THE WHITE AFRICANS, FROM COLONISATION TO LIBERATION

Out of the collapse of European supremacy in Africa has emerged a modern phenomenon - the white African. For generations, through colonialism and settlement and through apartheid in South Africa, the whites sought to preserve their ancestral links with Europe, to maintain an identity separate from the indigenous majority and to dominate them. The fall of colonialism and apartheid has, however, left some five million whites finally severed from their European roots and facing a new identity as Africans. At the same time they face an uncertain future as an ethnic minority, having surrendered the power they once held to the people they or their forebears dominated and often exploited.

The negotiated transfer of power in apartheid South Africa was the last act in the dismantling of white supremacy in the continent. While opening a new era for the whites in Africa, it closed an earlier one that contains some of the most dramatic and colorful episodes in world history. In telling the story of that era and of the making of the white Africans, the full saga of the Europeans in Africa is recounted here for the first time in a single book, necessarily in brief but in vivid description and with fresh analysis.

The story is traced through the Europeans’ exploration and settlement, through their slavery and economic exploitation, their conquest and colonization, through decolonization and the liberation struggles in Kenya, Algeria, the Portuguese territories, Rhodesia and Namibia to the negotiation of democracy in South Africa. Eschewing both past falsities and recent distortions, the book seeks the truth of the European experience, whether benign or malign. Always it pursues the reasons for actions and events. It examines the present situation of the white Africans and, finally, looks at what might lie ahead for them.

Gerald L’Ange is a South African journalist and writer – and a white African himself. A journalist all his working life, L’Ange has functioned in that capacity in South Africa, Kenya (during the Mau Mau insurgency), Britain, Canada and the United States. As an accredited journalist at the United Nations in New York for seven years from 1968, he was able to observe at first hand the growing opposition in the UN to white supremacy in Africa. He was a foreign correspondent in Washington during the surge in anti-apartheid activity in America in the eighties which led to tough measures against apartheid by both the White House and Congress. In some 15 years with the special Africa service of his country’s major newspaper group, L’Ange covered events in a number of African countries. As the service’s editor, he directed coverage of the insurgent warfare in Rhodesia and Namibia, of the South African military interventions in Angola, of the South African campaign of destabilization in the sub-continent and of the African National Congress’s activities from its bases in neighboring countries. He lives in Hout Bay with his wife, Barbara.