In 2016, Thula Simpson, an academic historian who now teaches at the University of Pretoria, published Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle, the first comprehensive history of the army of the African National Congress (ANC). Written, much like a classic detective novel, in the present tense and with a sense of narrative urgency, it is more accessible than the drier kinds of academic history.
Simpson has now published an ambitious survey, aptly titled History of South Africa, that begins with the end of the South African War (formerly referred to as the Boer War) in April 1902 and ends with the riots that tore through parts of the country in July 2021. At a little more than 600 pages, it is impressive in its breadth.
History of South Africa: From 1902 to the Present, Thula Simpson, Oxford University Press, 614 pp., $37.50, October 2022
Following a mode of writing South African history that was entrenched under apartheid and in the earlier colonial historiography, it begins with the 1652 arrival of Jan van Riebeeck, of the Dutch East India Company, in what is now Cape Town, and then follows European movement into the interior. This is a curious choice in a moment in which many academics and other intellectuals are trying, in different ways, to research, think, and write outside of the old colonial frames—especially for a book that might in some cases become a textbook in universities.
The shift away from writing South African history as if it begins with van Riebeeck’s arrival in the Cape, and then following white movement into the interior of the country, is now well established. School history books often start with archaeological evidence from the deep past. The internationally successful 1986 television series Shaka Zulu, produced by state television under apartheid, begins with a scene in England, moves to the Cape Colony, and then follows European protagonists into the Zulu Kingdom. The new and hugely popular 2023 television series Shaka iLembe does the opposite, beginning with an African world prior to European arrival, engaging that world and its history on its own terms rather than as a mere prelude to the colonial encounter and viewing European arrival through African eyes.
The kindest interpretation of Simpson’s curious choice would be to argue that South Africa came into being as a country via colonialism, and so the colonial mode of writing histories that begin with white arrival have some explanatory power. But even if one accepts this view, why not begin with a view from the shore of the arrival of Bartolomeu Dias, the Portuguese mariner, on the coast of what is now South Africa in 1488? More specifically, why not begin on Feb. 3, 1488, when a group of men from Dias’s crew came ashore at what is now Mossel Bay and an encounter that began with barter ended with the European murder of an African man?
A Black man reads on a bench marked “Europeans Only” in a South African park circa 1970.Bettmann/Getty Images Archive
When Black actors do begin to take the stage in the book, their appearance is primarily in the mode of what the subaltern studies school of historiography in India called elite nationalism. In a country in which many historians—such as Noor Nieftagodien and Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, following in the tradition of British historian E.P. Thompson—have written often remarkable histories from below, the examination of Black agency, which begins to pick up in the fourth chapter, remains largely that of Black elites. The book, operating on a totally different plane to work such as Charles van Onselen’s 1996 classic The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, offers very little on the lived experience of the majority, or the thinking and politics of ordinary people.
There are also some politically loaded choices of terminology.
Naming is an exercise in power that should always be approached mindfully. South African readers will be startled to encounter the uncritical use of the term “non-white” here, a term that, while in common use elsewhere, is archaic in South Africa and has been considered pejorative since Steve Biko rejected it during his reinvigoration of the South African political scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Biko, all people not classified as white by apartheid should be identified as Black as a shared political identity. Perhaps the uncritical use of the term “non-white” here is the result of a decision by an editor more concerned with U.S. conventions than South African sensibilities.
But this seems unlikely to explain the deviation from another standard terminological usage deriving from the Black Consciousness movement associated with Biko. Simpson rhetorically excludes people racially classified as “coloured” [the term means mixed race] from sharing in a Black political identity by writing of “coloureds” and “blacks” as separate groups of people. There is an inadvertent complicity here with what Patric Tariq Mellet describes as the de-Africanization of people who came to be classified as “coloured” under colonialism and remain so today.
Even the older term “non-Europeans,” which the apartheid state once used to refer to anyone with dark skin and then abandoned in the 1970s, appears in the book. There are other examples, and the tendency to uncritically use colonial terms extends beyond South Africa. Indeed, there seems to be a degree of leakage from colonial and apartheid archives into Simpson’s text.
This insufficiently critical attitude to the colonial archive is seen in other ways too. For example, we are told in the author’s voice that Ernest Oppenheimer, the dominant figure in the highly exploitative gold and diamond mining industries for many decades, “was a renowned philanthropist who funded housing, medical and recreational facilities for his African employees.” There is no reflection on how Oppenheimer accumulated his wealth, who considered Oppenheimer to be a renowned philanthropist, or what the politics of his philanthropy might have been—or the social costs of the migrant labor system that made men such as Oppenheimer rich.
