South Africa Post c. 1850 (African Studies)

Introduction

This bibliography is concerned with the history of the country that came into being in 1910 as the Union of South Africa, the boundaries of which remain virtually the same as those of the present-day South Africa. There are many links and connections between the history of South Africa and that of other countries in the southern African region, but this bibliography is limited to South Africa itself. In the mid-19th century, “South Africa” was only a geographical expression, made up of one substantial British colony, the Cape, a much smaller British colony (Natal), two fragile Boer republics-in-being (the Orange Free State and South African Republic or Transvaal), and a number of still independent African states. The key development in late-19th century South African history was the mineral revolution, which, beginning in the 1870s, laid the basis for the industrialization of the country and did much to create the conditions for the way the country was ruled for most of the 20th century, with a small white minority oppressing a large black majority. In the early 1990s, the country underwent a transition to what was in effect black majority rule, and the implications of that transition are ongoing. This bibliography covers, then, a century and a half of dramatic change, and South Africa has the richest literature of any country in Sub-Saharan Africa, so this bibliography is inevitably highly selective. It overlaps slightly with the separate Oxford Bibliographies article on Southern Africa to c. 1850, which should be consulted on the period before this one begins. To some extent the selections listed here reflect the personal interests of the compiler, which are more political than social or economic, but an attempt has been made to choose what a wide range of historians are likely to consider important works, of use to academics and students. Work published more recently is prioritized, as they are likely to be the most relevant for readers. Memoirs and biographies have on the whole not been included, and there are very few periodical articles, chapters in edited collections, or local studies. For all its limitations, this bibliography aims to open a window onto the many debates that are ongoing in the much-contested field of South African history. After general works and sources, it proceeds chronologically before ending with a few key themes: social identities, people, culture, economy, religion, and South Africa and the World. In all cases, reference should also be made to books in other sections, and it should be borne in mind that what is included is only a minute proportion of what could have been listed had space permitted. Finally, works are limited to those in English, as there is hardly any substantive work on South African history in other languages that has not been translated into English.

General Overviews

Many general histories of South Africa have been written over the years, and new ones appear frequently. These vary greatly in quality. Wilson and Thompson 1971 was a breakthrough when it appeared; with an overall theme of “interaction,” it is the classic “liberal Africanist” synthesis. The Illustrated History of South Africa was, at the time it was published, a pioneering attempt at an alternative history for a popular audience. For those looking for an introductory general overview of all South African history, Thompson 2006 is recommended, as is the multi-authored Giliomee and Mbenga 2007; those with some prior background are likely to find Beinart 2001 the best survey of the 20th century. The fullest one-volume survey remains the heavily political Davenport and Saunders 2000. The most recent scholarly history is Ross, et al. 2011, which is likely to remain the single most important survey for many years to come.

Beinart, William. Twentieth Century South Africa. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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A short but pointed survey by a leading Oxford-based historian from South Africa, it draws on both “liberal” and “radical” writing and tries to present an “Africanist” perspective on the South African past, seamlessly blending political, cultural, and economic themes.
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Davenport, Thomas Rodney, and Christopher C. Saunders. South Africa: A Modern History. 5th ed. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000.
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The most detailed single-volume scholarly history by professional historians available as of 2012, this is mostly a political history. While it updates earlier editions by T. R. H. Davenport, it now needs further updating.
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Giliomee, Hermann, and Bernard Mbenga, eds. New History of South Africa. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2007.
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An illustrated set of essays by historians, summarizing recent scholarship.
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Reader’s Digest Association South Africa, ed. Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story. 3d ed. Cape Town: Reader’s Digest, 1994.
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A popular history that provided a pioneering Africanist perspective when it first appeared in the late 1980s; it is well illustrated and easily readable.
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Ross, Robert, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson, eds. The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Some of the chapters in this important volume are listed separately throughout this bibliography. They represent the most up-to-date historical scholarship on the country, and range from chapters on resistance to others on the economy and culture.
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Thompson, Leonard M. A History of South Africa. 3d ed. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2006.
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The last edition of the single most readable history of the country, it includes a chapter on the transition of the early 1990s. By one of South Africa’s leading historians, who wrote as an emeritus professor of history at Yale University.
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Wilson, Monica, and Leonard M. Thompson, eds. The Oxford History of South Africa. Vol. 2, South Africa, 1870–1966. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
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A pioneering work, notorious for having blank pages in its South African edition instead of the chapter on African nationalism by Leo Kuper, for fear the South African censors would ban the volume. A number of the chapters were not written by historians and lack a strong chronological sense but nevertheless remain worth reading.
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Historiography

Until relatively recently, most significant writing on South African history was by males of European descent who lived in the country or had left the country to settle abroad. Since the 1830s, when the first major historical debate erupted, on the way in which whites had treated blacks in the Cape Colony up to that time, the question of race has dominated South African historiography. Since the late 19th century, South African historiography has been dominated by a “settler” school that presents a Eurocentric view of the country’s past. In the early 20th century that view was challenged by Afrikaner nationalist writers, who focused exclusively on Afrikaners, and by “liberal” English-speaking historians, who rejected segregationist policies. Then, beginning in the 1960s, South African historiography was transformed by two new currents, which in some writing was combined: on the one hand, the historiography was decolonized in line with developments in tropical African historiography; on the other, it came under the influence of neo-Marxism. In the 1970s a vigorous debate took place among English-speaking historians over the relative weight of race and class, at the same time as new international currents, such as history from below, gender, and transnational history, influenced the writing of South African history. For a view of that history from the moment when the old order was about to give way to the new, see Brown, et al. 1991. Only relatively recently have works by women and blacks increased significantly. To date no new strongly black nationalist school of historical writing has emerged, and historical writing remains highly diverse and difficult to categorize. There are no recent surveys of the kind produced in the late 1980s (e.g., Saunders 1988, Smith 1988), although there is a polemical work (Lipton 2007) and a chapter in The Cambridge History of South Africa (Grundlingh, et al. 2011) provides insights into new historiographical directions. Maylam 2001 is the best survey of writing on race; Stolten 2007 brings together a range of papers relating to historiography and memory; and Worger 1999 is especially useful for what historians of South Africa have said about “the imperial factor.”

Brown, Joshua, Patrick Manning, Karin Shapiro, Jon Wiener, Belinda Bozzoli, and Peter Delius, eds. History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices. Critical Perspectives on the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
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Emerging mainly from the Witwatersrand History Workshop, most of these important papers were first published in Radical History Review 46–47 (1990).
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Grundlingh, Albert, Christopher Saunders, Sandra Swart, and Howard Phillips. “Environment, Heritage, Resistance, and Health: Newer Historiographical Directions.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994. Edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson, 600–624. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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A brief discussion of recent trends in these four areas of historical enquiry.
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Lipton, Merle. Liberals, Marxists, and Nationalists: Competing Interpretations of South African History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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A strongly anti-Marxist and tendentious account of late-20th-century debates among historians by one who sees herself as a “liberal.”
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Maylam, Paul. South Africa’s Racial Past: The History and Historiography of Racism, Segregation, and Apartheid. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001.
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Clearly written, balanced, and well-informed discussion of the debates about the history of racist policies in South Africa.
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Saunders, Christopher. The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1988.
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Analyzes the development of English-speaking South African historical writing from G. M. Theal in the late 19th century through the English-speaking liberal Africanist historians to the radical Marxist historians of the 1970s and early 1980s.
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Smith, Kenneth W. The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing. Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1988.
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Discusses both English and Afrikaans historical writing from the 19th century to the 1980s.
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Stolten, Hans Erik, ed. History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa. Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007.
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A relatively easily accessible collection of papers, most of which were first given at a conference in Copenhagen, on a wide range of history writing and on memorialization.
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Worger, William H. “Southern and Central Africa.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 5, Historiography. Edited by Robin W. Winks, 513–540. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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Brief but useful discussion of historical writing on South Africa and the British Empire, some of which relates to the post-1850 period.
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Documents and Archives

