The conflict that broke out on 10 October 1899, with the expiry of President Kruger's ultimatum to the British government, was South Africa's ‘Great War’, as important to the shaping of modern South Africa as was the American Civil War in the history of the United States. South African union, on the imperial agenda since the failure of confederation in the 1870s, was born in its ashes, as whites on both sides joined hands to shore up white supremacy against the background of rumours of revolt by restive Africans. If, at one level, it was a war about colonial self-determination – however limited – at another, it was also a war for the survival of a settler society, and about the credibility and international reputation of the British Empire, raising major moral issues of global importance. As the ‘biggest ever “small war” of late Victorian “new Imperialism”, the 1899–1902 conflagration has a recognised significance in world history’, not least because of the way it touched the fin de siècle European and American imagination.

The mineral discoveries that launched its industrial revolution between the late 1860s and the end of the 1890s were crucial in the shaping of modern South Africa and the peculiarities of its social order. Within that period, the years between 1880 and 1899 were both violent and formative. Framed by wars of conquest at their beginning and by the outbreak of the South African War of 1899–1902 at their end, at the heart of those years lay the mineral discoveries of the 1860s–1880s, first diamonds in Griqualand West in 1868 and then alluvial gold in the eastern Transvaal in the early 1870s, followed by gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. All over southern Africa, mining led to a dramatic increase in economic activity and to renewed imperial intervention in its affairs. For the first time, the region received large flows of immigrants and capital investment from abroad. New towns, railways, roads and harbours were built, and new urban markets opened up for locally produced food and manufactured goods. The earlier movement of African migrants in search of work in colonial labour markets was greatly accelerated. And as the demand for African land and labour spiralled, conflict was heightened as white farmers tightened their grip on rent and labour tenants on their land and encroached on African lands beyond the colonial and republican borders.

One of the many paradoxical features of the ‘new’ South Africa has been the virtual disappearance of the political violence associated with the Inkatha Freedom Party and its founder and leader, Chief Gatsha Mangosuthu Buthelezi, since the 1994 elections. Widely described in the media as ‘black on black violence’ and ascribed by many a pundit to deepseated ethnic or tribal conflict, the violence, at least in its political guise, seems to have vanished almost unnoticed by those who were most inclined to proclaim its innate propensity. If, in the ten years prior to the elections, the questions were why the violence and what are its implications for democracy in South Africa, the question now is how and why has that violence come to such a remarkable end? What, if anything, can the strange death of ethnic violence tell us about the way in which ‘ethnic diversity can become part of the democratization process and be accommodated within democratic institutions’? Has the ‘imprint’ left by this process furthered or hindered democratic processes?

The answer to these questions encompasses and illuminates in part at least three broad themes addressed in this volume: (i) the ways in which ethnicities are constituted and transformed through confrontation or struggles over the organization of political community, power and resources in colonial and post-colonial state formation; (ii) the imprints of ethnicity on nation-state building and politics, state-society relations, and popular perceptions of the interrelationship of class and communal differences; and (iii) the challenges posed to the search for more legitimate, inclusive and democratic forms of governance.

Historical Context

In a world awash with violent ‘ethnic’ conflict, it is already difficult to recall the intensity of the violence in South Africa in the decade before the 1994 elections, the threat to the peace process it posed and how close to civil war and anarchy South Africa seemed. ‘Blood Set to Flow as Zulus Talk War’ screamed the Sunday Times headlines in December 1993.

Some 10 years ago, the British medical historian Virginia Berridge (1992a: 326), strikingly declared: ‘History and historians have had a significant role in interpreting the AIDS epidemic … History, in some national responses to AIDS, became a direct policy-relevant science.’ At the outset, she argued, history was used in two ways: as a form of background knowledge; and as ‘“historical partisanship”, the use of historical example to advance particular policy positions’ (Berridge, 1992a: 326). It entered the policy debate directly and, at least in the UK, ensured a liberal non-punitive approach to people with HIV/AIDS. Analysing the chapters in the pioneering volume edited by Elizabeth Fee and Daniel Fox (1989) she showed how, in the early days of the disease, the presence of historians at international conferences was assiduously courted in the United States and the UK. They were called on to deal with earlier public health and popular responses to the spread of infectious (especially sexually transmitted) disease – quarantine and compulsory vaccination – all of which had relevance to the contemporary debate. Even more surprisingly, she maintained, leading medical authorities (notably Sir Donald Acheson, Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health, and Michael Adler at the Middlesex Hospital) had themselves drawn direct analogies with the past and addressed historical precedents in their advocacy of a liberal public health policy (Berridge, 1992b; see also: Berridge, 1992a; Berridge and Strong, 1993; Berridge, 1996).