Африка. История и историки

Undoubtedly the most important work to have appeared in the centenary year on the establishment of the ANC takes the story to, but not beyond, the meeting in Waaihoek, Bloemfontein, in January 1912 at which SANNC was founded. Andre Odendaal’s «Te Founders», subtitled «Te Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa», contains almost 500 pages of text, followed by 56 pages of notes in very small font, and this refects the extent of the research that underpins the volume[730]. Te book draws upon Odendaal’s most impressive master’s dissertation, published as «Vukani Bantu: the Beginnings of Black Protest Politics to 1910» as long ago as 1984, the doctoral dissertation that he completed at the University of Cambridge in 1983 on «African Political Mobilisation in the Eastern Cape, 1880–1912» and new research, especially on African organisations outside the Cape. Te result is a masterly synthesis, which inter alia explores the impact of the South African war on black African organisation in the four states of what became South Africa, then how the process leading to the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 galvanised black Africans into united action. «Te Founders» ofers a mass of new information on many members of the new educated African elite and their activities in the late nineteenth century and frst decade of the twentieth. Odendaal calls his work «an organisational or “family” history, which seeks to construct a group biography of the frst generations of activists and political bodies in South Africa» (P. XIII–XIV). As he says, he only addresses historiographical debates on his period implicitly, his main concern being «to restore the African voice and identity» (P. XIV). The key that unlocked the door to this was his reading of the early newspapers published for black readers, newspapers that contained content both in English and in indigenous languages.

Writing in 1984, Odendaal wondered whether the ANC, when it reached its centenary in 2012, would be «guerrilla or government» (P. XV). Now that we know the answer, he ends his Introduction to his new book by expressing the hope that the past he has recovered «will inspire those both inside and outside the ANC… to proceed into the future more enlightened and more emboldened in the pursuit of human dignity and democracy» (P. XV). He clearly writes as an admirer of the ANC, who has not allowed disillusionment with it in the present to afect his retelling of what he sees as an inspiring story of people struggling for equal rights. One can of course quibble with the way he has presented some of his material – the struggle against segregation in the early twentieth century was hardly one for democracy in the sense that we know today, for example, which makes his sub-title less than accurate – but this is a major scholarly work, which will retain its importance long into the future.

The same cannot be said for another book that became available in 2012, though published in 2011, the frst full-scale biography of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the driving force behind the establishment of the South African Native National Congress in January 1912[731]. Moss Mashamaite’s «Te Second Coming» is an ofen poorly written and self-indulgent amalgam of scattered information about Seme, about whom the author writes in hyperbole, at one point calling him «Arguably the most important historical South African fgure» (P. 37). Tough Mashamaite has found some interesting new information about Seme’s role in the establishment of the Native Farmers Association of Africa (Chapter 6 and especially P. 165f), his book is far from being the seminal biography that Seme deserves, one on the lines of, say, to Brian Willan’s monumental biography of Seme’s colleague Sol. T. Plaatje, the frst Secreatry General of the South African Native National Congress or Heather Hughes’s powerfully-written life of John Dube, the frst President-General of the organisation[732]. «Te Second Coming» is especially weak on Seme’s later years, including his disastrous presidency of the ANC from 1930 (Chapter 14), where Mashamaite makes no use of Marvin Faison’s thesis, which remains the most detailed study on that period of Seme’s life[733].