In Search of a New National History: Debunking Old Heroes in Robert Kirby's The Secret Letters of Jan van Riebeeck

Despite the fact that the "new"--postapartheid--South Africa is frequently called the "Rainbow Nation," the applicability of the term "nation" is far from being unanimously accepted. For example, Robert Thornton argues that "most African countries today are countries, not nations, states or ethnic groups" (148), and he insists that South Africa is one of these countries, since there "is no fundamental identity that any South African clings to in common with all, or even most other South Africans" (150). Until the dismantling of apartheid as a political system, governmental policy decreed that "Whites," "Blacks," "Coloureds," and "Indians" constituted separate nations (see Morse et al. 226). Thus, black homelands could be created and released into official "independence" in a move to strengthen the white claim to the largest portion of the land. ¹ By maintaining that different nations inhabited the geographical space called "South Africa," government policy led to a situation in which rather than "serving as an overall uniting factor, nationalism in the South African context accentuated differences" (Green 45).

The political context in South Africa, however, has altered dramatically over the last ten years. 1990 saw the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela; a new constitution was debated and finally installed in 1994, and in the same year the first democratic elections were held. This created a political reality in which it is now at least possible to imagine South Africa as a "multicultural nation" that includes people of all skin colors. If the concept of the nation is to be kept distinct from that of the state, ² then the term nation would have to imply some sort of identity shared (at least to some extent) by all its members, a binding force that lets a seemingly heterogeneous group of people imagine themselves as a community (see Anderson), that lets them see themselves as a nation. In the case of South Africa, there seem to be very few possible sources for unity; even the common language and its standardization via "print capitalism" as emphasized by Benedict Anderson (see 44 ff.) does not apply, since South Africa's constitution recognizes eleven official languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu (in alphabetical order).

Within the critical debate on the origins of nationhood, there is some agreement that a common history is one possible aspect of such national identity. For example, Raymond Grew argues that "national identity is something constructed out of history" (35), Stuart Murray points out that nationalism writes history "to provide mythologies to strengthen the sense of a collective self" (10), and John Tosh notes that "history is probably a stronger force than language in the moulding of national consciousness" (3). Consequently, re-imagining the past has long been recognized as one of the strategies by which postcolonial literatures seek to overcome the "colonial syndrome" (Hulme 120), since, as Bill Ashcroft points out, colonialism "found in history a prominent, if not the prominent instrument for the control of subject peoples" (194).

I do not want to imply that concepts of postcolonial theory can be uncritically applied to South Africa without further inquiry into the specific differences between apartheid and colonialism as political systems. ³ However, there does seem to be at least one striking similarity: both colonial governments and the white minority government in South Africa used their power to create "official" versions of a country's past to justify their position in controll. As the black activist Steve Biko explained in 1973, black history in South Africa "is presented merely as a long succession of defeats" (44) in an official historiography that is clearly aimed at discouraging the development of a black nationalism and its anticipated claim to the franchise. ⁴ This white version of...