A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820-2000 (review)

Saul Dubow's A Commonwealth of Knowledge, growing out of his Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (1995), represents an interesting new direction in its attempt to write an institutional history of white South African knowledge production—mostly academic and scientific—on its own terms. The book carefully connects the key institutions of knowledge production to the major shifts in South African political history from 1820—the year the first large group of English settlers arrived—to the inauguration of what is often termed the post-apartheid era. Dubow explains that the book focuses on the "'South Africanization' of knowledge over a considerable span of time . . . [and] of its 'Afrikanerization,' and, most recently of its 'Africanization,' both of which mark attempts to renationalize knowledge for particular political purposes that closely reflect the politics of identity" (278). A Commonwealth of Knowledge explains the state and civil society organizations that fostered the necessary production of knowledge for the shifting formations of white South African identity, from magazines to universities, from censuses to learned societies. While Dubow focuses on these organizations and how they became South African, he also foregrounds the relations between these institutions and major international players like the Carnegie Corporation, and international intellectual trends like scientific racism.

Dubow traces the history of important Cape institutions such as the South African Library, College, and Museum; the Gardens; the South African Journal; and the Cape Monthly Magazine to argue that "knowledge-based institutions and societies were one means by which the colonial middle-class established its public presence" (2). Dubow is scrupulously clear on the historiographic stakes in writing this largely neglected institutional and intellectual history: "recent generations of historians have tended to lose sight of the salience of tensions between imperialists and colonists, despite this being very much a live issue in the late nineteenth century" (5). more significantly, he offers a clear sense of the shifting and often hidden ideologies of white identity in South Africa, ranging from the early days of British presence at the Cape through the uneasy alliances between British and Dutch intellectuals and bureaucrats fractured by the south african War of 1899 to 1902, to the emergence of south Africanism as an ideology of intra-white reconciliation after the war, to Smutsian internationalism, to the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, and finally to a provocative claim of continuity into the post-apartheid era. Through this detailed trajectory, Dubow redresses the problem that "modern South African historiography has been disinclined to pay serious attention to the barely conscious assumptions that sustained white power for so long" (11). Writing on science and South Africanism, Dubow notes that "a central theme of [Jan] Smuts's Commonwealth persona was the link between science and statehood" (202).

Throughout Dubow makes good on the claim that "viewing the Empire as an interconnected zone constituted by multiple points of contact offers a significant advance on older, often economic based theories of core and periphery" (16). This book suggests the inadequacy of postcolonial theories that do not take the singularities of settler colonialism into account, and one of its most fascinating sections tracks the interest shown by South African intellectual leaders in the southern United States in the early twentieth century.

If I have one criticism of A Commonwealth of Knowledge's extraordinary intellectual labor, it is the omission of a radical tradition in knowledge production in South Africa. This omission is entirely understandable given the sentimentalization of protest literature in the anti-apartheid movement, and that this insurgent tradition's key white figures never achieved toeholds in significant national institutions. Yet do the great maverick race traitors of twentieth-century South African intellectual life—Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Beyers Naude—not even merit a mention? This neglect can partly be attributed to the book's increasing focus on scientific knowledge as its narrative unfolds deeper into the twentieth century and its concomitant neglect of literary...