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From Colonization to Democracy: A New Historical Geography of South Africa by Alan LesterReview by: Alan MabinThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2/3 (1999), pp. 507-509Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/220402 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 507

FROM COLONIZATION TO DEMOCRACY: A NEW HISTORICAL GEO- GRAPHY OF SOUTH AFRICA. By Alan Lester. London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1996. Pp. viii, 278, 5 maps, index. $59.50.

The ambitious purpose of this book is to provide an explanation for the evolution of contemporary South African society and its spatial configuration (p. 1). The preface by David Smith welcomes the book as useful to those in a number of disciplines seeking background (p. viii). But the book is also a narrative of South Africa's social group formation (p. 14). The central theme of this book, then, is identity-its construction and its consequences.

The vehicle for this theme is a sweepingly general historical account, divided into eight chapters with traditional periodization. The book is based on a reasonable range of secondary sources but little primary research. Indeed, the book is essen- tially a rereading of South Africa's past in terms of postcolonial categories of identity-an approach fashionable in British geography, since a decade-old cultural tum in the discipline. Application of some of these ideas certainly produces a new account of things, for example using Coetzee's and Wade's analyses of South African literary works' to elaborate on the shaping of identities in space. But it does not provide a new understanding of South African society, or for that matter geography. The derivative approach produces an occasionally annoying style, too often reading like a literature review that buries the intellectual argument.

The underlying argument of the book seems to be that the need for whites to possess white space exclusively, and the implicit threat of culturally shared space, lay at the core of segregation and apartheid (p. 245). This position is really the same as A.J. Christopher's argument that South African cities are essentially variants on a more general (British) colonial theme.2 In its postcolonial variant, it runs into dif- ficulties as soon as the question of demonstration occurs-for example, faced with the many shared spaces of South African geography. But it is a powerful idea, and deserving of more attention-indeed, of much more attention than it gets in this book. Even the concept of "white space" is never properly developed here.

There is tension in the book between the grand narrative (the portrayal of apartheid South Africa as "the culmination of a central geographical and psycho- logical project,"9 p. 14) and the view that "there was no centralizing, overarching attempt to order South Africa's spatial flux" (p. 71, at least until the twentieth cen- tury). Thus is one of the dilemmas of South African social research revealed: the country shows such an impress of attempts at controlled geography, yet on closer investigation always reveals a maddening complexity that subverts the very concept of overarching plans. Thus the debate on Deborah Posel's thesis3 that apartheid was

1 J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven, 1988); and M. Wade, White on Black in South Africa: A Study of English Language Inscriptions of Skin Colour (Basingstoke, 1993).

2 A.J. Christopher, "From Flint to Soweto: Reflections on the Colonial Origins of the Apartheid City," Area 15, 2 (1983).

3 Revised and published as Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid 1948-1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford, 1991).

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508 BOOK REVIEWS

not a "grand plan": it was, and it wasn't. Lester gives many hints in similar direc- tions, but does not exploit the opportunity he creates to develop this ever-present tension. Instead, the book competently but perhaps wastefully devotes most of its space to telling the whole story-not to the vignettes and cases that might have helped to achieve greater depth for its identity theme.

What does the subtitle-that this is "a new historical geography"-imply? It is difficult for any scholars coming to South African society to avoid an indulgence in history. It may be debated whether this is due to a peculiar necessity of deeper his- torical explanation than most societies demand, or merely to the recent dominance of history among the social disciplines as applied to South Africa. It is new, pri- mary historical research and innovative historical methods that have given rise to the latter. Unfortunately both are absent here. It may be true that a disciplinary interface "allows a unique blend of insights," as David Smith puts it in his preface (p. vii). One has to ask whether a focus on the intersections between the disciplines of his- tory, economics, political science, anthropology, sociology and geography takes us any further towards understanding South African society. Chapter 8, for example, begins with the sentence "This chapter narrates the developments in South African politics since De Klerk's assumption of the presidency" (p. 226). Surely this is not the task of historical geography. One has to lament that another opportunity has been missed to demonstrate what if anything would make a peculiarly geographical contribution to understanding South Africa.

What could "a new historical geography" offer? Hopefully something different from the summary history this book provides; something less simplistic and outdated (p. 47) than synoptic constructions of the "space economy" at intervals from 1870 to 1960. What is frustrating is that Lester occasionally shows an ability to move beyond the many simplicities of past South African historical geography. For example, in the face of the oft-repeated models of (especially apartheid period) urban South Africa, he notes how

no general model of South African city development ... can accommodate the specific influences which contributed to the moulding of each city's form ...; like a palimpsest, the influences were layered one upon another over time, and while some of those influences may have been more univer- sal, others were local and contingent (p. 55).

And later: even with the unusual degree of standardisation that it [the Group Areas Act] brought, the term "the apartheid city" still lacks utility beyond that of descriptive simplification (p. 116).

These phrases cry out for intellectual amplification, new research, connection to the identity theme. But Lester regrettably does not provide such development.

Scholars of various schools generally understand the historical geography of South Africa primarily in terms of racially defined landscapes. Rooted in an aver- sion to the institutionalized racism of apartheid, their explanations for the develop- ment of these landscapes reveal an underlying view that South African geography is distorted from the norms of other parts of the world. Yet exploration of such sub- jects as the geography of railway building or of public housing shows how inver-

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BOOK REVIEWS 509

sions of the usual explanations bring the South African experience disturbingly close to the paths of other countries.4

Against such prospects, Lester offers that the systems that characterize "South Africa's human geography as a whole" are migrant labor, influx control, and spatial segregation (p. 71). None of these receives any really original analysis. Instead we are presented with a panoply of ideas about identity and segregation-the most interesting drawn from literary critics, but mostly operating at the level of assertion (Wade: "whites inhabit a psychotic perceptual world") rather than as the product of socially-rooted observation. Difference is mostly taken as present, not needing explanation; and some of the more widely studied areas of difference (of gender, for example) do not receive any exploration. Ultimately it is white (especially Afri- kaner) identities that fascinate Lester, who fails to explore critical questions of the formation of other identities.

The contribution of this book is its continual (if sometimes submerged) insis- tence on the need to understand identity formation. It should invite attention through further studies to critical issues in the formation of identity in South Africa, such as language and residential location. The consequences of apartheid residential patterns for identity formation are now surely central to thinking about where the struggle for democracy goes after 1991 or 1994; the centrality of language to the construc- tion of difference has received so little attention. If identity is the key to understanding South Africa, what prescription flows? For Lester, in the closing pages, it is "a need for most South Africans ... to extend the boundaries of their identity so as to incorporate former others on their own terms"-perhaps a development of what the popular image of the rainbow nation' seeks to accomplish. But other outcomes surely need consideration too. After all, the rainbow is an ephemeral image.5

ALAN MABIN

University of Witwatersrand

THE CROWN AND THE TURBAN: MUSLIMS AND WEST AFRICAN PLURALISM. By Lamin Sanneh. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. Pp. vii, 290; 1 illustration. $69.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

The Crown and the Turban takes a fresh look at the intertwining of Islam and pre- Islamic traditions and outlooks in West Africa. Written by a scholar of religion who was raised as a Muslim in Gambia, the perspective of this book is deeper and far more insightful in regard to the importance and resilience of traditional African soci-

4 For example, S.M. Parnell and A. Mabin, "Rethinking Urban South Africa,"Journal of Southern African Studies 21, 1 (1995), 19-38.

5 Cynthia Kros and Shelley Greybe, "The Rainbow Nation vs. Healing Old Wounds," Report No. 2, History Curriculum Research Project, Cambridge University Press and History Workshop, University of Witwatersrand.

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