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History Matters by Bill Nasson – a book review

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History matters: selected writing, 1970−2016
Bill Nasson

Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 9781776090273

William Richard (Bill) Nasson was born on 28 May 1952 in Cape Town. Nasson is currently a distinguished professor of history at the University of Stellenbosch. Before that, for two decades, he was professor and head of the history department at the University of Cape Town.

He is a historian of modern South Africa, specialising in the field of war, but including other fields, namely, education, politics and oral history. He has won a number of awards for his work, such as the 1993 UCT Book Award for Abraham Esau's War: a black South African war in the Cape 18991902, the 2007 UCT Book Award for Britannia's empire: making a British world (Tempus, 2004) and the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education, 2008.

Nasson has held visiting fellowships at the University of Cambridge, the Australian National University, Yale University, the University of Illinois, the University of Kent and Trinity College, Dublin University. Books published by him include Abraham Esau’s war (1991), The war for South Africa (2010), South Africa at war 1939−1945 (2012), Springboks on the Somme: South Africa in the Great War 1914–1918 (2012) (see review: http://www.litnet.co.za/paul-murray-reviews-i-springboks-on-the-somme-south-africa-in-the-gr/), The war at home (2013) and World War One and the people of South Africa (2014) (see review: https://www.litnet.co.za/review-wwi-and-the-people-of-south-africa-by-bill-nasson/).  

It is incredibly wonderful that Nasson, an accomplished and acclaimed historian, should dedicate the book to the memory of RO Dudley (1924−2009), a school teacher. Even more so, “a teacher’s teacher”. It might be difficult to understand Nasson’s History matters without some understanding of Dudley. However, it goes beyond the scope of this book review to go into Dudley’s life to find out why. Those interested in further reading can access the obituary by Nasson himself, entitled “RO Dudley: teacher, educator and political dissenter (1924−2009)”, published in South African Journal of Science, Vol 106, no 9/10, Sep/Oct 2010.

Perhaps it lay in Dudley’s subtle and wise way of imparting knowledge, always with an understanding of those he was addressing. To Nasson, “Dudley was a visionary educator, for whom Livingstone High School’s chemistry room was a transmission belt of all sorts of questioning knowledge.”

How strange it must have been for the chemistry teacher to inspire one of his charges to become a historian!

RO Dudley

This photograph of RO Dudley was downloaded from http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S0038-23532010000500005&script=sci_arttext on 24 January 2017.

It is also wonderful that the foreword for Nasson’s book was written by South African literary giant, the late Tim Couzens (1944−2016). Reading Couzens will soon make any reader of Nasson understand why. He takes on similar themes to Nasson’s, such as the history of WWI. Writing about his The great silence: from Mushroom Valley to Delville Wood, South African forces in World War One, Couzens says:

As in most of my books I believe in never going beyond the historical evidence, but I also believe that history and life are extremely complex. So, I always try to write with poetic techniques in mind. The first chapter and the last chapter are deliberately put there.

Couzens identifies the three main themes of the book’s chapters: Nasson’s early life and schooling, book reviews and pure history (although these are each divided into a number of chapters). Each of these three components is contextualised into the whole that makes up History matters: early life and schooling, relating the politically challenging times in which Nasson’s school-going life was enriched by the likes of Dudley; the immense historical research that accompanied his book reviews; and then the chapters on history that blend with publications such as Abraham Esau’s war (1991).

Furthermore, with Couzens’s incalculable knowledge and experience as a writer – one who categorises History matters as biographical writing (four decades of it) – a paradoxical task in reading it is to understand the person’s motives and actions, while at the same time trying to be detached from and objective about it. So Couzens and Nasson were colleagues, both historians, the one fictionalising it more than the other, and both universal in their application. Couzens says of Nasson’s History matters: “the accumulation of diligence, facts, careful thought and humour, all derived in the plain and comprehensible style he urges, a historian talking not to a narrow clique of historians but to a much wider audience.”

The late Tim Couzens

The picture of Tim Couzens was downloaded from http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2016/10/27/Renowned-historian-and-author-Tim-Couzens-dies on 26 January 2017.

