Leonard Thompson: a History of South Africa. (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1992).288 Pages. £ 9.95; $

216 MATATU weaknesses it can only be recommended for people interested in the ongoing discus sion about gender equality in the new South Africa. Ingrid Schiro (Aachen) Leonard Thompson: A History ofSouth Africa. (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1992).288 pages. £ 9.95; $ 15. "And which general history of the country should I read?" asked the student about to begin a course on South African literature at the University of Heidelberg. "Try this," I replied, handing her the book I had just been reading on the train journey down, Thompson's History of South Africa. A rather impromptu recommendation, no doubt, but one which on reflection I see no reason to revise. The book, though relatively short, offers a comprehensive introduction to the subject and among its many qualities is the author's concise narrative style, which makes it a pleasure to read. Leonard Thompson, Emeritus Professor of History and Director of the Southern African Research Program at Yale, is the author of many books on South Afuca, prime among them The Political Mythology of Apartheid (1985) and that monument of lib eral historiography, The Oxford History ofSouth Africa (1969 and 1971), which he co edited with Monica Wilson. The present work thus represents the culmination of a lifetime's study by one of the foremost authorities in the field. The book is a slightly revised edition of the 1990 publication, updated to August 1991. It is written in a lucid, uncluttered style. Thompson is very good at encapsulating harsh political realities in telling phrases that stick in the mind: "After emancipation in the Cape Colony ... ," he writes, "the forms were the forms of freedom, but the facts were still the facts of exploitation" (65). The text is a model of condensation, abound ing in judiciously expressed opinions on events and concisely formulated summaries of historians' debates; he constantly makes one aware of what topics - which he perforce must treat with brevity - have exercised scholars' minds, the question of the relation ship of mining and industrial capitalism to apartheid, for example. Thompson charts a clear course through some of the complexities of South African society: the termino logical minefield created by apar.beid, the distribution of population, the problem of language use, especially of Afukaans. The book contains very few errors (although Njabulo Ndebele is not a novelist, nor is Es'kia Mphahlele's autobiography Down Second Avenue a novel, 270). Thompson includes 34 pertinently captioned illustrations and useful footnotes, which provide sensible pointers to further reading. He surveys the whole of South African history. Recent archaeological research having firmly established that human settlement in South Africa somewhat predates the coming of the whites in 1652, he begins his account with the earliest traces of the presence of ancestors of the Khoisan in Southern Africa more than 50 000 years ago, and then moves forward to the early Iron Age settlements of mixed farmers about the fourth century and ends his account with the recent unbanning of the ANC and the re lease of Nelson Mandela in 1990. He pays particular attention to precolonial African society in the belief, central to the general argument of the book, that although the so cial forms and cultural traditions of indigenous South Afucans may have been "assaulted, abused and modified" by the combined onslaught of colonialism, capital- Book Reviews 217 ism and apartheid, they have never been eradicated, and that, consequently, one cannot begin to understand: the vigor of black resistance to the apartheid state without knowledge of precolo nial African ideas about the social and economic obligations of rulers and rights of subjects, and the basis of political legitimacy (2). What Thompson gives us is a sense of the whole, the broad outline of South African history: he characterises the underlying violence of the slave-owning society of the Cape, the resourcefulness of the trekboers, the interminable wars between white in vaders and African societies throughout the nineteenth century, the rapid growth of in dustrial capitalism after the discovery of diamonds and gold, the predations of British imperialism, the legislators of the segregation era after Union busily laying the groundwork for the later abomination of apartheid itself. Within the wider sweep of this overview, however, there emerge recurring themes which serve to remind one of the continuities of South African history. One of these is white dependence on African labour. The "utter" dependence of the white colonists on the labour of slaves and of indigenous peoples Thompson sees as "crucial facets of the social structure of the colony" (51); this it was that enabled them to create a society which was soon to differ greatly from that of the Northern Europe they had left behind them. In the Natal Republic of the 1840s the white minority would face a similar problem of "reconciling its need for security with its dependence on the labour of conquered peoples" (92). Throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Thompson reminds us, whites remained dependent on black labour, without at the same time ever countenancing any form of participation in the wider society. Another recurring theme of the work is, not surprisingly, racism. Thompson records numerous instances from the inordinate brutality with which whites established control over the Khoikhoi at the Cape to the frequent Afrikaner intolerance of any form of so cial interaction with black people. But, as Thompson rightly points out, it was the process by which "the racial structure of preindustrial colonial South African society" was applied in the mining industry which was to prove "fateful" (112). What it was that enabled whites so to impose their will on Southern African socie ties is clear: not "civilization," not "bravery," but superior force of arms, as at the Battle of Blood River, superior technology, as in the Zulu Wars. The British colonists, be they military or administration, emerge with little credit from his account: Sir Harry Smith - "the epitome of British military arrogance and na ivete" (95), certainly no match for the consununate Basotho diplomat, Moshoshoe; Sir George Grey, for all his intellectual interests and colonial experience yet "possessed the unquestioning cultural arrogance of the ruling class of Victorian Britain" (77); Sir Alfred Milner, British High Commissioner at the Cape, drafting into the terms of the Peace of Vereeniging between the British colonies and the Boer republics what Thompson describes as a "momentous commitment" in the shape of "one major con cession to Afrikaner and British colonial sentiment," namely the phrase: "The question of granting the franchise to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government" (144), a supreme abdication of British responsibility which opened the way to the subsequent abolition of the existing Cape franchise and thereby to the eventual introduction of apartheid. .

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