One Azania, One Nation: The National Question in South Africa

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In the post-apartheid world it is easy to miss the deep and rigorous polticial, theoretical and philosophical debates that were woven through the anti-apartheid struggle and that consumed time and effort in the liberation movements. Perhaps the central debate and one that remains essential to understanding as well as developing politics for former colonies of settlement is the 'national question': in short, what is the nature of social and ethnic groups in these countries. This 'question' was one of the central points of disagreement among the groups fighting apartheid and sat at the centre of the split between the African National and Pan-Africanist Congresses in the late 1950s. This, sadly long out of print, book explores the heated debates over the politics of colonisation in South Africa, the 'national question', apartheid era polices including Bantustans as well as the historiography of South African nationalisms. Despite the end of apartheid and despite the emergence of South Africa's 'rainbow nation' the new orthodoxy excludes many of the tendencies that concentrated on resolving these issues of the status of peoples in colonial and post-colonial settings. Although the historiogrpahical review may have dated, although many of the policies are gone the key theoretical points remains as rich and important in the early 21st century as they were in 1979, when the book was published.