Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa

By Baba G. Jallow

In A History of South Africa, Leonard Thompson gives a brief survey of that country’s chequered
past from the pre-European era to the demise of apartheid and beyond. Informed by the liberal
paradigm that shuns eurocentric approaches to African history, Thompson engages the liberal
paradigm and persistently seeks to highlight the overarching role of European economic greed,
racism, petty rivalry, and land-grabbing to craft a crowded but clear panorama of South African
history. While he is careful to highlight cleavages within the White community that marked
South African history until 1910 and beyond, Thompson treats South Africa itself as one unit and
black South Africans as one people under the oppressive hand of white minority rule alongside
Coloureds, Indians and other Asians.
Thompson’s method is more chronological than thematic. He is very meticulous with the
use of dates highlighting the major steps in the growth and institutionalization of a racist
ideology in South Africa as well as in marking the major milestones in apartheid’s inexorable
march towards its rendezvous with death. This is certainly one of the book’s major strengths
because it gives a very accessible outline of what is otherwise a very long and complex
historiography. While Thompson recognizes the difficulties of reconstructing pre-European
South African history owing to the absence of written documents, he still manages to make good
use of available archeological, anthropological and linguistic evidence in his History. He also
makes sure to acknowledge the difficulties of avoiding the eurocentric tendency to tell South
African history according to eyewitness accounts of the nineteenth century because these were
mostly white people who were less sensitive to the excesses of white invasion and domination of
the indigenous African peoples.
Thompson conceptualizes South African history largely along the lines of European
adventurism and political intrigues - intra-Afrikaner and Anglo-Afrikaner, racial prejudice, the
oppression of, and resistance by black and coloured people, and economic factors such as land,
mining and industry. Thompson takes care to note the fact that not all white people were racist
bigots. In the final chapters of the book, he highlights the crucial contributions to the anti-
apartheid struggle of White run organizations such as the South African Council of Churches,
Beyers Naude’s Christian Institute, the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand, the
National Union of South African Students, the women’s organization Black Sash, authors such
as Alan Paton, Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Athol Fugard, parliamentarian
Helen Suzman, some White representatives of Africans in the Senate, as well as white lawyers,
historians and archeologists.
Tracing the roots of White presence in South Africa, Thompson shows how the initial
limited objective of Van Riebeeck’s 1652 mission gradually turned into a permanent European
presence in South Africa. Through the activities of the Dutch East India Company, a gradual
settlement and diffusion of slaves and white people started at the Cape and expanded inwards
toward the fertile valleys beyond the Cape. From this point on, Thompson argues, blacks were
systematically disenfranchised and pushed further out into less fertile and less habitable lands by
the growing white population of South Africa. Initial black resistance was mercilessly crushed by
a combination of superior fire power and the wanton destruction of African food sources and
reserves. The arrival of the 1820 Settlers, Thompson suggests, changed the destiny of the Cape
Colony, and by extension, of South Africa forever (p. 55). In a gripping narrative sprinkled with
dates and events of some of the most crucial events, Thompson guides us through the immensely
eventful history of South Africa, from the pre-European era to the forging of the Union of South
Africa in 1910, the ascendancy of the National Party in 1948, the release of Nelson Mandela in
1990 and the country’s first democratic elections won by Mandela and the ANC in 1994.
Thompson seeks to prove that from the very beginning, White interest in South Africa
was driven purely by economic considerations. While Britain often sought to create a colony
conforming to the political yardsticks of its colonies elsewhere in her Empire, the emergent
Afrikaner and White settler population were chiefly interested in establishing a “Whites only”
state, independent of Britain and excluding the indigenous populations of the region. Thus, he
suggests, racial segregation started long before apartheid was institutionalized as official state
policy by Prime Minister Verwoed in the late fifties and early sixties.
Thompson breaks his history of South Africa into two major periods: the pre-Union
period before 1910 and the post-Union period from 1910 to the immediate post-apartheid era.
Throughout these periods, Africans remained constantly at the forefront of Thompson’s
narrative. The reader is constantly reminded that virtually all White activities in South African
history were designed to oppress and exclude the Africans from their own homeland, and to
expand the frontiers of white domination, both political and demographic. To avoid the
conventional practice of breaking Black Africans into perpetually feuding ethnicities – Khoisan,
Zulu, Xhosa etc – Thompson generally takes Africans as a single group even though he mentions
differences in skin color between blacks and coloureds for instance, and admits that African
tribes fought each other even after the arrival of the Europeans. His overriding concern, it seems,
is to expose the relentless bullying tactics of the Whites and to give the lie to white supremacists
claims of racial superiority over black and coloured peoples, or to the more mundane claims of a
civilizing mission launched by Governor Sir George Grey in 1854, or indeed to claims about a
bogey Communist menace after the Second World War. At the same time, Thompson leaves the
reader in no doubt that the death of apartheid was a foregone conclusion. These seem to be the
issues that drive Thompson’s interpretation of South African history.