While many collections of documents exist, most of these concern the evolving bureaucratic state. The emphasis here is instead on scholarly collections of documents and reports that concern resistance to that state, although the items listed reflect something of the range of material available. Harris 2007 discusses the archives of the country in general, while Doxtader and Salazar 2007 provides the most important documents from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Karis and Carter 1972–1977, Drew 1996, Karis and Gerhart 1997, and Gerhart and Glaser 2010 are key political collections of resistance documents. Hancock and van der Poel 1966–1973 is a collection of selected papers of South Africa’s leading white politician of the early 20th century. The South African Democracy Education Trust volume reproduces interviews with struggle activists.

Doxtader, Erik, and Philippe-Joseph Salazar, eds. Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: The Fundamental Documents. Claremont, South Africa: New Africa Books, 2007.
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Reproduces, with commentary, the key documents from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process of the late 1990s, including extracts from the Commission’s seven-volume report.
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Drew, Allison, ed. South Africa’s Radical Tradition: A Documentary History. 2 vols. Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1996.
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The first of these two volumes, both of which emphasize socialist and Unity Movement radicalism, especially in the Western Cape, runs from 1907 to 1950, the second from 1943 to 1964.
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Gerhart, Gail M., and Clive L. Glaser. From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1990. Vol. 6, Challenge and Victory, 1980–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
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Continuing the tradition of the earlier volumes in this series (see Karis and Carter 1972–1977 and Karis and Gerhart 1997), this text provides an excellent commentary on the turbulent 1980s, along with relevant documents.
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Hancock, W. K., and Jean van der Poel, eds. Selections from the Smuts Papers. 7 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966–1973.
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Hancock, who wrote the standard two-volume biography of Smuts and was his South African assistant at the University of Cape Town, selected key material from Smuts’s voluminous papers, which range from his involvement in the South African war to his years as prime minister.
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Harris, Verne S. Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007.
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A collection of elegantly written essays by South Africa’s leading archivist, who in 2012 heads the Centre for Memory at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, on approaches to the country’s archives, especially in the transition period of the early 1990s. Harris emphasizes the fluidity of archives and the need to approach them critically.
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Karis, Thomas, and Gwendolen M. Carter. From Protest to Challenge. A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1964. 4 vols. Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution, 1972–1977.
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The seminal collection of documents on African politics, with commentaries, traces the development of African protest from the first African political organization in 1882 to the Rivonia trial of 1963–1964. The first volume, edited by Sheridan Johns of Duke University, takes the story to 1934; the second runs to the Defiance Campaign in 1952, and the third to the end of the Rivonia trial in 1964.
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Karis, Thomas G., and Gail M. Gerhart. From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1990. Vol. 5, Nadir and Resurgence, 1964–1979. Pretoria, South Africa: UNISA, 1997.
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Excellent commentary with carefully selected documents, from the nadir in resistance politics after the Rivonia trial to the resurgence after the Soweto Uprising of 1976.
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South African Democracy Education Trust. The Road to Democracy: South Africans Telling Their Stories. Vol. 1, 1950–1970. Houghton, South Africa: Mutloatse Arts Heritage Trust, 2008.
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The first of a planned series of volumes of interviews conducted by SADET for the Road to Democracy in South Africa series of volumes (see South African Democracy Education Trust 2004–2012, cited under Resistance to Apartheid to 1970).
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Reference Works

Printed reference works are increasingly being superseded by online ones, although some of the latter are available only by subscription. Shillington 2005 and Middleton and Miller 2008 are among the encyclopedias that contain many South African entries, while Johnson and Jacobs 2011 is now the best single-volume encyclopedia on South Africa. The Dictionary of South African Biography and its later volumes, and the more scholarly, British-based Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, contain biographies of numerous figures in South African history since the mid-19th century. While Duminy 2011 is now the leading work on the country’s historical maps, Saunders, et al. 2000 is a wide-ranging historical dictionary and Saunders 2011 is a brief survey of recent history.

de Kock, W. J., ed. Dictionary of South African Biography. 5 vols. Pretoria, South Africa: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 1968–1987.
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Although there are some outdated biographies in these volumes, they remain an essential biographical source, continued after the transition in South Africa as the New Dictionary of South African Biography, Vol. 1 (Pretoria, South Africa: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 1995) and Vol. 2 (Pretoria, South Africa: Vista University, 1999). The latter rather slight addition to the series set out to correct earlier biographical dictionaries by including a large number of black African biographies.
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Duminy, Andrew. Mapping South Africa: A Historical Survey of South African Maps and Charts. Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana, 2011.
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A survey by an emeritus professor at the University of KwaZulu Natal, which for the 20th century briefly explores the development of photography, devices to measure distance, the Global Positioning System, and Google.
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Johnson, Krista, and Sean Jacobs, eds. Encyclopedia of South Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011.
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An authoritative work that provides a well-rounded overview of South African politics, culture, and economy throughout its history.
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Matthew, H. C. G., and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 60 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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Contains numerous articles on South African figures, not all of them members of the elite. The online version, available by subscription, includes additional articles.
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Middleton, John, and Joseph C. Miller, eds. New Encyclopedia of Africa. 5 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 2008.
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An expanded edition of Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Scribner’s, 1997), this provides useful coverage of major themes in the history of South Africa.
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Saunders, Christopher. “South Africa: Recent History.” In Africa South of the Sahara 2012. 41st ed. By Christopher Saunders, 1147–1154. London: Routledge, 2011.
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This publication provides an easily accessible, largely descriptive account of the country’s history, emphasizing recent developments. Updated annually.
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Saunders, Christopher, Nicholas Southey, and Mary-Lynn Suttie. Historical Dictionary of South Africa. 2d ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2000.
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This follows the other volumes in the Scarecrow series and includes an extensive bibliography.
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Shillington, Kevin, ed. Encyclopedia of African History. 3 vols. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
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Contains numerous relevant articles on South Africa since 1850 by leading scholars.
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Journals

The history of South Africa is well served by both international and locally published academic journals, most of which are now available online by subscription. The South African Historical Journal (SAHJ) has reflected the concerns of professional historians in South Africa from its first issue to the present. The University of the Witwatersrand–based African Studies is a broader, interdisciplinary journal. Among historical journals, the most important local ones are, besides SAHJ, African Historical Review and Historia, but some of the most significant articles appear in the two leading UK-based journals, the Journal of African History and the Journal of Southern African Studies. Kronos is especially important for the history of the Cape, and Safundi for comparisons between South Africa and the United States.

