WHITE TRIBE DREAMING: Apartheid's Bitter Roots as Witnessed by Eight Generations of an Afrikaner Family

by Marq de Villiers ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1988

De Villiers, now a Toronto editor, is the eighth generation of a pioneering Afrikaner family. In this well-written, evocative book, he revives traceable elements of family history and suggests the broader history of Afrikaners in South Africa. De Villiers' history works especially well early on, despite the sketchy evidence available, because the colonial world he describes is one where individuals count for much and because he is extraordinarily effective at sensing perceptions on both sides of a series of early white-black encounters at the Cape and beyond. In successfully risking the use of imaginative projections from what be knows of present-day South African race relations and from his wide reading in traditional history and social science, de Villiers comes close to the powerful insights of J.M. Coetzee's early novella, Dusklands, and Andre Brink's A Chain of Voices. His linkage between family and communal history weakens, however, with the Anglo-Boer War--when his concentration on Free State Afrikaners exaggerates their role--and fades out with this century, despite the significant public role played by his father, Retie, as a journalist, editor, and opposition parliamentarian. His own stint as a journalist in South Africa is muted, and comments on the current political conflict are short and superficial, with the crucial shortcoming being giving far too much weight to ""orderly"" Afrikaners (like his father) as opposed to ""anarchic"" Afrikaners. He sees the former as coming from a Free State base and the latter particularly characteristic of Transvaal; while some truth remains in this geographical-historical insight, many overlapping elements of education, profession, and class have come into play in the past several decades. Besides, and sadly, he is unduly optimistic about the ability of ""orderly"" Afrikaners to encourage accommodation by their government of black nationalist political goals. For insight into Afrikaners, but far less into contemporary South African race relations and politics, this book is much better than Vincent Crapanzano's and Waiting (1985).

Pub Date: March 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION