78.

On Reserve Only: Kirsten McKenzie, The Making of an English Slave-Owner: Samuel Eusebius Hudson at the Cape of Good Hope, 1796-1807 (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1993), pp. 9-13, 53-85.

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Optional Paper Topic: See Prof. Landau if you are interested in writing a comparative slavery paper to be presented later on.

Week 4: On Shaka, African Agency and Academic Provocateurs

Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty.

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Optional Paper Topic: What happened to create the "Mfecane Debate"?

John Laband, Rope of Sand: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu kingdom in the Nineteenth Century (Pietermaritzburg: Jonathan Ball, 1995).

Julian Cobbing, "The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts ..." Journ. Af. History, 29 (1988), pp. 487-519.

Elizabeth Eldredge, "Sources of Conflict ..." Journ. Af. History, 33 (1992), 1-36.

John Wright, "Mfecane," forthcoming CHSA chapter draft available in typescript.

Week 5. On Colonizing Consciousness on the Frontier

Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1, 1-48, 170-308.

On Reserve Only: Paul Landau, "Nineteenth Century Transformations in Consciousness," forthcoming CHSA chapter draft available in typescript.

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Optional Paper Topic: What is new in Elizabeth Elbourne's analysis, compared with previous literature?

Richard Elphick, Hermann Giliomee (eds.), The Shaping of South African Society (Middletown: Wesleyan U. P., 1989), esp. (but not only): Legassick, Geulke.

Nigel Penn, "The Orange River Frontier Zone, C. 1700-1805," in Andrew B. Smith, ed., Einaqualand: Studies of the Orange River Frontier (Cape Town: Univ. of Cape Town Press, 1995), 21-109.

On Reserve Only: Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground (Middletown: Wesleyan, 2003).

Week 6: Tribe, Peasant, Gender

Colin Bundy, "The Emergence & Decline of a South African Peasantry," African Affairs, 71 (1972), 8-41.

Jeff Peires, "Suicide or Genocide? Xhosa Perceptions of the Nongqawuse Catastrophe," Radical History Review 46/7 (1990), 47-57.

Robert Ross, "Origins of Capitalist Agriculture," in Beinart, Delius and Trapido, eds., Putting a Plough to the Ground (Jhb.: Wits Press, 1988), 57-89.

On Reserve Only! Helen Bradford, "Gender and Recent African Studies" (unpublished version).

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Optional Paper Topic: Discuss current approaches to African agrarian history from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries.

Tim Keegan, Rural Transformations in Industrializing South Africa: The Southern Highveld to 1914 (London: Macmillan, 1987).

Jeremy Krikler, Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).

Keletso Atkins, "The Moon is Dead! Give us our Money!" The Social History of a Work Ethic in Colonial Natal (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993), pp. 79-143.

Week 7: On Nationalisms

Paul la Hausse de la Louviere, Restless Identities.

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Optional Paper Topic: What kind of framework is emerging for understanding the South African War?

Bill Nasson, The South African War, 1899-1902 (London: Arnold, 1999).

David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson, eds., The Impact of the South African War (Blasingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

Greg Cuthbertson, Albert Gundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Suttie, eds., Writing a Wider War (Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 2002).

Week 8: Van Onselen's (Auto)Biography

C. Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine.

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Week 9: South Africa in Comparative Focus

James Campbell, Songs of Zion.

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Optional Paper Topic: With reference to the treatments below ... what is the point of comparisons?

Stan Greeberg, Race, State and Capitalist Development: Comparative Perspectives (New Haven: Yale, 1980). (This is the man who, with James Carville, got Bill Clinton elected president).

Ran Greenstein, Genealogies of Conflict: Class, Identity and State in Palestine/Israel and South Africa (Middletown: Wesleyan, 1995).

Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: CUP 1998).

George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United states and South Africa (New York: OUP, 1995).

Week 10: On the "Making" of Bushmen

E.H.L. Schwarz, "The Kalahari and its Native Races" (London: Witherby, 1928), pp. 142-151.

Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari (London: Hogarth, 1958), pp. 9-54

Hylton White, "The Homecoming of the Kagga Kamma Bushmen," Cultural Survival Quarterly (Summer 1993), 61-3.

