When you travelled to Botswana did you already have an idea about what you were going to study?

I knew I was going to study history. I do not know why, I have always been fascinated by history. I seem to remember winning a school price for history when I was nine. That should not mean very much, I also won a school price for scripture at the same time. They are both history, I suppose. So in that sense, I knew I was going to study history when I got back from Botswana. My choice for African history was made essentially in my third year as an undergraduate [at Cambridge University]. I had had a relatively unsuccessful career up till then doing European and English history, slightly more doing the Expansion of Europe paper, slightly less doing the history of political thought. And so in my third year, when I had to take two papers and a special subject, there was one paper of African history and one of Indian history. And so it was quite obvious that I would do African history. It was at the time one of the larger papers, it had about sixty people doing it. It was taught by Ivor Wilks, John Lonsdale, Sydney Kanya-Forstner. I was supervised by Sydney who was Canadian and had written a book on the Western Sudan, he was at that time research fellow, in his mid to late twenties.Footnote ³

And the others all had a colonial background?

Wilks had just come back from Ghana and taught in Cambridge for three or four years till he got a job in Northwestern. And Lonsdale had come back from Dar es Salaam. And so they and Kanya-Forstner gave the lectures and you would not have been able to find a better team anywhere. I started a Ph.D. after that year on the basis of a research proposal that I still know off by heart: “The social economic history of an African tribe” full stop. I convinced them over the telephone. The faculty in those days had a number of Ph.D. places to distribute and I got one of them. It was 850 pounds a year, that was 1970. It was not a lot, but enough to survive and I began my Ph.D. under Ronald Robinson who had been away on leave in the year that I did my undergraduate in African history. So I worked under him for a year, and in the beginning of my second year, just before I went to Africa, Robbie went to Oxford, Ivor Wilks went to Northwestern and John Iliffe came back from Tanzania to take over and I was moved to work under him. And so I met him briefly before I went to Africa for nine months and I only really got to know him when I got back to write the thesis.

I went to South Africa largely at the suggestion of Ronald Robinson. When I was still thinking about which African tribe I was going to write that socio-economic history of, he said “why don’t you take a look at the Griquas, they look interesting and come back in two weeks’ time and tell me everything there is to know about the Griquas.” So I really did and went down to Sussex where Martin Legassick was teaching. He had written a thick thesis on the Griquas.Footnote ⁴ I talked with him for a while and thought they were indeed rather interesting and decided I would work on them. Initially I thought it would be something on the Tswana, but the Griquas seemed more interesting, and I wouldn’t have to learn a language. Well I had to learn some amount of Dutch and Afrikaans, but that wasn’t so difficult. And so I first spent two or three months in the archives of the London Missionary Society in London, commuting up to central London. I spent nearly a year in South Africa, mainly in the archives, and having one beautiful field trip from Cape Town to Kimberley and then through Philippolis to and through Lesotho via Ongeluks Nek down to Kokstad.

That is interesting: in contrast to many Ph.D.s at the time, you actually went to look at the various places that you were writing about?

Well I certainly went to look at them, but I am not sure whether that is in contrast to many Ph.D. theses—I mean Shula’s [Marks, who taught at SOAS, University of London] students like William Beinart, Pat Harries, Phil Bonner, Peter Delius, Jeff Guy. They, all that lot went to see places they were writing about and did quite a lot of oral history, which I never did or hardly any.

Why didn’t you?

I could have spent more time in Kokstad and I might have learned something, but part of it was scepticism and part being chased by the South African Special Branch. Which was our own fault. I was travelling with a man called Jeff Lewenbery, an anthropologist who worked on the Le Fleur Griquas and we arrived in Kokstad when the Kokstad advertiser was asking for suggestions as to how to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the town and we wrote a letter to the Kokstad advertiser and which went more or less like this: “Dear madam, when, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Kokstad, the son of the first missionary, a man called Dower, gave a sermon in the Griqua church with the text: ‘The wells that were delved by your fathers have been filled in by the philistines.’ In view on the recent expulsion of the Griquas in the centre of Kokstad under the Group Areas Act, might we suggest that a similar service is held and might we suggest with the text: ‘and is this place, which was built in my name become a den of robbers.’” The South African police did not actually appreciate this and followed us around East Griqualand for two or three days. This was 1972, at the end of high apartheid.

You refer to various historians who you consider to be your contemporaries: Beinart, Harries, Guy…. You are the only one who is not South African.

