HiPSA: ANNUAL REPORT FOR 2024 (Delivered by Professor Howard Phillips at Protea/Aristata Bookshop, Claremont, 30 October 2024) It is only 6 months since my last annual report was presented at our delayed 2023 AGM in April this year, but the focus of this report, as of that, continues to be on the two core underpinnings of our operation, viz. finance and membership. In the area of finance we are in the midst of an experiment to cut our distribution [...]
HiPSA: ANNUAL REPORT FOR 2022 (Delivered by Professor Howard Phillips at HiPSA AGM, 17 November 2022) This is what I will call a two-handed report as it is filled with plenty of ‘on the one hand, but on the other’. In many ways it has been a year of very mixed fortunes for HiPSA, several of them rather dispiriting. On the one hand, we signed up 22 new members; but on the other we lost 23 primarily due to [...]
(Delivered online at HiPSA AGM, 17 November 2021) In the Western World it is popularly believed that the Mandarin word for crisis (weiqi) consists of two words combined, ‘wei’ meaning ‘disaster’ and ‘qi’ meaning opportunity. In other words, a crisis presents danger but also opportunity. However, Mandarin linguists disagree with this interpretation and label it wishful thinking among Westerners in search of Oriental wisdom. But I have to tell you that HiPSA’s experience in the past year in a [...]
I regret to say that this has not been a good first year for HiPSA. Our paid-up membership has continued the decline in numbers which began in the 2010s, notwithstanding several imaginative initiatives to arrest this fall. Today we have 607 fully paid-up members, 45 fewer than a year ago. Another 154 are in ‘suspended animation’, not having paid their subs for the last two years. In part this decrease is because a number of older members decided to [...]
Whichever doctor said that when you reach the venerable age of 98, you should be taking things easy was clearly not thinking of the VRS, for the 98th year of our existence, which has just ended, has been a very active – almost hyperactive – year. Our administrators, Rolf Proske and Sandra Commerford, the six members of the Executive Committee, and all 16 members of the Council know from personal experience the extent of such hyperactivity. So I thank them [...]
2018 was a year marked by culmination and transformation. CULMINATION because we reached our century, celebrating this in a number of memorable ways: by organizing a UCT Summer School course, ‘Witnesses to South African history’, convened by Elizabeth van Heyningen, which shop-windowed the contribution to the writing of South Africa’s history by our publications; by publishing two volumes in the year to bring the number of volumes produced under our imprint to 100 (or 106 if we include Jan [...]