The demise of apartheid was one of the great achievements of postwar history, sought after and celebrated by a progressive global community. Looking at these events from the other side, An African Volk explores how the apartheid state strove to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a post-colonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy. Drawing upon archival research across Southern Africa and beyond, as well as interviews with leaders of the apartheid order, Jamie Miller shows how the white power structure attempted to turn the new political climate to its advantage. Instead of simply resisting decolonization and African nationalism in the name of white supremacy, the regime looked to co-opt and invert the norms of the new global era to promote a fresh ideological basis for its rule. It adapted discourses of nativist identity, African anti-colonialism, economic development, anti-communism, and state sovereignty to rearticulate what it meant to be African. An African Volk details both the global and local repercussions. At the dawn of the 1970s, the apartheid state reached out eagerly to independent Africa in an effort to reject the mantle of colonialism and redefine the white polity as a full part of the post-colonial world. This outreach both reflected and fuelled heated debates within white society, exposing a deeply divided polity in the midst of profound economic, cultural, and social change. Situated at the nexus of African, decolonization, and Cold War history, An African Volk takes readers into the corridors of white power to detail the apartheid regime's campaign to break out of isolation and secure global acceptance.

This work is a study of civil-military relations in the Republic of South Africa while Pieter Willem Botha was prime minister (1978-89). The author's controversial thesis is that Prime Minister Botha, recognizing that his country had reached the historical juncture when it needed to establish a new political order encompassing all of its diverse peoples, moved effectively to prepare the ground for fundamental constitutional change. What was needed above all were stabilization measures to assure the support of the white population for reform. Botha used the South African defence force as his primary instrument. By 1989, Professor Roherty maintains, a striking degree of stabilization had been achieved within the country and throughout South Africa, and the groundwork for epochal change had been prepared. The author makes use of exclusive interviews with South Africans from the political, military, intelligence, corporate, and academic worlds.

A century ago, one of the five most recognizable names in the world was arguably that of Paul Kr ger, president of the Transvaal Republic-a small Southern African country inhabited by a white tribe-who took on the overwhelming superiority of the mighty British Empire in defense of his people's sovereign independence. It was a David and Goliath story. As most of the world-including the US-cheered the Boers on, they fought a desperate war to the bitter end (1899-1902) against colonialism, until their country lay smoldering in ruins and an estimated 27, 929 Boer women and children, as well as an untold number of blacks, had died in British concentration camps. Yet within little more than half a century, those same Afrikaners had squandered their political capital and gone from being the world's favorite underdog to one of the most reviled names in history. Their subsequent social engineering project known as apartheid became an abhorrent concept in the eyes of the international community. Bernard Botes Kr ger is a fifth-generation descendant of the wartime president, Paul Kr ger. He is an Afrikaner who lived most of his life in the turmoil and conflict that has dominated his country's history. His new historical novel, A Battlement of Spears, tells the remarkable story of how not only the Afrikaners, but also the many other former sovereign nations within the redrawn borders of the postwar South Africa struggled to come to terms with a common identity, often with devastating consequences. "What cruel twist of tectonic irony caused the deepest scar on the earth's surface across the face of that continent that would also suffer the most appalling of human tragedies?" the author asks. Set against the backdrop of the timeless mountain called in Zulu uKhahlamba (Barrier of Spears), a dramatic geographic boundary that divided nations throughout history, A Battlement of Spears is an epic story spanning twenty-four years and two continents, of two young men with similar interests but vastly different cultural backgrounds who become unlikely friends. In a tragic series of events they will discover what sacrifices are exacted from those who would dwell in the symbolic no man's land of the summit, where fog often obscures the vision and deprivation dulls the senses, until it becomes all too easy to drift into hostile territory or stumble into the jaws of the precipice. In the process they will become separated, spending a lifetime before finding each other again a world away, on a different continent. But in the course of their respective journeys, they will also learn that barriers are not always what they seem, and that choices are sometimes inevitable, with far-reaching consequences. In that hauntingly beautiful land it is never merely about survival, but about the things that make it truly worthwhile, such as loyalty, friendship and honor, regardless of the price. Do not go into this story expecting to encounter the usual themes of race. To consider South Africa synonymous with racial hatred would be an oversimplification. This story is not about race. In fact, despite the elaborately drawn details highlighting many of the customs of traditional cultures-Portuguese, Zulus, KhoiSan, Afrikaners, rural and urban, conservative and revolutionary-the story is not even uniquely South African. It is not about apartheid, or about Blacks, or Whites. Rather, it is about the countless 'gray' people of many different cultures, ordinary individuals simply looking to survive, who become trapped in the consummation of historical inevitabilities that are neither of their doing, nor of their choosing. Written in a style that endeavors to entertain while enlightening the uninformed about South A