O! South Africa

This book covers a concise history of South Africa, beginning with an unintended colonization by Holland when its Haerlem shipwrecked at the southern tip of Africa in 1647. The author touches just briefly on subjects already covered more extensively in his book Out of Ashes, the Boers' Struggle for Freedom During the English War 1899-1902. Then it proceeds with the country's political developments. In South Africa, as all over the world where possible, settlements began with husbandry and agriculture. Having been born on and grown up on a farm, the author is salvaging the history of farming methods with the ox, the horse, the mule, and farming implements used then, all of which have now long ebbed away as memorabilia into distant history. The apartheid era is covered. Its impractical aspect is well understood, but the author wants to be fair, and also exposes the frequently distorted and ignorant opinions that took hold in the world through the news media, lasting until today. The world did not know, and if it did, it purposely ignored the massive educational programs initiated for millions of nonwhites as well as nation-wide, much better, government-launched housing developments. Because nonwhites well appreciated their greatly improved standard of living they were enjoying and the much brighter future for their children, the violence and communist oriented African National Congress did not make much headway. World news media gave little attention to Russia’s involvement in Southern Africa with a Cuban surrogate army in Anglo, and providing anarchists with arms and money to convert South Africa with all its mineral riches needed in the world, into another Cuba. The Nationalist government successfully fought this intention internally as well as on its boarders. The reader will come to appreciate the goodwill between whites and nonwhites that had developed in South Africa by the fact that on election day in 1994 when Mandela was elected president, there was not a trace of violence. Unfortunately, Mandela and those who became part of his government, were poorly equipped to run a highly industrialized country. It soon became apartheid in reverse and hundreds of thousands of whites left and are still departing the country. For a detailed report about the confusion since 1994 journalist R. W. Johnson’s 702 page South Africa’s Brave New World, The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid, (2009) would be an interesting and informed supplement. But it would be well to keep in mind that he writes as a journalist, and comes from the English speaking whites. Sometimes his conclusions seem too biased, and resting on scant information. Throughout the reader will be entertained by pictures interspersed, worth much more than a thousand words.