Trying to understand South African history is like looking through a kaleidoscope. Every author, every museum, every movie has an angle or a lens that they tell a story through. This is true all over the world, but I've been surprised that I can't find even a museum presentation that attempts to give me a big picture. Perhaps this is because the country is in a transition – they are re-imagining history and story-telling, for good reason, and so you get shards to put together like a Gaudi with his mosaic art.
The National SA Museum, for example, has a big sign at the front of their main exhibit about how they had to take down most of the exhibit when apartheid was abolished because the “Africa bushman” dioramas are racist. The Voortrekker Museum in Pietermaritzburg, which I was counting on to piece together the fragments I'd gathered from Boer War memorials about the Afrikaner story in the middle part of the country, had beautiful detail about oxcarts and how the French crown prince died here in battle and the Hindi influences on community building, but it felt obvious that “larger picture” exhibits had been pulled and not replaced or summarized.
There are great exhibits put together at the Jewish Museum, the Slave Lodge, the District Six museum on Coloured (read Indo-Asian) displacement, our own Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, and several others we've seen in the last couple weeks. But you have to connect the dots yourself – I carry the timelines around in my head – for example, Judiasm wasn't allowed by the Dutch, thus the first synagogues came with the British; the British were not very interested in the area until the end of the 18th century – hmnn, were they preoccupied with another colony till then? I feel like a detective sometimes, in a very well-researched area. Do those living here know the other stories? Realize how it affects their stories? What stories do we not know in our own American history? I was shocked to learn about the Japanese internment camps in the US during WWII, long after I received a political science degree.
Anyway, this is supposed to be a book review, so I'll get off my preaching stool and tell you about this peculiar book choice:
South Africa, Lesotho & Swaziland, Lonely Planet Series, by Jon Murray, Jeff Williams, Richard Everist, 3rd ed, 1998.
I am hardly an expert on travel guides, and I don't mean to say that Lonely Planet is the best series – but allow me to point this book (or other editions of it) out to you. I read a lot about where I travel, and I've read what I can get my hands on about South Africa, and this book caught my attention, in that it answered questions that I've asked, but couldn't find answers to. It also gives history in reasonable bits throughout the book, by town and district. (FYI - This book did beat out the other two guidebooks in our car, Footprints and DK Eyewitness Travel – my poor family surely got tired of my daily narrations of the countryside...)
Q: Why was the British relationship with the Afrikaners (read: Boers) so confusing?
A: Because the Brits were confused!
“However, because of changing policies their [British] armies and officials often had no idea of whether they should be restraining Boers, protecting blacks, enforcing British treaties, revenging Boer losses or carving out new British colonies. Nobody knew what orders would arrive on the next mail boat from England.” Pg 23
(If this snippet intrigues you, there is a lot more in interesting anecdotes you can read about.)
I also had heard of The Difaqane, seen panels that talk about this mass migration and conflict between South African tribes, and wondered at how that ties into the larger picture. This book explains most clearly how it was “a time of immense upheaval” as Zulu warriors successfully conquered neighbouring tribes including total war and forced migrations for survivors. This book is the first place I saw that connects this African-on-African violence to the Great Trek of the Afrikaner farmers leaving the now British-run Cape.
Q: How can black Africans claim their lands were stolen while the white Afrikaners simultaneously swear the lands were empty?
A: “The Boers, whose Great Trek coincided with the difaqane, mistakenly believed that what they found – deserted pasture lands, disorganised bands of refugees and tales of brutality – was the normal state of affairs. The Afrikaner myths, now dying hard, that the Great Trek was into unoccupied territory or that the blacks and the Boers both arrived at much the same time, stem from this. The difaqane also added emphasis to their belief that European occupation meant the coming of civilisation to a savage land.” Pg 20
Sure, I had guessed at something like that answer already, but without the logic, you still wonder in the back of your mind.
You see other big picture things, too, like how the British predictably make some conquest decisions to “keep it from the French,” and that they liked to solve territorial problems between others by simply annexing the disputed area. And there is still a lot more to understand.
