[532] Annual Cyclopedia, 1867, pp. 19, 20.
Reviews of Books
History of South Africa from 1795 to 1872. By George McCall Theal, Litt.D., LL.D. George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., London.
This work is intended to be a general history of South Africa in detail. It is to be completed as a revised edition in five volumes, three of which have already appeared. Each volume contains about 500 pages, is neatly printed and substantially bound. The work is well supplied with maps and charts reflecting the growth and development of the country.
The author of this history has lived in South Africa and has served as keeper of the archives of the Cape Colony. The preparation of this history has occupied his almost undivided attention during the last fifty years. He says that he has made the closest possible research among official documents of all kinds. Apparently he has had little use for secondary material, but his large collection of books on South Africa has served him as a guide. The author asserts that to the utmost of human ability he has striven to write without fear, favor or prejudice, to do equal justice to all with whom he had to deal. For this reason, he offers his work to the public as "not alone the only detailed history of South Africa yet prepared, but as a true and absolutely unbiased narrative." The work shows, however, that it is written in the attitude of arrogating to himself the privileges of the superior group, exhibiting occasionally a bit of sympathy for the inferior, who had to be exterminated to make room for those chosen of God.
The first volume of the work deals largely with the conquest of the colony. It is mainly a narrative of the deeds of the conquering leaders of the colonists, closing with an account of the destruction of the Bantu tribes. In succession, we read here about the exploits of James Henry Craig, Earl McCartney, Major General Dundas, Sir George Younge, Jacob Abraham De Mist, J.W. Janssens, General David Baird, Du Pré Alexander, Lord Charles Somerset, Sir Rufane Shaw, and General Richard Bourke.
The second volume adheres in the beginning to the same sort of style, making the history of the whole colony center largely around the life of a single man, mentioning such characters as Sir Lowry Cole, Sir Benjamin D'Urban, Sir George Napier, and Sir Peregrine Maitland. In the 32d chapter, however, the work becomes more nearly historical in taking up the emigration from Cape Colony, and the abandonment of that country by many thousands of substantial burghers, who were intent upon seeking homes in the wilderness. This movement is further illuminated by a treatment of the emigrant farmers in Natal, the republic of Natal, its overthrow, its transitory state, and movements north of the Orange.
The third volume maintains the standard of the last part of the second in dealing with the Kaffir Wars, and sketching the conditions leading up to the grant of a liberal constitution. It returns to the District of Natal from 1845 to 1857, discusses the creation of the Orange River Sovereignty, the abandonment of the Sovereignty, and the events north of the Vaal, in the South African Republic and Orange Free State from 1854 to 1857. In these last chapters the author brings out more prominently than elsewhere the conflict between the whites and the blacks, the correlated problems arising therefrom, and measures brought forward to solve them. The reader easily learns that the handling of the question in South Africa has not been very different from the method of attack in the United States. The South African method has, in some respects, been more cruel than that of the United States.