Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Of ships, bedraggled crews and the miscegenation of ideas: interpreting intellectual traditions in South Africa -- Pt. 1: Inherited ideas, transplanted institutions and local critique. 1. The abiguous legacy of liberalism: less a theory of society more a state of mind? -- 2. The double lives of South African Marxism -- 3. Afrikaner intellectual history: an interpretation -- 4. A genealogy of South African positivism -- pt. 2: Resistance to domination, African and Asian alternatives. 5. African nationalism -- 6. Pan Africanism in South Africa: a confluence of local origin and diasporic inspiration -- 7. The intellectual foundations of the Black Consciousness Movement -- 8. Gandhian ways: the South African experience and its legacy -- 9. Feminism and the South African polity: a failed marriage -- pt. 3: Religious dogma and emancipatory potential. 10. Christianity as an intellectual tradition in South Africa: Les Trahisons des Clercs? -- 11. The Hindu intellectual tradition in South Africa: the importation and adaptation of Hindu universalism -- 12. Jewish responses: "Neither the same nor different" -- 13. Islam, intellectuals and the South African question -- Conclusion: The power of the past: the future of intellectual history in South Africa.

"This rich volume not only deals with political traditions but gives attention to religious and communal intellectual practices. The scope covers interpretations of traditions such as African nationalism, Afrikaner thought, Black Consciousness, Christianity, feminism, Gandhian ways, Hinduism, Jewish responses, liberalism, Marxism, Muslim voices, Pan Africanism and posivitism. Powerful institutions and individuals were central to the various colonising and apartheid projects that directly controlled and subordinated much of the population. But the social engineering they wrought failed - and spectacularly so. In the wake of this, unintended and unforeseen spaces for individual agency and for the discovery of traditions of thinking have helped change the way we live today. "Only by thinking about these, the ideas that made us who we are, more deeply can we re-imagine our country and the world," says co-editor Peter Vale. This explains why this book, which looks at our past and our present through different lenses, fills an important gap in South Africa's historiography and says new things about its politics."--Back cover.