Suchergebnisse

After spending much of his career comparing the United States and South Africa, George M. Fredrickson has now written a short history of racism.1 This is, of course, a bold undertaking, and let it be said at once that his book is both very readable and densely packed with illuminating and suggestive insights. After some discussion of the meaning of the term "racism," Fredrickson begins with a survey of its origins. He moves from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the rise of modern forms of racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along the way, he inevitably draws a number of comparisons between different racial systems. What follows here is not a review of the book as a whole—that has been done elsewhere, most notably by Orlando Patterson2 —but is a commentary on what he says regarding the United States and South Africa, as a way of drawing the attention of those interested in comparing the two to Fredrickson's ideas in his latest work. These ideas are of course in part drawn from his earlier comparative writing. It is indeed fortunate for those interested in such comparisons that so distinguished a scholar, a former President of the Organization of American Historians,3 who has described himself as a "heterosexual white male of Swedish-American ancestry,"4 should have devoted so much of his distinguished academic career to comparing aspects of race in these two societies.

Namibia's main liberation movement, the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO), relied heavily on outside support for its armed struggle against South Africa's occupation of what it called South West Africa. While East Germany's solidarity with Namibia's struggle for national self-determination has received attention, little research has been done on West Germany's policy towards Namibia, which must be seen against the backdrop of inter-German rivalry. The impact of the wider realities of the Cold War on Namibia's rocky path to independence leaves ample room for research and new interpretations. In West Germany and Namibia's Path to Independence, 1969-1990: Foreign Policy and Rivalry with East Germany, Thorsten Kern shows that German division played a vital role in West Germany's position towards Namibia during the Cold War. West German foreign policy towards Namibia, at the height of the Namibian liberation struggle, is investigated and discussed against the backdrop of rivalry with East Germany. The two states' deeply diverging policies, characterised in this context by competition for infuence over SWAPO, were strongly affected by the Cold War rivalry between the capitalist West and the communist East. Yet ultimately the dynamics of rapprochement helped to bring about Namibia's independence. This book is based upon a doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Cape Town in 2016. Kern conducted research in the National Archives of Namibia and in German archives and his work draws on interviews with contemporary witnesses