The Afrikaners: Biography of a people - Hermann Giliomee

The Afrikaners loom large in the history of South Africa as it has unfolded over the past three and a half centuries. Theirs is a story—both heroic and tragic—of a people searching for security in ways which made its ultimate attainment impossible. The history of the Afrikaners, colonizers and colonized, is replete with drama, irony and paradox.

THE AFRIKANERS – BIOGRAPHY OF A PEOPLE, the first comprehensive history of the Afrikaner people based on—and critical of—the most recent scholarly work, also draws on the author's own research and interviews conducted with leading political actors. Hermann Giliomee weaves together life stories and interpretation to create a highly readable narrative history of the Afrikaners from the colonization of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company to the twenty-first century.

As a group whose population reached one million only in the 1930s, the Afrikaners suffered from all the anxieties about survival that mark numerically weak peoples. Taking this as its point of departure, the book depicts the contradictions and complexities of Afrikaner history with empathy but without partisanship.

THE AFRIKANERS also offers a fresh contextualization of apartheid, its paradoxes and its complex effects. Giliomee revises current orthodoxies on white supremacy in South Africa in important ways. The result is not only a magisterial history of the Afrikaner people, but a fuller understanding of their history, which for good or ill resonates far beyond the borders of South Africa.