PREFACE
TO
THE
1995
EDITION
Readers should be aware that, in South Africa as elsewhere, historians
are shaped by the context in which they live and work, and that their pub-
lications in turn-especially
their textbooks-influence
the history of
their times. During the British colonial regimes of the nineteenth century,
many authors wrote in an imperialist mode. In reaction against that met-
ropolitan bias, British colonists composed works that embodied their per-
spective as a dominant minority in an African milieu, often at odds with
the British metropole; and by the end of the century, when British imperi-
alism was reaching its apogee, Afrikaners were laying the foundations of
an exclusive, nationalist historiography. In the segregation and apartheid
years, the white regime authorized textbooks and favored other publica-
tions in the settler and Afrikaner nationalist traditions of the previous cen-
tury. Today, those traditions are becoming obsolete. They have been over-
shadowed by counter-historiographies
that, since World War II, have
become increasingly rich, varied, and nuanced.
Historians writing from a critical liberal perspective began to expose
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