From colony to democracy

• Published date: 16 October 2021
• Publication title: Saturday Star

Drawing on never-before-published documentary evidence – including diaries, letters, witness testimony and diplomatic reports – the book follows the South African people through the battles, elections, repression, resistance, strikes, insurrections, massacres, economic crashes and health crises that have shaped the nation’s character.

Tracking South Africa’s path from colony to union and from apartheid to democracy, History of South Africa documents the influence of key figures, including Pixley Seme, Jan Smuts, Lilian Ngoyi, HF Verwoerd, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, PW Botha, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa.

The book gives detailed accounts of definitive events such as the 1922 Rand Revolt, the Defiance Campaign, Sharpeville, the Soweto uprising and the Marikana massacre. Looking beyond the country’s borders, it sheds light on the role of people such as Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro and Margaret Thatcher, and unpacks military conflicts such as the World Wars, the armed Struggle and the Border War.

The book explores the transition to democracy and traces the phases of ANC rule, from the Rainbow Nation to transformation, state capture to ‘New Dawn’. It examines the divisive and unifying role of sport, the ups and downs of the economy, and the impact of pandemics, from the Spanish flu to Aids and Covid-19.

With South Africa facing a crisis as severe as any in its history, the book shows that the challenges are neither unprecedented nor insurmountable, and that there are principles to be found in history that may lead us safely into the future.

Extract

BY THE late 1990s, an estimated 200 babies were being born with HIV every day. Cost had remained a barrier to treatment throughout. On October 9, 1998, Nkosazana Zuma said at the launch of an R80-million state-funded Aids awareness campaign that the government could not provide AZT to pregnant women, because ‘it is not cost-effective’. As a result, pilot projects scheduled to begin that month were indefinitely postponed.

A turning point in the national debate came on October 28, 1999, when President Mbeki claimed in the National Council of Provinces that AZT was highly toxic, and that a number of legal cases were pending in South Africa, the UK and the US against Wellcome (which had been taken over by Glaxo in 1995). He referred the public to ‘the huge volume of literature on this matter available on the Internet’.

Two days later, Glaxo Wellcome’s sub-Saharan Africa head, Peter...