Andrew Duminy, Emeritus Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), has died in Ballito at the age of 88.
Professor Duminy, who modestly avoided using his professional title in public, was instrumental in the establishment of South African and KwaZulu-Natal history as a serious and sustained concern in the country’s universities, and played a key role in managing UKZN’s post-apartheid transformation.
Born and raised in Pretoria, he was second son of Gwen (nee Finnemore) and JP Duminy, the Rhodes Scholar, South African cricketer and committed, liberal principal of Transvaal Technical College and University of Cape Town. The product of a then-controversial union of an English and Cape Dutch-speaking couple, he grew up in an unusually diverse and fertile intellectual milieu. His parents’ friends included JH Hofmeyer, the great liberal intellectual and politician, and JH Pierneef, the famed artist. That milieu would be reflected in the eclectic set of interests, traits and skills that he carried throughout his life – including a love of ideas, nature, sport, and art.
He was schooled at Pretoria Boys’ High, which lay adjacent to his family home on College Avenue. There his art teacher Walter Battiss fostered in him a love of painting, often eccentrically awarding him more than 100 percent for his submissions. He then followed older brother Peter to Rhodes University, their mother’s alma mater (their younger sister Pam would also study there). His choice of academic discipline and career not being clear from the outset, he studied political science and mathematics to a high level, but graduated with an MA in history in 1953. Under the tutelage of remarkable scholars like Michael Roberts and Winnie Maxwell, his department produced a series of graduates who would play an important role in shaping history as a discipline in South Africa. He thrived at Rhodes, serving on the Student Representative Council, and playing tennis for the university team.
After graduating, he wavered in committing to a career. In 1955 he headed north to Salisbury (now Harare) to work in the government archives of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, but in 1959 he returned to Grahamstown to teach mathematics at Kingswood College, where he remained for two years. In 1960 he married Patricia Joyce, later becoming father to daughter Jane and then John, his first son.
His career would soon follow a more definite bearing when he was offered a position as lecturer in the history department at the Durban campus of what was then the University of Natal, arriving to take up the post in 1961. He was, at that stage, the only South African specialist in the department.
In 1973, after promotion to senior lecturer, he completed his doctoral thesis on the political career of Rand mining magnate Sir Percy FitzPatrick. This formed the foundation for an edition of FitzPatrick’s letters (1976) and a biography (1987), both in collaboration with close colleague Bill Guest.
Up to this point the history department in Durban had not excelled itself in research and publication. Indeed, neither it nor the faculty in which it was situated had exerted itself much at all in this field of endeavour. His example and leadership provided a catalyst to change this state of affairs.
This was especially true when his research and publication interests broadened to encompass the history of KwaZulu-Natal. Books, articles, postgraduate supervisions, workshops and conferences followed, all driven mainly by his enterprise. So too was the Journal of Natal and Zulu History, which has gone from a home-produced publication in 1979 to become part of the prestigious Routledge publishing stable, reaching its 34th volume in 2021.
These efforts, alongside those of departmental colleagues and growing numbers of postgraduate students, were critical for rectifying the relative neglect of KwaZulu-Natal within scholarship of Southern African history. They helped inspire a new generation of historians and others who looked to the past to help understand the predicaments of the present; many sought ways to write South African history from an ‘Africanist’ and non-Eurocentric perspective, applying new and innovative techniques of historical analysis. Their careful archival and analytical work laid an invaluable foundation for later rounds of critical reinterpretation.
His former colleagues remember his supportive contribution. Alexander (Sandy) Johnston, who in the early 1970s arrived in Durban from Scotland to take up a position lecturing in political science, recalls: ‘I took immediately to his dry, wry, sceptical manner, which was instinctively conservative, but tolerant, questioning, and with a subversive streak. We were to be colleagues for twenty-five years, until he left the university, and friends for close to fifty years. He was more than the best of colleagues to me: in his unobtrusive way he was an example, an encouragement, a guide, and a mentor.’
Although he could not be accused of crowd-pleasing histrionics in the lecture theatre, he was meticulous, demanding, and encouraging in developing students’ abilities, especially in postgraduate supervision.
Intellectually, he accepted the existence of, but impossibility of obtaining, an objective ‘historical truth’, seeking wherever possible to eliminate historical errors by scrutinizing all available evidence, identifying one’s own subjective biases, and taking an ecumenical rather than fundamentalist approach to the application of theoretical and analytical frameworks. Raised and educated to think and question, he was invariably reluctant to entertain the prospect that the world was not, at root, rational and sensible.
During the 1970s, when the ‘great debate’ in South African historiography pitted the ‘liberals’ against a new generation of Marxist-inspired ‘radicals’, he identified more with the former camp, believing that historical analysis should leave room for individual creativity, freedom and agency while also accounting for wider structural and economic forces. For him, history should prioritize attention to detail, and ‘a continual testing of theory against evidence’. At the same time, he saw historical writing as the poetic generating and expressing of ideas and interpretations, and eschewed histories that simply droned out an exhaustive chronology of ‘facts’.