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![In this black-and-white photo from the 1950s, a line of supporters of the African National Congress stand against a wall, holding picket signs with messages such as "Defend trade unions" and "We shall resist." Most of the members of the group are Black African men wearing hats and overcoats.]()
In this black-and-white photo from the 1950s, a line of supporters of the African National Congress stand against a wall, holding picket signs with messages such as “Defend trade unions” and “We shall resist.” Most of the members of the group are Black African men wearing hats and overcoats. - Supporters of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) gather in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August 1952 as part of a civil disobedience campaign.AFP via Getty Images
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![A group of Black African protesters lean out of the windows of a train, many of them giving a thumbs-up gesture to the camera. Above them, a sign stenciled above the window reads "Europeans only."]()
A group of Black African protesters lean out of the windows of a train, many of them giving a thumbs-up gesture to the camera. Above them, a sign stenciled above the window reads “Europeans only.” - Protesters take part in the civil disobedience campaign in Johannesburg, South Africa, in June 1952.AFP via Getty Images
Simpson begins to develop a sustained focus on Black politics from the book’s 10th chapter, which looks at the ANC-led Defiance Campaign of 1952, a national campaign of civil disobedience against apartheid laws and regulations. But as he moves from the Second World War and into the period in which the ANC became a popular movement, most of his attention is given to the politics of Black elites. Accounts of events in which ordinary people briefly seized the political stage tend to miss easy opportunities to develop more inclusive narratives, even when there is excellent historiography that takes seriously the agency and lived experience of ordinary people.
This is true, for instance, of the strike by indentured Indian workers on the sugar plantations and elsewhere in 1913, where Mohandas Gandhi appears in the book as the motive force and the workers little more than pawns on a chessboard. It is also true of the riots led by African women in Cato Manor near Durban in 1959, where the work of Iain Edwards, written in a classic “history-from-below” style, could have enriched Simpson’s book. An exception is the excellent account of the Pondo revolt in 1960. Here, Simpson makes good uses of various sources and the work of historians such as Sukude Matoti and Lungisile Ntsebeza to offer a stronger sense of the motivations and actions of ordinary protagonists.
To his credit, Simpson does not follow much of the official history that would reduce his account of politics among national elites to the ANC. Organizations outside of the ANC, such as the Pan Africanist Congress and the Black Consciousness movement, are not only included but also given a fair account. Unusually, a set of smaller groups are acknowledged, including the Yu Chi Chan Club, co-founded by the important Black intellectual Neville Alexander, and the National Committee of Liberation, which had drawn in militants from a range of political backgrounds, as well as the African Resistance Movement, which had its roots among disaffected members of the Liberal Party.
Students demonstrate in Soweto, South Africa, in August 1976. AFP via Getty Images
The narrative begins to gather pace at it moves into 1976, and the revolt in Soweto schools. Unsurprisingly, given Simpson’s previous work, he develops a particular focus on the history of armed struggle and the military clashes in the wider region, including the civil war in Angola. While his accounts of the South African War and the South African involvement in the Second World War are pedestrian and repeat long-established views, Simpson is very strong on more recent military history in Southern Africa, and in particular the war in Angola in the 1980s that drew in the Cubans and the South African state.
As the arc of the book moves through the 1980s, labor history is noted, but popular politics are dealt with in a very cursory way. This was a period in which millions of people were mobilized and the apartheid state driven into a stalemate. There is a huge archive from this period, and Simpson could certainly have given far more attention to it and to the ordinary people who stormed the stage of history.
There is also a disturbing statistical slip-up in the account of the post-apartheid period. In 1994, Mangosuthu Buthelezi—the recently deceased leader of the violent right-wing Zulu nationalist movement Inkatha, which transformed into a political party—stated that there were up to 8 million undocumented migrants (Simpson uses the incendiary term “illegal immigrants”) in South Africa. Simpson writes that it “was by no means clear that his estimates were unreasonably high.”
Figures for the number of migrants living in South Africa vary. A recent count has the number at 2.9 million. The state’s statistic agency put the figure at 3.9 million in mid-2021 and the U.N. put the number at over 4 million in 2019. Of course, the numbers today are much higher than in 1994 and Buthelezi’s figure was clearly not credible.
Treating Buthelezi’s inflammatory statement as credible is unfortunate error in a country in which xenophobic sentiment often takes violent forms and is encouraged by opportunistic political entrepreneurs, such as the former businessman-turned-politician Herman Mashaba, who was the mayor of Johannesburg from mid-2016 to late 2019.
The account of the post-apartheid period uncritically follows the preoccupations of the press sources on which it overwhelmingly draws. Corruption, undeniably an urgent issue, gets a lot of space. Grassroots politics is largely absent. No mention is made of the now regular assassinations of grassroots activists.
