The Mythology of Apartheid by Leonard ThompsonReview by: Bernard MagubaneCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 21, No. 2(1987), pp. 303-305Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/484403 .

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303 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

Sinnar. The Western-based capitalist world-system is not the only one that involves the use of specie and the expansion of mercantile activities into barter economies. Long before the existence of the capitalist world-system, Muslim society was an urban and strongly mercantile social order which expanded into "feudal" societies with destructive consequences. It is important for Spaulding to distinguish in some way the similarities and differences between the medieval experiences of interaction between Islam and local societies and the eighteenth century experience of Sinnar. In a number of ways, Islam was a competing world-system in the sixteenth to eighteenth century era rather than simply a surrogate for the Western capitalist world-system.

Spaulding has a rare ability to be both entertaining and encyclopedic. He has been one of the small number of people who have actively sought old documents and have made them available. Many of the new insights presented in this volume are the fruits of these labors combined with Spaulding's acute analytical abilities. The lack of an index in a comprehensive book of this type is a drawback. However, this work should be a standard source for the study of Sinnar and is an important study of social trans- formations of interest to many people.

John O. Voll Department of History University of New Hampshire

Leonard Thompson. The Mythology of Apartheid. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. 285 pp.

The white minority regime of South Africa is experiencing its deepest crisis since the Nationalist Party assumed power in 1948. The crisis is organic, embracing every aspect of this system of apartheid. Leonard Thompson's latest book deals with part of the ideological crisis.

The book is divided into six chapters, dealing with particular cases that the Afri- kaners used in mobilizing the Afrikaner volk into a solid political force. The first chapter is a theoretical exegesis which explains what Thompson means by political mythology and political myths and also places the problem of political myths in per- spective. The second chapter describes the context in which the mythology of the Afrikaner nationalist movement developed and the ways in which that mythology was propogated. Chapter three describes the history of what has become of the mythology of the apartheid state: its racial ingredient. Chapter four relates the history of the Slagtersnek incident and how it was blown up as an attempt by a few frontier farmers to "defy the British colonial government" in 1815. Chapter five is an account of the events of 1838 when an Afrikaner commando defeated a Zulu army. The so- called Day of the Covenant is a major public holiday in South Africa today and pro- vides the title of James Michener's South African novel The Covenant. The conclu- sion then raises general questions about the role of political mythology in the light of the case studies in the previous chapters.

According to Thompson, the mythology that constitutes the core of Afrikaner nationalism has deep roots and represents an attempt to come to terms with the press- ing political problems raised by the advent of British imperialism and the feeble struggles the Afrikaner frontier farmers waged against it. In light of the events that

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304 CJAS/RCEA XXI:2 1987

constitute the core of the nationalist mythology, it is hard not to conclude that Afri- kaner nationalism is not only an illusion but also self-deception that can be traced to such developments as the Vootreker movement, motivated by among other things the emancipation of the slaves by the British early in the nineteenth century. In leaving the Cape Colony and venturing to the interior, the aggrieved farmers vowed to main- tain proper relations between master and servant.

Initially then, according to Thompson, the Afrikaners came to define their iden- tity in terms of their relation with British imperialism, the very imperialism which on

many occasions would save them from certain annihilation by African kingdoms they encountered in the interior. With the final defeat of the Boer republic of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in the Anglo-Boer War of 1900-02 and their incorporation as junior partners into the Union of South Africa in 191o, Afrikaner petty bourgeois nationalists would now mobilize their constituents to gain social and economic par- ity with the English. The African would now constitute the danger. Segregation and later apartheid evolved as a way of freezing African social development and constitut-

ing them as a permanent source of surplus extraction. Interesting and readable as Thompson's book is, it suffers from lack of theory. He

mentions the work of Hermann Giliomee, who advanced the theory that the I815 uprising like the earlier disturbances in 1795 and 18oi were the product of strains created in a local white society by transition from "pioneering frontier" to a "closed frontier" (210-212). Giliomee also used the date provided by Heese to show that there was a distinct class factor in the Slagtersnek episode. The rebels were, for the most part, the new landless, propertyless class of Boers. One wishes that Thompson would have developed these insights to explain the evolution of Afrikaner nationalism as a whole and especially to explain the stresses and strains it is now experiencing.

What, for instance, is the source of the "tight-fitting" religiosity of the likes of Paul Kruger, D. F. Malan, and currently Treurnicht? Marxism, for instance, stresses that in class society religion is above all rooted in social factors. In South Africa in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the experience of the Afrikaners, especially their impoverishment by the rising forces of monopoly cap- italism, produced helplessness which would enable Afrikaner Dominees to exploit these fears to their own class advantage.

The role of fear that lies behind religious explanation of the unknown has been dealt with by other Marxist writers. Lenin, for instance, writes:

Fear of the blind force of capital - blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people - a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict and does inflict "sudden," "unex- pected," "accidental," ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation - such is the root of modern religion which a materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant school mate- rialist (Collected Works 15: 4o6).

Since the false, including the religious forms of reflecting reality, are generated by the social conditions prevailing under capitalism in South Africa, they can be over- come only by liquidating capitalism and replacing it with a social system free from

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305 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

exploitation, and not simply by exposing the falsity of these illusions as Thompson believes.

Bernard Magubane University of Connecticut

Jan Vansina. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. 258 pp.

Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History elegantly consolidates more than twenty years of discussion following translation of the original classic Oral Tradition in 1965. The rewriting offers a new and convincing synthesis that often explains to sub- sequent commentators - including myself - a good deal of what they probably meant to say all along. The book sometimes focuses on the limitations of arguments that others offered as refutations of what Vansina said in creating the entire field two decades ago. But its thrust is to combine their numerous contributions with Vansina's own further thoughts, some published in a series of essays over the intervening years, to raise the debate from methodology to an almost philosophical plane of inquiry and to present a new whole that greatly exceeds the sum of its parts.

In essence, Vansina takes the human mind as his point of departure, a psychologi- cal entity with individual propensities to perceive, interpret, and recall as well as a social and historical being with identifiable tendencies to create, share, calculate, and strive. From there, in an oral environment, people are shown to create distinguishable types of utterances that may - among their many other purposes and features - con- tain evidence from the past.

The new title thus conveys the essence of the distinction between this book and the Oral Tradition of 1965 (originally published in French in I96I). In 1959 it was urgent to demonstrate that oral utterances could be historical in any sense meaning- ful to conventional historians. The first book, therefore, concentrated on relatively straightforward transmissions of observations in the past through a chain of document-like testimonies down to the present. It acknowledged differences between written and spoken evidence and identified distortions peculiar to the oral mode; but in the end it validated oral sources so thoroughly by classic standards that it did not fully explain psychological, sociological, cultural, and processual aspects distinc- tively prominent when people retain perceptions in memory and transmit them by word of mouth. The new book starts with these human and historical features to reach a sophisticated restatement of the original conclusion, that oral sources neces- sarily convey evidence from the past in the midst of their many other aspects. It then sets about treating that multifaceted "oral tradition as history" in two additional senses: it comes in part from the past; and it changes through time and thus has a his- tory of its own.

Vansina goes beyond asserting that traditions are sources to explain how they are so. Indeed, specialists engaged in the technical debate about oral traditions and his- tory are likely to share my sense of illumination upon reading how the isolated insights of numerous oral performers combine to produce more evidence about the past then even their staunchest defenders could have explained clearly up to now.

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