Promise and despair

Few terms reverberate so powerfully through historical scholarship, contemporary politics and popular consciousness alike as that of ‘the struggle’ in South Africa. Both in its academic or everyday invocation, however, it is typically taken to reference a quite specific anti-apartheid repertoire of events, figures and processes – 21 March 1960 and 16 June 1976; Biko, Mandela, Sobukwe and Hani; anti-pass campaigns, exile and insurgency. As the research under review here shows, there was – and continues to be – a much longer and broader process of struggle beyond the parameters of formal apartheid. Martin Plaut's aptly titled Promise and Despair situates the roots of South Africa's struggle in the opening decade of the twentieth century. Just a few years after the conclusion of the devastating South African War, local white politicians and the imperial government alike were pushing for the former Boer republics to unite with the colonies of Natal and the Cape as a self-governing British dominion. Ruling Afrikaner politicians put forward a constitution which would establish the new Union as a ‘white man's country’. At the same time, a remarkable cast of white, coloured and African political leaders campaigned for the extension of the Cape colony's qualified non-racial franchise in order to empower educated and property-owning men throughout the new Union with the vote. Plaut's book focuses on these contentions around the future national franchise. At its core, it tracks the valiant efforts of a multiracial deputation of South African politicians who travelled to London in 1909 to lobby the British parliament to reject the proposed race-based constitution. This vivid and highly readable account places the making of South Africa and the first struggle for black enfranchisement firmly within its broader historical context of European racism and imperial realpolitik.

Cape · Colonialism · Constitution · Dominion · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · History · Law · Legal Issues in South Africa · South African History and Culture