Book Review

In 1991 Nelson Mandela visited Brazil and hailed its racial democracy as a model for postapartheid South Africa, much to the astonishment of sharp observers of South America's rainbow nation. The future South African president suddenly found himself in the silly position of the British prime minister John Major, who in 1990 had declared that his country was about to become a classless society. You end by feeling sorry for such sweet innocence. These men obviously had scant idea of what was going on in the world. Britain's problem for centuries has been class. That problem can be solved only by the end of capitalism. The problem that has long bedeviled Brazil, South Africa, and the United States is race. That can be solved only by universal racial inclusion and integration between black and white. It may be true that there is no historical problem beyond solution, but some difficulties remain tricky.	1
As these books illustrate, racism and its inscription in state authority and power has had a long innings, but there is no visible prospect of the game being abandoned. Timothy Keegan's dense and analytically rigorous survey illuminates a crucial transition in the history of preindustrial colonial South Africa. That transition was the death rattle of an eighteenth-century order based on slaveholding and bondage and the birth and maturation of a society built upon a more systemic and coded settler racism. By the mid-to-later nineteenth century, the usages of race had so profoundly imbued settler practices and state regulation that it was difficult for colonial society to view affairs in any other meaningful way. It is true that things were not absolute. Some lukewarm liberals favored drawing a small-propertied, westernized African elite into an accommodationist politics of economic and political rights. But the very point of this, Keegan argues, was to provide a cushion against the resentments of a dispossessed black majority and the political antagonisms of sour African chiefs, whose authority could not be disposed of as readily as white administrators might have wished. As an exercise in British Cape colonial social control, even this mildly assimilative form of domination was built on sand. The mineral-based industrial revolution of the later nineteenth century unleashed fierce imperial pressures for further expansionism and conquest. The realities of this accelerating capitalist modernization and its accompanying Darwinian racism extinguished such petty entitlements as were enjoyed by "respectable" blacks and fatally undermined surviving pockets of African peasant production. Henceforward, African societies were to turn to the rhythms of migrant wage labor and not to that of independent or sharecropper market production. If there was fertile soil, it was for the growth of more thoroughgoing and coercive policies of twentieth-century segregation.	2
Some of these themes have been aired before but rarely in so rich and convincing a materialist explanation. Nor have we had so compelling an account of the irony of the preindustrial transition from a Dutch to a British colonial order. This was the brisk manner in which a reformist British interest moved seamlessly from unshackling servile Khoisan labor and freeing slaves to lubricating a settler capitalism through such things as conquest of the Xhosa people and the legal subordination of "free" colored labor whose actual rights were virtually nil. Early-nineteenth-century humanitarian liberal racial emancipation and the annexing of the freed to capitalist imperatives were merely two sides of the same coin. In this acute portrayal, the web of white supremacy was not spun on the isolated frontier of Afrikaner republicanism as "frontier racism." Nor was state racial regulation merely a purposeful stratagem to service the needs of the industrial revolution. For Keegan, those forces aided and abetted developments. The real genesis of the modern white supremacist South African state lay in the conquering power of British imperialism, through which the region was integrated into the European world economy. Keegan's vivid interpretation of nineteenth-century colonial South Africa will be of great comparative interest to historians of America, particularly those with an eye on the frontier "tradition" and the making of a racial order.	. . .