SA’s history is just one damned thing after another — or not

He didn’t coin the phrase, but historian Arnold J Toynbee is often associated with the saying, “History is just one damned thing after another.”

Actually, Toynbee was deeply critical of the idea that history was without rhyme or reason and only quoted the phrase to criticise it. Toynbee’s alternative was a kind of rising-and-declining-nations thesis, driven by spiritual thirst — an idea that led him into some thick undergrowth.  

So although Toynbee, at one point very influential, has not endured, the rather amusing put-down of history and historians has. I suspect this is because events and facts remain the inevitable foundation of any historical analysis. Toynbee’s more or less contemporary, poet Max Plowman, was also critical of people who “worship” facts. 

“In return, the facts hit them like hailstones,” he wrote, adding that in these cases: “Truth becomes an endless succession of stepping-stones that have a way of disappearing into the bog as soon as they are passed over.” 

Like all history of conflicts, South Africa’s history is heavily contested. And yet it is also made up of facts. Funny, that. And like all histories, not only does the history itself change but perceptions of that history change too. It’s difficult to assess the rights and wrongs of history if you don’t live in the period, and yet, to avoid doing so seems to shirk at least our present morality.

Perhaps unfairly, I consider labour migrancy to have been an absolute curse on SA and a historical period to be reviled. Migration split up families, reduced once-functional cultures to gradual impoverishment, distorted national and regional politics, served only elites, and reduced its participants to something akin to slavery.