The Lion and the Springbok

The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War. By Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv, 379. $60.00. Ronald Hyam is emeritus reader in imperial history, University of Cambridge. Peter Henshaw studied under Hyam at Cambridge and is now a research professor in history at the University of Western Ontario. They have both been actively involved in the massive Documents at the End of Empire Project and have published widely on imperial and South African history. Much of the information presented here is not new, as many chapters were previously published in professional journals or books. Hyam and Henshaw have selected from their various writings, however, to provide a connected narrative and analysis of relations between Britain and South Africa from 1895 to 1961. Hyam and Henshaw's approach is limited in two ways not reflected in their title. First, the authors' data comes principally from government archives and therefore mainly presents the view of British-South African relations. This is a study of imperial and Commonwealth history as much as of South African history. Second, by ending in 1961, when South Africa left the Commonwealth and became a republic, their study seems incomplete. In Chapter 12, the authors attempt to provide some South African perspective by using South African newspaper articles to show how South Africans viewed Britain from 1948 to 1961. They devote the last chapter to British reactions to apartheid, 1948-1994, which is again based primarily on newspaper articles. They end with a short Epilogue that looks at events surrounding the collapse of apartheid and South Africa's return to the Commonwealth. Both the last two chapters and the Epilogue are interesting but none are of the same quality or depth as the rest of the book. Since the first permanently occupied the Cape in the early 1800s relations between the two major white populations, and Afrikaners, have been tenuous at best and deadly at their worse, as during the South African War. Indeed, during the first half of the twentieth century, when white South Africans spoke of race relations, they were referring to relations between and Afrikaners, rather than the more obvious black and white relations. And yet, white fear of the swart gevaar (black peril) of black rule and the loss of white economic privilege in South Africa united both peoples and also significantly influenced relations between South Africa and Great Britain. Hyam and Henshaw begin their work with a historiographical essay, however, that challenges the view that economic interests alone shaped imperial policy toward South Africa, as has been the position of revisionist historians, particularly Marxists, since the 1960s

Ancient history · Archaeology · Ethnology · Geography · Political science · African history and culture studies · Commonwealth, Australian Politics and Federalism · History · South African History and Culture

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