Introduction

The accounts provided in this book make something of a break with the intellectual traditions of South African scholarship in history and the social sciences. The authors represented here reflect the coming of age of a new and vigorous strand of scholarship, drawn from the small ranks of black intellectuals, professionals and social scientists. In the past this group has been intellectually marginalized by the hegemonic position and numerical dominance of white scholars in the old 'liberal’ universities (like the Witwatersrand and Cape Town), or prematurely dismissed because they were forced to work in institutions created by the apartheid planners.