Herman Giliomee has recently released an updated version of his book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. This new edition has added chapters looking at the often strained, relationship between Afrikaners and the ANC, as well as the changes the past decade has wrought in South Africa. The author answered 16 questions about his work and the circumstances that lead to the update for Politicsweb:
1. Why a second edition with the first one having appeared as recently as 2003?
The book sold remarkably well (25,000 in both the English and Afrikaans editions) and it was out of print at the beginning of the year after having gone through six reprints. To reprint it again would not make much sense. Simply too much has happened in the last ten years. A substantial new chapter was needed to take developments up to the present time.
2. Does it often happen that a history book gets a second edition so soon?
Not really, but it is South Africa's fate to have too much history and too much politics, particularly for a country with a relatively small population (only six million a century ago). Over the past ten years too much has happened and the public mood has changed drastically. It is almost similar to what happened in the four years before the Great Trek (1832 -1836), the four years between the Jameson Raid and the Anglo Boer War (1895-1899), the five years between the Depression and Fusion (1929 -1934), the five years after becoming a republic (1961-1966), and the nine years after P.W. Botha's Rubicon speech in 1985.
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