Dominique Lapierre (Full Circle 2010)
Dominique Lapierre’s soul stirring narrative charts the epic saga of South Africa from 1652, first as a tiny fresh food supply depo for ships of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Town with its dormant Calvinist seed, through the gradual emergence of ugly apartheid right up to its tumultuous end with the Presidency of Nelson Mandela.
What appears as the usual script of colonialism in the beginning, with sympathy for the hardship and suffering undergone by the white Dutch settlers, soon takes a definite turn for racial segregation and the growth of cruel oppression as the settlers begin to convert their own survival into strategies for oppressing of the African tribes, exploiting their internecine warfare, depriving them of education, denying them even basic wages for work much less the choice of profession, and stealing their native land by forcibly confining them to urban ghettos covering less than 35% of their country’s land and imposing Christianity as well as Afrikaans on them to wipe out their very identity and integral culture. It is therefore not surprising that the original peaceful resistance to white oppression by the African National Congress (formed in 1912 by Pixley Seme), inspired by Gandhi, is soon overwhelmed by the need for black violence to counter white cruelty.
Although the situation on both sides of the racial divide is impartially depicted and Mandela’s personal as well as political struggle comes movingly alive against this background, the action in the novel is mostly seen from the white perspective. The blacks appeared to me as passive victims of apartheid or as reactive to it. I found this is the only shortcoming of an otherwise historically accurate saga of a regime whose inhuman brutality was inspired by Nazi Germany and lasted over a duration four times as long.