Phil Bonner was brought up in Kenya, Kevin Shillington is not South African—but, yes Colin Bundy, Charles van Onselen, slightly later Saul Dubow, Deborah Posel, Susie Newton King and Bill Nasson are all South Africans. Indeed very few of us were not South Africans, and most of the ones who were not went to live there. I reckon that in 1994 I was one of about two or three serious South African historians who weren’t eligible to vote one way or the other.

So going back in time you completed your Ph.D. in 1974?

Yes just before my 25^th birthday.

How did you end up in Leiden?

When I got my Ph.D., probably because I was not very efficient at those sort of things, I did not manage to organize myself a research fellowship in Cambridge or in Oxford. There were not that many postdocs around anyway. I was in that stage keeping myself in beer money by working in the Harrods perfume and cosmetics department (moving boxes around, I did not sell the stuff). I decided that this was not a good thing to do in the long term, and thought I could might as well do the same in Holland and learn Dutch in the meantime. So I did. I moved around flowers in the Aalsmeer flower auction when I needed money and said hello to the people in Leiden and after a while got some sort of job translating into English and slowly worked my way in, I think it took me 19 years to get a vaste aanstelling [permanent position], something like that anyway.

So, in 1975 you got your first job at the history department?

Yes by the end of 1975 I started editing and translating. The Series—Comparative Studies in Overseas History — were publications of the werkgroep [seminar group] History of European Expansion and Reactions, later called IGEER.Footnote ⁵ The “reactions” were included in the title but not taken too seriously.

That means that you were present at the birth of Itinerario.

Yes! And I edited for two or three years, mainly with George Winius, and I did some of these interviews I did Mathieu Schoffeleers, Dharma Kumar, Clifford Geertz among others. There is little to say about it. We sat in a room in the history department and chatted for one and a half hours as one does with interviews.

Geertz interests us, because we wanted to work out what, or why you take the approaches you do take to history. We think of you as an eclecticist, but others might say other things. And you have just spoken about Clifford Geertz, who has an interesting approach to history. Looking at your own career, would you say there is a constant and what would that constant be?

The virtual constant is that I have been trying to understand colonial Cape Colony and people who left it and were in connection with it—take the Griqua book, the thesis, is just outside the Cape Colony, but it was completely dominated by the Cape colony—the problem with the book is that it had a whole set of hypotheses, which depended on knowing about the Cape colony, which I didn’t, so I decided I needed to find out more about it.Footnote ⁶ Then within that, I have looked at the Cape in a whole variety of different ways—economic, demographic, religious, various forms of social, but not a lot of politics. That is the constant—eclecticism—I don’t know—most of what I have been doing up till the 1990s, after the thesis, was based on very short visits to South Africa, very short archival bursts in the Cape archives. Status and Respectability Footnote ⁷ was written, if you look carefully, on hardly any archival basis at all, and a lot of the mission stuff was based on published material, because many of the French and German mission journals were at that stage available in OegstgeestFootnote ⁸—and thus even closer to home than the Archives in The Hague—and the archives in the Hague formed the basis for the slavery book, Cape of Torments,Footnote ⁹ and also the economic history with Pieter van Duin.Footnote ¹⁰

Indeed, I have gone off on a whole variety of different directions, but within a geographical and temporal unity—I do not know why, it is just what seemed to make sense. And a lot of it, certainly Status and respectability has a lot of anthropology, but not Geertz. Also not Adam Kuper,Footnote ¹¹ though I was close to him when he was here. I would say that a lot of the stuff I have done has been about finding individual stories which fit to illustrate a particular pattern. Certainly the slave book is full of individual stories. Status and respectability is, to some extent Adam KokFootnote ¹² is at the beginning and certainly the Kat River book.Footnote ¹³ On the other hand I can add up and so I am quite happy with numbers and am very happy with maps. It is the relationship between individual stories and the world of social events, which very often interest me. And then the more general books, the Concise history of South Africa and the History of clothing came basically because people asked me to do them.Footnote ¹⁴

So your excursion into global history was on assignment?

Yes I got this letter from Polity [press] saying “Dear Dr. Ross, we have this series with books about various things and we would very much like you to write a history of clothing,” I am not quite sure why they asked me, it was fairly soon after Status and respectability, and once I stopped laughing—for those who remember how I was dressed in the 1990s and 1980s will understand—I began to think yes, one can do something really quite interesting about that. So I did.

When I [JBG] was an undergraduate I remember you once talking about clothing in class and sort of saying “clothing is a conscious choice and signals who you are.”

