Men in my (historical) life Jane Carruthers

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Herinneringe/Reminiscences

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Men in my (historical) life

Jane Carruthers - University of South Africa

Although more than forty years have passed since I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town, I can still hear the icy tones of Professor H.M. Robertson, enrobed in his ancient academic gown long turned from black to a musty shade of green, as he addressed me: “Miss Swingler, would you and your noisy friends who are disrupting my class from the back row leave the room immediately.”

I cringe when I recall the episode, embarrassed by my lack of appreciation for Robertson’s eminence and erudition as a leading international economic historian and economist. But then, in his book on the history of UCT, Howard Phillips has observed that Robertson, who had joined the staff in 1930 and was thus fairly old when he lectured to dissident students such as me, would deliver his carefully crafted lectures with “studied slowness”. And so I prefer to think that it was my impatience rather than my stupidity that generated the back-row conversations to which he took such exception. This reminder of my academic inadequacy is not, one would have thought, the kind of memory I would retain of someone who was extremely influential on my intellectual development and fostered in me a love and appreciation of history.

Robertson, however, did just that. His first first-year Economic History lecture began by expounding on the “speculative” nature of history, by explaining how the discipline was constructed through personal argument and evidence and by strongly asserting how our understanding of the past mutated over time. Typically, his essay topics demanded the assessment of contrasting scholarly quotations, the use of individual judgement and the presentation of considered and supported opinion. These were excellent lessons for an undergraduate to be given at the start of a degree and, despite my occasional inattention, I adopted them at once. More importantly, Robertson imbued in me a lasting appreciation that history has a material foundation, that modes of production are fundamental historical drivers and that at the very core of historical studies lies the central issue of how people produce and augment their food supplies and their goods and services. Far more than the details (of which there were many – the then much-discussed significance of the three-field agricultural system among them), Robertson emphasised the changing historiography about economics, introduced us to views of the Annales School, Lynn White and others on resource use, economic growth and recession. We debated ideas like

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feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, the origins of banking, mechanisms of exchange, the rise of the monetary system, the gold standard, the economic impacts of specific natural environments, of war and of human and animal disease. We also received a heady introduction to theories about development and under- development in an Africa that was fast becoming post-colonial.

If Robertson initiated me into the broad-brush picture of where the motor of history should be sought, the energetic, enthusiastic and dapper Eric Axelson, Professor and Head of the Department of History in the 1960s, demonstrated that the beauty and the drama lay in the detail.

Axelson’s many publications and his student presentations were based on archival material that he had diligently and patiently collected from archives and libraries in Portugal and the East. Axelson’s lectures were engagingly delivered as he hopped around the platform in the front of the room – almost bird-like. He was at pains to explain precisely where the evidence was located, of what it consisted, how a single document might lead one on a hunt that ended with a definitive sentence in an interesting and important book. His recommended reading lists were comprised almost exclusively of primary sources and he conveyed the pleasure of the research chase and the rewards of the finding. Around that time, Axelson’s books were coming hot off the press, for example,Portuguese in South-East Africa 1488-1600 (1973),Portugal and the Scramble for Africa (1967), and Portuguese in South-East Africa 1600-1700 (1969), and I often refer to them. The thrill of discovering the traces of a lost year or forgotten or neglected incident, together with the recognition of an interface between history and archaeology, are my lasting legacies from Axelson. Imbued with his fervour, a little later, after we were married, Vincent and I spent a month in northern Mozambique exploring Mozambique Island and the Nacala area and thus personally experiencing the languages, history and environment with which Axelson had inspired me.

The third person to excite my interest in history was not a historian at all. He was Martin Versfeld, the eccentric, philosopher and Professor of Ethics (which, together with English, was my major subject; I did not major in History at UCT). Versfeld was a local man from the Western Cape, who – although Afrikaans-speaking – had been educated at UCT and at Glasgow and who later became known for his culinary philosophy and his poetry. Versfeld was no natty dresser and I retain a recollection of his oft-worn misshapen orangey-red cardigan. More significant, however, is the fact that his eclectic and original ideas also still resonate with me. Reason and structured argument were the basis of his approach.

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His lectures on moral philosophy, ranging from Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, through Saint Augustine, Hume, Kant and Mill to the more modern excitement of Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger or Buber were exhilarating in terms of attempting to elucidate what it means to be human in a time-bound universe. Versfeld introduced me to a rich literature dealing with issues such as the nature of truth, freedom and the consequences of choice, human rights and responsibilities, secularism, Christian and atheist existentialism and an analysis of language that would today be called post-modern, or the “linguistic turn”. These topics formed the subjects of intense discussion with friends – often late into the night, fuelled either by Lieberstein (a very cheap Cape wine) or coffee, depending on which was the more readily available. Versfeld filled my mind with the revelation that even the most fundamental paradigms and expressions of humanity are historically and spatially bound. Apparently Jeremy Cronin was also influenced by this professor of Ethics a little later than I was, and it was Versfeld’s capacity to integrate concepts, ideas and disciplines that Cronin found so powerful. While I would certainly agree with this assessment, for me it was the enduring belief that we make our own lives and our own history. As T.S. Eliot expressed it so beautifully in his well-knownFour Quartets

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.¹

Of course, as a university student in the South Africa of the 1960s, one was well aware of the fact that economics, history, human rights and ethical behaviour were urgent political issues. We could see the academic debates to which Robertson, Versfeld and others alerted us being played out in the divided society around us. There was a proximal historical consciousness with which I engaged through my membership of NUSAS committees and combat with the rival Afrikaner Studentebond.

At that time, friends and acquaintances fled the country, we actively contested the stance of our reactionary university principal, J.P. Duminy, and we listened with awe to what visiting Robert Kennedy had to say about racism and civil rights. Through these personal experiences I took with me the message that “history matters”: it still does.

A further effect on my historical initiation came from my father, a UCT graduate in mechanical engineering, whose own reading, I have to

1. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”, lines 1-5.

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confess, did not extend much beyond newspapers, business reports and engineering diagrams. While I was at university, he kept me on an extremely meagre clothes and pocket-money allowance that he doled out rather begrudgingly at the start of every month, but he encouraged me to buy as many books as I liked, on any subject that took my fancy and whatever their price. My large monthly account for book purchases went directly to my father in Johannesburg and he paid it without comment or demur. In this way I began to build up a library to which we have added over the years and which has become an invaluable personal resource.

Over subsequent decades, more mature personal interests and agendas have nudged me in the direction of environmental history – an area of study with strong relationships to other disciplines, other places and other pathways of knowledge, but, happily, I have never escaped from the passion of that early and varied introduction I received at UCT.