Meanwhile, his personal life had found firmer footing following the end of his first marriage when he fell in love with Linda Ladlau, coincidently a graduate of the department in which he taught. They had found common interests in travel, history, books, art, and antiques. They married in 1977 and moved into a beautiful Edwardian house in Vernon Road on the Durban Berea. Linda’s support and encouragement, and the birth of sons Charles and James, confirmed for him a new period of personal happiness and professional success.
Around the time he became Professor of History, in 1983, several other important professorial appointments were made in the faculty, and responsibility for improving its profile broadened. His collaboration with his peers, and leadership of his juniors, remained outstanding. Having served as the head of the history department from 1982, he was appointed Dean of Humanities in 1988.
His institutional memory, strong academic profile and leadership qualities inevitably presaged a move into university management.
The 1990s, a period in which he served as the faculty dean and acting principal of the Durban campus, as well as occupying specialist full-time roles in curriculum development and institutional architecture, were challenging and on occasion turbulent as the first waves of post-apartheid transformation rolled in.
His interactions with student activists – animated by grievances surrounding financial aid, academic exclusions and shortages of student accommodation – which came to a head with protest action on the Durban campus in April 1996, presented a particular and edifying challenge. He did not shy away from that trial, working (as ever) diligently and efficiently to address the students’ demands.
When he retired as the acting principal of the Durban campus, Panyaza Lesufi (then president of the university’s Student Representative Council) wrote a letter thanking him for his ‘commitment and sacrifice’. ‘You’re indeed a true soldier in the academic field’, Lesufi concluded, ‘You die in the battlefield, you don’t retreat’. This impression, presumably intended as a compliment, was received with some surprise. It did, however, capture his broader willingness to speak his mind and hold the ground of his values and principles.
These interesting times gave him scope for calm crisis management, people skills and a strong measure of creativity in designing new institutional and curricular structures and processes. Regrettably, but perhaps inevitably, not all of these were adopted.
There were also sides to his character that would not have been obvious to all his colleagues who saw him as an intellectual and manager. He was an immensely practical man who relished a challenge, whether it may be building a boat, designing a house, cultivating a shade house of orchids, starting from scratch, learning on the job, or improvising and ‘making a plan’.
The times he perhaps enjoyed most were the vacations spent with the family in the Drakensberg (where flyfishing, walking and swimming were enjoyed daily), and long cross-country road trips to stay in brother Peter’s house in Plettenberg Bay, perched above Lookout Beach. Whenever possible, and with whatever willing accomplices were available, he would walk to the Keurbooms River mouth before sunrise to fish, with variable success. In later years, these trips afforded opportunities to reunite with siblings Pam and Peter once they had settled permanently in Plett.
When he retired from university life in 1998, the family moved from Durban to a new home in Shaka’s Rock, built on a corner of the Ladlau family farm, Beverley Estate, which gazed far out over the Indian Ocean. In 2007, once the farm had been sold and reborn as Simbithi Eco-Estate, Andrew and Linda moved over the ancient dune hill to a house (built to an award-winning design) surrounded by the coastal swamp forest that the couple had always treasured when rambling across and between the sugarcane-contoured hills that couch the Ladlau farm’s homestead.
Never content with an indolent and indulgent retirement, his post-academic years were spent busily researching and writing books. He began by satisfying a long-held yearning among his family to know more about their first South African ancestor, the French mariner and cartographer François Renier Duminy who settled in the Cape in the eighteenth century. This fed an interest in the history of South African cartography, the product of which was Mapping South Africa, published in 2011. A book on the life and career of his father JP Duminy, published in 2020, destroyed an inaccurate historical revisionism that has in recent years targeted the latter’s leadership at the University of Cape Town. Other volumes were produced for personal interest and distribution, including self-published works on his long love affair with Plettenberg Bay, and on the place and role of historical thought in contemporary South Africa. Shortly before passing, he had submitted to a publisher a manuscript examining the career of Sir Andries Stockenström, on whom his master’s dissertation had been written years before (with distinction).
Understated and modest, with a dry and often impish sense of humour, he invariably preferred the company of his close family and friends, or a book, to social gatherings. Never one to deny his personal ‘faults and foibles’, he found edification and direction in his love for his family and history. Although he was an undemonstrative man, his pleasure, pride and love in all to do with Linda and the four children shone through as transparently as could be.
Honouring his preference to not hold a funeral, the family will remember his life and legacy over a weekend spent walking, swimming and fishing in the Southern Drakensberg, a place that he loved to visit, and paint.
Text by James Duminy and Alexander Johnston
