A new history of South Africa could engender controversy. Author Frank Welsh spoke to Anthony Egan
The great British historian EH Carr said that a crucial way to understand history was to understand the historian. The life of Frank Welsh – businessman, banker, boatbuilder – tells us much about his book.
A History of South Africa (HarperCollins) is a masterly synthesis of past and present South African scholarship which tries to be scrupulously fair to all while also being opinionated and filled with often amusing, sometimes tragic, vignettes. This is historical storytelling in the grand narrative tradition rather than detailed academic monograph.
Welsh read history at Cambridge University but chose to go into business. He was officially a banker, but in effect ran a steel works with subsidiaries in South Africa.
Reacting to the Tories’ handling of the Suez Crisis in 1956, he joined the Labour Party, becoming branch chair (partly because there were only four in his branch). He was swiftly recruited to serve on the boards of a number of nationalised industries. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and with the bank he directed being bought out, he moved into writing full time.
This sense of principle is redolent in his book. Historical figures are fleshed out – Andries Pretorius, hero of Blood River, comes across as a sinister, rather nasty figure, while the ill-fated AH Potgieter emerges more favourably. For Welsh, some of the “greats” of our history are deeply flawed, the greatest of these being Jan Smuts – an intellectual, a fine leader, an internationalist, but on matters to do with injustice within South Africa, totally blind.
After some coaxing, Welsh describes Nelson Mandela as “like an English 19th- century liberal, in the great Gladstonian tradition”. This, for Welsh, is a complement.
Welsh’s first book was a comparative study of the British public sector and the 1930s New Deal Tennessee Valley Authority – a project notable for the absolute transparency of its management. Other books on economics soon followed.
Welsh’s interest in history was spurred by a number of events. He and a group of Cambridge friends designed and built – with the help of the Greek navy – a trireme, an ancient Greek ship, with a battering ram on its bow. “Unfortunately,” said Welsh, “we didn’t have another trireme with which to test it.”
I ask him whether he considered history literature or social science. “Its both, I’m afraid,” he says. To Welsh, writing history is not a simple process of collecting data, analysing and writing up the findings; it is also an exercise in storytelling. Having read his new book, it seems that he has the storyteller’s gift.
A History of South Africa was four years in the writing. Welsh immersed himself in the “excellent” published works of South African historians and visited many archives in South Africa and Britain.
Occasionally even such painstaking research slips up. His assessment of the white African Resistance Movement (ARM) as a mainly white communist group is wrong: ARM comprised a few very lapsed communists and a handful of Trotskyists, certainly, but most of them were disillusioned ex-Liberal Party members.
He holds to the traditional view of the mfecane as a massive political-military cataclysm that both destroyed and created new African polities. His dismissal of the contrary, revisionist view, without arguing his case, is enough to make most modern academics’ hair stand on end.
The weakest sections of the book are those on the crisis and end of apartheid. “I would have preferred not to have covered the period from 1990 to 1994,” comments Welsh. Evidently, the publishers thought otherwise. The section is adequate, but lacks the sparkle and narrative force of the rest of the book.
The finest and largest part of the book covers the period of Dutch and British colonial rule. “I am a British colonial historian at heart,” admits Welsh. His next project will be a one-volume history of Australia.
But Welsh expresses his continuing interest in this country: ” I feel really privileged to have had the opportunity to write about South Africa.” Many readers may feel that the privilege is theirs.