The negotiated transfer of power in apartheid South Africa was the
last act in the dismantling of white supremacy on the African
continent. While opening a new era for the whites in Africa, it
closed an earlier one that contains some of the most colourful
episodes in world history. In The White Africans, South African
journalist and writer Gerald L'Ange gives a warts-and-all account of
the European experience in Africa, from the explorations of the
15th-century Portuguese mariners to the presidential inauguration of
Nelson Mandela in 1994. The story is traced through the Europeans'
exploration and settlement, through their slavery and economic
exploitation, their conquest and colonisation, through
decolonisation and the liberation struggles in Kenya, Algeria, the
Portuguese territories, Rhodesia and Namibia to the negotiation of
democracy in South Africa. Avoiding both past falsities and recent
distortions, the book seeks the truth of the European experience,
examines the present situation of the white Africans and looks at
what might lie ahead for them.
