I am sitting at what has to be the world’s slowest internet cafe where, as a glutton for punishment, I have waited ten minutes simply to be able to log in here to write this post. Apparently the dial-up connection is not that strong on a Friday afternoon.
I just got done with my special session for this year’s Historical Association of South Africa (HASA) biennial meeting, which was one of my justifications for coming (other than the World Cup, which is, I remind you, a work trip for me!). HASA is not to be confused with another group of which I am a member, the Southern African Historical Association, or SAHA, which also meets biennially but on the opposite timetable, and no, I never remember which one I am attending in any given year.
In any case, the meeting was scheduled for the University of the North-West’s main campus in Potchefstroom for 7-9 July, but that conflicted with the World Cup when the Lords of FIFA decided to buy up every room in Potch despite not needing them and ultimately releasing just about all f them. Nonetheless, that forced HASA to change the meeting to a couple of weeks from now. Three of us could not change our travel plans, and as a consequence the organizers, with help from the University of Pretoria’s historical studies department, arranged for a special session to be held today from 11:00 to 1:00 on the beautiful University of Pretoria campus in Hatfield.A surprising number of people showed up (more than at most typical conference panels) largely because of what I imagine is none-too-subtle arm twisting of UP history grad students.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the panel was a bit of a hodgepodge, as there was no internal logic to the papers on the panel other than the fact of our travel plans. The panel led off with Miles Larmer of the University of Sheffield, who presented “National independence, local identities and transnational conflict: the Katangese Gendarmes in historical perspective,” a fine blend work that blended questions of nationalism, transnationalism, identity and politics into the context of military history. The specifics were a bit removed from my own work, but those questions are relevant to the work of most Africanists.
In a qualitative letdown, my paper came next. I am not engaging in false modesty – my purpose in presenting my paper was to force myself to start working on the introduction to a book project on anti-Apartheid resistance and state responses to it in what I am calling the “Long 1985,” a period extending from September 1984 to late-1986 that I have worked on in fits and starts since I first came to South Africa in 1997. Titled “The unhappiest year of our lives”: The Long 1985 and the downfall of Apartheid” my paper is a much more tentative and not especially groundbreaking attempt to begin to wrestle by discrete case studies into a larger, more coherent narrative. Because they were recording each presentation individually in order to play it during our scheduled panel at the conference in a few weeks, we each had our individual q+a directly after our presentation rather than waiting for all of us to finish. The questions to me were good ones, and many really did help me to clarify ways of thinking going forward – that does not always happen at historical conferences.
HASA is a multilingual organization, though the vast majority of the HASA conferences end up being conducted in two languages, English and Afrikaans (for the longest time I believe HASA was primarily an Afrikaans organization). The organization has also cultivated a connection with the African Studies Centre at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, which always tries to have at least one panel at the conference. To honor the Afrikaners, George Harinck gave his paper in Dutch. That worked OK for the native Afrikaans speakers in the room, as the two tongues are largely mutually intelligible. I can muddle through conversationally in Afrikaans (and am better at reading it, having once actually been quite good at it for research purposes) but the added degree of difficulty with adding Dutch meant that it was a bit tougher for me to master the fine points of what I still gathered was a quite good paper, “Receptie in Nederland van B. B. Skeet, Suid Africa waarheen?” which regarded the responses to South African anti-Apartheid theologian BB Skeet and especially the response to his book Whither South Africa.
Tonight I still plan to attend the Blue Bulls game (again: for work purposes!) Tomorrow morning I commence the last phase of my South African journey as I head to a neighborhood near Melville for my last two nights in the country. There I will watch the last two games of South Africa’s grand World Cup. It was interesting to hear the varied academic takes on the Cup in discussions before and after the panel. This is especially so because those of us on the panel were from the Netherlands (Professor Harinck was quite happy), England (Professor Larmer was bemused) and myself. We had a wide-ranging discussion on media treatment of the Cup abroad (very supportive in Holland, less so in England, though it is also easy to mistake the negativity of the tabloids for the whole, which has actually been quite supportive) and other topics, providing me with yet more perspectives as I make sense of all that I have seen in the past few weeks.