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Reviewed by:
  • The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics ed. by Clifton Crais and Thomas V. McClendon
  • Simon Lewis
The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics EDS. CLIFTON CRAIS AND THOMAS V. MCCLENDON Durham: Duke UP, 2014. xiv + 605 pp. ISBN 9780822355298 paper.

Trying to produce an anthology that “offer[s] entry into the past and present of [South Africa’s] complex, conflicted, cacophonous society” (3) is a labor that would test Sisyphus and Hercules combined. Nothing daunted, Clifton Crais and Thomas V. McClendon have compiled an admirably wide-ranging, informative volume, packed with powerful primary documents including folktales, trial transcripts, reportage, political manifestoes, and lyrics to resistance songs, as well as extracts from key critical works, autobiographies, and fiction.

The ninety-three individual selections, divided among eight sections, cover origin stories from the San and Zulu (“African Worlds, African Voices”) before moving through the colonial encounter with Dutch and British settlers, to the [End Page 186] development of Afrikaner identity, and the transformation into a mining-industrial society (“All That Glitters”). The final four sections occupy two-thirds of the volume and cover the racially driven history of the Union of South Africa and the apartheid era Republic, before concluding in a section (“Transitions and Reconciliations”) “intended to provoke discussion about the ‘new’ South Africa” (7). Throughout it all, the volume includes a string of crucial texts, ranging from Piet Retief’s manifesto, Emily Hobhouse’s harrowing exposé of the British concentration camps in the South African War, Sol Plaatje’s scrupulous description of the effects of the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, through pieces by Drum authors Can Themba and Henry Nxumalo, and statements by all the major political figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Reflecting his iconic stature, Nelson Mandela is one of the only figures to be represented by more than one selection: so we have not only an extract from his Rivonia Trial statement from the dock, but also his statement on release from jail, the text of his “Record of Understanding” with F. W. de Klerk, and an extract from his inaugural address.

Although the editors state that South Africa “was always more than oppressive legislation,” and that it was also “an exuberant society of township culture, religious change, and political life” (6), The South Africa Reader emphatically—and justifiably—reinforces a historical narrative determined by inter- and intra-racial violence. This violence appears to reach a peak in the penultimate section (“From Soweto to Liberation”), but there is no teleological trajectory to the volume culminating in the achievement of the “rainbow nation.” On the contrary, the final section draws attention to contemporary South Africa’s continuing economic inequality, its destructively high unemployment rates, horrendous HIV/AIDS infection rates and levels of sexual assault, and outbursts of xenophobic violence.

Cumulatively, then, the volume clearly stresses the “History” and “Politics” of its subtitle at the expense of the cultural. When, for instance, Crais and McClendon include extracts from novels they do so to illustrate key historical moments: Plaatje’s Mhudi tells us something about the mfecane, for instance; contemporary writers Yvette Christiansë and Zakes Mda are pressed into service to illustrate slavery at the Cape and the Xhosa Cattle-Killing, respectively; the selection from Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story describes a 1991 rally in Cape Town; while Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow provides insight into violence against makwerekwere. Similarly the few selections of lyrics from songs are fairly directly political: Sontonga and Mqhayi’s “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” and selections of mine-workers’ songs and “Struggle Songs.” The one indulgence is the inclusion of two recipes credited to Crais. While the two recipes—for biltong and for bobotie—are indeed distinctive of South African culture, it seems odd to me not to have found original recipes (for instance, by C. Louis Leipoldt) that might have been able to speak about their own moment of writing and shown how the cultural, historical, and political intertwine.

In general, however, The South Africa Reader is a remarkably rich collection of primary and secondary material that will make an excellent textbook for courses in South African studies classes and an immensely handy and valuable reference...

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