South Africa’s story maker
SShula Marks JEWNIVERSITY CORNER
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HE IS the godmother of southern African history. Shula Marks not only transformed our understanding of South Africa, but, just as importantly, inspired a generation of African historians to re-describe how the history of their continent was written.
Born Shula Eta Winokur in Cape Town in 1938, the future Professor Marks was raised in a religiously observant household. Her mother, Frida, was from a Lithuanian shtetl. The family moved to South Africa (like many European Jews) lured, says Marks “by the fabled wealth of the recently discovered goldfields.” Things didn’t go according to plan, and instead of gold, the family made their keep from bread and milk — opening a dairy-cum-bakery. Her father was also from Lithuania, and, like her mother, was an ardent Zionist. After becoming widowed, Marks’s mother retired to Israel (where she died in 2000 aged 101).
Marks took her undergraduate degree at University of Cape Town in the 1950s. She initially intended to move to Israel and take a further degree in Jewish history at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, but because her fiancé and future husband, Isaac, wanted to study psychiatry in UK, she applied instead for a place at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Growing disillusionment with Israel was one reason that they decided to make London their permanent home.
They had arrived in the UK in 1960. It was a momentous time for Africa. That same year, Harold Macmillan delivered his famous speech — “the wind of change is blowing through this continent” — in Marks’s home city of Cape Town. Ghana had already achieved its independence (1957), and Britain would shed much of its empire over the following decade.
Until then, the history of Africa had been largely the narrative of a few Great White Men. The continent was to be understood as seen through the eyes of Cecil Rhodes or King Leopold II. Decolonisation made that narrow history — which largely ignored the people to whom history was, as it were, being done — untenable. Left-wing historians began to reimagine the past, through the eyes of ordinary people. Marks was part of this new trend, but with a twist.
Officially, apartheid (literally meaning ‘separateness’) had been introduced in South Africa in 1948, following the victory of the Afrikaner
National David Edmonds Great White Men had dominated African history
spotlights a Jewish thinker
Party. Black South Africans were relegated to second class citizens in law. But Marks, a rather unorthodox Marxist (her students call her a “Shula-Marxist”) thought it more illuminating to view race through the prism of class. She traced white subjugation of blacks in South Africa way back to the 19th century and the mines. In South Africa, gold ore is plentiful, but deep, low-grade and tricky to extract. It is still a labour intensive industry today, but it was much more so over a century ago, and the deprivation of black rights was a means to suppress the price of labour. The miners were kept in disgraceful conditions. Apartheid was not a radical rupture with the past, but its natural continuation.
Nowadays, that is not a particularly original analysis. But Marks is the doyenne of a school of African history which pays close attention to capital, the economy, and class relations. She has also been keen to research and evoke women’s lives. One book was on the role of nursing in South Africa. That might seem like a niche topic, but in South Africa, with as she put it, the “possibility of white (female) hands on black (male) bodies — and black (female) hands on white (male bodies)” the nursing profession provided a fascinating arena to analyse the dynamics of race, class and gender. Among her skills as a historian she is widely respected for an ability to empathise with those whose lives are radically different from her own. But she rejects any suggestion that her Jewish background has influenced the direction of her research.
Beyond her own contributions to South African history is the role she’s played as midwife in African historiography generally. In 1969 she decided to set up a seminar series on Southern Africa at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. It would run for three decades. It may have been 6,000 miles from home, but it was more influential in shaping how we view the region’s past, and by implication, its present, than any institution in southern Africa. More often than not it was the theatre in which important new ideas in South African history were first aired. Many of the best known names in southern African history teaching today, in the UK, South Africa and elsewhere, are offspring from Professor Marks’s legendary seminars.