Volume 29, Number 4 · March 18, 1982
Settlers and 'Savages' on Two Frontiers
By George M. Fredrickson
The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared
edited by Howard Lamar, edited by Leonard Thompson
Yale University Press, 360 pp., $37.50; $7.95 (paper)
The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820
edited by Richard Elphick, edited by Hermann Giliomee
Longman, 415 pp., $30.00; $12.95(paper)
Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa
edited by Shula Marks, edited by Anthony Atmore
Longman, 385 pp., $23.00; $9.95 (paper)
The frontier experience still looms large in popular descriptions and explanations of the 'American character.' Pioneers hewing new communities out of the wilderness are revered as the archetypal American democrats and individualists, a notion that received historical respectability in the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner and his disciples. Other nations have also had frontiers and frontier interpretations of their history, and one of the most conspicuous is the Republic of South Africa. Afrikaner nationalism—the ideology of the dominant segment of the ruling white minority—draws strength and determination from a romanticized image of the Great Trek, a mass migration of Dutch-speaking stock farmers into the interior of South Africa during the 1830s and 1840s.
Review, 3893 words
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