African Historical Review. 2007–.
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Successor to the University of South Africa’s in-house journal Kleio, this annual journal is, despite its title, mainly focused on recent South African history.
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African Studies. 1942–.
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The successor to Bantu Studies (1921–1941), which was mainly anthropological in focus, this publishes a broad range of articles and special issues on topics such as HIV/AIDS.
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Historia. 1956–.
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Second only to the South African Historical Journal in importance as a historical journal based in South Africa, Historia includes a wide range of articles on South Africa since the mid-19th century, some of which are in Afrikaans.
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Journal of African History. 1960–.
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The longest established journal in the field of African history, the Journal of African History has retained its status as a premier journal that maintains very high standards. A number of articles on South Africa since the mid-19th century have appeared in its pages.
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Journal of Southern African Studies. 1974–.
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Originally published by Oxford University Press, since 1997 this journal has been published by Taylor and Francis. The premier academic journal on the region, it has published numerous key articles on South Africa since 1850, with an emphasis on recent history.
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Kronos. 1979–.
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This annual journal, initially published by the Institute for Historical Research at the University of the Western Cape, was initially mainly concerned with the history of the Cape, but in 2008 (Vol. 38), it repositioned itself as a journal of “southern Africa histories.”
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Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies. 1999–.
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The only journal that focuses on comparative studies of the United States and South Africa. Started by Andrew Offenburger when a student, its name is a play on the Xhosa word Umfundisi, meaning “learned one.” Mainly historical and literary, Safundi’s focus has shifted recently to the literary.
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South African Historical Journal. 1969–.
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The leading professional journal in the field of South African historical studies. In recent years it has published mostly articles on the period from the late 19th century onward, some in issues or sections on special topics, such as the Bantustans.
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Collected Essays

There are many collections of essays on South African history. A few that might have been listed here can be found in other sections of this article (e.g., Carton, et al. 2009, cited under the Making of Social Identities). The ones cited here concern either a particular period (Onslow 2009), range widely over South African history (Collected Seminar Papers, Marks and Atmore 1980, Marks and Rathbone 1982, Marks and Trapido 1987), or concern a particular type of history (Duminy and Guest 1989) or a particular theme or topic (Dovers, et al. 2002; Etherington 1992).

Collected Seminar Papers on the Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries. 20 vols. London: University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1971–1989.
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For almost twenty years the seminar organized by Shula Marks at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London was the leading seminar on South African history. These volumes collect together the papers delivered there.
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Dovers, Stephen, Ruth Edgecombe, and Bill Guest, eds. South Africa’s Environmental History: Cases and Comparisons. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002.
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One of the earliest collections of papers on environmental themes in South African history.
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Duminy, Andrew, and Bill Guest, eds. Natal and Zululand: From Earliest Times to 1910: A New History. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1989.
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Perhaps the best general history of what is now KwaZulu province, edited by two professors at the University of KwaZulu Natal, Pietermaritzburg.
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Etherington, Norman, ed. Peace, Politics and Violence in the New South Africa. London: H. Zell, 1992.
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One of the first collections to analyze the transition, based mainly on papers given at a conference at the University of Western Australia, where the editor was a professor. Among the key articles are those by Hermann Giliomee on Afrikaners and the transition and by Shula Marks on the origins of ethnic violence.
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Marks, Shula, and Anthony Atmore, eds. Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa. London: Longman, 1980.
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The first of a series of volumes collecting papers from the seminar run by Shula Marks at the University of London, this one contains important essays on the late 19th century.
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Marks, Shula, and Richard Rathbone, eds. Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930. London: Longman, 1982.
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The second of three seminal collections of papers originally given at the seminar run by Shula Marks at the University of London, this one ranges from the beginnings of the mineral revolution into the early 20th century.
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Marks, Shula, and Stanley Trapido, eds. The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa. London: Longman, 1987.
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The third in the series of volumes edited by Shula Marks and others. Like the others in the series, it contains an excellent introduction.
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Onslow, Sue, ed. Cold War in Southern Africa: White Power, Black Liberation. London: Routledge, 2009.
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A collection of essays on aspects of the impact of the Cold War on Southern Africa, including John Daniel on security strategies and Anna Mart Van Wyk on South Africa’s nuclear ambitions.
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History since c. 1850

Given the vast volume of historical writing on South Africa since c. 1850, it is possible here to highlight only certain themes and topics, which are to some extent arbitrary and a matter of personal choice. A selection of General Overviews has already been given. More specific works are included here under a series of chronological subheads, beginning with the late 19th century (Before the Discovery of Gold) and proceeding into the 20th through the themes of Gold and War, unification (see Union and White Politics and Black Life and Politics from Union to Apartheid), Racial Segregation in the Early 20th Century, and apartheid (Policy of Apartheid and Impact of Apartheid. Then follow works on resistance to apartheid, before we come to the transition from apartheid to democracy (see Resistance to Apartheid to 1970, Resistance to Apartheid Post-1970, and Transition to Democracy, 1990–1997). Finally, the section on Postapartheid lists key works on South Africa since 1994. Some works that could well have been included in these chronological sections are found instead in the thematic sections that follow.

Before the Discovery of Gold

In the late 19th century, what is now South Africa underwent a great transformation brought about by the “mineral revolution,” the impact of the discovery and exploitation first of diamonds and then of gold. At the same time, and related to this, the remaining independent African states were conquered and brought under white rule. Much of that conquest was effected by the British army. On the impact of the discovery of diamonds, Turrell 1987 and Worger 1987 remain the key works. Guy 1994 is the seminal study of the destruction of the Zulu kingdom following the British invasion of Zululand in 1879. As the late-19th-century histories of Lesotho and Bechuanaland are covered in separate articles on those countries, the only two works that relate to South Africa’s neighbors in this section are Bonner 1983 on relations between the Boer Republic of the Transvaal and the Swazi state and Storey 2008 on the impact of guns, which has a special focus on what was then Basutoland (now Lesotho). Only a few years into the second half of the 19th century, the Xhosa-speaking people of what is now the Eastern Cape suffered a major crisis when a prophet encouraged them to destroy their cattle. Peires 2003 is the seminal work on the cattle-killing episode. In its aftermath, a new class of Africans began to emerge in the Eastern Cape who produced for the market and were, at least to some extent, modernizers. This is where Bundy 1979, a classic study, begins, taking the story of the African peasantry into the early 20th century. On white racial attitudes from the 1870s, Magubane 1996 should be consulted.

Bonner, Philip L. Kings, Commoners, and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth-Century Swazi State. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983.
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Remains the best account of relations between the South African Republic and the Swazi state in the late 19th century.
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Bundy, Colin. The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. London: Heinemann, 1979.
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Elegantly written and well researched, Bundy’s work did not escape criticism for its overall conceptualization, its detailed cases, and its failure to deal with women.
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Guy, Jeff. The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand, 1879–1884. 3d ed. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1994.
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Guy is the leading scholar on Zululand history, and this book—his revised doctoral dissertation—argues that the Zulu kingdom was destroyed as much by what the British did after the invasion in 1979 as because of it.
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Magubane, Bernard M. The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875–1910. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996.
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Mostly concerns the racial attitudes of those who were involved in the processes from the 1870s that led to the Union in 1910. The work of a sociologist with a strong sense of history.
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Peires, Jeffrey B. The Dead Will Arise: Nonqgawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2003.
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A seminal work that tells the story of the desperate attempt by the Xhosa to resist British colonial expansion in the Eastern Cape in the 1850s. In this updated edition, Peires responds to his critics and reviewers in an afterword. His book is, in a sense, an outgrowth of his earlier work on Xhosa history, The House of Phalo, new ed. (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2003; originally published in 1981).
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Storey, William Kelleher. Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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This key work on the relationship between new weapons technology and the establishment of political power in late-19th-century South Africa shows how new types of guns aided the conquest of African societies. Storey includes chapters on guns and the Langalibalele affair, the British attempt to create a confederal South Africa in the 1870s, and the Cape Sotho war of 1879–1880.
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Turrell, Robert. Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871–1890. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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Detailed monograph on the development of the diamond industry at Kimberley, showing how the monopoly developed and black claimants were forced out.
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Worger, William H. South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867–1895. Craighall, South Africa: A. D. Donker, 1987.
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Well-written account of the development of Kimberley itself, how Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers Company came to dominate the industry, and the appalling conditions under which black laborers in the diamond mines worked and lived.
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Gold and War

