Polemics Of History

A friend of mine wrote emailed me from London, asking what i thought of Dr. RW Johnson. I asked her to read my book review of his book i did a couple of years ago. She wrote me to say she could not find it on the internet, and so I've decided to republish it here again.
The book South Africa: The First Man And The Last Nation, written by the bel esprit of South African liberal thought, RW Johnson, is tedious and controversial from the very moment you pick it. Dr Johnson makes it clear from the preface of the book that he’s wielding a political axe to grind. Those who hate polemics in historical writings only go on reading hoping that, perhaps, such declarations are signs of unassailable integrity; or at least hoping fresh historical insight that’ll make reading the book worth one’s while. Alas all that to no avail.
Dr Johnson states his thesis from the beginning: 'We have to have to face the sad truth that South Africa , with the end of apartheid, exchanged one set of authoritarian, hegemonic nationalist for another and that many of the hopes of liberation have faded as the similarities between these two hegemonies have multiplied. One has to be frank about history. The job in hand, here in the southern tip of Africa , is to live through this period and to tell the truth about it so that we can one day go beyond it.'
Conspiracy mongering often serves as an excuse of avoiding the difficult task of finding a political alternative. One can be frank about history and still be dishonest if the motives are false. I suppose that’s what Freud meant when he wrote that the ‘Unconscious knows no negation.’ As if that was not enough, a nest of tedious exculpations try sustain shores of the discourse of Dr Johnson throughout the book with a tone of acquired subtle racism and Kliping’s colonialist ‘burden of the white man.’

Most of what Dr Johnson says has been said before, culled from pop history publications of South African history that sees themselves as promontory wall against the waves of false interpretations of history by African Nationalists. What the reader makes of statements like . . . 'and that many of the hopes of liberation have faded as the similarities between these two hegemonies have multiplied'. . . depends on one’s political leaning. Even so I cannot imagine the majority of people in our country agreeing with the statement. It makes one surmise that there’s an obvious truth in the belief of irreconcilable difference between liberal persuasions and the sentiments of ordinary people.

In reading Mr Johnson’s book one gets the feeling that we’re not dealing with assumptions of good old racists, but with a rise of imperialistic mind disguised in humanist language. We’re dealing with a prominent example of an urge to raise new walls of division by some Hesperian intellectuals in the name of progress. This new racism is in a way much more brutal than the previous one, because it’s implicit legitimisation is not naturalist—the superiority of the white race—but culturalist. It wants to preserve the Western cultural identity from the specious coming chaos of the ‘barbarians.’ We’re, in short, dealing with unabashed cultural egotism that has recently been heard calling for relocation of 20010 Soccer World amid unfounded fears that South Africa would not be able to cope.

Books like Dr Johnson’s projects fears, anxieties, rumours, and secret desires of liberals’ needs for intellectual prominence. Dr Johnson has collected and illuminated them into specious intellectual reports, and present them in the book as historical discussion. As the result the book is longueur-laden, fettered with irrelevant cultural sweeps that would make for another book in quotation. Where correct in it’s assessment, Dr Johnson’s book is unoriginal. It is a mixture of summaries from summaries, and reads like a poor slop of original tealeaves in their fifth wash of hot water.

Sometimes a reader may be taken in the book by the style of writing even though not necessarily agreeing with the author’s conclusions. The example of the Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee comes to mind. Dr Johnson, in every chance he gets, sets Coetzee as an example of a man of letters who could not live in clear conscience under governments of what he calls 'authoritarian, hegemonic nationalist'. Indeed, Coetzee is a master stylist whose sentences are classically balanced, dry, yet intimate and oracular. One is sometimes simply swept along by his writings despite the reservations he might have about content. Unfortunately the same is not true with Dr Johnson’s journalistic style of writing. One of the advantages artists have over historians is that they can compose works, even from dubious motivations, and still produce interesting and important, lasting, art. Historians are not permitted such margins. It matters that they get things right. Their opinions—which is all they have—in examining historical content are crucial. Wisdom in a historian is never an excess baggage. If only Dr Johnson had more wisdom and less thickly laid polemics.