H-SAfrica

H-SAfrica’s visibility through the well-known H-Net name, accessibility, and opportunity for off-list personal relationships render it a “real community” for scholars (and lurkers) interested in South Africa. It has clearly defined the rules for its community, and it functions as a supportive network (and therefore “real community”) bounded by those rules.

Who is participating? Keith Tankard of Rhodes University started H-Safrica in September 1996. Tankard edited the list for the first two years until a rotating and changing team of editors from universities in the U.S., Europe and South Africa took over in 1998. Though the list is open to anyone who is approved by the editors, the people who post are primarily university professors. Their posts, however, are often on behalf of graduate or undergraduate students. Of course, it is impossible to tell who is lurking around these messages, though the logs indicate that there are sanctioned observers of the list and its discussions that are not professors.

What are the rules for interaction? H-SAfrica has clearly defined its community. Text on the site states the list’s purpose clearly. The list is “dedicated to the promotion of all aspects of South and Southern African history and culture, and Southern African studies in general,” is a “cross between an academic journal and a friendly academic newspaper.” The site further defines acceptable forms of communication: international job adverts, book reviews, conference announcements and calls for papers … new computer software, websites, films and videos … mature discussions of on-going research, of articles and academic papers, books and journals, methods of teaching and debates on historiography.” H-Safrica began as a spin-off from H-Africa, and there was intense debate about the creation of the new community on the H-Africa list that was reprinted in the new H-Safrica list in the first few months of its existence. Arguments for the list helped carve out its niche and probably made people feel invested in the community.

What are people saying? I reviewed H-SAfrica’s discussion logs for every September between 1996 and 2004, and also looked at the logs for October and November 2004. In each of these months, there were between roughly 40 and 70 postings. There are several types of postings generally acceptable in this community: job postings, requests for advice/information on teaching, requests for directions to resources, calls for conference papers, debates about a specific subject, often arising out of requests for specific pieces of information, specific historical questions: i.e. “When individuals were captured in Madagascar and Mozambique, were they kept in barracoon-like structures for extended periods before they were shipped to the Cape?” There were also three book reviews between 1996 and 1998, none in 1997-1999, and then more than 200 between January 2000 and the present. The postings also encourage interaction off the list. Frequently, users ask for responses directly to their personal email accounts. It is important to remember, however, that postings are considered to be a form of publication and content can be edited, such as “material that, in the editors' opinion, is not germane to the list, involves technical matters (such as subscription management requests), is inflammatory, or violates evolving, yet common, standards of Internet etiquette,” and sometimes editors consolidate postings. Posting, especially (and especially more recently) calls for historical debates, sometimes go unanswered (or seem to in the official discussion logs) but the list betrays no hard feelings or complaints.