A striking miner stands after police fired tear gas at Lonmin’s platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa, on Sept. 15, 2012.Alexander Joe/AFP via Getty Images
In the account of the massacre of striking mineworkers at Marikana in 2012, readers are not given any sense of what the striking miners were thinking, what political traditions they drew on, and so forth. There is not even any mention of the fact that most of the miners came from Pondoland in the Eastern Cape, or that their revolt was connected to the enduring system of migrant labor.
Indeed, the cursory way in which the book deals with the migrant labor system, in which labor was drawn from neighboring states and the internal Bantustans, is unfortunate given that migrant labor was the economic bedrock of the apartheid system, and the Bantustans its political bedrock. Simpson’s account of the events of that led to the Marikana massacre reads much like a record of the moves in a chess game without offering any real sense of the structural, cultural, or political reasons for people’s actions.
Simpson is very good, though, in his brief but very well-written account of major sporting events and the politics surrounding them in a country where sports have long been central to the national culture and often taken on significant political import. Written in crisp prose and with sharp insights, these sections really shine. He captures the textures of shared experiences around sport very well, writing, for instance, of how for the middle classes the temporary sense of safety on the streets during the 2010 World Cup “had the psychological effect akin to the end of a curfew.” There is also real insight into the politics and mechanics of sport. He can capture the essence of a match in a single sentence.
Soccer fans wave flags as South Africa’s national team parades past in Johannesburg on June 9, 2010, ahead of the beginning of the 2010 Men’s World Cup, which was hosted by South Africa. Mustafa Ozer/AFP via Getty Images
The craft of the historian requires both wide reading of the best historiography and most useful archives as well as careful rumination informed by theory and comparative histories. Consequently, it is not uncommon for historians to falter when they conclude their books in the present.
Simpson’s book weakens as it ends with the riots that followed the brief incarceration of former President Jacob Zuma in 2021. While most of the book draws on important archives and the often-excellent historiography of South Africa, as he moves into the present, Simpson turns to social media and the popular South African press, including white-owned, edited, and dominated publications such as News24 and the Daily Maverick, neither of which offers a credible first draft of history.
Reporting in these kinds of publications often tells us more about white prejudices and paranoia than it does about the realities of wider society. This was turbocharged during the riots, which were profoundly threatening to elites in general, and excited deeply ingrained colonial paranoia and hostility among many whites.
As Simpson repeats the logic of the account of the riots given in real time by these publications, he ignores key elements of the riots. There is no acknowledgement that the rapidly mutating events began as a massive food riot, often carried out in a carnival-like atmosphere. There is also no acknowledgement that endemic hunger had become a mass crisis during the brutally enforced COVID-19 lockdowns that preceded the riots, and that the sudden withdrawal of a modest grant (350 rand, or $18) offered to some during the lockdown was widely experienced as callous abandonment by the state.
At the time, it was not unusual to hear of desperate parents boiling weeds in water for the evening meal for their children. On-the-ground reports during the riots clearly indicated that in the first days of the tumult, many people with no loyalty to Zuma seized the opportunity to appropriate food as the authority of the state collapsed.
A man gestures as rioters loot the Jabulani Mall in the Soweto district of Johannesburg on July 12, 2021. Luca Sola/AFP via Getty Images
Following the logic of the media reports on which he often relies, Simpson does not acknowledge any of this, but does look at the experience of middle-class residents confronted with rioters—rioters who appear as a shapeless mob seen from outside. We hear that in Chatsworth, an Indian neighborhood under apartheid, “residents and security guards fought to prevent people from the Bottlebrush squatter camp from entering the main shopping centre.” Here, the African residents of Bottlebrush, which is in Chatsworth, are summarily excluded from being counted as residents of Chatsworth.
A clear and essentially sympathetic sense is given of how some middle-class residents organized themselves into armed groups, but, following the logic of most media reports at the time, we do not hear from the residents of the shack settlements from which many of the rioters came, especially during the initial food riot.
Simpson could not have consulted official archives and academic work while writing into the present. There is no relevant available archive, and good academic work on the riots is yet to come. But he could easily have spoken to people who participated in the riots or who live in the same communities as many of the rioters, as the Financial Times’ Joseph Cotterill did. He could also have consulted the small, marginal and sometimes unstable collection of online sources that do give some voice to people who were systemically denied it in much of the media coverage at the time.
Simpson’s book offers a good account of dominant understandings of South African history over the past 120 years. The impressive scale of the work, and its reach into the present, make it uniquely valuable for anyone wanting an overview of how South African history is understood by dominant opinion. Unfortunately, it is not a democratic history from below. An account that does justice to the lives and struggles of the majority awaits an author.
