Stanley Trapido (1933–2008)

Stanley Trapido, one of South Africa’s foremost historians, died at the age of seventy-four in January 2008. He had for many years been attached to Queen Elizabeth House in the University of Oxford and was Lecturer in the Government of New States and a Fellow of Lincoln College. Based in Oxford Commonwealth Studies, he was a major influence within the dominant coterie of left-wing scholars who ploughed the contours of new historical writing on South Africa through the 1970s and 1980s, in which social history and class analysis fertilized the minds of many probing postgraduate students and appreciative academic colleagues. Although Stanley Trapido was in the thick of this, he never cultivated a school of personal protégés. He had no need of that sort of reputation.

Born in 1933, Stan Trapido grew up and was schooled in the gruff Transvaal mining town of Krugersdorp, an appropriately geological spot from which to embark on his initial science studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. But finding common cause with a radical fringe of students associated with the Congress of Democrats in the 1950s tilted him towards political history and he completed a Masters dissertation on the ANC. After a junior lecturing stint at the University of Cape Town, he went on to Durban to teach at the University of Natal. There Stan met and married the woman who would be his devoted companion to the end of his life, the noted novelist, Barbara Trapido. In December 2007 she wrote gently and wryly in the Guardian about working in an attic still bulging with ‘biographies of dead imperialists’ and once decorated with pictures of colonial buffalo hunts and mission churches. It had been occupied previously by her husband, identified as ‘Stanley, a historian’, for whom she had by then become the ‘carer’, in the coy language of modern welfare service custodianship.

Over four decades earlier Stan Trapido had left a repressive apartheid South Africa and had gone into self-imposed exile in Britain where he taught for several years at the University of Durham, much favoured by silverspoon undergraduates. He recalled one admissions interview there with a snooty sixth-former, an Etonian Rob Roy of pristine pedigree. A descendant of ‘Sir Ian Montcrieff of that Ilk’ he would declare, with a characteristic low chuckle. With a University of London PhD under his belt, Stan then left Durham for Oxford where he worked until his retirement in 2001 and continued to live until his death.

Stanley Trapido was a truly uncommon scholar. His no-nonsense upbringing included immersion in athletics and boxing, and an early childhood passion for cricket and rugby never waned, with the state of play at Cape Town’s Newlands rugby ground or at Lords always getting him into a quizzical state of mild animation. His sceptical temperament and self-effacing sensibility made him healthily critical or quietly dismissive not only of ruling establishments and their institutions, but also of academic pretentiousness. When I first encountered him in the 1980s, it was in a Cape Town room filled with studious bees swarming around a visiting grand historian of Central Africa in order to be dazzled. True to type, Stan was sitting alone on the floor, up against a sofa, primed with squinting insights of a horizontal kind. He embodied then, as so often, the most mellow and beguiling contrariness imaginable.

Stan Trapido’s earliest pieces in the liberal journal, Africa South, were indicative of the trademark form that his penetrating historical works would later assume – the rigorous essay, whether as argument, as exploratory stab, as historiographical squib or as polished synthesis. An exceptionally meticulous researcher who relished time-consuming archival labour, it is striking that Stanley Trapido rose to become so influential a historian without ever writing a book of his own. Perhaps there was something in his reserved and low-key sensibility of never really wanting to have his cake and eat it. Instead, his creativity in reinterpreting crucial aspects of South African history through a Marxisant lens was doled out in virtuoso slices from the [End Page...