A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820-2000.

Clark, Patricia G.

A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820-2000, by Saul Dubow. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. viii, 296 pp. 60.00 [pounds sterling] (cloth).

Since its first democratic elections in 1994, South Africa has been preoccupied with building a prosperous, egalitarian, non-racial nation. This book examines a previously unexplored historical facet of that nation-building, the role of science and intellectual activity in the service of building a nation from colony to apartheid state and beyond.

Saul Dubow analyzes the relationship between science and South African society using a mix of published and unpublished sources, ranging from biographies and institutional histories to Ph.D. dissertations and archival material held at the University of Cape Town and Oxford's Bodleian Library. Dubow's familiarity with South African intellectual and political history is apparent as he argues that science was an essential part of the intelligentsia's nation-building toolkit from the nineteenth century onward, shoring up Prime Ministers' Jan C. Smuts's holistic idea of South Africanism and Hendrik F. Verwoerd's pharaonic projects.

Dubow interprets science broadly; the first two chapters describe the cultural organizations and publications that arose in South Africa's western Cape region in the nineteenth century. Institutions such as the South African Museum followed a cabinet-of-curiosities model; the South African Library, supplyied utilitarian literature to the educated community; and the public art gallery that eventually became the South African National Gallery provided spaces for middle-class collectors, readers, and art enthusiasts to consider themselves at once South African and part of the culture of the west. The Cape Monthly Magazine, which began in 1857 and continued intermittently throughout the latter nineteenth century, supplied a publication outlet for local knowledge on topics from botany to philology. "Progress" and "improvement" were key terms appearing regularly in the magazine, expressing the educated elite's interest in material and intellectual well-being and desire to be seen by the metropole as "civilized" colonial subjects.

In 1872, the Cape Colony achieved responsible government. As Dubow's third chapter details, tensions arose between the forces of nationalism and continued assertion of imperial rule in this step toward increased self-governance. The concurrent mineral revolution shifted the axis of political power from the Cape to Johannesburg, the Witwatersrand, and its environs in the north, leading to increased discussion as to the constitutional meaning of "South Africa."

Late-nineteenth-century intellectuals were involved in these debates over "South Africa" as more than a geographic expression, and these deliberations involved English and Afrikaans speakers. Dubow includes a fascinating discussion of Roman-Dutch law, the hybrid of English common law and pre-Napoleonic Dutch legal code used at the Cape. Also known as Cape law, this legal system expanded its reach from the Cape to the north and was eventually adopted by the Afrikaner republics. During the South African War 1899-1902, the Cape Law Journal renamed itself the South African Law Journal and promoted Roman-Dutch law as the best legal system for a future, unified South Africa. While a deliberation on the South African legal system may seem far removed from science, it effectively illustrates the importance of a shared body of knowledge in nation-building.

The second half of Dubow's book focuses on "South Africanism" as a dominant political ideology in the first half of the twentieth century. South Africanism attempted to build connections between politically moderate whites. It aimed for an inclusiveness that was limited to the white population, underscoring the differences between whites and blacks (and thus rationalizing segregation) while stressing the "Teutonic" roots of English and Afrikaans speakers. Its major proponent, Smuts, was also a major proponent of South African science and its importance in creating a unified white state. After his first stint as prime minister of South Africa, Smuts served a term as president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science (also known as the S2A3), the body formed at the turn of the century to promote interest in pure and applied science among amateurs as well as professional practitioners.

It was during J.B.M. Hertzog's premiership in 1924-39, however, that South Africa truly became a commonwealth of scientific knowledge. Many scientific and technical organizations formed in the tare nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attained critical mass in the interwar period, creating a web of specialists with expertise in the local South African environment.

Much of that expertise was in presumed knowledge of the African population through developments in physical and cultural anthropology. Dubow has analyzed elsewhere the use of science in justifying racism [in his Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, 1995)]. Here he points out that, although much of the applied research funded by the government in the 1930s was to address the "native question" (and buttress segregation), grants were made to scholars across the political spectrum.

The interwar period was marked by growth in social scientific research--such as the Carnegie Corporation-sponsored inquiry into white poverty--intended to address South Africa's domestic problems. World War II saw South Africa experience the transition from welfare to a warfare state. The establishment of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in the 1940s signaled the beginning of "big science" in the country. Developments such as the Orange River water project showcased science in the service of Afrikaner nationalism. By the height of apartheid in the 1970s, professional organizations were bifurcated along political and ethnic lines; South Africanism in scientific endeavor was moribund.

Dubow concludes with a discussion of post-apartheid science, examining indigenous knowledge systems and President Mbeki's contradictory statements on HIV/AIDS as part of the African Renaissance. The bulk of the book covers the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the final section on apartheid science and science in the "new" South Africa outlines many directions for future research.

Comparativist historians of science as well as scholars interested in imperial and Commonwealth history will find much of interest, as Dubow compares the growth of South African scientific institutions with similar developments in Canada and Australia. More emphasis could have been placed on the ways in which expert knowledge was diffused; South Africa's isolation from the international community during the apartheid years and its censorship of scientists with unpopular political views undoubtedly affected the transmission of scientific information through formal and informal networks. Overall, the work contains a wealth of detail for historians interested in South African intellectual and political currents, as South Africa continues its search for identity as a democratic nation.

Patricia G. Clark

Westminster College, Wilmington, Pennsylvania