A picture of Nasson talking about one of his books

This picture was downloaded from http://www.pletthistory.org/assets/Uploads/image003.jpg
on 27 January 2017.

A historical education. This is the first of the three main sections of the book. The inaugural editor of the school magazine Impact in the 1960s initiated a long career in writing for Nasson. The grasp of the magazine was intellectual and international, discussing topics including the Vietnam War, nuclear disarmament and the Irish Republic, and using quotations from Cicero, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and lesser literary lights, such as Brigitte Bardot and Prince Philip.

The magazine was characterised by the total absence of items dealing with sport. The publication’s op-ed piece, which Nasson refers to as “even if overheated and utterly pretentious”, was entitled “Dissent: some thoughts on a current vogue, by WR Nasson (1970)”. The piece is on pages 5−6 of the book. There follows a biographical entry, “Ben Kies: a tiger of non-racism and non-collaboration, 1917−1979”.

Ben is described as not light-skinned enough to pass as a white in the nod-and-a-wink kind of Cape Town suburb, Woodstock, which triggered his “absorption in political issues and involvement in left-wing political activism”. For students of the history of South African political activism, the piece is a gem in the way that it documents the historical path of some of South Africa’s radical political bodies and resistance politics, from one who had powerful “views on the special vanguard role of teachers in mobilising the minds of colonised people by disseminating dissident political ideas”.

The overall gem of the section is the obituary of RO Dudley, an aspirant student of English and history induced into the teaching of science, chemistry, physics and mathematics, because the school where he taught needed it more – a universal person, equally at home in the ars poetica and ars pratica. There are lovely descriptions, stories and anecdotes about Dudley on pages 11−14. “Life at Livingstone High School in Cape Town from 1966−1970” outlines important influences on Nasson the schoolboy, which were processed in his working, writing and teaching career (pages 15−24). Not surprising is the fact that Nasson was head boy of his school, although it never went to his head, and dealing with schoolboy peccadilloes was a challenge (lenient as he probably was).  The exposure to the teaching he received, infected by internationalist history, might have been one of the defining things he took away from the school, and, “aside from mounds of homework”, he “learnt the meaning of non-collaboration and the boycott as values with which to do some of the navigating of [his] abnormal society”.

The South African War and World Wars. The opening piece in the section on the South African War, entitled “Tommy Atkins in South Africa”, totalling 12 pages (31−42), contextualises the position of the British rank and file in the South African War during the period 1899−1902. Nasson carefully unpacks the reality of the situation, sifting the perceptions of the glamorous picture, versus the harsh realities and experiences of British soldiers fighting far away from home.

Who were the ones who were the real enthusiasts about the overall harmony and social unity in the British army fighting in South Africa at the time: the ordinary British soldier, the officers or the volunteers, perhaps “often anxious to move upwards” into positions that had become vacant? “The war of Abraham Esau, 1899−1901: martyrdom, myth and folk memory in Calvinia” (43−66) analyses the South African War on black communities and individuals: how they act on and respond to events.

Esau’s response was to defend his town against Boer forces, for which he paid the ultimate penalty: in leg irons, he was tied between two horses and dragged out of town, where he was beaten and shot. The intense irony in the story lies in the fact that three days after Esau’s brutal death, Calvinia was recaptured by the British (our own Wilfred Owen, who died only a few days before the end of WWI).

News of the death of the coloured village blacksmith reached the British tabloids, and the response from the High Commissioner, Lord Milner, to the terrible death, was hugely damning, which basically said that someone such as Esau was far more civilised than the average Boer farmer (55). Nasson’s research into this dark episode in South African history, and the way it is written up, will leave the reader aghast at the fact that anything as barbaric and savage as what happened to Esau could ever have happened in the first place.

It is Nasson’s art to find pieces of history such as what happened to Esau, and to present it to a reading public. In this way, the social historian fulfils his responsibility to enable the reader to become more conscious and aware of the country’s terrible political and human rights past.

This front cover of Nasson’s book about Abraham Esau was downloaded from http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/abraham-esaus-war-bill-nasson/1100938470;jsessionid=74D5F8C7A2DFA9BD43701537106564A7.prodny_store01-atgap10?ean=9780521530590 on 28 January 2017.