It does not signal who you are, as much as it signals who you want other people to think you are.

One of the things that strikes—when you read Cape of torments, there is an incredible anger in the writing, an anger, which is right there on the surface, at the top, and which disappears from your later work.

Kat river was not quite as angry? I don’t know, if it is how you read it, is how it is.

Kat river is subtle

Yes Cape of torments is not subtle. I am just trying to remember the details as to when Cape of torments got written—how much of that is in a personal thing, how much of that is from spending several months reading court cases with people getting put to death for whatever they did, which is not likely to make one happy about the thing, and how much is my experiences of living for short periods of time in South Africa. Though I never lived there for more than nine months at the time. But then, it is probably a consequence of maturation, Cape of torments was published when I was thirty three.

A totally different question: how did you manage to steer clear of the back biting and incredible feuding that existed among South African historians in the 1980s and 1990s?

Well that is because I was not a South African historian, it makes a lot of difference.

and yet you are the most respected of the historians of South Africa.

Maybe… well, as I said I did not have to refight the rugby matches between Bishops [Bishops Diocesan College] and SACS [South African College Schools]. These are two major secondary schools in Cape Town, to which a number of my colleagues went and that competition is still there. It is that we know who went to Bishops and who went to SACS. But I did not have the fight going back to my youth and the colonial Cape work that I was doing was somewhat away from others. Also, I am not a particularly combative sort of type, and I mean those debates were a lot about politics by some other name, continuation of politics by other means, the Cambridge history of South Africa describes its history—I know because I wrote it—and in that sense I did not participate. I did not need in the same way to demonstrate that clearly who I was and where I came from.

But that doesn’t mean that the type of history that you wrote was apolitical.

You can’t get a more political book than Cape of torments. No, I was not apolitical, but I was not part of any given sect and that was the sort of way I worked. I was not a theoretician either, which made life easier, in the sense of the way some of them were theoreticians. I did not enter into the massive Marxist debates, mainly because I could not understand them, not sure if all participants could …

Whereas your work is very much informed by theory, anthropological theory mostly.

Yes I suppose so, such as symbolism. But that anthropological theory varies and that gets absorbed by osmosis. I got slightly more theoretical as I got older.

You are undoubtedly the most productive historian of South Africa of your generation, why is that?

I think, I have three things which mean that I work very efficiently as historian. First, I read at the speed of light—I once found one of these books saying “read better read faster” and I did the test at the end and discovered I read twice as fast as the best possible result they suggested. Secondly, I have a very good memory. Thirdly, I somehow learned to write in a draft and a half, most of the time. I don’t know how that happened, but I think a lot of that had to do with being brought up listening to good English prose at least once a week. Anyone who has been brought up in the old days of the Anglican Church recalls saying general confession once a week, with the classic sentences “we have done those things which we ought not to have done and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done.” It does not matter about the message, it is a wonderful sentence with one word of more than one syllable—“and there is no health in us”—it goes on. You cannot be a postmodernist if you have done that, or a theoretical Marxist. Well, you probably can but then you were not listening.

So you are basically saying it is because of your background, because of your parents, you are a Bildungsbürger.

I was brought up with my sisters in an academic family and that with as good an academic education as you can get. I went to a high-class academic English public school and then to Cambridge. That made it a lot easier and as I said, learning what an English sentence sounds like helps.

Since the 1970s you have been returning to South Africa regularly in a turbulent period. How did you experience that and how is that reflected in your work?

How one experiences such changes? It is obviously a much less tense place than it was when I first arrived. The first weekend I arrived in Cape Town, on a Sunday morning all the lefties of Cape Town were woken up at five in the morning and house searched, nothing more than that, I don’t think. These were academics, Ph.D.s and researchers, basically UCT [University of Cape Town] left.

So, I mean South Africa is a much easier place to live in than it used to be. You still have a reasonable chance getting murdered or be wiped out in a car crash. I must admit that I have never experienced violence in South Africa ever, you must know where not to go, and possibly I have been naïve. And the amount of change at the top, the political top, is considerable to some extent, but if you are not racist the change is very little, because the society has not changed very much. It has just got a lot of Black faces at the top, which were not there, if you don’t notice it. Well of course you have to notice, but if you ignore that, you wonder what has changed: Bishops and SACS still exist, there are still people who make money from tenders for the telephone books as Verwoerd’s cousins did. That the National Party got subsumed in the ANC shows that there is absolutely no difference…which it really did.Footnote ¹⁵

We looked at your thesis and thought of your latest book, The Borders of Race and noticed parallels between the books. But, the circumstances under which you could do research there were different, you weren’t chased by the police this time.

