HOW Series | Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: Social Histories of Accommodation

In this episode, Prof Neil Roos discusses how whiteness operated not only through state violence but also via the bureaucratic disciplining of the white working class. Drawing on archival material and personal memory, he illuminates how apartheid’s structures absorbed and managed misfit white bodies, from the expansion of the civil service to the little-known ‘work colonies’ where white men deemed deviant were reformed through labour therapy. Through exchanges with Dr Anell Daries and the audience, Prof Roos grapples with the psychological and generational complexities of complicity. He underscores that the task of history is not only to record the past but to provide moral and political off-ramps—ways to imagine futures beyond the prison of whiteness.NEIL ROOSNeil Roos is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Fort Hare. He is also one of the lead implementers of the South African Department of Higher Education and Training’s national collaborative Future Professors Programme (FPP). He writes on histories of race, and his recent research has focused on the historical, moral and political dimensions of white everyday life in apartheid South Africa. From this body of work, he has published essays in Social History, the Journal of Social History, The Historical Journal and International Review of Social History. Roos is also interested in historiography and theory, especially the theoretical moorings of a post-Marxist, left wing social history.

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