In southern Africa, as in Ireland, history is formidably active in politics. What people believe about their past has been both a consequence and a cause of conflict, and also a source of political energy. People are not chess pieces. Their next move depends not only on where they are in relation to others but also on how they got there, and on how they think they got there. No matter how loaded it may be, the historical luggage which people carry in their heads, and in their school textbooks, is an important fact.

Such luggage is generally of three types. One is the moving symbol with which men seek ‘to rally support for themselves or some cause, or to maintain a distinction’. Secondly there is the searing event which has happened recently enough for many people to have experienced it themselves, or to have grown up in homes where parents or grandparents were still affected by its having happened to them. Thirdly there is the political myth whose supposed happening is used to justify certain political beliefs or actions. All three types of luggage are carried about everywhere but their weight, both relative and absolute, varies in different societies at different times. In southern Africa in the 1930s there was an abundance of such luggage although not everybody carried the same pieces.

For blacks the most important historic event was the loss of land to white conquerors. The hundred-year war in the eastern Cape, in Natal and elsewhere, culminating in the Land Act of 1913 which prohibited Africans from buying land outside the residual reserves was a bitter memory.