BOOK REVIEW: Witz, Leslie. APARTHEID'S FESTIVAL: CONTESTING SOUTH AFRICA'S NATIONAL PASTS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Cape Town: David Philip, 2003.

Reviewed by: Apartheid's Festival: Contesting South Africa's National Pasts James Cobbe Witz, Leslie . 2003. Apartheid's Festival: Contesting South Africa's National Pasts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Cape Town: David Philip. 324 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck, on behalf of the Netherlands East Indies Company, established a victualling station at the Cape of Good Hope. In 1952, D. F. Malan's National Party government sponsored a tercentenary festival, which included a large exhibition and fair on the shore of Table Bay, a recreation of van Riebeeck's landing, various processions and exhibitions, and travels by seven "mail coaches" through almost sixty towns, providing occasion for local festivals in each one, to arrive in Cape Town at the start of the main "festival week." Naturally enough, not all the inhabitants of the then Union of South Africa at the start of the 1950s saw what Jan van Riebeeck had done three centuries earlier in quite the same way. This book is a detailed and exhaustive study of the planning of, and opposition to, this festival, and then of the festival itself and associated events. The book is also a detailed study of how various groups within South Africa perceived both these events, and the history that they were seeking to expound, all placed in a context more fully informed by what has happened since. The book begins with a long introduction, which opens by contrasting the wildly different behaviors of the Dutch mayors of van Riebeeck's birth town, Culemborg, in 1952 and 1992. This introduction discusses the commemorations or attempted commemorations of other "discovery" events: Columbus in the Americas and the First Fleet in Australia. The book then goes on to examine the evolution of the perceptions of van Riebeeck in South Africa before 1952, focusing on how he was depicted in school textbooks and through his diary. It moves on to how the various ways of interpreting the past were negotiated and distilled down into a specific set of essentials that told an "acceptable" (to the dominant groups) story of the national past, by a complex process of negotiation, compromise, and imposition of power. This history, despite its obvious inconsistencies and misrepresentations, was the officially approved storyline of the pageants and displays incorporated into the festival. The process of producing the festival spurred a variety of counterhistories, produced by groups boycotting the events or objecting to them. While the official storyline was largely embodied in events and physical pageantry, these counterhistories were largely verbal, presented in public meetings and publications. The book concentrates on how these counterhistories, whether spoken, or printed in newspapers or books, interacted with the process that was producing the official history. The actual reactions to the festival when it did happen are then explored through oral histories and popular publications of the time. Finally, there is a discussion of how the mail-coach journeys resulted in similar constructions of, and struggles over, local histories in various parts of the country. This is a serious work of history and social commentary, but at the same time it is an intriguing and interesting read, full of conscious and [End Page 131] unconscious irony. The illustrations—photographs and newspaper cartoons—are in themselves quite fascinating and have been cleverly selected. I have far too little knowledge of the history of the period to give an informed evaluation of the book as a work of historical scholarship, but as an interested layman I can warmly recommend it to anyone interested in how history evolves and changes in settler societies, and the purposes to which it is put. It is fascinating contextual information on the late 1940s and early 1950s in South Africa—which could be useful supplementary reading for students. James Cobbe The Florida State University Books Received Abaka, Edmund. 2005. Kola is God's Gift: Agricultural Production, Export Initiatives and the Kola Industry of Asante and the Gold Coast. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Google Scholar Allen, Philip M., and Maureen Covell. 2005. Historical Dictionary of Madagascar. 2nd ed. Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Google Scholar Arnson, Cynthia, and I. William Zartman. 2005. Rethinking the Economics of War: The...

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