Topics as diverse as farmworkers in the Karoo and reproductive health proved how broad in scope the discipline of History has become, as around 50 former and current staff members and students gathered for a recent colloquium at the Rhodes University History Department.
Topics as diverse as farmworkers in the Karoo and reproductive health proved how broad in scope the discipline of History has become, as around 50 former and current staff members and students gathered for a recent colloquium at the Rhodes University History Department.
The two-day event, on 16 and 17 September, was to mark the department's centenary. It was founded in 1911.
Participants from generations spanning every decade since the 1940s presented papers both on the history of the department and their experience of it, and their current research interests, which included studies of Karoo farm workers, North West mining communities and marginalised Eastern Cape communities, reproductive health and the post-apartheid school history curriculum.
Hugh Macmillan, son of the university's first lecturer in History and Economics, WM Macmillan, spoke about his father’s research in Grahamstown and travels in the Eastern Cape.
A former Rhodes History lecturer, Bruce Murray, gave a paper on WM Macmillan’s subsequent years after he took up the chair of History at the University of the Witwatersrand. WM Macmillan became the most distinguished, influential historian of his generation in South Africa.
Rodney Davenport, head of department from 1975 to 1990, spoke about his years at Rhodes, dating back to his time as a first-year student in 1943. Also present were those who had studied in the department in the 1960s – among them, Deryck Schreuder, who went on to become the vice-chancellor at the University of Western Sydney and later the University of Western Australia.
Rosemary Jackson gave a critical account of the difficulties experienced by women students at Rhodes in the early 1960s, highlighting the humiliation and indignities they endured.
Later generations of graduates described how a degree in History had helped them in their careers and activities, whether teaching, NGO work or, in the case of Alan Webster, running the jazz festival as part of the Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts.
