Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade Notre Dame University

Boer republics, as a self-governing and white-minority-ruled dominion within the British Empire. The author then looks at the 1912 formation of the Union Defence Force (UDF), the first South African state military, which attempted to combine British and Boer military culture, though it favored the former, and in which armed service was restricted to the white community. As Van Der Waag explores in detail, South Africa’s participation on the side of Britain in the two world wars was problematic, given both the UDF’s lack of preparation and Boer/Afrikaner sympathy for Germany and desires to remain neutral. Some of the strongest and most original chapters in the book, supported by rich archival investigation, cover the institutional development of the UDF during the interwar period (1919–39) and in the immediate post–Second World War era of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the new apartheid government, in the context of politicizing and Afrikanerizing the military, changed its name to the South African Defence Force (SADF). The last part of the book looks at the Cold War–era SADF military campaigns in South West Africa (now Namibia), where it embarked on counterinsurgency, and in southern Angola, where it fought conventional battles against a Soviet-backed Angolan state and its Cuban allies during the late 1970s and 1980s. The concluding chapter discusses the transition to democracy in the 1990s and the formation of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), comprising elements of the old SADF, the armies of South Africa’s self-governing black homelands such as Transkei and Venda, and the armed wings of the anti-apartheid movements. Van Der Waag ends with an important warning that the current SANDF, now commanded largely by former liberation fighters associated with the governing African National Congress (ANC), is in danger of being politicized in the same way as the apartheid-era SADF. Although this is a very thorough and skillfully written history of South Africa’s state military, that emphasis creates an imbalance. The author’s goal of attempting to bridge the gap between the military history of the primarily white UDF/SADF and the liberation history of the mostly black anti-apartheid organizations (4) remains unfulfilled. Focusing heavily on the military of the white-minority state, the book provides meticulously researched and extensive information on topics such as the family background and education of white generals, the changing threat perception of white military planners, South African military budgets, and South African participation in a series of imperial defense conferences held in the 1920s and 1930s. By comparison, the military history of black South Africans receives limited attention. The 1906 Bambatha Rebellion is seen as informing the defense policy of the emerging white government, but the military aims, decisions, and methods of the Zulu rebels are apparently irrelevant. The disputed and dubious claim that Albert Nzula, the first black secretary general of the Communist Party of South Africa, was murdered by Stalin’s secret police in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s is repeated as fact and, seemingly, as an example of the pathetic nature of African resistance (Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators:’ Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–1939, Columbia University Press 2008, 294–95). Much more could said about the evolution of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC during the antiapartheid struggle; its leaders are either ignored (like Chris Hani) or do not receive the same in-depth treatment as their UDF/SADF counterparts. Indeed, the military activities and cultures of other liberation movements, such as the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), are entirely overlooked. Surely, this topic is pertinent, given the fact that former APLA members became generals in the post-apartheid SANDF (see table on p. 303). Last, it is odd that this book fails to acknowledge the existence of several previous military histories of South Africa (e.g., Annette Seegers, The Military in the Making of Modern South Africa, I.B. Tauris 1996, and Timothy Stapleton, A Military History of South Africa: From the Dutch-Khoi Wars to the End of Apartheid, Praeger Security International 2010).