Saunders tackles South Africa post 1850 for OUP's online bibliographies
Like all OBO bibliographies, these are ongoing projects, which will be updated from time to time.
Here is an extract from Saunders' paper:
In March last year, I was approached by Professor Tom Spear of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a historian of East Africa and head of the Africa section of the new Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) project, to produce a bibliography on 'South Africa'. I was daunted by the task, for a number of reasons. Preparing such a bibliography seemed an impossible task, given the vast literature on the country, and I remembered the advice that the wisest thing when faced with an impossible task is not to attempt it.
But then I thought that if I did not do it, someone else would, so why not chance my arm? Being semi-retired, I could risk the wrath of colleagues who would not find their work included (some will doubtless look to see whether they are in it or not, and if they are not, may dismiss it out of hand) and could afford to ignore, at least to some extent, the brickbats that would be likely to be thrown at me for the inadequacies and/or bias of the bibliography.
I was also hesitant about undertaking the task because of the restrictive OBO guidelines, which require each bibliography (called 'article') to have a maximum of 150 items, subdivided into categories of no more than eight items each. The initial categories must follow a set pattern: General Overviews, Documents and Archives, Reference Works and Journals. Though other categories are chosen by the author, a general Introduction must set out how the bibliography is structured, each category must have a commentary of no more than 400 words explaining why each particular item has been selected, and each item must have an annotation of no more than 50 words. I could understand the need for conformity, but to attempt to follow these guidelines for South Africa's entire history seemed ridiculous.
My task was eased when, in mid 2011, I heard that John Wright was to produce a bibliography on 'States in Southern Africa', and learned subsequently that he and Simon Hall had agreed to 'cover' South Africa to 1850, leaving me with the period since then. (While they took 'Southern Africa' to include South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, and neighbouring regions of Botswana and Mozambique, I was only asked to write about South Africa, and I decided to limit myself to the present country, plus Namibia under South African rule.)
A chronological dividing line between the two bibliographies seemed a good idea, though did not, of course, overcome the problem of themes and topics that run across that divide. The mid-19th century, said Wright and Hall, marked roughly 'the beginning of a period of more aggressive settler expansion in the subcontinent, and hence of engagements between settler and African communities', of the 'thickening up' of the 'documentary, as distinct from archaeological, sources on the region's history', and of 'the beginning of a new and much more vigorous phase of political and economic "modernization"'. But of course there was no sharp break.
How to come up with categories, besides those imposed on me by OBO? I began with mainly chronological ones - before the discovery of gold; the impact of gold and the South African War, Union and segregation, apartheid, transition, and post-apartheid - but it soon seemed to me that some of these needed to be broken up. I therefore, for example, separated the policy of apartheid from its impact, and divided resistance to apartheid into two periods, before and after 1970.
I then added some thematic categories, on the making of social identities , on individuals and population, regional and local studies, culture, economy and religion, ending with 'South Africa and the World'. I would have added more categories had space permitted, say on land issues, intellectual history (Wright and Hall also thought of including such a category) and the history of South African literature.
Had space permitted, I would have liked to introduce more internet sources and journal articles, and to have said more about the way in which so many topics are highly contested, though I hoped that some of this would emerge in part in the section on Historiography. But should I have been bolder and come up with new categories more reflective of recent scholarship?
How to select and annotate? Under almost all these categories I could have included many more than the eight items I was restricted to. In selecting from a vast literature, I favoured more recent items and ones I knew, meaning that the bibliography is, as I admit, biased towards political history, my personal bias. I include some older items of importance to indicate that the earlier literature should not now be ignored and retains its value.
While the annotations had to be factual, in some cases they reflect my personal view, but should I have been bolder and more opinionated? Can such a bibliography be other than a very personal interpretation of the relevant literature? In what ways do the Introduction and commentaries fall short in providing a useful introduction to someone coming to South Africa post 1850 without any specialised knowledge?
Are there more useful ways of categorising South Africa's past in this period? Do I give much too much weight to race and resistance, not enough to, say, gender and class? What important categories are missing? How could the annotations be improved? What needs changing for the next edition? I welcome your comments...
Chris Saunders can be reached at: Chris.Saunders@uct.ac.za