Volume 32, Number 14 · September 26, 1985
Mythology
By Desmond Tutu
The Political Mythology of Apartheid
by Leonard Thompson
Yale University Press, 293 pp., $22.50
I remember as if it were yesterday our reactions as black primary school children when we read what the Reverend Mr. Whitehead had to say when describing the relations between the Xhosas on the eastern border and the white frontiersmen. Mr. Whitehead was, I believe, a Methodist missionary who wrote a history textbook which we were obliged to use if we wanted to pass our history examinations. I must underline that my contemporaries and I were not the radicalized and highly politicized students of the sort who were involved in the 1976 uprising and in the current violent protest against the vicious and immoral policy of apartheid. We were rather docile and thoroughly unsophisticated and naive, hardly questioning what appeared to be the divine ordering of our segregated society. It is therefore particularly noteworthy that it was such innocents who found certain features of Mr. Whitehead's historiography disturbing.
Review, 2379 words
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