The Classics and South African Identities

The Classics and South African Identities. By Michael Lambert. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2011. Pp. 160; bibliography, index. $33.00 paper. Every student who has ever taken a course in western civilization knows that the ancient Greeks were "just like us," befitting the true founders of western culture. Despite the best efforts of instructors who draw on the recent work of S.L. Marchand and Paul Cartledge to study classical societies value free on their own terms, this notion persists nonetheless. Classical scholars have shown that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the collective "West" has in fact developed national identities through an odd double evolution. All of them consider themselves to be the cultural descendants of the ancient Greeks, with a grudging nod to Rome, but also as the polar opposites of other societies, especially those of the "East" or "Orient," which are opposite, strange, and different The Greeks themselves started the ball rolling of course by calling everyone who did not speak Greek, "barbarians," a term that some world historians today could altogether do without, as indeed also with the term "civilization. " The study of classical civilization has all too often been deployed by a society to inflate and justify its own righteousness and sense of cultural superiority over lesser societies. This notion forms the basic assumption of Michael Lambert's brief study The Classics and South African Identities, "that academic disciplines in South Africa, such as the Classics, are deeply embedded in the power relations, which have existed and continue to exist between the different races that constitute South African society" (p. 7). Lambert is senior lecturer in the School of Literary Studies, Media and Creative Arts (Classics) at the University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus, so he carries some first-hand experience as well as scholarly expertise to the subject. The first thing that comes to mind to anyone with a knowledge of South African history is "What could be more obvious? " The study of classics is simply part of a matrix of western imperial education that was used to justify an exploitative and racist system and therefore has no part to play in a postapartheid, majority African South Africa. Yet in this unique, readable, very personal work, Lambert does detail how the Classics shaped the identities of three groups in South African history concluding with some speculation about what the future holds for the study of Classics in the new multiracial South Africa. He begins with the foundation of the Classical Association of South Africa (CASA) in 1956, which acted as a potent cultural reinforcement of Afrikaner identity. Founded at the height of the Nationalist Party's apartheid regime, the organization founded by Afrikaner scholars sought to have Latin and Greek texts translated into Afrikaans. Comparisons were lovingly made between the hardy, serious farmers of the Roman Republic and the Voortrekkers. Classicism came to be viewed as "a cultural beacon in a sea of black barbarism" (p. 48). Afrikaners were associated with the virtue of the ancients. It advocated the teaching of Latin and Greek in schools. The presence of Gerrit van Niekerk Viljoen, one of the founding members of CASA, later minister of education in the Nationalist government and chairman of the Broederbond, indicated just how strongly the organization was involved in Afrikaner nationalist ideology. Lambert next turns his attention to the Classics and English-speaking South African identities. Here he begins with Cecil Rhodes, whose last will and testament included a quotation from one of Horace's Odes, and whose two favorite works were Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. …