The country now known as South Africa is one of the places on the earth with the oldest continuous human habitation. But these earliest inhabitants have had to suffer wave after wave of inward migration. What is clear is that by the end of the seventeenth century, all of the groups that are major actors in the contemporary drama of South Africa had arrived. Almost everything that follows is contested fiercely. In this unique short book, R. W. Johnson, perhaps the English-speaking world’s most acute, elegant and authoritative historian of South Africa, unravels the tangle of claim and counter-claim to describe a turbulent and bloody history. He explains, among many other things, how the original Cape settlement transformed itself from a staging post for the Dutch East India Company into a permanent presence, bringing with it black African slavery and describes how by the middle of the 18th century, one-third of all marriages were inter-racial, creating the country’s ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) community. Johnson charts the traumatic consequences of expansion into the country’s interior; the rise in the 19th century of African states and the causes, and effects, of the arrival of British, Indians and Jewish immigrants. He also traces the great Boer treks and illuminates the war between the Zulu and the British. He also, of course, lays bare the origins of apartheid in the fractious years between 1902 and 1948 before moving to examine closely apartheid in action. He concludes by assessing the degree to which the new South Africa is what the Afrikaner and African nationalists have always wanted – a fully decolonised republic.