My South African years: An autobiography by Macmillan, William M
My South African years: An autobiography by Macmillan, William M
Hardcover, ISBN 9780949968425
Publisher: D. Philip, 1975
Used - Very Good. Book and DJ in a great condition and protected with a Cellophane cover.
William Miller Macmillan (1 October 1885 in Aberdeen, Scotland – 23 October 1974 in Long Wittenham, Berkshire, England) is regarded as a founder of the liberal school of South African historiography and as a forerunner of the radical school of historiography that emerged in the 1970s. He was also a critic of colonial rule and an early advocate of self-government for colonial territories in Africa and of what became known as development aid.
Macmillan was born in Aberdeen, Scotland on 1 October 1885.William Macmillan travelled to South Africa in 1891 with his mother and five elder siblings to join his father, who was working at the Victoria College, Stellenbosch, now the University of Stellenbosch. He attended the Boys High School, Stellenbosch, and did the first two years of the BA degree at the Victoria College, matriculating in 1901 and passing the intermediate exams in 1903. Following the death of Cecil Rhodes in 1902, Macmillan was in 1903 one of the first group of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University in England.Macmillan studied modern history at Merton College and graduated in 1906.
While in Grahamstown, Macmillan did pioneering work on poverty among white South Africans. He was the only English-speaking delegate at the Dutch Reformed Church congress on White Poverty, which was held at Cradock, Eastern Cape in 1916. Macmillan's first published work appeared anonymously as a pamphlet, Sanitary Reform for Grahamstown in 1915. This was followed in the same year by Economic Conditions in a Non-industrial South African Town. In 1918, Macmillan did substantial fieldwork on white poverty in rural areas, resulting in lectures and a book, The South African Agrarian Problem and its Historical Development, published in Johannesburg in 1919.
Macmillan was one of the first people to articulate a vision of South African as a single society. This view brought him into conflict with the segregationist government of the day as well as with liberal segregationists. He became chairman of the Johannesburg Joint Council of Europeans and Natives and was involved in 1932 with public clashes with the ministers of Native Affairs and of Justice – the latter was Oswald Pirow. After the University of Witwatersrand sought to gag Macmillan, he went on sabbatical leave at the end of 1932, but he did not return to the university. He resigned in September 1933.
Macmillan retired from St Andrews in 1954 and served for one year, 1954-5, as acting professor of History at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. After his wartime experience in West Africa, he became skeptical about the claims of African Nationalism and was broadly supportive of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which the British government saw as a bulwark against the spread of Afrikaner nationalism from the south and African nationalism from the north.
Macmillan was awarded honorary degrees of D.Litt. by Oxford University in 1957, University of Natal in 1962, and Edinburgh University in 1974.
