Customer Reviews

A Concise History of South Africa (Cambridge Concise Histories)

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This work by the well respected historian Robert Ross is primarily concerned with the economic, social, and political factors that influenced South African history. As the title suggests, it is a concise history and thus some topics receive less coverage than one might like. For example, the description of the Boer War takes place in a little over two pages. But the text is both coherent and highly informative, and strives to be as complete as possible given the limit on length presumably imposed by the people who publish Cambridge Concise Histories. The book begins with a physical description of the South African environment and then discusses the indigenous peoples and their societies previous to 1652, the point at which the Dutch established a base on the Cape, and where many histories begin. The next chapters are entitled Colonial Conquest, Unification, Consolidation, and Apartheid. Next follows a chapter that was of particular interest to me, The Costs of Apartheid, in which the author considers the political, social, and economic consequences of the imposition of apartheid. The book ends with the chapters Let Freedom Reign, and Epilogue: The Acid Rain of Freedom. My single complaint is that I would have found a few more maps helpful. But the careful reader will most likely find this to be an excellent book.

Based on the title, I assumed that this book would be a relatively light overview of S. African history and would provide some commentary about how S. Africa had gotten to where it is today. My assumption was wrong, however, and I found it to be much more academic than I expected.

It seems to be the ambition of many historians to make their subject as dry and inaccessible as possible. I mean, why write a sentence like 'Then Bob rode his horse into the sunset' when you could write 'following, Robert employed his most favored mode of transport, equestrianism, to progress toward the sun, which was setting, as it had done ever since the Earth had formed from a rotating disk of hot dust, and was expected to do in the foreseeable future, every night."

Ross seems to struggle with the 'concise' aim of the book on a number of levels. First, as I've alluded to, he wastes a great deal of space with sentences like "He was succeeded by Balthazar Johannes Vorster, often, and surprisingly, anglicized to John, who was relatively junior in the cabinet and unforgiven by its elder members for his participation in the Ossewabrandwag, in the course of which he had spent some years in gaol during the war for nazi sympathies.' And, perhaps my favorite: 'Nevertheless, the cultures that have been developed are only local when, as is the case with certain of S. Africa's ethnicicities, they have been created in almost conscious rejection of values, which within the confines of S. Africa, are universal.' If you found those sentences clear and riveting, rush right out and buy this book.

Second, he seems bent on covering relatively minor occurrences with a single (run-on) sentence that has no real context and assumes that the reader has previous knowledge of the event. Combine that with the fact that there are no good maps to refer to and no glossary to consult when you forget the difference between an 'inboekelinge' and a 'dorp', and you have a book that seems almost intentionally obscure.

So why not one star? Ross's scholarship is undeniable, and he is as unbiased as can be reasonably expected.

The bottom line, though, is that I had to fight with this book to get anything out of it. The benefit of its conciseness was negated by my wandering mind and the fact that I had to re-read sentences constantly. Go with Leonard Thompson's 'History of South Africa' which, though twice the length, appears to have been written with the goal of actually informing and entertaining the reader.

This book is hard to follow. The maps are very poor and there is no sense of historical journey. It is very fact based and hard to follow.