I wasn’t chased by the police around Kat River, but we were certainly involved in political competition. It is a very very tense place still, I mean we never quite worked out whether it was the mayor who dropped his main opponent of the Seymour Dam or whether it was the mayor who got dropped, but there was an enormous amount of communal tension in the valley between the Xhosa and the descendants of the settlers. That is what we were pulled into. The place is tense and highly politicized because there is a competition for scarce fertile irrigable land and that still goes on. Obvious the relationship between Adam Kok’s Griquas and The Borders of race is considerable in some ways it is practiced and the theme is very much the same and a number of characters appear in both, so even at that level the connection is there.

Historians are not supposed to predict the future, but they always do.

Probably better than others. What is going to happen in Southern Africa—probably more of the same in the coming ten years and I cannot see any serious shift in the political dispensation in the relatively near future. Part of that means that the current political dispensation backs up, and profits from the current economic dispensation even though people who run the economy are not the people who run the politics. Some of them maybe, there are clearly people who form the bridges, Ramaphosa and Sexwale, but the people who run the politics are sufficiently dependent on the people who run the economy, not to cock up the economy in the way it has happened in Zimbabwe. At least that is my probably unduly optimistic view.

Would you attribute that to the rapid growth of the African middle class?

Yes. The black middle class has an enormous stake in its future. The black middle class is at least two times as large as the white middle class. Those are the people for whom the ANC in government works, which is what pisses of people who vote for the Economic Freedom Front of Julius Malema. But I think that they want their own part of the pie, they are not going to let the pie disappear. And there is this incredibly complicated relationship between the black middle class and the ANC top, which as I see it, basically because the ANC cannot say they are supporting the middle class, and have to keep their relationship with the unions and the communist party running. But nevertheless it is good for the ANC to have people like Malema around. When they were still in the ANC it was a lot easier for them, because he could shoot his mouth off and pretend, and everyone thought that the ANC was being radical whilst it was just getting on with its business.

Yet it has delivered over the past twenty years rather more than could be expected of it: quite a lot, in terms of electrification, social grants have been enormous and boomed many poor communities. There has been a form of redistribution towards the bottom of society, which perhaps does not show up in income or inequality measures, but there are other things like health care and education. These are unquantifiable forms of income which probably have improved the lot of South Africans substantially. There are obviously many very poor South Africans still and there will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. But I do not think it will explode—famous last words.

One of the other extremely important things is the end of formal racial discrimination.

That makes an enormous difference. I think there is a lot more social mobility than people realize.

In the introduction to Beyond the paleFootnote ¹⁶ you reflect on questions of continuity and change as you did just now. In the same text you passionately declare your love for South Africa—so what is it that you love about South Africa?

I love the country side, I love the country—I love landscapes anyway, the South African landscape has always gotten me and I love trying to work out how society works. There is also the sense in which South Africa is a place of incredible social complications, and I said nothing has changed. Obviously that is not really true, but there is an enormous amount of social complications and fascinating people around them. Understand them and make sense of them, that is what I love.

You retired last year, but did not stop working of course. We know you are working on three projects at the moment, can you elaborate?

One of them is a spin off to the Kat River book. It is an anthology of Khoi political thought, which is to see what there is when putting it together. I have collected 85000 words of text so it will get cut down—Not that I have written it myself, these are various texts, which together give a running commentary on how the lower class saw colonial South African racists from about the 1820s to the 1870s, and I will have to contextualize it and write little essays on why it is that they were objecting Cape separatism and such. And the second one, which I should have finished long ago is not a Cape book. It is on black material culture: it is about tables and chairs, knives and forks and those sorts of things and how they have been adopted in black homes, which is not easy to find literature on. A lot is going to be based on market research from the 1970s onwards and before that just picking things up in various places. The third, which I haven’t done much on yet, apart from collecting a certain amount of information, is an ecological history of a single valley in the Eastern Cape, the Gamtoos. This is about the work of the developmental state and about solving ecological problems, but also it is about missions and such like.… I shall have to go and do some interviews and find someone to work for me in the deeds office in Cape Town. It is about an area, which since the 1970s has become a very flourishing agricultural district. Before that, for a number of reasons, it was rather run down, poor white. Since the 1970s it became very rich on the basis of Afrikaner economic empowerment. After 1994 it benefitted enormously from 1994, the end of sanctions. These are citrus producers, and it is an island of high productivity and a certain amount of wealth and prosperity certainly at the farms and substantial employment.