The greatest British intervention in what became South Africa came at the end of the 19th century. While historians have questioned whether there was a direct relationship between the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 and the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer or South African War in 1899, there can be no doubt that the exploitation of gold lay behind the war. On this debate see especially Trapido 2011. The most recent survey of the late 19th century is Meredith 2007, which weaves together the mineral revolution and the clash between Britain and the independent Boer Republics and focuses especially on the key individuals involved, such as Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate who became Cape Prime Minister; Paul Kruger, the crusty Afrikaner leader of the South African Republic (or Transvaal); and Alfred Milner, who as British High Commissioner in South Africa did much to bring on the war in 1899. For the history of the early Witwatersrand, showing how the discovery of gold brought together migrants of many kinds to create a vibrant new society, there is the brilliant work of Van Onselen 2001 and the study of migrancy in Harries 1994. Tamarkin 1996 is concerned with white politics in the Cape in this period, focusing on Cecil Rhodes, the key individual in colonial politics to 1896, and the Cape Afrikaners. All this is brought together in Marks 2011, which weaves together politics, economics, and class. As a result of the Anglo-Boer or South African War of 1899–1902, the greatest conflict ever fought on South African soil, the British conquered the two Boer republics, which meant that all of what is now South Africa came under British rule. Nasson 2010 is now the standard account of the war, though Cuthbertson, et al. 2002 helped open a range of new perspectives on it.

Cuthbertson, Greg, Albert M. Grundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Suttie, eds. Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899–1902. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002.
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The most important collection of new work that came out of the centenary of the South African War, striking for its many new interpretations and the many new dimensions of the conflict it explored, including its international dimensions and the role of gender.
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Harries, Patrick. Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994.
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The first major study of the lives of Mozambique migrants in South Africa, showing the relationship between work and culture.
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Marks, Shula. “Class, Culture, and Consciousness in South Africa, 1880–1899.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994. Edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson, 102–156. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Masterly survey of the impact of the mineral revolution on the making of class identities in late-19th-century South Africa.
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Meredith, Martin. Diamonds, Gold, and War: The Making of South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007.
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Written for a popular readership in a lively style, this draws on recent scholarship to present an able synthesis.
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Nasson, Bill. The War for South Africa: The Anglo-Boer War. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2010.
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The best single history of the war, clearly written and up to date with the most recent interpretations both of the military strategies and tactics and of the social history of the war. Unlike those who use the term “South African War” to suggest its inclusive character, Nasson sees it as essentially a white civil war. An earlier version of this book was published as The South African War, 1899–1902 (London: Arnold, 1999).
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Tamarkin, Mordechai. Cecil Rhodes and the Cape Afrikaners: The Imperial Colossus and the Colonial Parish. London: Frank Cass, 1996.
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Explores in detail the relationship between Rhodes, the key figure in Cape politics until the Jameson Raid, and the Afrikaners who had remained at the Cape when others went into the interior on the Great Trek.
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Trapido, Stanley. “Imperialism, Settler Identities, and Colonial Capitalism: The Hundred-Year Origins of the 1899 South African War.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994. Edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson, 66–101. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Explores the longer-term causes of the South African war as well as the immediate ones.
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Van Onselen, Charles. New Babylon, New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2001.
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In this brilliant work of social history, first published in two volumes under the title Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand (New York: Longman, 1982), Van Onselen explores changing life in Johannesburg and its surroundings from the discovery of gold to World War I.
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Union and White Politics

The South African War set the scene for the movement to a unification of the four white-ruled states: the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony. Unification was achieved in May 1910, creating the modern South African state. On the process leading to Union, Thompson 1960 is the classic account, but Odendaal 1984 opened new perspectives on black responses to unification. The ruling white elite was deeply divided by the war. English speakers, who retained many connections with Britain, were less numerous than Afrikaners, some of whom were willing to accept that Britain had been magnanimous and were willing to work with English speakers to create a new, white South Africa. From soon after Union, a more exclusive Afrikaner nationalism began to challenge these more moderate Afrikaners, long led by Jan Smuts. On Smuts Hancock 1962 is the classic biography, while Davenport 1966 is the seminal study of Afrikaner politics at the Cape before Union. After Union, the National Party emerged as the main political vehicle of Afrikaner nationalism, and its history is related in Geyser and Marais 1983. Krikler 2005 is the fullest study of the clash between white miners and the state in 1922. On Afrikaner nationalism, Moodie 1975 and O’Meara 1983 should both be consulted.

Davenport, T. R. H. The Afrikaner Bond: The History of a South African Political Party, 1880–1911. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1966.
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Remains the key work on Cape politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the first real political party in what became South Africa. It concludes with an excellent chapter on the Bond and Afrikaner nationalism.
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Geyser, Ockert, and A. H. Marais. Die Nasionale Party. Vol. 1. 2d ed. Bloemfontein, South Africa: Institute for Contemporary History, Orange Free State University, 1983.
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The most detailed, though a highly descriptive study of the rise of the National Party, from its beginnings.
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Hancock, Keith W. Smuts. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
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Superb biography by a leading Australian historian, sympathetic to Jan Smuts. The first volume takes the story to the end of World War I, the second, subtitled “Fields of Force,” from 1919 to his death in 1950.
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Krikler, Jeremy. White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa. Manchester, NH: Manchester University Press, 2005.
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Detailed account of the so-called Rand Revolt of 1922, when white workers rose against the mining companies and the Smuts government intervened to smash the uprising. Krikler provides the first detailed analysis of the racial killing that took place during the rising.
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Moodie, T. Dunbar. The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
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Not yet superseded, this book analyzes the mobilization of Afrikaners around what Moodie called “civil religion,” ignoring the economic dimension that O’Meara 1983 focuses on.
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Odendaal, André. Vukani Bantu! The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912. Cape Town: David Philip, 1984.
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The first detailed study, based in part on newspaper reports in African languages, of African political mobilization before the establishment of the South African Native National Congress (predecessor to the African National Congress [ANC]) in 1912.
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O’Meara, Dan. Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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Marxist interpretation of the economic springs of Afrikaner nationalism, very critical of the approach of Moodie 1975. Though much criticized for focusing too much on the economic underpinnings of that nationalism, it was the first book to explore them, and their importance is clear.
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Thompson, Leonard M. The Unification of South Africa, 1902–1910. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960.
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Magisterial account of how the union of South Africa came into being, based on wide reading in the relevant archives in Britain and at the Cape, but it has little to say about African responses to unification, on which see Odendaal 1984.
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Black Life and Politics from Union to Apartheid

The history of the black majority in the early 20th century, once ignored, was, when first tackled, reduced largely to a history of resistance to segregation and the rise of nationalism, as in the semipopular work Roux 1964 and the scholarly monograph Walshe 1971. More recently, historians have traced the growth of an African middle class (Cobley 1990, Kirk 1998) and have shown the relationship between race and class in different localities (Limb 2010), while the single richest study of a single black life is Van Onselen 1996. Vinson 2012 is now a key work on the African American impact on South Africa.

