EVERY STEP OF THE WAY: The Journey to Freedom in South Africa
by Michael Morris
(Human Sciences Research Council for the Ministry of Education)
As a kid brought up under apartheid education, I must confess that I treat all ‘official’ histories with deep suspicion. My instinctive response is to ask: ‘Whose history are you telling? And who are you excluding?’ Given the way in which history has been ‘downgraded’ from school curricula in recent years, I tend to be even more wary of a book that seeks to give a ‘comprehensive’ account of South Africa, not least because there have been a number of truly brilliant single volume histories published over the years. Suspicions aside, let me now reassure the author, his editors, publishers and the Ministry: I like what I see.
Michael Morris has produced an excellent synthesis of South African history, one that takes note of new developments in scholarship and new approaches to the subject. We are not confronted with dry as dust lists of dates, places, battles, dead white men and even deader black men (with no reference to women and children until the horrors of the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War). What we read rather is an account of the growth and development of communities, conflict and by the end the hope of many becoming one. Idealistic vision, certainly! Yet the author has no illusions about the complexities of how this ‘grand narrative’ came into being, and how many (often unresolved and possibly irresolvable) tensions remain.
Visually, the book is well set out – well illustrated, yet also with frequent little ‘sidebar’ sections that provide a particular perspective on a famous event. Thus one has a story of a black indentured servant of a farmer who went on the Great Trek; elsewhere there is a story of semi-forgotten activist or a missionary, whose life epitomized the tensions between liberal politics and remaining rooted in European culture.
For the most part Morris is remarkably fair – no easy task whether you write history from the left or the right. He tries first of all to understand his subject and then conveys this understanding to the reader. This desire for balance is helpful, but at the cost of that delicious frisson one gets when you read a real historical controversialist.
All in all, then, this is a very respectable book, certainly centuries apart from the crude propaganda we read in our day. Morris is to be congratulated for a book that is fair and well-written: it is never dull and often is quite a page-turner. Praise too to the team of historical advisors and especially to the Ministry of Education for avoiding the temptation to use history as an exercise in scoring points off the ancien regime.