And it nails both the lies in current circulation. Otherwise, the book seemed pretty accurate and informative to me. And in 1967 it was the pound, not the Rand, that dropped in value.
But the Rand was only introduced in February 1961, and until 1966 its value was fixed at R2.00 to the British pound. Lapping described one of the effects of the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 as a drop in the value of the South African currency, the Rand. I found only one significant anachronism in the book. To suggest that “the British” introduced this is absurd, and Brian Lapping pretty clearly explains why. In that period they sometimes tinkered with the means, but never altered the final goal until in 1990 most of the NP leaders realised that the game was up. Those three aims of the National Party remained constant from 1948 to 1990, when they gave up. To ensure National Party supremacy over the white Afrikaners.To ensure white Afrikaner supremacy over other whites.To ensure white supremacy ( baaskap) over nonwhites (blacks, coloureds, Asians).What were the aims of the apartheid policy and the apartheid laws? There is a lot more that could be said, but as a layman’s introduction it really is pretty good. It’s short, and tells the bare bones of the story. These canards have been repeated so often that they seem to be gaining the status of factoids - things that resemble facts, but are not. That the Dutch landed at the Cape in 1652 before there were any black people living in what later became South Africa.That it was “the British”, and not Dr Malan’s National Party, that had introduced apartheid.The main reason was that I wanted to refresh my memory on the topic, because of two old lies that have resurfaced and seem to be increasingly circulated on social media nowadays. So why read a popular, non-scholarly book about it?
I lived through apartheid, from beginning to end.
Why should I read a book by a foreign journalist on the history of apartheid?
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