A Praetorian sensibility?: the making of the humanities and social sciences through the tangled histories of the HSRC and the Humanities Faculty in Pretoria

Abstract

I begin, then, with the position that the institutions the University of Pretoria, the Bureau and the HSRC have complex histories. They were born as white institutions. Today, of course, they are very different. But black people did not feature then. In coming to construct a story of the institutions, I show, in seeking to hold the complexity of the institutions in sight, that they were messy spaces. They were messy precisely because South Africa was at a point when these institutions were being established, of working out the question of white identity at a time when the white community was caught in an intense struggle over its future. The question was primarily about what it meant to be white what was expected of white subjects, and how they should think of themselves, in relation to each other, and in relation to people not considered to be white. The South African nation was being defined. Framing the question was, at one level, a struggle about Englishness against and over a sense of what it meant to be Afrikaans and Afrikaner, and, at another level, about the relationship of white people with black people. Was it to be over, against, or, in the emerging language of the day, separate and apart from black people?