There is much to celebrate in this inclusive work about the great variety and diversity of African and European history and culture in South Africa. Especially welcome are writings by Solomon T. Plaatje, John William Colenso, Emily Hobhouse, Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela, and Steve Biko. In the book's eight sections, the editors have selected primary sources and written commentaries that cover creation to the present, perspectives of men and women, lives of Africans and Europeans, and arguments of racists and anti-racists. Politics, food, music, traditional medicine, and oral tradition as well are considered. Some of the strongest selections concern the New South Africa: HIV/Aids, xenophobia, Sara Baartman in the present, game parks, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Instructors will find the Khoisan selection on Krotoa very moving. Likewise, the ‘Statement of the Prophetess Nonkosi’ will stir discussion, although more commentary here would have been helpful. Emily Hobhouse conveys tragedy of a different sort in ‘Concentration Camps’, which gives readers a sense of the lasting rift between English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. Our need for music, so well exemplified in ‘Mine Workers' Songs’, ‘Struggle Songs’, and ‘Nkosi Sikelele’ iAfrica’, conveys both the anguish and solace of the anti-apartheid struggle, as well as an emerging sense of patriotism today. In a future edition the editors should include the lyrics of Richard Rive's folk song, ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’, which would also give more attention to District Six.
Unfortunately, Rhodes's Glen Grey speech and legislation are not part of this reader. The time has come to re-examine Rhodes, not to put him back on his Anglophile pedestal, but rather to apply his weaknesses and strengths to the twenty-first century. After all, Howard Zinn did not find it necessary to ignore John Rockefeller, John Pierpont Morgan, or Andrew Carnegie in his best-selling, provocative work, A People's History of the United States. Zinn used these Robber Barons as counterpoints for events and people in US history that previous historians had marginalized. He realized, for example, that the life of Emma Goldman made much more sense as a humanitarian reaction to the callus ruthlessness and greed of Robber Baron contemporaries of Cecil Rhodes.
In contrast, South Africans have largely erased Rhodes from their present-day school curricula. Yet he still gazes northward from The Company's Garden and the Rhodes Memorial. Gaze he might, many present-day South Africans do not know who he is. The Mandela Rhodes Hotel, for example, is rightly full of Madiba – perhaps too much so in the buying and selling of his name rather than his noble ideas and accomplishments. But Rhodes? He appears only in the hotel's name. I wonder what must go through the minds of South Africa's Mandela Rhodes Scholars and Oxford's Rhodes Scholars when they walk through that hotel.
Sankofa reminds us that the present emerges from the past; if you do not know where you came from, how can you know where you are going? As a case study, Rhodes can teach us much about the abusive structure of capitalism in South Africa. His persistent legacies favoring elites over the masses help explain why the African National Congress has had a difficult time ending high unemployment and entrenched poverty, and of course, Rhodes's practice of buying influence to gain his ends exemplifies the power of economics on human behavior, something the critics of recent ANC corruption have noted. Lest we forget, Rhodes's lengthy Glen Grey speech and legislation in which he evoked the Pullman Strike to attack socialism in the House of Assembly in July 1894, established much of the foundation of apartheid in the twentieth century. Revisiting Rhodes can help creative policymakers move reform forward. South Africa's intractable economic problems in 2014, which are similar to the concentration of wealth in the United States, provide much of the fire for Julius Malema's attacks on the government. The time has come to stare Rhodes down.
This important book nevertheless brings together primary sources covering a wide range of South African history and culture. Instructors and students will find much to consider. They will also discover why South Africa and South Africans represent such a fascinating microcosm of our world. Instructors can compensate for the omission of Rhodes and Glen Grey. Robert Rotberg's The Founder will help. Adam Habib's South Africa's Suspended Revolution restates the problem well. Ironically, some solutions have long been advocated in one of Rhodes's best legacies – his land grant to the University of Cape Town, whose scholars continue to reveal and attack remnants of his racist policies. Abusive capitalism, you are next.