Cobley, Alan Gregor. Class and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950. New York: Greenwood, 1990.
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Pioneering account of the rise of a black middle class from the mid-1920s.
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Kirk, Joyce F. Making a Voice: African Resistance to Segregation in South Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998.
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The first resistance among workers and the emergent African bourgeoisie, especially in Port Elizabeth.
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Limb, Peter. The ANC’s Early Years: Nation, Class and Place in South Africa before 1940. Pretoria, South Africa: Unisa, 2010.
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Considers the ANC both nationally and regionally and traces the relationship over time between the ANC and black workers.
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Roux, Edward. Time Longer than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa. 2d ed. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1964.
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The first and classic account of resistance to white rule from the late 19th century to the 1940s, this work by a former member of the Communist Party of South Africa was first published by Gollancz in London in 1948, but it was the 1964 edition that gained a wide readership, even in South Africa, where it was banned.
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Van Onselen, Charles. The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894–1985. Cape Town: David Philip, 1996.
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Classic biography of Kas Maine by South Africa’s leading social historian, based almost entirely on oral evidence.
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Vinson, Robert Trent. The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012.
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Shows how Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was seen as a potential source of liberation in many parts of South Africa in the 1920s.
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Walshe, Peter. The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912–1952. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
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The first scholarly account of the history of the ANC from its origins to the Defiance Campaign of 1952. Based on a doctorate thesis for Oxford University.
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Racial Segregation in the Early 20th Century

Racial segregation had a long history in South Africa before the period that this bibliography covers, but it was in the late 19th century that it took on the forms that made it so notorious in the 20th century. Historians have therefore linked the development of segregation closely to the mineral revolution of the late 19th century and to the resulting urbanization of the early 20th. Krikler 1993 is a detailed study of the relationship between the reimposition of segregation after the South African War and black responses. While the section that follows this one is focused particularly on racial segregation in its more developed form of apartheid, introduced by the National Party when it came to power in 1948, there are of course numerous continuities between segregation before 1948 and apartheid afterwards, as shown in, for example, Bonner, et al. 1993. Beinart and Dubow 1995 presents a set of key readings across the 1948 divide. Dubow 1989 examines key segregationist legislation in the interwar period, while Evans 2009 focuses on the absence of lynching in South Africa, which the author argues was not necessary, given the pervasiveness of other forms of racial violence. The meaning of segregation for individual women is vividly brought out in Marks 1987.

Beinart, William, and Saul Dubow, eds. Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa. London: Routledge, 1995.
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Brings together key articles by leading historians such as Maynard Swanson, Martin Legassick, Shula Marks, Deborah Posel, and Jeff Peires, with an excellent historiographical introduction.
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Bonner, Philip, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel, eds. Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–1962. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993.
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Essays arguing for continuities between the decade before 1948 and the apartheid era.
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Dubow, Saul. Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989.
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Shows how racial segregation took on new forms in the 1920s and early 1930s under the pressures of industrialization.
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Evans, Ivan. Cultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killing in South Africa and the American South. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.7228/manchester/9780719079047.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Detailed comparative study, based on some primary research.
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Krikler, Jeremy. Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
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Based on a doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Oxford, this book argues that there was an incipient revolution in the Western Transvaal in the immediate aftermath of the war.
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Marks, Shula, ed. Not Even an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1987.
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Very readable edition of correspondence between a British philanthropist, a young Xhosa girl, and an African social worker in 1949–1951.
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Policy of Apartheid

Introduced by the government that came to power in 1948, apartheid took different forms over time. H. F. Verwoerd, who became prime minister in 1958, emphasized apartheid as “separate development,” but it involved vast social engineering, meaning millions were forcibly removed. The best short general introduction is Clark and Worger 2011, while Guelke 2005 shows how debates about apartheid have developed over time. The finest scholarly overview is Posel 2011. Posel 1991 is a detailed study of the emergence of apartheid. The relationship between the politics of the National Party and apartheid policies is traced in O’Meara 1996. The “unraveling” (Davis 1991, p. 3) of apartheid was a gradual process, which gathered steam beginning in the mid-1980s. While van der Westhuizen 2007 focuses on the political aspects of why apartheid unraveled, Welsh 2009 adopts a broader approach to the question.

Clark, Nancy L., and William H. Worger. South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 2011.
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Second edition of an accessible and instructive survey, first published in 2004 as part of Pearson’s Seminar Studies in History. It contains some key documents.
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Davis, R. Hunt, ed. Apartheid Unravels. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991.
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Essays on white politics, liberalism, black consciousness, the United Democratic Front (UDF), and regional politics.
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Guelke, Adrian. Rethinking the Rise and Fall of Apartheid: South Africa and World Politics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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A professor of political science analyzes the various factors that influenced the development of apartheid and then its collapse and decline.
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O’Meara, Dan. Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948–1994. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1996.
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Detailed history of the leaders and party politics of the apartheid era.
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Posel, Deborah. The Making of Apartheid, 1946–1961: Conflict and Compromise. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
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Key work on the early history of apartheid, this book argues those who came into power in 1948 did not have a blueprint that they then implemented.
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Posel, Deborah. “The Apartheid Project, 1948–1970.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994. Edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson, 319–368. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Masterly survey of the first two decades of the apartheid regime.
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van der Westhuizen, Christi. White Power and the Rise and Fall of the National Party. Cape Town: Zebra, 2007.
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Relates the collapse of the National Party to the history of the development and then fall of apartheid. A well-researched, semipopular account by a journalist.
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Welsh, David. The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2009.
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The best single volume on the topic, with more on the fall than the rise, by a former professor of politics at the University of Cape Town.
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Impact of Apartheid

While apartheid affected almost all aspects of South African society, its impact was far from uniform, and historians have begun to trace in detail the way it affected different aspects of life, from urban policy (Maylam 1990, Maylam 1995), to censorship (Merrett 1994), to the development of the Bantustans (Ally and Lissoni 2012). For legal aspects of apartheid, Dugard 1978 is seminal, as is Lipton 1985 for the relationship between economic development and apartheid racial policy.

Ally, Shireen, and Arianna Lissoni, eds. Special Issue: Let’s Talk about Bantustans. South African Historical Journal 64.1 (2012).
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This special issue brings together key articles on aspects of the history of the various Bantustans created under apartheid.
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Dugard, John. Human Rights and the South African Legal Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
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One of South Africa’s leading jurists analyzes the laws of apartheid, political trials, and the role of the judiciary under apartheid.
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Lipton, Merle. Capitalism and Apartheid: South Africa, 1910–84. Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1985.
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Sophisticated study of the role of economic change in the adaption of apartheid.
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Maylam, Paul. “The Rise and Decline of Urban Apartheid in South Africa.” African Affairs 89.354 (1990): 57–84.
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Useful survey article that ranges from the key urban segregationist measure of 1923 to the collapse of urban apartheid controls in the 1980s.
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Maylam, Paul. “Explaining the Apartheid City: 20 Years of South African Urban Historiography.” In Special Issue: Urban Studies and Urban Change in Southern Africa. Edited by Hilary Sapire and Jo Beall. Journal of Southern African Studies 21.1 (1995): 19–38.
DOI: 10.1080/03057079508708431Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Survey of writing on urban segregation and apartheid over a twenty-year period.
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Merrett, Christopher. A Culture of Censorship: Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip, 1994.
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Explores state censorship in the apartheid era.
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Resistance to Apartheid to 1970

The division of resistance to apartheid into two categories, before and after 1970, is of course somewhat arbitrary. Many works, such as Buntman 2003 (cited under Resistance to Apartheid Post-1970) and Mandela 1994 (cited under Individuals and Population), a classic autobiography, range across the chronological divide, as do numerous memoirs and biographies of resistance figures not included here. Some of the literature on resistance tends to be romantic and uncritical; here more scholarly and critical contributions are emphasized. For both periods, the detailed and comprehensive volumes of South African Democracy Education Trust 2004–2012 are now an essential source. Tom Lodge, who wrote the first detailed scholarly study of black politics (Lodge 1983), returned to explore the Sharpeville massacre and its consequence in depth (Lodge 2011). Pogrund 2006 focuses on the great Pan-Africanist Congress leader Robert Sobukwe; Vigne 1997 on liberals, white and black; and Walker 1991 on women’s resistance to segregation and apartheid.

