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The Afrikaners : Biography of a People
Author: Hermann Giliomee
698pp; size 244mm X 173mm
Softcover; ISBN 0-624-03884-X; non fiction
Published: Tafelberg, Cap Town, 2003
The Afrikaners loom large in the South African drama as it has unfolded over the past three and a half centuries. Theirs is a story — both heroic and tragic — of a people searching for security in ways which made its ultimate attainment impossible. The history of the Afrikaners, colonisers and colonised, is replete with drama, irony and paradox.
The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, the first comprehensive history of the Afrikaner people based on — and critical of — the most recent scholarly work, also draws on the author’s own research and interviews conducted with leading political actors. Hermann Giliomee weaves together life stories and interpretation to create a highly readable narrative history of the Afrikaners from the colonisation of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company to the 21st Century.
As a group whose population only reached one million in the 1930s, the Afrikaners suffered from all the anxieties about survival that mark numerically weak peoples. Taking this as its point of departure, the book depicts the contradictions and complexities of Afrikaner history with empathy but without partisanship.
The book also offers a fresh contextualisation of apartheid, its paradoxes and its complex effects. Giliomee revives current orthodoxies of white supremacy in South Africa in important ways. The result is not only a magisterial history of the Afrikaner people, but a fuller understanding of their history, which for good or for ill resonates far beyond the borders of South Africa.
Readers' Comments:
A book to welcome — a history of the Afrikaners from the first European settlement to the present day written by a proud and even patriotic Afrikaner which is nevertheless critical in its approach and untainted by Afrikaner nationalism. It includes an account of the origins and demise of apartheid that must rank as the most sober, objective and comprehensive we have.
J.M. Coetzee — author.
I know of no living person who can approach Giliomee’s qualifications for writing this history. Though his conclusions will be highly controversial, even his critics will regards this as the definitive history of the Afrikaners for at least a generation. When it is eventually revised by historians with more critical distance from 20th Century events, it will remain an invaluable source of information based largely on interviews with prominent historical actors . . . Giliomee’s overall interpretative framework — the struggle between the Afrikaner’s quest for survival and the search for justice — is powerful and original, as is his interpretation of numerous moments in the long story he describes.
Richard Elphick
In his usual provocative and focused manner, Giliomee not only shows the importance of the Afrikaner experience in the overall context of South Africa’s modern history but also the fact that the very concept of ‘Afrikaner’ has always been contested in spite of the predominant sense of ethnic unity. Even if one does not accept all his positions, they compel one to engage seriously with a most controversial subject.
Neville Alexander
Giliomee is level-headed, independent-minded and wholly unafraid to take on even the most difficult questions.
R. W Johnson
Outstanding!
Herbert Adam
NB: The Price includes shipping costs inside South Africa.
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R420.00 |
