Popular Politics in the History of South Africa 1400-1948

Popular Politics in the History of South Africa 1400–1948 offers a newly inclusive vision of South Africa’s past. Drawing largely from original sources Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country’s people from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands through the colonial era to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization alliance and amalgamation persisted mutated and occasionally vanished from view; it survived against the odds in several forms in tribalisms Christian assemblies and other seemingly hybrid movements; and it continues today. Landau treats southern Africa broadly concentrating increasingly on the southern highveld and ultimately focusing on a transnational movement called the “Samuelites.” He shows how people’s politics in South Africa were suppressed and transformed but never entirely eliminated.