PUBLISHER: BLACKWELL PUBLISHERS LTD, 108 COWLEY ROAD, OXFORD 1JF, UK. 2000

PAGES: 189

PRICE: $9.98

REVIEWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG

It is unfortunate that a people’s worth is measured by the amount of evil it is able to overcome, and translate into progress. History, at least for now, is all about this: wars, mayhem, crime, killings, genocide, denial, hunger, deceit, lies, superiority complex, demeaning of the ‘Other,’ and all the pains of human existence. Hardly are peaceful means worth becoming history. This book is about all these, more so about a people’s long-running struggle to topple the apartheid system, perhaps the most evil of systematic ‘darkness’ of the human soul in the last century or so.

Hear this from the author: "For more than two decades South Africa has been much in the public eye. Events such as the Soweto uprising of 1976, the virtual civil war of the 1980s and the collapse of apartheid in the 1990s brought wide international attention to a country whose policies of legislated racial discrimination had made it an anomaly in the post-colonial world." It is not surprising that since the last 1970s there have been numerous academic works on South Africa’s past, including university courses on South African history throughout the world (the reporter took a course on the sociology of South Africa at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada). This boom in South African works and courses is described "in historiographical terms represents a revolution."

The book focuses from pre-colonial period to the present, between the 1910s and the 1960s, when apartheid was created. However, the theme of the book is wrapped around writings on South African history in the 1990s. The author says his work is not a complete general history of South Africa though it can be read as "a self-contained work."

Despite its multi-racial mix, earlier history of South Africa was concerned with the White settlers. Even of this, perspectives were varied: Afrikaner nationalist writers praised the achievement of the trekkers and their siblings. British historians looked more at activities of the British government and inhabitants. Aside from all these, earlier South African histories emphasized political events and the "making of the nation state." Liberal historians are today exploring the economic and social background to segregation and apartheid. Despite all these, the author tells us that most writers see South Africa as a "dual economy," distinctively between the rich Whites and the poor Africans. Such one-sided thinking pervaded South African histories well into the 1970s and this dominated South African schools and syllabuses into the 1990s. It is, therefore, not surprising that Black South Africans are today calling for new histories of their country be written to reflect not only the country’s multi-racial diversities but the ‘lies’ reflected in the history textbooks of yesteryears.

Even such respected publications like the Oxford History bought these lies that the outcome of apartheid is South Africa’s "unique process of industrialization. Segregation, so argued the revisionists, was specifically developed to nurture early industry, particularly mining, and capitalist agriculture" and saw the poverty and deprivation of Africans as part and parcel of the South African industrial system. Cheap African labour was the cornerstone of the economy, and is the sin qua non of the growth and dynamics of modern, shining capitalist South Africa. This was the view of the irrational racism in pre-industrial colonial South Africa, where capitalists rather than broad race domination offered the argument that segregation and apartheid resulted from class domination by whites. The focus now, said the author, Nigel Worden, history professor at South Africa’s the University of Cape Town and author of numerous books on South Africa, is early industrialization after the 1880s rather than on pre-industrial trekker republics and British colonies in the early 19^th century. Included here, unlike yesteryears, is the nature of specific social class formations in differing times and regions.

As apartheid crumbled and more light hit the dark recesses of South Africa (just remember the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission) the biased histories of yesteryears are gradually fading, giving way to individuals and communities experiences. Oral history is being used to recover such experiences. Worden gives us an example of one acclaimed South African history book of the 1990s featuring an illiterate sharecropper, Kas Maine, based on series of oral interviews. "His experiences challenge the crude generalizations of historians by showing a complex and subtle defiance to the economic and political onslaught on black cultivators that lasted throughout most of the twentieth century. Similarly, a collection of interviews made in the 1980s with black women from an impoverished part of the Bosphustatswana homeland revealed the active ways in which they had been able to shape their lives despite the multiple disadvantages of their race, class and gender."

The book has six chapters, good bibliography, index, maps, acronyms, and well-researched outline chronology. It is well written and balanced in its presentation of the South African history, such as the inclusion of the importance of gender, environmental history (the relationship between people and their environment, especially changes of hunting and farming practices, and the impact of settler societies on the landscape), and in an era of postmodernism the manner in which history has been reconstructed and represented. Despite these innovations, the book, while maintaining racial domination and its "Separate Development" policies, and capitalist growth, focuses on the historiographical revolution.