In the essay entitled “A flying Springbok of wartime British skies: AG ‘Sailor’ Malan”, Nasson’s intense interest in this subject is reflected. Adolph Gysbert Malan was from Wellington in the Cape, acquiring his nickname because he had joined the Union Castle Line of the Mercantile Marine at 15. One of Malan’s comrades recalls him in the following light: “He was a born leader and natural pilot of the first order. In him there was a complete absence of balderdash. As far as he was concerned, you either did your job properly, or you were on your way. He inspired his air crews by his dynamic and forceful personality, and by the fact that he set such a high standard in his flying” (Bill Skinner, who won the Distinguished Flying Medal with 74 Squadron of WWII, writing of Sailor, with whom he flew, in http://zar.co.za/sailor.htm). The life of this great South African certainly inspired Nasson to pen an essay no less than 23 pages long on the flying Springbok, who defended the British Isles realm at a time of intense aerial warfare (116−39).

This picture of “Sailor” Malan was downloaded from http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Portrait-of-Squadron-Leader-A-G-Sailor-Malan-by-Eric-Kennington-Posters_i8514610_.htm
on 28 January 2017.

Books, More Books, Even More Books and Film. These four chapters include a wide range of reviews reflecting a possibly equally wide range of interests of Nasson. The first collection of reviews is contained on pages 67−88, including the topics of early colonial Cape history; the British high commissioner at the Cape at the time of the South African War, Alfred Milner; and cricket. Karel Schoeman’s Cape lives of the eighteenth century (Protea House, 2011), a 676-page-long tome, examines Cape colonial society at the Cape of Good Hope in the last years of the period of the Dutch East India Company.

Nasson, the professional historian, can easily detect how, in such a weighty work characterised by heavy documentation and reconstruction, Schoeman’s choice of the copious material can “[become] recycled or repeated in different circumstances or just in slightly different words”, as contextualised by Nasson: “There is, after all, only so much that is fresh to be said about gardens, estates, marriage, divorce, slave ownership, foodstuffs, servanthood, Khoi mistresses, social climbing, warfare, hunting and a myriad other diverting topics and themes.”

Forgotten patriot: a life of Alfred, Viscount Milner of St James’s and Cape Town, 1854−1925, by J Lee Thompson (Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 2007), recalls the controversial figure of Milner as “a supremely dedicated kind of Anglo-Saxon race patriot”. Again, it is the professional historian who unveils the events around Milner, and Milner in them, in “high politics” that goes well beyond his tenure in South Africa. In the words of Nasson, “To savour the life of an obsessively interfering, plotting, bossy and impassioned British imperialist, look no further.”

Cricket aficionados will surely love reading Nasson’s reviews on cricket (78−87), including something about Herschelle Gibbs and Basil D’Oliviera: the former as the “gifted and erratic Cape Town coloured cricketer who had had the silver spoon of a Diocesan College school education”, which, in the light of Gibbs, “who infamously claimed he had never read a book”, might have been more appropriately put as someone who benefitted from the system; and the latter, a South African whose career path in cricket was drastically diverted because of the South African laws of race absolutism. He subsequently became renowned as an England international cricketer, and was at the centre of the D’Oliviera affair surrounding the 1968−1969 tour of apartheid-era South Africa.

This picture of Herschelle Gibbs’s front cover of his autobiography (written with Steve Smith) was downloaded from http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9637715-to-the-point
on 28 January 2017.

In the piece entitled “I braai, therefore I am”, the title for a review of Richard Wrangham’s Catching fire: how cooking made us human (Profile Books, 2009), Nasson attempts to untangle the threads of cause and effect, and the grand theory about the past leaves us with his view that [the book] “is fatter on socio-biological speculation and rather thinner on direct proof”. It is a fact that, in reviewing books, Nasson can cast his beady eye on very many different fields.

Whether the words of the American novelist, Michael Chabon, “Every time another review comes out, I let out a deep breath”, can be true for authors writing books reviewed by Nasson, will surely depend on how good they are!

