The Rise Of The South African Reich - Brian Bunting

The Rise Of The South African Reich - Brian Bunting - 1964 - Penguin - Paperback.

The Rise of the South African Reich, first published by Penguin Africa Library in 1964

and revised in 1969, analyses the period in which the political foundations of the

apartheid regime were laid.

It traces the mobilisation of Nationalist Party power in the 1930s and 1940s around an

ideology which had close affinities with that of Nazism. It documents the steps by which

the Nationalist Party, having become the ruling party in 1948, consolidated its power:

control of the trade unions, banning of mass political organisations, control of education

and censorship of ideas, and the building of a massive armed machinery of repression.

After the writing of the book the apartheid regime shifted its social base, greatly

expanded its repressive capacity and introduced new elements in its strategy for

maintaining minority control. The political map of Southern Africa was redrawn by the

advancing forces of liberation..

The book was written in the 1960s, a period which many observers labelled as one of

'political quiescence'. Bunting, however makes clear in his account of the regime's

preparations for the defence of apartheid by military means, that the mass political

mobilisation which later threatened the regime was built on an unbroken history of

resistance.