Lodge, Tom. Black Politics in South Africa since 1945. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983.
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Fine set of essays on aspects of resistance politics by one who was, at the time of writing, in the Politics Department at the University of the Witwatersrand.
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Lodge, Tom. Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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A well-written account of the Sharpeville massacre and its consequences, both within the country and internationally. Ends with a chapter on the memorializing of the massacre.
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Pogrund, Benjamin. How Can Man Die Better: The Life of Robert Sobukwe. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2006.
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Sympathetic biography of the founder of the Pan-Africanist Congress by a journalist who worked closely with him.
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South African Democracy Education Trust. The Road to Democracy in South Africa. 6 vols. Cape Town: Zebra, 2004–2012.
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Series of large volumes that aim to tell the story of resistance to apartheid, both in South Africa and abroad. A presidential project, SADET, launched by Thabo Mbeki, was directed by Ben Magubane, a long-time ANC activist scholar. The volumes contain detailed, original essays on internal resistance, the armed struggle, and other forms of opposition to apartheid. Many of the chapters are written by younger black scholars who conducted interviews for the project.
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Vigne, Randolph. Liberals against Apartheid: A History of the Liberal Party of South Africa, 1953–68. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997.
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A history of the Liberal Party from its founding in 1953 to its dissolution in 1968 by a leading figure in this history who uses the Liberal Party papers held at the Alan Paton Centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.
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Walker, Cherryl. Women and Resistance in South Africa. 2d ed. Cape Town: David Philip, 1991.
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Walker’s study, which begins in the early 20th century, becomes mainly focused on the multiracial Federation of South African Women in the 1950s. This is the second edition of a book first published in 1982.
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Resistance to Apartheid Post-1970

In this phase, resistance politics was dominated in the 1970s by the Black Consciousness Movement and in the 1980s by the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the uprisings in the townships. Recent work has explored the less organizational forms of resistance, including the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) underground activity (Suttner 2008). South African Democracy Trust 2004–2012 (cited under Resistance to Apartheid to 1970) are the most important studies and cover cultural aspects, along with the armed struggle and internal resistance. Buntman 2003 traces the history of struggle on Robben Island, while the history of the UDF of the 1980s is analyzed in Seekings 2000 and van Kessel 2000. Gerhart 1978 discusses the Africanist strand in black politics from the ANC Youth League of the 1940s through the Pan-Africanist Congress to the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s. For the role of the media, see especially Switzer and Adhikari 2000.

Buntman, Fran L. Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511616327Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The best book on what happened on Robben Island, outside Cape Town, to the political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, showing how they challenged the conditions there and triumphed against great odds. Written by a South African professor at an American university.
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Gerhart, Gail M. Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
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Remains the key work on Black Consciousness in South Africa and its links with earlier Africanist currents in the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress.
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Seekings, Jeremy. The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983–1991. Oxford: James Currey, 2000.
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The most substantial history of the activities of the UDF, based on its records held by the University of the Witwatersrand, by a professor of sociology and politics at the University of Cape Town.
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Suttner, Raymond. The ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976: A Social and Historical Study. Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana, 2008.
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An account by an academic and activist of the ANC in South Africa from the time it was banned until the Soweto uprising. Suttner was himself in the underground in the early 1970s.
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Switzer, Les, and Mohamed Adhikari, eds. South Africa’s Resistance Press: Alternative Voices in the Last Generation under Apartheid. Athens, OH: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, 2000.
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Essays on the most important alternative publications during the last decades of apartheid, including The Weekly Mail.
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van Kessel, Ineke. “Beyond our Wildest Dreams”: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
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Study of the impact of the UDF in three separate areas, drawing on interviews and detailed archival research, by a researcher based at the University of Leiden.
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Transition to Democracy, 1990–1997

Beginning in the late 1980s, South Africa underwent a transition from white minority rule to black majority rule, and from authoritarianism and repression to democracy. During the transition there was much political violence but not the racial civil war that many had long predicted, and a series of negotiations eventually produced a new constitution that provided for a democratic state. The negotiations are well treated in Friedman 1993 and Friedman and Atkinson 1994, while the first democratic election is analyzed in Johnson and Schlemmer 1996. The way the final constitution was then produced is discussed in Ebrahim 1998. The overall process is covered in Sisk 1995, Waldmeir 1998, and Welsh and Spence 2011, while Sparks 2003 provides a journalist’s treatment of the “talks about talks” in the late 1980s that helped lead to the negotiated settlement in 1993.

Ebrahim, Hassan. The Soul of a Nation: Constitution-Making in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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Commentary and documents relating to the constitution drawn up by the Constitutional Assembly between 1994 and 1996 by one who was himself involved in the process.
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Friedman, Steven. The Long Journey: South Africa’s Quest for a Negotiated Settlement. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1993.
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A detailed account of the negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa from December 1991.
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Friedman, Steven, and Doreen Atkinson, eds. The Small Miracle: South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1994.
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Excellent essays on the negotiated settlement from different perspectives.
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Johnson, R. W., and Lawrence Schlemmer. Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election, April 1994. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
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Detailed analysis of South Africa’s first democratic election.
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Sisk, Timothy D. Democratization in South Africa: The Elusive Social Contract. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
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A political science analysis of the process leading to the democratic outcome.
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Sparks, Allister H. Tomorrow Is Another Country. The Inside Story of South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2003.
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Originally published in 1994, this was the first account of the secret talks between Mandela and others in the ANC with the government before 1990, by one of South Africa’s leading journalists.
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Waldmeir, Patti. Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
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A well-connected journalist’s brilliant account of the transition.
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Welsh, David, and J. E. Spence. Ending Apartheid. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2011.
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Brief discussion by two eminent liberal scholars of why apartheid came to an end.
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Postapartheid

There is a large sociological literature on South Africa since 1994, much of which is likely to prove ephemeral. It is possible here to select only a few key works to illustrate some of the themes that have been covered for this period. One is politics, for which see Lodge 2002. For a semipopular, very critical take, see Johnson 2009. One of the features of this period has been the resurgence of popular protests (Beinart and Dawson 2010). Posel and Simpson 2002 analyzes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Venter and Landsberg 2011 is a broad-ranging treatise on government and politics, while Marais 2010 provides the best overall survey of the challenges facing postapartheid South Africa from a critical left perspective. Sitas 2010 discusses the decade from the decision to unban the ANC and release Nelson Mandela unconditionally to the end of the Mandela presidency.

