Howard Phillips

AIDS in the context of South Africa's epidemic history: preliminary historical thoughts.

In the reams of writing on AIDS in South Africa, both scholarly and popular, there runs a strong sense that this is an unspeakable epidemic, without precedent in the country’s history. It ‘defies description’, remarked a leading AIDS scholar recently,’ while the South African chair of the AIDS 2000 Conference in Durban said he ‘could find no parallel in history for AIDS’ it was an epidemic ‘the likes of which we have never seen’.2 Not surprisingly, at a popular level this perception has been even more marked. In 2000, Time magazine referred to AIDS in South Africa as being ‘worse than a disaster’ and of rural Kwazulu-Natal as being ‘the cutting edge of a continental apocalpyse’, while very recently it followed up these dire descriptions of an entirely unparalleled disaster by labelling AIDS ‘humanity’s deadliest cataclysm’.’ The lack of a comparative perspective which such views suggest is a reflection not only of the authors’ short historical memory, but also of the relative failure of South African historiography to make past epidemic experiences part of the mainstream narrative ofthe country’s history. Recent general histories of South Africa make but passing reference to epidemics, and generally give greater prominence to epizootics like rinderpest and East Coast Fever than to smallpox, bubonic plague and influenza. In this regard, AIDS has shown up very sharply this failure of historians of South Africa to fulfil one of the basic tasks of history as a discipline, i.e. what the American historian Joseph Strayer called the ability to help in ‘meeting new situations, not because it provides a basis for prediction, but because a h l l understanding of human behaviour in the past makes it possible to

Locating the location of a South African location: the paradoxical pre-history of Soweto

This article examines the decisive role of the pneumonic plague epidemic of 1904 in re-shaping the racial geography of Johannesburg after the South African War. The panic which this epidemic evoked swept away the obstacles which had blocked such a step since 1901 and saw the Indian and African inhabitants of the inner-city Coolie Location forcibly removed to Klipspruit Farm 12 miles outside of the city as a health emergency measure. There, the latter were compelled to remain, even after the epidemic had waned, making it henceforth the officially designated site for their residence. In 1963, now greatly expanded, it was named Soweto. From small germs do mighty townships grow.

Review Article What did your University do during Apartheid

Ivory towers South African universities are not, nor ever have been. Think only of the key role that they played in fostering nationalism ± both Afrikaner and African ± or of the explicitly political motives behind the creation of apartheid’ s bush colleges. Nor, as the ® rst two books under review make abundantly clear, was this any less true of historically white, English-medium universities like Wits, whose links to wider South African society were both wide and deep. Keenly aware of this interconnection, both Murray (implicitly) and Shear (explicitly), writing on the cusp of South Africa’ s transition from apartheid to democracy, are at pains to distance their institution from the old order. Shear, having just retired as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Wits, was commissioned by the University in 1991 to put on record how it had `handled the apartheid era’ (p. xii), while Murray’ s title, Wits: the `Open’ Years, despite the inverted commas, is clearly making a somewhat positive statement about that university’ s stance during the onset years of apartheid. To explain this stance, Murray, also a Wits insider ± he is head of the History Department there and author of Wits: the Early Years 1896 ± 1939 (1982) ± has adopted a more political focus than in his earlier study. Whereas that volume provided a broad overview of Wits’ early years, this volume has as its dominant theme the opening of the university to select black students during the 1940s and its vain efforts to uphold even this limited `openness’ against the imposition of university apartheid in the 1950s, a failure marked by the passing of the paradoxically titled Extension of University Education Act in 1959. Though Murray is anything but starry-eyed in his portrayal of this process ± he makes it very apparent that, given the restrictions on the handful of blacks admitted to Wits, it would have been more accurate to label the University `less closed’ than other South African universities rather than `open’ ± it is evident that he considers this issue to be the one which, pre-eminently, de® ned the public persona of Wits as a liberal university at odds with the apartheid state. The real achievement of Wits’ effort to maintain this much-

Reports on Colloquium Sessions

Reports on Colloquium Sessions Mohammed Adhikari , Howard Phillips , Liese van der Watt , Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk , Lance van Sittert , Harriet Deacon , Natasha Erlank , Lindsay Clowes , Nigel Worden & Vivian Bickford-Smith To cite this article: Mohammed Adhikari , Howard Phillips , Liese van der Watt , Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk , Lance van Sittert , Harriet Deacon , Natasha Erlank , Lindsay Clowes , Nigel Worden & Vivian Bickford-Smith (2004) Reports on Colloquium Sessions, South African Historical Journal, 50:1, 210-248, DOI: 10.1080/02582470409464803 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582470409464803

The role of the university in writing and teaching history in Africa in the twenty-first century

Reports on Colloquium Sessions Mohammed Adhikari , Howard Phillips , Liese van der Watt , Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk , Lance van Sittert , Harriet Deacon , Natasha Erlank , Lindsay Clowes , Nigel Worden & Vivian Bickford-Smith To cite this article: Mohammed Adhikari , Howard Phillips , Liese van der Watt , Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk , Lance van Sittert , Harriet Deacon , Natasha Erlank , Lindsay Clowes , Nigel Worden & Vivian Bickford-Smith (2004) Reports on Colloquium Sessions, South African Historical Journal, 50:1, 210-248, DOI: 10.1080/02582470409464803 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582470409464803