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2000 was a rough year for publishing a history of South Africa, even one as superbly written and brilliantly researched as Leonard Thompson’s far too blandly titled A History of South Africa.
So much hung still in the balance, a precarious circumstance so potent that it reduced Thompson to this final, modest sentence: ‘Nothing is preordained in human history. In 2000 it was still conceivable that the dreams of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and millions of other South Africans would eventually, in some fashion, triumph.’
Indeed.
Six years later, this reviewer has had opportunity to observe the astonishing steps the South African people have taken towards establishing a multiracial civil society. Although immense challenges remain, Mandela, Mbeki, and even a more sympathetically reviewed de Klerk can rightly be seen as the protagonists—though hardly of equal stature—in one of modern history’s great human dramas.
Leonard Thompson has proven himself equal to the task of chronicling all of South Africa’s known historical periods with a lucidity that has well served its subject matter. Rarely does history go down so easily and hungrily as do Thompson’s 358 lovingly written pages.
The six years since its publication have been so full that one longs for another volume from Thompson’s angle, hopefully more confident that that victory that remains so undetermined in human history can—from time to time and in the most longsuffering places—be achieved.
Thompson celebrating the South African people’s realization of the secularly sainted elder Mandela’s vision, say, ten years from 2006.
Now there’s a sequel worth pre-ordering.
In the meantime, it would be difficult to find a single volume so blessed of an historian’s virtues as the one Thompson has given us.
Canter Bridge 
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