On Reserve Only: Robert J. Gordon, Picturing Bushmen: The Denver Africa Expedition of 1925 (Ohio: Ohio, 1997), pp. 1-57.

On Reserve Only: J.D. Lewis-Williams, ed., Stories that Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), at least pp. 1-24, and Kukummi 5, 7, 21, 22.

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Optional Paper Topic: How did the idea of "bushmen" come about in South Africa?

Richard Lee and Irwen DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).

Edwin Wilmsen, Land Filled With Flies: A Political Ethnography of the Kalahari (Chicago: 1989), pp. xi-157.

James Denbow, "Prehistoric Herders and Foragers of the Kalahari: The Evidence for 1500 Years of Interaction," Past and Present in Hunter-Gatherer Societies, 1984, pp. 175-93.

Barbara Haraway, "Remodelling the Human Way of Life: Sherwood Washburn and the New Physical Anthropology, 1950-1980," in Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 186-230.

Week 11: On the Making of Apartheid (big week)

On Reserve Only: Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton, 1996), 3-61.

Saul Dubow, "The Elaboration of Segregationist Ideology," in William Beinart and Saul Dubow, eds., Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), 145-175.

Hermann Giliomee, "The Growth of Afrikaner Identity," chap. 4 in Giliomee and Heribert Adam, Ethnic Power Mobilized: Can South Africa Change? (New Haven: Yale, 1979), reprinted in William Beinart and Saul Dubow, eds., Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), 189-205.

On Reserve Only: Peter Alexander, Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1-22, 118-126.

Hilary Sapire, "African Political Organization in Brakpan in the 1950s," in Bonner, Delius, and Posel, Apartheid's Genesis, 1935-1962 (Bramfontein, Jhb.: Ravan, 1993), 252-274.

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Optional Paper Topic: Review the contrasting arguments and assumptions from the following.

Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in South Africa (Jhb.: Wits Press, 1995).

Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948-1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991, 1997).

Ivan Evans, Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997).

Dan O'Meara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party (Jhb.: Ravan, 1996), 3-98, 206-69 only.

Week 13. Witchcraft as local initiative, and other discoveries

Peter Delius, A Lion amongst the Cattle.

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Optional Paper Topic: What exactly is witchcraft for these anthro-historians? Is it one thing or many things, "real" or "belief" Ñ and to whom?

Adam Ashforth, Madumo: A Man Bewitched (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000).

Clifton Crais, The Problem of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge: CUP, 2002).

Peter Geschierre, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Virginia: Univ. of VA Press, 1997).

On Reserve Only: Isak Niehaus, "Bodies, Heat, and Taboos: Conceptualizing Modern Personhood in the South African Lowveld," Ethnology: An International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology, 41, 3 (2002), 189-207.

Week 14. New approaches to the history of South Africa (i.e. other material I feel like showing you . . . No Paper

Gary Minkley and Ann Mager, "Reaping the Whirlwind: The East London Riots of 1952," Phil Bonner et. al., eds., Apartheid's Genesis, 1935-1962 (Bramfontein, Jhb.: Ravan, 1993), pp. 229-51.

Denis-Constant Martin, "Cape Town's Coon Carnival," in Sarah Nuttal and Cheryl-Ann Michaels, eds., Senses of Culture: South African Cultural Studies (OUP: 2000), 363-379.

On Reserve Only: In Giorgio Miescher and Dag Henrichsen, eds., New Notes on Kaoko (Basel: Basler Africa Bibliograhien, 2002), read Introduction; Manasse Hihanguapo, "The History of Opuwo"; and Patricia Hayes, "Camera Africa: Indirect Rule and Landscape Photographs of Kaoko, 1943."

Carolyn Hamilton, "Living by Fluidity: Oral Histories, Material Custodies and the Politics of Archiving," in Carolyn Hamilton et. al., eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 209-228.

On Reserve Only: In Ciraj Rassool and Sandra Prosalendis, eds., Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum (Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2001), "Introduction," and Linda Fortune, "A Record of History: Extracts from the District Six Museum Diary."

Reflector List Question:

Due the Monday following the end of classes: Evaluate Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) in light of what you now know.