Three hundred years: a history of South Africa

"The purpose of this history is to expose the process of the conquest,
dispossession, enslavement, segregation and disfranchisement of the oppressed
Non-Europeans of South Africa, in order that the oppressed as a whole will
understand better how to transform the status quo into a society worth
living for and worth living in.
The present South Africa, the status quo, did not drop from the heavens.
It was man-made. It can be transformed by man. In the very process of
conquest, expropriation and enslavement, the conquered were metamorphosed
into potential liberators, the con,querors were rendered unfit to manage
society, and the artificial restraining walls of colour-discrimination baulk
progress in all walks of life.
To understand these forces of liberation and reaction and the contempo-
"' rary struggle between the two, we must understand how both came into
being. For we cannot know a phenomena without knowing its history.
To know the past is already a step forward in knowing the road to
liberation. This study is not academic, but part of the knowledge of
liberation. The study of our past should aid us in unburdening ourselves
of the decaying monster, the status quo, which grows hungrier with age,
more desperate with time, for its main sustenance is the ignorance, unawareness
and passivity of its host, the oppressed, and its death knell is the
a wakening of the people"
-Preface