W.M. Macmillan: The Wits Years and Resignation, 1917–1933

As one of South Africa's pioneer professional historians, William Miller Macmillan (1885–1974) is best remembered as the founder of the ‘liberal school’ of South African historiography. In his famous trilogy, The Cape Colour Question (1927): Bantu, Boer and Briton, The Making of the South African Native Problem (1929), and Complex South Africa (1930), he stressed the notion that the different races in South Africa constituted a single society. But he is also important for beginning the teaching of history at two of South Africa's English-medium universities, Rhodes and Wits, and for giving that teaching a strong European bias, which long survived him. The Department of History at Wits was his creation, and despite a brief reaction under his immediate successor, Professor Leo Fouché, the direction he gave it proved enduring. His contribution to South African historiography together with his inspirational teaching at Wits were cut short in 1933 when he resigned while on sabbatical in Britain, never to return to South Africa on a long-term basis and never to find another academic home as a historian. The academic career he had shaped for himself was prematurely over. In his autobiography Macmillan suggests there were two primary reasons for his resignation. The first was work related, that he was tiring of teaching and wished to focus on his research and writing. The second was political, that the University's leadership had been unsettled by his role as a public intellectual critical of government policy, and sought to silence him. This paper establishes that there was a third major reason, relating to his personal life. It indicates that the University's leadership likewise found his friendship, as a married man, with the young Mona Tweedie, daughter of the British Vice-Admiral in Simonstown, unsettling. The University's disquiet on the personal as well as the political fronts were central to Macmillan's decision to resign.