White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865.

A few years ago interdisciplinary-minded historians aped social scientists. We crunched numbers, ran regression analyses, placed the dead on couches. In our enthusiasm we made messes. Sometimes we forgot that the aim of our craft is to interpret the past to the largest audience possible. But it kept us busy and learning, and so it was good. Lately we have been looking in another direction, at least as murky, that of the literary theorist. The number of books on the invention of this, the gendering of that, the essentializing of something else, is already past counting.(1) All manner of institutions we had thought were reasonably solid--nations, races, classes, tribes, continents, even the family--turn out to be invented. Far from being a narrative of facts, as Ranke supposed, each attested by three independent witnesses, history itself is imagined: a text to be deconstructed, a play composed of layer upon layer of symbol, ritual, and characters playing roles. As, indeed, it is. Though the techniques of post-modernism may seem novel, most of its major premises are not only true, but perhaps even commonplace. It has much to contribute.

The work under review is a first book, based on a dissertation written at the Johns Hopkins University. As the sub-title indicates, it is a regional study of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, what the nineteenth century called the Eastern Frontier, centered on Port Elizabeth. There, over the course of a century before the better-known Zulu War of the 1880s in Natal, Africans had waged a dozen or so bitter conflicts. The area was as complex and volatile as it was violent, chock full of imagined and invented categories: "Hottentots" or, for that matter, "the Khoikhoi"; "Kaffirs" or, for that matter, "the Xhosa"; "the Boers," or, for that matter, "Afrikaners"; "blacks" (who range from yellowish to dark brown) and "whites" (who are really swine-pink). In this imaginative, carefully controlled, well-written book, Clifton Crais has put the region under a post-modernist lens.

It isn't that the assumptions or conclusions are so unusual; if they were they might not be so persuasive. It is the texture that is distinctive. The statement that the colonial order inherited, solidified, and transmitted a structure of misunderstandings, dividing group from group while binding them together ever more tightly, sounds rather like a truism. As Crais demonstrates, however, used sensitively, meticulously, and even humbly, postmodern techniques can provide important, original insights and reinterpretations of such well-treated texts as "Kaffir wars," the Great Trek, or the Xhosa cattle-killing of the 1850s. They can help us see groups--Xhosa, Afrikaners, Cape Coloured People--in the process of formation, imagining themselves and being imagined by others. They can illuminate institutions--slavery, white supremacy, segregation--before they solidified or calcified. They enable us to rewind the reel, playing it back at different speeds, widening or narrowing the focus, examining the drama as it happened, as though we didn't know how it came out.

Just how well Crais succeeds can be shown, I think, by comparing his book with another postmodern work, the widely acclaimed study of the missionary impact on the souther Tswana by the anthropologists, Jean and John Camaroff.(2) Although it is no part of my purpose to denigrate the Camaroffs, whose work I have found interesting and provocative, Crais's approach to postmodernism strikes me as a good deal sounder. The reason is that he so clearly understands text-reading as a supplement to, rather than a substitute for, more orthodox historical methods. Despite the fact that the book amounts to a series of sketches rather than a connected narrative--indeed, I wish that it had been longer, that it had included much more detailed textual analysis--it is very solidly grounded. Grounded in sources: for while the Camaroffs base their book neither on intensive fieldwork nor on archival research, Crais has used numerous official and private archives, in Britain as well as South Africa--and though archives for the historian, or fieldwork for the anthropologist, may exert a kind of tyranny, they also contain additional texts, as well as whole communication networks that may never have reached print.(3) Grounded in time, for while the Camaroffs regard the "narrative" as Western, culture-bound, and part of the problem, Crais is properly wary of anachronism. Grounded in space, for while the Camaroffs discuss regional connections infrequently, Crais treats them constantly, in detail, and with great clarity.

For all these reasons, although the Camaroffs' Of Revelation and Revolution is an interesting and valuable contribution to social theory, Crais's book is in my view the better model for the historian. And that, for an assistant professor's first book, is quite an achievement. In my view this book should be a strong candidate for the Herskovits prize.

John W. Cell Duke University

ENDNOTES

1. The most relevant books for this review are Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1970); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2nd. ed.; London, 1991); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990); Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992); V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, 1988); Henry L. Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988). A quick search of a college library turned up titles like Imagining America, Imagining Hitler, Inventing Japan, and Inventing Motherhood; the list goes on.

2. Jean and John Camaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991).

3. Moreover, although the South African side of their scholarship seems sound enough, the English side has glaring, important weaknesses. Their reading is often spotty and scattershot. For instance, they repeatedly cite the seventeenth-century historian, Christopher Hill, as a leading authority on Nonconformity in the nineteenth; again repeatedly, they cite Robert Fogel, the American economic historian, on Methodism in English cities; the bibliography does not contain standard works by Bernard Semmel and others. For another, they have translated the (highly questionable) argument that mid-nineteenth-century Britain was anticolonial back to the generation after the American Revolution, when much of India, Australia, and the Cape were added to the formal empire, along with huge "informal" outreach into South America, the Indian Ocean, southeast Asia, etc.; again, the bibliographical citations on what was arguably the single most expansionist phase in British history omit not only Christopher A. Baily, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989), but the old warhorse by Vincent Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763-1793 (2 vols.; London, 1952-64). The Camaroffs' book is a little like arsenic: important medicinal qualities, but should be used with caution.