This book considers the role played by Classics in the formation and maintenance of group and individual identities in the complex cultural and political conditions of South Africa. After setting out the volume's general aims and assumptions, the introduction establishes an imaginative context for what follows through a discussion of Aeschylus' Suppliants, drawing out its relevance to issues of identity construction with special regard to South Africa, contemporary and historical; the parallels are not all convincing, but this was a suggestive move, prompting interesting reflections (not least on the potential value of this play as a course text). The three central chapters examine the reception of Classics in three broadly defined cultural communities; the categorisation is necessarily lacking in nuance, but aligns closely with (some of) the dominant perceptions of identity and difference in South African society. Chapter 1, ‘The Classics and Afrikaner Identities’, begins by tracing the history of education in the Cape from the arrival of van Riebeeck in 1652 to the twentieth century, with a strong emphasis on the creation and development of Afrikaner identity. Against this background, the chapter homes in on the foundation of the Classical Association of South Africa (CASA) in 1956, an event which can be seen to have forged a powerful formal link between Classics and Afrikaner nationalism, at the time strongly enmeshed with the racist politics of the governing National Party; on L.'s account, Classics was thus appropriated and internalised as part of the identity of the politically dominant cultural/linguistic group in an inversion of the similarly exclusionary tendencies of British rule in the Cape in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2, ‘The Classics and English-speaking South African Identities’, turns from nationalism to colonialism, in particular analysing ‘the Oxford connection in Natal’ through a critique of the inaugural lectures of three successive Professors of Classics at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, in the 1970s and 1980s. There is fascinating material here, especially in the discussion of David Raven's 1973 lecture, criticised by L. for its use of the imperialistic ‘we’, ‘includ[ing] the audience as part of the great British diaspora in the wake of Empire’ (p. 71), and for a patronising attitude towards South African schools and universities; by contrast, Geoffrey Chapman's lecture eleven years later is praised for its genuine inclusivity as well as its more generous understanding of ‘Classics’. Chapter 3, ‘The Classics and Black South African Identities’, examines some of the wide range of engagements with Classics on the part of black South Africans, many of them educated in mission schools, since the late nineteenth century. Issues of inclusion and exclusion are again prominent. L. discusses, among others, the case of the newspaper editor John Tengu Jabavu, who in the 1880s argued against the exclusion of black pupils from Greek and Latin classes at Lovedale Missionary Institution because they were thus denied admission to university entrance examinations (and all they implied), and of the ‘coloured’ Robert Grendon, whose alignment with the colonising power extended to his writing a pro-British epic of nearly 5,000 lines on the South African War of 1899–1902; and the very different cases of ANC leaders Nelson Mandela and Chris Hani, who ‘exemplify the ways in which classical texts can be appropriated by the oppressed and thus become “resistant discourses”’ (p. 114). A brief conclusion analyses J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello in search of a new model for the study and teaching of Classics in South Africa.

This summary glosses over much else of interest, and overall, within the limitations of a study on this scale, L. fulfils his essential brief well; but the book also has its weaknesses. I am not sure it is entirely fair to claim, as another reviewer does, that L. ‘tends to portray all Afrikaans-speakers as if they were hewn from the same block of Verwoerdian granite’ (J.-M. Claassen, AClass 55 [2012], 172), but certainly some politically based criticism seems parti pris: to lay a charge of separatist sympathies against a regional branch of CASA for confining the scope of a colloquium on ‘Africa’ to Hellenic and Roman North Africa (p. 53) is hardly reasonable when the year in question is 1963, a quarter of a century before Black Athena. Indeed, L.'s evident political commitments frequently distort his perspective: the teaching of Classics in Dutch as well as English at the South African College in 1829, for example, might more appropriately be seen as broadening opportunity than as a foundation for the ideological parallel-medium education of the apartheid years (p. 32; cf. 33, where L. similarly criticises an opposite move). There is a kind of guerrilla war going on in Chapter 1 in particular; L.'s discussion of Gysbert Hemmy's 1770 Leiden dissertation, engaging in an enlightened, almost Herodotean, way with both indigenous South Africans and peoples of different, distant cultures, is used to ambush twentieth-century Afrikaans-speaking scholars whose work L. identifies, by contrast, as narrow and disengaged (pp. 30–1) – a suggestive hint, actually, at a kind of laager scholarship, which might fruitfully be developed further.

Perhaps partly because L. is himself so intensely engagé with the politics of his own country, a wider perspective is largely missing. An eye is briefly cast beyond South Africa in a quotation from Fanon (pp. 119–20), but such references are rare, and L. seems entirely to ignore relevant recent work in the field of classical reception (including postcolonial receptions); even F. Waquet's Latin or the Empire of a Sign is unmentioned. Indeed, the view L. offers is often the view from his own province of KwaZulu-Natal. Again, the book aims explicitly at an international readership (p. 19), but frequently assumes a knowledge of South African history and education that outsiders cannot reasonably be expected to possess: the Pass Laws, ‘banning’, ‘matriculation’, ‘Latin 1 course’ are all referred to without explanation, while ‘Onze Jan’ Hofmeyr is introduced by surname alone at p. 39 and never clearly identified as the politician finally provided with some background at pp. 62–4. The general impression is of a book excitingly conceived but too hastily written.

And yet, for all its rough edges and shortcomings, this volume makes a significant contribution to the history of classical scholarship. At the beginning, L. declares that the book represents ‘a self-questioning and critical response to the South African classical tradition’ (p. 7) – and the important word here is ‘self-questioning’. For what L. provides is a testament to his attempts to negotiate his own relationship with Classics as a white English-speaking South African, first as a student imbued with an ‘insecure academic identity’ by Raven's Oxonian condescension (p. 72), and later as an academic who, in a period of change, sought, and struggled, to find ways to root the study of Classics effectively in stony South African soil. In this account, he does not hesitate to criticise his own pioneering work of the 1990s in comparative Greek and African myth and religion (pp. 85–8), perhaps displaying excessive sensitivity to the risks of comparativism, though by the same token showing a welcome awareness that none of what we do takes place in a vacuum. It is not clear, all the same, that, at the end of all this, L. has succeeded in finding a way forward that ‘dissolve[s] the binaries European/African (or even Eurocentric/Africanist) which have bedevilled the study of the Classics in South Africa’ (p. 132), which is the object of his search; the notion of an ‘African lens’, through which he suggests classical antiquity might be viewed, is surely itself too reductive when (as L. himself demonstrates) ‘African’ is far from being a single or simple category. But L.'s pessimism about the future, strikingly reflected in the death motif which closes both introduction and conclusion (and is immanent too in the bibliography, in which obituary notices are prominent – an evocation here of the continual sense of loss within the Classics laager of the past), is challenged by his own passionate (if also, at times, frustrated) commitment to the search itself. As an instance of ‘personal voice’ scholarship, this book will have lasting value.