Beinart, William, and Marcelle C. Dawson, eds. Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010.
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Essays mostly by younger scholars on popular social movements, from the use of strikes and boycotts in Cape Town and the Mandela campaign of the 1980s to the Treatment Action Campaign of the 1990s and strikes by nurses at Baragwanath Hospital.
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Johnson, Richard W. South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid. London: Allen Lane, 2009.
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A polemical account, very critical of the new ANC government, especially under president Thabo Mbeki.
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Lodge, Tom. Politics in South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki. 2d ed. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002.
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Survey of South African politics since the transfer of power in 1994.
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Marais, Hein. South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change. Clermont, South Africa: UCT Press, 2010.
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First-rate analysis by a journalist of the challenges facing South Africa since 1994, from HIV/AIDS to poverty and unemployment.
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Posel, Deborah, and Graeme Simpson. Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002.
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One of the numerous books concerned with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this includes a number of critical essays based on detailed scholarly research.
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Sitas, Ari. The Mandela Decade, 1990–2000: Labour, Culture and Society in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria, South Africa: Unisa, 2010.
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Essays by a sociologist on aspects of the decade dominated by Mandela.
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Venter, Albert, and Chris Landsberg, eds. Government and Politics in South Africa. 4th ed. Pretoria, South Africa: Van Schaik, 2011.
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Essays on government, Parliament, the executive, the judiciary, provincial and local government, political economy, and foreign policy formulation.
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The Making of Social Identities

As South Africa is a highly diverse and cosmopolitan country, there are many overviews of the history of particular groups, ethnic and otherwise. Carton, et al. 2009 is the best single collection of essays on Zulu-speakers. Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2000 concerns South Africans of Indian origin; Gasa 2007, women; Giliomee 2009, those whites who saw themselves as Afrikaners; Lewis 1987, those classified as “Coloured” in South Africa’s racial terminology; Mendelsohn and Shain 2008, those of Jewish origin; and Yap and Man 1996, those of Chinese origin. Walker, et al. 2011 concerns social identities in relation to land.

Carton, Benedict, John Laband, and Jabulani Sithole, eds. Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
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Collection of essays on Zulu-speaking heritage and identity.
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Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma, ed. From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life. Cape Town: Kwela, 2000.
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The best short overview of the history of people of Indian origin in South Africa.
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Gasa, Nomboniso, ed. Women in South African History: Basus’iimbokodo, bawel’imilambo / They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2007.
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A collection of pioneering essays by feminist historians who seek to assert the importance of the role of women in particular situations, from Xhosa resistance in the mid-19th century to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
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Giliomee, Hermann B. The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. 2d ed. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2009.
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Sweeping, detailed survey by the leading Afrikaner historian, who sees the Afrikaners as seeking survival over time. The second edition contains a new section on South Africa post-1994.
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Lewis, Gavin. Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African “Coloured” Politics. Cape Town: David Philip, 1987.
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The best account of “Coloured” politics from the late 19th century to the 1970s.
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Mendelsohn, Richard, and Milton Shain. The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008.
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The best single volume history of Jewish people in South Africa by two University of Cape Town scholars.
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Walker, Cherryl, Anna Bohlin, Ruth Hall, and Thembela Kepe, eds. Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011.
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A collection of important essays on issues relating to land in South Africa, edited by a professor of sociology at the University of Stellenbosch.
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Yap, Melanie, and Dianne Leong Man. Colour, Confusion and Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996.
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Survey of the history of people of Chinese origin in South Africa.
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Individuals and Population

The outpouring of works on particular individuals has been particularly noticeable in recent years. The single most important autobiography is Mandela 1994, but a contrasting view is offered by de Klerk 2000. Excellent biographies have been written on Cyril Ramaphosa (Butler 2008) and Thabo Mbeki (Gevisser 2008). For the population in general over the 20th century, there is now an overview (Simkins 2011).

Butler, Anthony. Cyril Ramaphosa. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008.
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Detailed and sympathetic biography of a key figure in the National Union of Mineworkers, then in ANC politics and leader of the Constitutional Assembly, written by one of South Africa’s leading political scientists.
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de Klerk, F. W. The Last Trek—A New Beginning: The Autobiography. London: Pan Macmillan, 2000.
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Memoir that defends de Klerk’s role in government and tries to explain how he came to see apartheid as “unworkable.”
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Gevisser, Mark. Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008.
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Very elegantly written, detailed biography of Mandela’s successor as president, with excellent context. An abridged and updated edition was published under the title A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2009).
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Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. London: Little, Brown, 1994.
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The classic autobiography, begun when Mandela was a prisoner on Robben Island, and ghosted by American writer Richard Stengel.
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Simkins, Charles. “The Evolution of the South African Population in the Twentieth Century.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994. Edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson, 492–517. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Analyzes key trends in population over time, using statistics and the methodology of a historical demographer.
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Regional and Local Studies

Recent scholarly works have moved from the national story to the study of local or regional communities. While there is to date only one substantial provincial history (Delius and Hay 2009), there are detailed studies of the main cities—Cape Town (Bickford-Smith 1995; Bickford-Smith, et al., 1999), Durban (Maylam and Edwards 1996), and Johannesburg (Murray 2011)—as well as its particular townships (Bonner and Nieftagodien 2008). Delius 1996 explores links between rural and urban in the case of the Northern Transvaal.

Bickford-Smith, Vivian. Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995.
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Detailed study of the role of race in Cape Town in the 19th century.
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Bickford-Smith, Vivian, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Nigel Worden. Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History. Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 1999.
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The best single-volume history on Cape Town, continues an earlier volume edited by the same three historians, all based at the University of Cape Town, that took the story to the end of the 19th century.
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Bonner, Phil L., and Noor Nieftagodien. Alexandra: A History. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2008.
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Social and political history of one of Johannesburg’s most important townships, a seedbed of resistance in the mid-1980s.
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Delius, Peter. A Lion amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996.
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Powerful study of politics in rural South Africa from the 1930s to the 1980s.
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Delius, Peter, and Michelle A. Hay. Mpumalanga: An Illustrated History. Johannesburg: Highveld, 2009.
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The best provincial history, the text draws on Peter Delius, ed., Mpumalanga: History and Heritage (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2007).
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Maylam, Paul, and Iain Edwards, eds. The People’s City: African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1996.
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Essays on black Africans in Durban, from squatters to settled people.
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Murray, Martin J. City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2011.
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Powerful critique of urban development in South Africa’s most cosmopolitan city since 1994. Discusses gated communities and the growth of new suburbs.
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Culture

In recent decades there has been a move away from the political to the cultural, reflecting the “cultural turn” in scholarship more generally, in turn related to the move to “history from below.” This section interprets “culture” very broadly, to include memorialization (Coombes 2003), literature (Attwell and Attridge, 2012), work on disease (Karim and Karim 2010), historical writing (Mouton, et al. 2007), and art (Peffer 2009). While Raditlhalo 2011 attempts a general synthesis, Steyn and van Zyl 2009 focuses on sexualities and Wylie 2008 on a particular case of where art and revolution met.

