ABSTRACT
The Oxford History of South Africa , vol. I, To 1870 , ed. M. Wilson and L. M. Thomson is the first of a two-volume work of major importance. In the Oxford History the long-established, mainly English-language, liberal approach is combined with some of the insight provided by the historiography of Africa north of the Limpopo during the past twenty years. Leonard Thompson (ed.) African Societies in South Africa before 1880 develops some themes which emerge from the African History. J. D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath describes the complex demographic and political results of the formation of the Zulu kingdom early in the nineteenth century. I. D. MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa describes the early development of racial prejudice amongst the white settlers at the Cape. African response to white conquest in the nineteenth century still awaits its historians, but Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion is a brilliant reconstruction of colonial Natal in the throes of African rebellions in 1906-8.
