White Tribe of Africa: South Africa in Perspective (Used)

This book tells the story of the rise to power of the Afrikaners, the remarkable group of whites who today rule South Africa. At the beginning of the century they were a defeated nation after daring to challenge the might of the British Empire in the Anglo-Boer War. Their tiny army was beaten; their country had been laid waste by Kitchener’s scorched earth policy; twenty-six thousand Afrikaner women and children had died in the British concentration camps; the British had even tried to suppress the Afrikaners’ language.

But within fifty years, two and a half million Afrikaners had imposed their will upon ten times that number of other South Africans, white as well as black, imposing on them also the National Party’s own political vision called Apartheid. Now the whole system they have built up over thirty years faces challenge from within and pressure from without.

So how will the Afrikaners react? The White Tribe of Africa examines the Afrikaners’ dilemma and the tribal and historical forces that influence the way they act. It illustrates the total control the Nationalists now exercise in the land they govern, from the methods of education they have imposed to the laws they have introduced to silence dissent.

David Harrison has been filming regularly in Southern Africa for ten years, making full-length television documentaries in Mozambique, Zambia, Namibia, Zimbabwe as well as South Africa where his subjects have also included gold mining, sport, the Zulu, the National Party, Helen Suzman, Harry Oppenheimer, arms supplies and the church. In 1977 he produced a five-part BBC series on the Afrikaners, The White Tribe of Africa, upon which this book is based.