The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power. By Hermann Giliomee (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2013; orig. pub. Cape Town, Tafelberg, 2012) 447 pp. $28.17

Abstract

Apartheid originated as populist Afrikaner endeavor to regain hegemony for poorer and less favored whites in a South Africa dominated by wealthier English speakers and their moderate Afrikaans-speaking allies. In time, leaders such as Premier Hendrik F. Verwoerd created a rationalized ideology in an attempt to justify legislated segregation, the denial of human rights, the end of free speech, extreme separation of the “races,” and much more. President John B. Vorster and ruthless securocrats, such as General Hendrik van den Bergh, fashioned a security apparatus to maintain apartheid through repression. President Pieter W. Botha, later, tried to buttress the hegemony conveyed to Afrikaners and other whites through apartheid while simultaneously recognizing and coping with the realities of South Africa’s status as an international pariah, its fundamental economic decay, and its need to find a satisfactory way forward.Giliomee is a trusted guide through these convoluted waters, drawing effectively on his earlier acclaimed The Afrikaners: A Biography of a People (Cape Town, 2009; orig. pub. 2003). But he is even better in his analysis of apartheid’s end game. In the best manner of contemporary history, he shows why and how President Frederik W. De Klerk, Botha’s almost happenstance conservative successor, was able—much like Richard Nixon in his dealings with China—to accomplish the unthinkable. De Klerk, ahead of others, understood that since Nelson Mandela was not so much South Africa’s prisoner as South Africa was his, he had to release Mandela from his long imprisonment. De Klerk also knew that Mandela and the African National Congress (anc) were the rightful majority inheritors of power in a South Africa that could no longer play Canute against the powerful tides of time and humanity.Giliomee’s strong narrative and his intimate knowledge of how his fellow Afrikaners operated and what they believed, sought, and feared in the 1980s and 1990s is authoritative. He has no intent to be methodologically innovative or draw on cognate disciplines, but his solid research utilizes the written record in two languages and employs revealing interviews with many of the major figures of the era.Giliomee’s focus on the role of Afrikaner leaders in making and breaking apartheid is appropriate, if employed much more as an organizing than a theoretical rubric. In addition to the prime ministers and presidents that orchestrated apartheid, he also sketches in some detail the bright political rise of Frederik van zyl Slabbert from academic sociologist to leader of the Progressive Federal Party, South Africa’s liberal opposition. He credits Slabbert, crucially an Afrikaner with the character traits and athletic prowess beloved by Afrikaners, with undermining the very moral and theological credibility of apartheid that Verwoerd had labored to create and Vorster and Botha diligently to maintain. Giliomee also attempts to explain how Slabbert came to believe in the good intentions of the anc after visits to their bases elsewhere in Africa—how he was gulled and mesmerized by the bonhomie and artful promises of future president Thabo Mbeki and others. Giliomee portrays Slabbert as a tragic Icarus.Those JIH readers who know South Africa will find all kinds of interesting new nuggets of political information, and some speculation, in The Last Afrikaner Leaders. They will also discover that Giliomee is an unusually fluent guide to how Afrikaners, a people of whom he is proud, were misled by a set of domineering leaders, how the infernal edifice of apartheid proved a cruel and paralyzing detour in the maturation of South Africa, and how Slabbert—a potential savior of Afrikanerdom and South Africa—was himself out-maneuvered by Mbeki and the anc—to South Africa’s great loss.