As if Nasson’s talents are not limited to writing books, articles and reviews, enjoy reading about a direct and personal involvement in the making of the film The deal (2007), which was shot on location in and around Cape Town. The deal: Gladstone, Disraeli and a South African historian in the court of King Hollywood is an account of Nasson producing material for the film, for the scene between the Liberal-Conservative confrontation, in a Gladstone-Disraeli (alias Bill-Ben) standoff in Victorian politics (235−55). What virtuosity shown by the historian Nasson!

Social Histories and Historians. In the section “Social Histories”, Nasson revisits Calvinia, the abode of Esau. With Calvinia’s hugely divided history, as in the events of the South African War, the 1960s still saw separate commemorations of what Nasson terms the different groups’ “separate spheres of pilgrimage”. And, from this time onwards, Calvinia experiences a little bit of healing, which Nasson explains in the unfolding story, much like Paul Gallico would in his. Beautifully recounting the history, Nasson takes the reader step by step through the developments of the Esau story and the roles of outsiders, local residents and the communities of Calvinia, showing how “new history in the making is measured by a resurrection of the old …”

In the section entitled “Historians”, the six impactful pages include Nasson’s views of another renowned South African social historian, Charles van Onselen. A quote from van Onselen, “The hearse of history is not far from the playground, and the subject is already half dead”, sets the scene for an explanation by Nasson of van Onselen’s problematisation of South Africa’s complex past, as reflected in his award-winning book of non-fiction, The seed is mine: the life of Kas Maine (1996). The quote is also to be seen in context of the history profession’s “unseen vulnerability”, and how currently South African history is presented. Nasson’s view deserves to be quoted in full, as it will provide at least some understanding of his philosophy of what history should do for us:

For non-fiction about the past to regain serious life amid ordinary people, historical scholarship needs to dip into the ancestral richness of literary narrative so that it, too, cultivates the classic idioms of human experience like irony, malice and calamity. South Africa’s divided past surely has more than its fair share of those. And, in illuminating its complexities, the power of history can challenge the more unreasoning forces which stalk the posturing present.

And are the social histories by Nasson and van Onselen, respectively – the one tracing the life of a blacksmith (Abraham Esau's war: a black South African war in the Cape 1899−1902), the other, of a sharecropper (The seed is mine: the life of Kas Maine) – not examples of this?

See also the piece by Nasson, entitled “Remembering Stanley Trapido (1933−2008)” (209−12), of a historical revisionist within the Marxist tradition, remembered by the way he made “the practice of history … worthwhile … entertaining and enjoyable”. This is pleasing to the likes of Nasson, who wants to avoid the profession’s being “an exchange of numbly dry products or fields …”

Odds and ends. This section ends the ten-section book. Its first piece, “Maki-Saki”, which, in Afrikaans, is a way of saying, “It does not really matter” (irony – history matters), is explained by Nasson for its use of satire. In some cases, guest contributors are included in the writing. The targets for the lampooning, says Nasson, “were predictably, mostly the doings of universities and their academic employees, politics, and the world of books.” This specific contribution, which appeared in Southern African review of books on September/October 1993, was taken seriously by one literary critic who, to the delight of Nasson, published a rebuttal.

In South African poet Stephen Watson’s anthology Presence of the earth: new poems (David Philip, 1995), the poem entitled “That place” means to capture Nasson in the poem, but Nasson says that “the man in the poem is not me”. Mistaking Nasson for someone else is not important for what Watson was trying to achieve in his “universal illustration of encountering the past as picking through old ruins, as the historian pores over evidence of a bygone time to try to piece together a meaningful pattern”. Nasson says, “Here was Stephen Watson’s talent reeling in and interpreting the splintered world of Cape Town in language far beyond the grasp of us journeyman history writers.” Some confession from a historian! But then, that is Nasson, a humble historian, powerful in his profession.

The book is indexed, contains some favourite quotes, is 286 pages long, comes in hardback and, one must emphasise, is dedicated to the memory of “a teacher’s teacher” – RO Dudley. If Dudley was never meant to wave the magical fairy wand, to turn Nasson from a self-confessed numerical and scientific dunce into an Einstein, then he definitely succeeded in inspiring him to become a formidable historian. History matters is scientific proof!

Photo of Bill Nasson: Lavonne Bosman

The post History Matters by Bill Nasson – a book review appeared first on LitNet.


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