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This book is one product of the workshop, and the essays contained in it reflect a common concern for the history and analysis of the lives of ordinary people, and on desire to make available to a wider public the kind of work that people are encouraging and pursuing

This paper argues that some of the key determinants of the style and repertoire of the South African township revolts of the mid‐eighties lie in the changing configurations of race, class and authority within townships over a long period of time. One major and pivotal change in these relationships is identified, and the paper employs ideal‐typical constructions of the nature of townships in the two crucial eras concerned: what could broadly be described as the era of "welfare paternalism" and succeeding it after a period of complex change, the equally broadly characterized era of "racial modernism". Though both eras were racist, exploitative, and engendered class and community struggles they differed from one another in important stylistic and spatial ways. This paper suggests that the move from the one era to the other constitutes the move from a mode of "governability" to one of "ungovernability", and highlights the form, repertoire and style of rebellion.

This, and the following article, develop different critiques of the article on 'Class Struggle and the Periodisation of the State in South Africa' in ReviewNo.7. The argument developed here is that the article failed toprovide an adequate basis on which an explanation of the unique features of the South African state (its successful promotion of industrialisation, without any incorporation of the majority of the working class) could be constructed because of the particular interpretation given to theoretical concepts like 'fractions', 'hegemony' and 'form of state'. The author argues that these concepts need to be reformulated so that changes in hegemony refer to a change in the very nature of capitalism itself rather than simply to some re‐arrangement in the power bloc.

Intellectuals and their audiences facing history. The South-African experience of the history workshop (1978-1988).
The experience of the «History Workshop» of Witwatersrand University (Johannesburg) from 1978 is an excellent revealer of the evolution of the populist perception of the South-African intellectuals. The first meeting was a very academic one but the second one with an «Open Doors Day» in 1981 completely changed the relations with the audience. In 1984, the collaboration with the trade-unions and representative associations really led popular culture to play an important role. The new changes are even better mirrored in the 1987 workshop : nationalism took over working classes ideas. But the social history must preserve its autonomy, otherwise it would only serve a pre-established political line.