Thousands of students and academics who experienced his lectures, attended seminars with him and read his books would agree. His most famous work was The Making of Contemporary Africa<\/em><\/a> (in three quite different editions); last year he published Twentieth Century South Africa: A Developmental History<\/em><\/a>. <\/p>\n His studies (some co-edited) range from his first, a study of Nigerian tin mining<\/a>, to The African Worker<\/em><\/a>, comparative urban studies<\/a> and history<\/a>, Durban\u2019s Indian working class<\/a> and its wider \u201cvortex<\/a>\u201d, and a 2010 collection on South Africa\u2019s development dilemmas<\/a>. He was proficient in eight languages, including Kiswahili and Spanish, and wrote prolifically. Wits University Press will publish his autobiography<\/a> in early 2021.<\/p>\n Bill re-invented his Economic History department in 1998 to include a development studies programme, markedly original and historically imbued<\/a>. <\/p>\n Before his post at the then University of Natal, he experienced much of Africa<\/a> and Europe. His Yale PhD on the Batavians in the Cape from 1803 to 1806 took him just two years from 1969, including some months revelling in the UK\u2019s leftist academic environment. <\/p>\n He lectured for four formative years at Nigeria\u2019s Ahmadu Bello University Nigeria and five intense months at the University of Dar es Salaam<\/a>. During his three Harvard years his vigorous erasure of Samuel Huntington\u2019s<\/a> chalk-marks before his classes exorcised his hatred of American imperialism. <\/p>\n But he was at home in Durban<\/a>. Its famous dockworkers\u2019 strike<\/a> and the scholar-activists contributing to apartheid\u2019s end were key to his academic pursuits. The unions\u2019 key role in the struggle resonated with his Marxist \u2013 more lightly, \u201chistorical materialist\u201d \u2013 sense of history\u2019s weight, but also its forward march.<\/p>\n He co-founded the journal Transformation<\/em><\/a>, on New Left Review<\/em><\/a> lines. Bill worked on it until his end. <\/p>\n Transformation<\/em> retains its mark on the region\u2019s intelligentsia. What might this imprint be?<\/p>\n Stellenbosch academic Bernard Dubbeld recalls<\/a> that by the mid-1980s Bill foresaw the wilting of the \u201crevisionist Marxism\u201d and vigorously independent trade unions that had flowered in South Africa. In Transformation\u2019s<\/em> first issue<\/a> Bill warned that the clouds of crudely refashioned nationalism might smother the rigorous, unorthodox and non-sectarian materialist method developing in South Africa. <\/p>\n A quarter-century later Bill argued that Harold Wolpe\u2019s 1972 \u201ccapitalism and cheap labour power in South Africa<\/a>\u201d remained the \u201cmost stimulating and important idea<\/a>\u201d in South African sociology. Yet Wolpe may have been wrong<\/a> about South African labour\u2019s progress. Indeed young scholars influenced by Bill dug into the 1970\u2019s Durban dockworkers<\/a> to discover social forms more complicated<\/a> than a singular \u201cworking class\u201d. <\/p>\n Bill delved into history\u2019s deep structures. Their long-term changes \u2013 Bill\u2019s \u201cweight of history<\/a>\u201d \u2013 would stymie superficial efforts at \u201ctransformation\u201d, let alone \u201crevolution\u201d. Yet he refused to be transfixed; you could find and pry open the cracks as history moved<\/a>. There lay his light touches to historical materialism.<\/p>\n By 2010 Bill\u2019s introduction to his and Harald Witt\u2019s edition on South Africa\u2019s development dilemmas mourned the end of \u201cthe Marxist dream of a unified working class, created by mass industrialisation\u201d. In its wake, scattered, <\/p>\n often inchoate protest by the so-called multitude might lead to populist leadership assuming power but is no substitute for any coherent process of transformation<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Bill\u2019s impatience with liberal utopians<\/a> equalled that with faux-left demagogues and preachers of flimsy theoretical fads. Amartya Sen, he charged, had \u201cseduced us\u201d to believe that development could take us happily to freedom, forgetting Marx\u2019s \u201cblood \u2026 tears\u201d and \u201cage old principles<\/a>\u201d destroyed. Furthermore, he railed, could a country producing Donald Trump export \u201cdemocracy\u201d? He joked he\u2019d start a Journal of Dictatorship<\/em><\/a> to challenge the ahistorical tenets of those in post-Cold War bubbles<\/a>. <\/p>\n While entertaining that idea he produced his study of South Africa\u2019s apartheid-era development institutions<\/a>. These \u201cghosts from the past<\/a>\u201d resembled the \u201ctigers\u201d eastward \u2013 often authoritarian, but developing a solid industrial base with its widespread benefits. While despising incompetent bureaucrats, Bill held grudging respect for the parastatals\u2019 directors. <\/p>\n Are today\u2019s state-bound development managers a new transforming force? Not in this anti-statist age; nor if they are deployed ruling-party cadres. Bill\u2019s preferences regarding developmental prospects might be thus: first, real development with democracy; second, authoritarian development; and last neither development nor democracy. He wouldn\u2019t bet on each one\u2019s probability locally or globally. <\/p>\n Bill has left us bereft, but with lots for reflection and research.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/bill-freund-1944-2020-a-professor-who-wore-the-weight-of-history-lightly.jpg\")
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