Promise and despair: The first struggle for a non-racial South Africa

By (author): Martin Plaut. Martin Plaut's history centres on a little-known 1909 interracial South African delegation that travelled to London to lobby against the draft Union constitution's racial exclusions and for universal suffrage. Though unsuccessful, the mission's debates directly fed into the founding of the ANC in 1912, and Gandhi — who worked with the delegation — later drew on the experience for his own "Hind Swaraj." Covering 1909–1921, the book argues that Black South African political agency and even voting rights (in the Cape) have a much longer history than the post-1994 narrative usually allows.