Yowling from the Fencepost

What's on your reading list? (Episode 2)

My reading pile is never small, but even I think I may have gone overboard in recent weeks. Take the history of Africa, for example. I used to have about twenty or so works on the continent in general and on southern and South Africa in particular. Now, I think I doubled or tripled that section. Thank the book gods for used bookstores.

Here are some good works I would recommend:

Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader -- As a paperback, this book weighs in at just under seven-hundred pages of straight narrative text. I can't imagine the size of the hardcover. But hold on there, Hoss, 'cause Reader's history of the continent is not some unapproachable tome only meant for academics to decipher. Africa is a highly readable book that builds upon itself chapter after chapter. From pre-history to recent times, you can gain a sense of peoples and places, how past events shaped future events, and where the author stands on his interpretation of Africa's history.

The quick and dirty version of this work seems to argue the following: Africa is a unique, challenging environment and the people of that continent were doing just fine coping and prospering under those conditions until the Europeans arrived and screwed it all up.  Seriously, though, from the spread of export slavery, to domestic dispossession and dislocation, and to the economic and environmental ruin of populations in whole regions, the effect of Europeans on Africa over the last five-hundred years has left a gutted, rotten legacy for the continent's current population to repair. Although this summary is almost certain to raise the howling hackles of the right-wing bloggers, it is nonetheless the case that Western values, Western market economics, Western political and Western attitudes regarding race wrought much damage to Africans and continues to do so today. Since I know that critics of this interpretation will challenge this general thesis, let's move on to the next title, shall we?

Apartheid: South African Naziism, by Sipo Mzimela -- When I first saw this book, with its bright red cover and photos of bodies that testified to the horrors of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, my first inclination was to wonder if the author had made too much of a leap. I bought the book to check it out and discovered that this was a thoroughly serious work of academic research.

Mzimela not only makes literary connections between the Nuremberg laws that marginalized and dispossessed Germany's Jewish population and the apartheid laws that did the same to South Africa's non-white populations (not simply black South Africans, but also Asian and mixed-race people, too), he establishes timelines when the 1950s architects of apartheid were (physically) in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s studying (even literally, as in: in universities) the methodology and practices of the architects of what would become the Nazi genocide of European Jews in the late-1930s and early 1940s.

I am still working on this book, but it is a captivating and compelling read so far.

Now, in deference to my right-wing readers of this humble little blog, we shall hear from "the other side" of the so-called argument...

A History of South Africa: Social & Economic, by C. W. De Kiewiet -- If you are a well-read student of South African history, the author of this apparently innocuously-titled book should make you reach for it right away. For those of you not yet in the know, the architects of apartheid were decedents of Dutch settlers of the late-1500s and early 1600s, to be known first as boers, but later they will identify themselves as Afrikaners and view themselves in a shiny, mythical "white city on a hill" light that rivals the typical yet often skewed mythology many people in the United States hold about themselves and their nation today.

When I said that the title of De Kiewiet's book was "apparently innocuously-titled," the reader can quickly see that the author's intent is to establish a solid argument that it was the white population of South Africa that made it the land of prosperity it has become in modern times.

Ummm... Okay, I guess... except that De Kietweit's work is missing something... something that should stand out... hmmm...

Oh yes! I remember now... Apartheid! Nowhere -- not in the text, not in the index, no-flippin'-where -- does this odious policy and legal system that oppressed over three-fourths of South Africa's population show up in this book. I thought to give the author the benefit of the doubt because, after all, the book was published in 1941. When I saw that the book had been updated and revised into the mid-1970s, however, giving poor De Kieweit that benefit didn't seem to be right. You see, apartheid as a legal system began in the middle-to-late 1950s, with 1958 being a seminal year. Even with that in mind, the actions by white South Africans (Afrikaner and English) to turn the black population into little more than cheap laborers for the fiscal benefit the former group from as early as the 1600s, into the 1830s, and though the early twentieth century could not have gone unnoticed, right? Right?

It is fun to read a work such as De Kiewiet's to get a laugh at how a people can totally delude themselves and their history of themselves. The fun ends quickly, however, given the fact that such skewed self-notions of a people can result in the capability for that group to dish out large helpings of self-righteous oppression and violence to others over the course of a whole century.

I firmly believe that there are no "two-sides" to every argument. Instead, I believe that there can be as many sides to an argument as there are interested parties (active or passive). The problem of De Kiewiet's work, however, is that it would have certainly lined up with supporters of a pro-Afrikaner self-image, of which there were some who would go so far as to shout down or drive out anyone who would dare to challenge their mythology. Let's hope that this does not remind us too much of how things are today in our nation, where some are interested in making certain that people accept only our mythology as some kind of official, sanctioned version of our nation's history and driving out those they fear to be committing some kind of heresy.

There's much more on the pile, but I think it's okay to save that for a later date.

posted by Moses at Monday, April 02, 2007