The covenant - James A. Michener

The main setting of this extraordinary is the stunning landscape of South Africa, vivid episodes also take place in Indonesia, France, Holland and England. The dramatic presentation of actual and fictional characters in a background of historical events is a narrative technique of which Mr. Michener has long been acknowledged master - and never more powerfully than here.

The story begins 15,000 years ago with a clan of small brown people - the San, later called "Bushmen" - who are facing a crisis. A beautiful lake, long the center of their lives, is drying up, and they must move across a hostile African desert to seek better conditions. The hardships overcome by this intrepid hand - hunters, wanderers, artists - are minor compared with what will eventually confront those who come after them. Some of these are next shown in the 15th century toiling in the gold mines that enrich the black empire of Zimbabwe. They are overseen by Nxumalo, who has achieved power and fortune in that great city and who is an ancestor of one of the three principal families in this book.

The first European settlement in South Africa is the Dutch outpost established in 1652 at the Cape of Good Hope - a dangerous headland usually by-passed by ships sailing to and from the Far East. What begins there, several decades after the first English colonies in North America, parallels in many ways the growth of the United Sates, but with significant differences.

An original settler at the Cape is Willem van Doorn. Born in Java to a prominent Dutch family, he is a member of the first of ten generations of Van Doorns who dominate this novel and an early contributor to the racial mixture that will later be despised and repressed as the Coloureds. He is a pioneer in the east-ward movement which spreads his family and their countrymen across the southern tip of the continent to the Indian Ocean, confident in the belief that God has elected them to take this land by any means and hold it against any opposition. 

For a century and a half there is little to deter them: the San and the Khoikhoi ("Hottentots") are destroyed or pushed aside, and other European immigrants quickly assimilated. But the end of the 18t century brings more formidable obstacles: the Boers expansion to the east is encroaching on the territories of potent black tribes like the Xhosa and the Zulu: and in 1795 the English occupy the Cape, soon thereafter ceded permanently to Great Britain by Holland.

In the early 19th century English settlers arrive in increasing numbers, including the Saltwoods of Salisbury, who now share the stage. It is a century of violent conflict: white against black: black against black. Dutch against English, the death and destruction on all sides are hideous. The growing hostility to English rule finally erupts in the devastating Boer War (1899 - 1902).

The military victory of the British is converted by the Boers into a political triumph. As the 20th century approaches its end, they have become a rich, powerful, independent nation, heedless of their European origins Afrikaners, with their own language. They have passed elaborate laws for completely controlling the vast majority population of blacks, Coloureds and Asians through the system called apartheid, which with difficulty is being opposed. Mr. Michener fully explores and clarifies apartheid by showing, through characters and action, how and why it came about and how it functions. How long will it survive remains a hotly debated question.

The Covenant is a major novel about people, real and imaginary, caught up in the march of world history - a story of adventure and heroism, love and loyalty, cruelty and betrayal. Though not without comic elements, it portrays the tragic results of wrong decisions made by fundamentally decent people in the serene belief that they are right.