African Volk

The demise of apartheid was one of the great achievements of postwar history, sought after and celebrated by a progressive global community. Looking at these events from the other side, An African Volk explores how the apartheid state strove to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a post-colonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy. Drawing upon archival research across Southern Africa and beyond, as well as interviews with leaders of the apartheid order, Jamie Miller shows how the white power structure attempted to turn the new political climate to its advantage. Instead of simply resisting decolonization and African nationalism in the name of white supremacy, the regime looked to co-opt and invert the norms of the new global era to promote a fresh ideological basis for its rule. It adapted discourses of nativistidentity, African anti-colonialism, economic development, anti-communism, and state sovereignty to rearticulate what it meant to be African. An African Volk details both the global and local repercussions. At the dawn of the 1970s, the apartheid state reached out eagerly to independent Africa in an effort toreject the mantle of colonialism and redefine the white polity as a full part of the post-colonial world. This outreach both reflected and fuelled heated debates within white society, exposing a deeply divided polity in the midst of profound economic, cultural, and social change. Situated at the nexus of African, decolonization, and Cold War history, An African Volk takes readers into the corridors of white power to detail the apartheid regime's campaign to break out of isolation and secure global acceptance.

Jamie Miller's An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and the Search for Survival is the first in-depth study, based on primary sources, of Vorster's efforts to secure for South Africa a better image in the international community and attract allies in the independent African states in Southern Africa. Miller tells this entire story with great aplomb. His book is in my view the most outstanding debut of an historian of South Africa that has appeared in the last thirty to forty years....With An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and its Search for Survival Miller has made a seminal contribution to both Cold War history and to the study of the crucial stages of the transition to black rule in Southern Africa., [I]mpressive....[N]o one has researched this story in anything like the depth he has, and the result is a major contribution to knowledge of the ideology and discourse of the apartheid state in relation to the rest of Africa....[H]is book will, without doubt, long remain a key work on apartheid foreign policy in the 1970s., Jamie Miller's analysis of apartheid diplomacy in the 1970s... delivers two important points: that local political agendas mattered to the global history of the Cold War and that international developments prompted ideological reassessment in Afrikaner nationalist circles... Miller's close reading of Afrikaner politics supports his assertion that regional specifics mattered in the Cold War. His analysis also undermines assumptions about the power of international whiteness. Even within Afrikanerdom, there were differences about whose white privilege merited protection and how it might be achieved, this is a valuable and important study in presenting Vorster's diplomatic efforts and his emphasis on 'multinational' 'separate development,' ... as intimately linked and more than a cynical ploy, and in questioning claims in published sources through rigorous archival research. Above all, Miller refreshingly takes seriously arguments by and between Afrikaners themselves, regardless of how much he rejects such thinking., An African Volk is the first in-depth study, based on primary sources, of Vorster's efforts to secure for South Africa a better image in the international community and attract allies in the independent African states in Southern Africa Miller tells this entire story with great aplomb. An African Volk is in my view the most outstanding debut of an historian of South Africa that has appeared in the last thirty to forty years The book is based on a very wide range of primary sources in the archives of several countries and on personal interviews with many of the main actors. Proficient in Afrikaans, the language of most white political leaders and civil servants, Miller was able to develop an acute understanding of the dynamics of Afrikaner politics and the often contradictory goals of the Department of Foreign Affairs and the military establishment.

Jamie Miller is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has held fellowships at Yale University and Cornell University.