Moving from South Africa to the Netherlands, to Leiden where you spent quite a large part of your life. You entered academia there through the history department. But you managed to put African Studies on the agenda in Leiden.

I have lived in Leiden longer than anywhere else. Yes, I set up an African studies degree course—in fact I think I set up five degree courses in my life at various levels. I have never quite worked out why African studies as a degree course never attracted many students. There are difficulties about area studies, which count for African studies, Southeast Asian studies and South Asian studies alike, slightly less for China and Japanese now, slightly less for Latin America as well. Somehow they do not attract very many students, at the top end in the research masters we get ten students a year which is not enough. But over the last years Africa has been given a larger place within the history department, which is a good development. Most of my career, the history department did not look for cooperation. When I was working for African studies, they had to make use of me from time to time, but they tried to discourage that because of the way finances worked. It is cynical, but that is how it was. The credits of students who came to me, were not counted towards the history department; that changed about five years ago. But it is still ridiculous that Africa is now within history and China is not, but that also has to do with how the Sinologists think about these things. They do not see themselves in the first place as historians, but as Sinologists.

Do you feel that academia has changed much over time? You have revealed yourself as someone who emphasizes continuities over change but…

Leiden changed since I arrived in 1975, it has got better. It got much more professional, which in general is a good thing. I suspect that the power of what a friend of mine calls the crows—because they walk about in black gowns—has decreased somewhat. This is a good thing. There were few people who, when I first arrived, were too powerful. I benefitted from one of them enormously but that is another matter, not that I approved of it. There are those who I hated and those who I enormously appreciated, though I did not get anything out of them. Overall Leiden has become much more professional and much more productive. In part because there are some brownie points to be gained by being productive in terms of writing, which in the past there were not. And now slowly Leiden is beginning to realize that the university has the broadest selection of historians probably outside North America and they bloody well ought to make use of it and they do not, not enough. The only places which probably have a wider geographical range of historians is UCLA and Wisconsin, and that’s about it and this is not exploited enough.

Is it policy that creates institutional boundaries?

It is not so much policy, the boundaries are internal too. But on the other hand, if you look objectively what the potential strength is of Leiden, or of our institutions, it is in the breadth that could and should be exploited. The linguists managed to do so in a way that the historians never did. The original IGEER [Institute for the History of European Expansion and Reaction] idea might have worked, but in the end it was too Eurocentric to get everyone on board. Henk Wesseling had the right idea, but in the end there were some historians within the history department who rubbed some who were outside the department up the wrong way. Which meant that the symbiosis which was possible never happened. Part of it was personality, part of it was the institutional question. But whatever the linguists or the sinologists thought they were doing, they did not realize that what they were doing was so close to what was being done at the history department. That has to some extent changed, but probably not enough. There was a potential there that was not exploited.

In relation to your last remark on Eurocentrism among historians we have one more question. Looking at your work, you have experimented with a great range of sources, through a variety of approaches. We already spoke about your eclecticism. Now African history, and of course this counts for other regions too, is a difficult history to write. Often one has to depend, maybe not exclusively, but to a large extent, on European primary sources. Do you feel that you have developed a way to tackle this problem? And, on a lighter note, what then is your favourite source?

No I have not. I have worked almost entirely on a colonial society and you have then to think about how collections of written sources, which are filtered, which came into existence through the colonial society, through the colonial government can tell you things about what is going on among non-colonial people, basically Africans and slaves and that is essentially what 19^th and 20^th century African history is about, in a technical sense. And the idea that you can’t actually say something about the subaltern classes of colonial society, because the sources are colonial is of course a mistake. It is one-sided, but I have not found any better way out of it than anyone else. And I have always been a historian of colonial societies rather than of Africa, rather than someone who deals with Africa as before colonial times.

My favourite source is the landscape. The most enjoyable bits of being a historian I have had is walking and driving about various bits of southern Africa and working out how they came to be, to look the way they do. Trying to reconstruct irrigation system and such like. The Reference HoskinsW. G. Hoskins type of history is wonderful and such.Footnote ¹⁷ I don’t manage to do enough of it now, I spent more time reading archives and books and newspapers than I do walking around the countryside, but that does not mean to say I prefer doing it.