George McCall Theal

George McCall Theal wrote the history that white South Africa taught itself for most of a century. Born in New Brunswick in 1837, he arrived at the Cape at twenty-three, worked as a teacher, journalist and then as the colony's official archivist and historiographer, and produced some forty volumes, including the eleven-part History of South Africa that the 1691 to 1795 instalment belongs to. He was the first to work systematically through the Cape archives, and the collections he assembled are still used. The reading is another matter. Later historians describe his work as a settler account that treats African societies as a backdrop to European arrival and supplies the justification the colonial state wanted, and undergraduate courses now set him as a subject rather than a source. The 1882 folklore collection carries a word in its title that South African law now treats as an actionable insult; it was ordinary colonial usage when he published. He died at Wynberg in 1919.