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Working History | History Working
The History Workshop was founded over 40 years ago by a handful of intellectuals committed to contributing to the breaking down of apartheid in the wake of a powerful resurgence of student and worker militancy in the 1970s.
Africanist and Marxist influences mixed with strains of Social and People’s History to produce new ways of understanding Southern African history and for suggesting the most likely path to democracy. Academics sought to reach out to the ‘ordinary’ people whom they understood to be the makers of history.
The early years of the History Workshop are remembered for their spectacular Open Days and attempts to ‘teach’ people how to write their own histories. But it has been argued that much of the real business of the History Workshop was, nonetheless, conducted behind the closed doors of the seminar room.
After the Workshop went through an existential crisis in the early 1990s, the meaning of what came to be known as public history changed profoundly. Communities outside the university came to be regarded as partners rather than as occasional visitors. The Workshop – born in a dark and despairing moment of late apartheid – necessarily had to reorientate itself to engage with the new conditions that followed the installation of formal democracy in 1994.
Over the past 23 years the Workshop has been actively involved in various public history projects with communities, civil society organisations, heritage associations and educators. At the same time, the History Workshop played an important role in bringing an historical lens to bear on key questions confronting South African society. In recent years, a core component of its research has cohered around the South African Research Chair in Local Histories, Present Realities.