Colin Bundy

Professor Colin James Bundy (born 4 October 1944) is Principal^[1] of Green Templeton College, Oxford.

Professor Bundy was an influential member of a generation of historians who substantially revised understanding of South African history. In particular, he wrote on South Africa's rural past from a predominantly Marxist perspective, but also deploying Africanist and underdevelopment theories. [1] He was for most of his adult life an active member of the South African Communist Party, an organisation that openly calls for proletarian revolution across the world, and which supported the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Since the mid-1990s, however, Bundy has held a series of posts in university administration.

Education

He received his secondary education at Graeme College, Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape Province.

Bundy was educated at the University of Natal (B.A.) and the University of the Witwatersrand (B.A. (Hons)). He was then a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford (1968-70) and a Beit Senior Research Scholar at St Antony's (1970-72), graduating as an M.Phil. and D.Phil of the University of Oxford with a thesis entitled African peasants and economic change in South Africa, 1870-1913, with particular reference to the Cape (1976).

Career

Bundy was Director and Principal of the School of Oriental and African Studies (2001-06); Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of London (2003-06); Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand (1997-2001); and Director of the Institute for Historical Research (1992-94) and Vice Rector (1994-97), University of the Western Cape.

He returned to Oxford as a Research Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House (1979-80) and in the Department for External Studies (1980-84), subsequently being elected an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College. From 2006 until 2008 he was Warden of Green College, Oxford, becoming the first Principal of Green Templeton College on 1 October 2008.

Trivia

Bundy's controversial tenures as an administrator has given rise to the term of opprobrium 'Bundy Jump' [2], which is reasonably well-known in higher education circles in both South Africa and Britain.

Publications

His publications include

• 'Land and Liberation: The South African National Liberation Movements and the Agrarian Question, 1920s-1960s', Review of African Political Economy 11:29 (Summer 1984), 14-29

• History, revolution, and South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1987)

• Remaking the Past: New Perspectives in South African History (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1987)

• (with William Beinart) Hidden struggles in rural South Africa: politics & popular movements in the Transkei & Eastern Cape 1890-1930 (London: Currey; Berkeley: University of California Press; Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987)

• The rise and fall of the South African peasantry (London: Heinemann, 1979; 2nd edn., Cape Town: David Philip; London: Currey, 1988)

• The History of the South African Communist Party (Cape Town: Department of Adult Education and Extra-Mural Studies, University of Cape Town, 1991)

References

1. ^ University of Oxford: Appointments page

External links

• Guardian profile, 2004
• Talk by Bundy on Globalisation and universities, 1999
• Talk by Bundy on education in South Africa, 2003
• Article by Bundy on truth and reconciliation in South Africa, 1999
• Two-part video of Professor Bundy discussing the implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the prospects for global Marxist revolution. Part One Part Two