invaders." We read, for example, that
the mixed farming communities were far from static. They had many of the characteristics of a frontier society. During the first millennium A.D. a "tidal frontier" of mixed farmers had founded a series of settlements. . . . During the second millennium, mixed farmers had been expanding from those established settlements. . . . (30).
The problem, from the point of view, of Southern African blacks, was that the development of the society had reached a major point of inevitable turbulence and change just as whites began to gather power at the end of the nineteenth century. It is Thompson's argument that blacks would have evolved their own strategies for dealing with such turbulence and change. The whites did not deliver blacks in Southern Africa from anything but the freedom to pursue their own social, economic and political destinies in freedom and dignity.
Thompson aims to show that whites, from the beginning of their arrival in South Africa, imposed a racist structure on a land which would one day be ruled according to government-approved apartheid:
Within its first decade, the Cape Colony began to develop a degree of autonomy and an unforeseen dynamic. By the time van Riebeeck handed over the command to his successors in 1662, the colony had become a complex, racially stratified society (33).
Another important point made by Thompson is that, despite the continuous onslaught from whites throughout the centuries, black Africans survived in ways that native North Americans ("Indians") and Australians (aborigines) did not: "the African peoples . . . were proving to be remarkably resilient. They showed no signs of disintegrating. . . . Africans, moreover, were adapting to the opportunities as well as the constraints created by the invaders" (108-109).
Whites came to dominate South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. Military, political, social and economic forces from E...