Letter from Hermann Giliomee, Prof. Emeritus from the University of Capetown, South Africa

September 3, 2011

Thanks to Richard Elphick interceding I was blessed to have her as editor of my book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, which was published in 2003 by the University of Virginia Press. She taught me more about writing and using the difficult English language properly than I could ever imagine when we started to work together. For a start she put a thick pencil through all my abstract generalisations and told me in no uncertain terms to proceed with telling the the story. She also gave me the invaluable advice of using sub-divisions and building up the  story.

We had one major disagreement: dealing with apartheid.  When her work was completed she wrote to me  She criticized what she called  my inability to go as far as she would have liked ‘in acknowledging with greater candour and power the evils of apartheid.'

Twenty five-years earlier she had edited Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaveholders made, a book on the American South that rates among those books I most admire. She was at that point busy editing ‘The Mind of the Master Class’ co-authored by Genovese and his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Her message reads as follows:

"The danger few historians are able wholly to resist who write of events close to the present or of issues that dominate the present and about which they care deeply and have so immersed themselves in studying the history, in both your cases of oppressors, that they run the risk of some loss of detachment…For such historians it becomes a daunting task to achieve perfect objectivity and perspective, to understand and describe but not to yield to identification with the subjects of their study that in some degree affects the outcome in their books. It is a tribute to you, and to them [the Genoveses] that they have, most of the time, seldom let personal feelings determine what they write, and even more important, what they omit or fail to focus on. I would say of your book what Orlando Patterson wrote in a review of one of Genovese’s books back in the 1970s, with which he took issue on some questions.  He said that Genovese’s intellectual integrity and vivid research was such that he provided the evidence on the basis of which others could arrive at wholly different conclusions."

It is a comment I shall always treasure.

I am very glad I was able to work with her.  Although I never met her I almost regard her as a friend and teacher. I am sure you will miss her very much.  I am sure you have many fond memories that will sustain you in your loss.

Yours sincerely

Hermann Giliomee

Professor Emeritus in Political Studies

University of Cape Town