The revolution in South African historiography

The editors of the Cambridge History of South Africa (2010, 2012) stated of its two volumes that the first ‘pulls together’ while the second ‘represents a culmination of’ four decades of ‘revisionist’ scholarship.¹ The objective of offering a revisionist synthesis of the country’s past was one shared by many of the general histories of South Africa that appeared during those forty years. One consequence of this is that the prefaces, introductions and forewords of those works offer a good summary of the revisionist position. In South Africa: A Modern History (five editions: 1977–2000), Rodney Davenport wrote: ‘The study of