Abstract
M.A.
The study of South African history has developed considerably over the last number of years to incorporate new ideas, approaches, and styles. However, the standard works on South African historiography continue to provide a reader with very little beyond a descriptive framework to allow historians to locate their work within the body of South African historical knowledge. This dissertation attempts to address this shortcoming by encouraging and advocating a more analytical approach to the field of historiography. Here, the approach taken is the same as that taken by Hayden White in writing his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. At the same time, a stronger focus is placed on the role of historical context. To demonstrate the advantages of this type of analysis, of analytical historiography over the traditional conception of historiography, I have chosen the example of South African slavery under Dutch administration, 1652 – 1795. The question that this work then attempts to answer is: How can our understanding of South African Slave Historiography be enlightened by the use of Analytical Historiography?
The work is divided into two, with the first section dealing with the theoretical and methodological requirements of the work. The second deals with the Whiteian analysis of a number of works on slavery at the Cape before 1795.1 This is followed by the final analysis and conclusion.