Generations of South Africans, white and black, have been conditioned to perceive Africans as peripheral actors outside the main theatre of South African history, appearing rarely on the central stage – and even then only as hindrances obstructing the progress of Europeam civilisation.
In the past fifteen years extensive new research into the history of African societies in South Africa has been published. Much of this wrting, however, has reached a relatively small readership of academics and senior students. A primary aim of this book, which ranges over the subcontinent, including present-day Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, is to compress and synthesise the findings of this research in the hope that it will be filtered through a wider audience.
The book tries to look inside these African societies, examining their internal dynamics, regional variations, and processes of change over time. Two broad phases are covered: firstly, the precolonial, precapitalist era, beginning some 1700 years ago with the Early Iron Age; and secondly, the period from the mid-nineteenth century when colonial subjugation gradually evolved into the modern apartheid system.
In dealing with the first phase the book highlights the material base of Iron Age society, and considers some of the dominant power structures that emerged within African states and chiefdoms. In the second phase the emphasis is on the varying African responses to white domination. These responses have ranged between, on the one hand, quiescence or cooptation into the structures of domination, and on the other, various forms of resistance and protest: violent confrontation; peaceful, constitutional organisations and opposition; community-based popular struggles; and working-class organisations and action.
Dr Paul Maylam, who is the author of Rhodes, the Tswana and the British, is Senior Lecturer in the Depratment of History, University of Natal.
Language: English
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-86486-684-4978-0-86486-041-5, 1986, 220mm x 150mm , 259
Rights: World
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