From around the middle of the nineteenth century when Britain started taking a greater
interest in South Africa, relations between the two White populations were, to say the least,
uneasy and mostly openly hostile. While domestic British politics created uncertainty as to what
to do with the emergent white republics in South Africa, the growing Afrikaner population on the
ground minced no words in expressing their desire to create homelands independent of British
control and even supervision. From 1836 to 1854, those whites who could no longer
accommodate British interference decided to vote with their feet by embarking on the Great
Trek, dislodging indigenous populations and crushing resistance. Further diffusion of white
settlers from the Cape inland led to the creation of Natal, the Orange Free State and the
Transvaal. After the Peace of Vereeniging ended the Anglo-Boar war in 1902, the four white
colonies – the Cape, Natal, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal started working towards
Union, a process which culminated in the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 which,
Thompson is careful to note, “from the day of its birth was dominated by its white inhabitants”
(p. 115). Particularly racist were the two Afrikaner republics Transvaal and the Orange Free
State. Thompson indicates that the British were complicit in the plan to permanently exclude
Blacks from political participation in South Africa through the inclusion in the Peace of
Vereeniging of a clause that postponed the extension of the franchise to natives until after the
introduction of self-government in South Africa (p. 144).
 The creation of the African National Congress in 1912 marked the beginning of the end
for apartheid. Decades of accommodation and negotiation by Africans which were met by ever
more brutal repression by the white-controlled regime eventually led to the formation of the
armed wings of the ANC and the Pan-African Congress. And while the international community
managed to turn a blind eye or rationalize its tolerance of the nefarious apartheid regime in the
name of the Cold War and economic considerations for decades, countries like the United States
were eventually forced partly by domestic factors – mainly political, as in the case of the civil
rights movement, and by the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 – to face the
inevitable reality that apartheid was an evil system. In South Africa itself, increasing black
population growth, the diminishing number of white South Africans, increasing unrest and
resistance, a declining economy, and the emergence of a moderate leadership in the person of
President F. W. De Klerk in 1989 tolled the final death knell for apartheid. Shortly after De
Klerk took over from Pieter Botha, he set in motion a process of reform that led to the unbanning
of the ANC, the PAC and the South African Communist Party, the lifting of restrictions on other
political organizations in South Africa, the release of Nelson Mandela and thousands of other
political prisoners, and a constitutional consultation process that led to the process of transition
Thompson treats in Chapter 8.
In the chapter on transition, Thompson highlights the very complex and sensitive issues
involved in the move from centuries of oppression of black and coloured South Africans, to a
situation in which the formerly oppressed majority will assume power. In intricate detail, he cites
the very thin line both the De Klerk government and the ANC leadership had to tread to inspire
confidence particularly in the white minority that they will not become targets of vengeance, and
to assure people like Buthelezi that KwaZulu Natal cannot be left out of the new South Africa.
De Klerk dealt with the opposition among white voters to his reform agenda by organizing a
referendum on the issue in March 1992 and getting an overwhelming endorsement to go ahead.
Meanwhile, the Convention of Democratic South Africa (CODESA) convened and started its
work in December 1991, and eventually succeeded in reaching an acceptable compromise to
guide the process of transition from apartheid to black majority rule. In the April 1994 elections,
the ANC won enough seats to form a government. On May 10, Mandela was sworn in as the first
Black president of the Republic of South Africa.
In examining the first staggering steps of the new South Africa, Thompson makes it a
point to stress the enormity of the task facing the ANC government. Centuries of exclusion and
oppression have created problems of almost unimaginable proportions in South Africa, from
health delivery to housing, education, employment and security. In the face of such a grim
legacy, Thompson suggests, it would take a long time for the South African government to find
its feet and chart a steady course for the ship of state. The ANC government’s failure to meet its
promise of building three thousand houses in the first year for instance, Thompson argues,
should not be interpreted as a sign of failure. At least, the new government had managed to avoid
the racial catastrophe expected by many, considering the bloody legacy of the former rulers.
True, the problems facing South Africa are legion, but with time, good management and a
relentless determination to fight corruption and other crimes, and stick to the original spirit of the
ANC, much will be achieved.
Thus, the main themes in the final chapters of Thompson’s book are about reconciliation
and the challenges of the new political dispensation whose inheritance is a society racked by
centuries of strive and oppression. In my view, Thompson treats these issues with an objective
mind. It is certainly not realistic to expect the total, or even overtly dramatic transformation of
South African society overnight. With the ugly legacy of apartheid and the unavoidable sabotage
tactics of remnants of white supremacists in South Africa, the new government needs
understanding, patience and support from all and sundry.