James T. Campbell

Models and Metaphors: Industrial Education in the United States and South Africa

Over the last 15 years, the literature of comparative history has been swelled by a stream of books and articles comparing and contrasting South Africa and the United States. Slavery, segregation, sharecropping, racial ideology, black politics, the relationship of state and capital, the frontier experience, even the historical profession itself have all come under comparative scrutiny, producing a virtual sub-field in South African studies. Indeed, so fashionable has the USA comparison become that some scholars have objected, arguing that South African historians’ preoccupation with American (and, to a lesser extent, European) comparisons, combined with their neglect of seemingly more logical African comparisons, revealed an unwillingness to see their society as part of Africa.1 Others have argued that settler societies such as Israel and Northern Ireland or industrialized societies in the developing world such as Brazil provide more appropriate benchmarks for South Africa than an industrialized superpower like the United States. The sheer differentness of the two societies — the vast difference in scale, the virtual inversion of black-white ratios, the gulf between a democracy predicated on universal suffrage and (until recently) a minority regime would seem to vitiate the USA — South Africa comparison.2