Review article: Jacob Dlamini and the Hidden History Tradition of South African Historiography

Abstract

Hidden histories are pervasive globally, particularly since the advent of ‘history from below’ as social history in the 1960s. Jacob Dlamini’s body of work is firmly located within South African historiography’s hidden histories tradition and practice. His most recent studies, both published in 2020, Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park and The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police, are a remarkable contribution to this practice, indicating the purchase it has in developing and improving South African historiography. This article seeks, first, to demonstrate how Dlamini’s Safari Nation deepens and enriches environmental and nature conservation historiography by incorporating the traditionally marginalised experiences of black South Africans in the making of the Kruger National Park and the development of nature conservation and leisure in South Africa. Secondly, it demonstrates how The Terrorist Album contributes to and improves South African struggle history through the telling of an often neglected or overlooked interface between surveillance technology and subterfuge in the liberation struggle.