Attwell, David and Derek Attridge, The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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In thirty-nine chapters this monumental work ranges from San narratives through Xhosa and Zulu praise-songs, the literature of the early Cape, and travel writing to more modern writing in English and Afrikaans, before, during, and after apartheid.
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Coombes, Annie E. History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
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Concerned with how South African visual culture and memorialization has changed since 1994.
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Karim, Salim S. Abdool, and Quarraisha Abdool Karim, eds. HIV/AIDS in South Africa. 2d ed. Cape Town: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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Covers the origins of the pandemic, the development of prevention and curative strategies, the impact, and the future.
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Mouton, F. A., Nicholas Southey, and Albert van Jaarsveld, eds. History, Historians & Afrikaner Nationalism. Vanderbijlpark, South Africa: Kleio, 2007.
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A set of essays on some leading 20th-century Afrikaner historians, showing how they were influenced by Afrikaner nationalism
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Peffer, John. Art and the End of Apartheid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
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Black and resistance art, photography, and censorship.
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Raditlhalo, Tlhalo. “Modernity, Culture, and Nation.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994. Edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson, 573–599. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Ranges from translation to the performing and visual arts, theatre under apartheid, and postapartheid writing.
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Steyn, Melissa E., and Mikki van Zyl. The Prize and the Price: Shaping Sexualities in South Africa. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2009.
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Essays on interracial sex, sex and culture, sex and class, and heterosexual and same-sex marriage.
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Wylie, Diana. Art and Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele, South African Artist. Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana, 2008.
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Through the life of one artist who was killed in a South African raid on Gaborone, Botswana, in 1985, Wylie explores the relationship between creativity and resistance.
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Economy

Economic history was long taught separately from “history” at South African universities, and some economic history was highly technical and quantitative. One of Britain’s leading economic historians, who had grown up in South Africa, returned to produce, as his last work, a general survey (Feinstein 2005), which to some extent superseded the older set of essays (Coleman 1983). There is a wealth of material in the South African Journal of Economic History. Key labor studies include those on migrant labor in the mines (Harries 1994, cited under Gold and War; Wilson 1972) and on labor on the farms (Jeeves and Crush 1997). Though the key work on poverty remains the wide-ranging report of the Carnegie inquiry (Wilson and Ramphele 1989), an economist and a sociologist combined forces to write a survey of the relationship between economic development and poverty over time (Nattrass and Seekings 2011).

Coleman, Francis L., ed. Economic History of South Africa. Pretoria, South Africa: HAUM, 1983.
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Essays on aspects of the economic history of the country by leading economic historians.
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Feinstein, Charles H. An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination, and Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139165457Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The best scholarly economic history, written by an eminent Oxford-based economic historian, which puts all other similar work in the shade.
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Jeeves, Alan, and Jonathan Crush, eds. White Farms, Black Labor: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa, 1910–50. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1997.
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Analyzes the relationship between white ownership of farms and black labor, from when blacks were forced off the land as a result of the Land Act of 1913 to the era of apartheid.
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Nattrass, Nicoli, and Jeremy Seekings. “The Economy and Poverty in the Twentieth Century.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994. Edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson, 518–572. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Survey from the stagnation of the early Union period via the boom of the period from 1933 to 1945 to growth and stagnation under apartheid and the legacies, including poverty and inequality.
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South African Journal of Economic History. 1986–2009.
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Now called Economic History of Developing Regions (2010–).
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Wilson, Francis. Migrant Labour in South Africa. Johannesburg: South African Council of Churches, 1972.
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A pioneering survey of the chief form of labor in South Africa from the time of the industrial revolution, showing its dire social consequences.
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Wilson, Francis, and Mamphela Ramphele. Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge. Cape Town: David Philip, 1989.
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A report for the second Carnegie inquiry into poverty and development, it puts forward a wide range of policy suggestions for tackling poverty.
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Religion

South Africa is predominantly a Christian country, with small minorities who are Muslims and Hindus. While the Dutch Reformed Church long supported apartheid, other Christian faith communities challenged it in various ways (see especially de Gruchy 2009, de Gruchy and de Gruchy 2004, and Cochrane and Klein 2004). Black theology was an important aspect of the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s (Magaziner 2010), while the leading black cleric was the Anglican Desmond Tutu (Sparks and Tutu 2011), who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and became Archbishop of Cape Town. Elphick and Davenport 1997 provides an excellent synthesis of the impact of Christianity in this period.

Cochrane, James, and Bastienne Klein, eds. Special Issue: From Dark Days to Liberation: Perspectives on the Social History of Christianity in South Africa, 1936–1994. Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 118 (2004).
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This special issue is also available for purchase on CD-ROM; list of contents available online.
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de Gruchy, John W. Christianity and the Modernization of South Africa, 1867–1936. Pretoria, South Africa: Unisa, 2009.
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Commentary with selected archival documents. This is the second volume in the Social History of Christianity in South Africa: 1487 to 1994 series, available on CD-ROM; list of contents available online.
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de Gruchy, John W., and Steve de Gruchy. The Church Struggle in South Africa. 3d ed. London: SCM, 2004.
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The 25th anniversary edition of a classic work that first appeared in 1979 on the role of the church in the struggle against apartheid.
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Elphick, Richard, and Rodney Davenport, eds. Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
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Wide-ranging collection of essays on aspects of the history of Christianity.
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Magaziner, Daniel R. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010.
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Stresses the religious aspects of Black Consciousness.
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Sparks, Allister H., and Mpho A. Tutu. Tutu: The Authorised Portrait. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan, 2011.
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The most recent account of the life of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, profusely illustrated.
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South Africa and the World

South African history cannot be understood without knowing about the country’s extensive interactions with other parts of the world. This ranges from South Africa’s occupation of neighboring Namibia from 1915 to 1990 (Hayes, et al. 1998; Baines and Vale 2008; Wallace 2011), to South Africa’s postapartheid involvement in the rest of Africa, both economic and peacekeeping (Adebajo and Landsberg 2007), to its foreign policy more broadly (Barber and Barratt 1990, Landsberg 2004, Landsberg 2010). During the years of apartheid, many South Africans went into exile (Bernstein 1994), while the global antiapartheid movement gathered strength (on which see especially Volume 3 of the South African Democracy Education Trust project, cited under Resistance to Apartheid to 1970).

Adebajo, Adekeye, and Chris Landsberg, eds. South Africa in Africa: The Post-Apartheid Era. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007.
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Essays on different aspects of South African involvement in countries to the north.
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Baines, Gary F., and Peter C. J. Vale. Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts. Pretoria, South Africa: Unisa, 2008.
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Collection of historical and literary articles on South Africa’s involvement in the war in Namibia and Angola.
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Barber, James, and John Barratt. South Africa’s Foreign Policy: The Search for Status and Security, 1945–1988. Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1990.
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An able synthesis of the country’s foreign policy since the end of World War II, showing how the country responded to its increasing isolation in international fora.
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Bernstein, Hilda. The Rift: The Exile Experience of South Africans. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994.
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Based on interviews with three hundred South Africans who lived in exile in different countries, discusses going into exile, life in other countries, antiapartheid activity, and the consequences of exile.
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Hayes, Patricia, Jeremy Silvester, Marion Wallace, and Wolfram Hartmann, eds. Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment, 1915–46. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998.
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Aspects of South African rule of Namibia in the first thirty years, with emphasis on social themes.
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Landsberg, Chris. The Quiet Diplomacy of Liberation: International Politics and South Africa’s Transition. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2004.
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Based on an Oxford doctoral thesis, this book explores the international context of the transition to democracy, relating that context to internal developments.
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Landsberg, Chris. The Diplomacy of Transformation: South African Foreign Policy and Statecraft. Johannesburg: Macmillan, 2010.
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A professor of politics at the University of Johannesburg examines the relationship between internal political developments and South Africa’s foreign policy from the late 19th century to the Jacob Zuma administration.
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Wallace, Marion. A History of Namibia. London: Hurst, 2011.
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The best scholarly account of the country that South African occupied as a de facto colony from 1915 to its independence in March 1990, written by a leading historian of Namibia.