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Monday, February 8,2010

Rainbow in the Night: The Tumultuous Birth of South Africa (Da Capo), by Dominique Lapierre

Book Review

By David Luhrssen
South Africa had been a racial battleground since Dutch settlers arrived in the 1600s, and old antagonisms only worsened in the 1940s when the white minority government imposed the apartheid regimen of strict segregation and subjugation. As journalist/author Dominique Lapierre writes in A Rainbow in the Night, the generation of leaders that crafted apartheid combined their prewar experience as scholarship students in Nazi Germany with their ancestral Calvinist Protestantism into a cruel program of racism. A Rainbow in the Night is a good and easy read, if a little too imaginative to count as authoritative history. The alleged dialogue from the secret conclaves of white and black leaders is a clumsy, unnecessary touch. Aside from such flourishes, A Rainbow is a decent primer on South Africa and the rise of one of the last century’s most remarkable leaders, Nelson Mandela.

 

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