The apartheid experience in South Africa was a horrendous one for mankind, in which humans unleashed all sorts of evil on one another due to unfounded categorization based on color. This led to a superiority complex where a class saw another as not worth the treatment their dogs received. The fact is that black color was an adaptive one, given the environment of the possessors; the melanin which is the pigmentation that makes the skin black is meant to prevent the skin from cancer emanating from radiations from the sun. It shouldn’t be a thing of social disequilibrium. Following the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in 1990 and the demise of the apartheid system of rule, South Africa became a free country, which provided the ground for South Africans and others to embark on penning books of personal histories of these painful experiences under apartheid.

Collectively, the three books in review present classics for the understanding of South African nationalism, and of course the problematic and latent potentials in various areas of the experience. The essence is to build a South Africa for all. Anne Hadfield’s A Bold Profession: African Nurses in Rural Apartheid South Africa is a scintillating story and averment of the fact that the nursing profession is a calling and not a job, without which no one could have survived the apartheid era. Thus as Hadfield asserts:

Nursing is therefore a profession that captures the changing roles of women in a mix of opposing medical values of the West and the rural Xhosa practices, blending both the foreign and native to attain the best. There was no doubt that certain gendered considerations affected nurses in apartheid South Africa as they struggled to balance career successes with family responsibilities. Their stories were prefaced by the last decades of British colonialism and shaped by the rise of apartheid and the creation of African homelands. In spite of the racial and economic injustices that Africans experienced under apartheid, nursing allowed many African women to pursue careers that gave them a sense of purpose and some measure of agency, while providing them with a stepping stone into the middle class.

It is the tragedy of history that healthcare and nursing history in South Africa is ensconced in the history of apartheid. The history of nurses working in rural homeland clinics opens a unique lens into the history of healthcare in South Africa, exchanges between medical systems, and the work and lives of professional African women. (p. 7) It is evident that this book creates a fuller history of the dominance of the black nurses in blending rural and Western-style medicare. It appreciates the diverse working conditions, community–patient relationships, and racial and gender discrepancies in homelands rural clinics nursing in South Africa. There was also the cultural dimension of the notion of the sort of ailment that women can cure as women. What is evinced from the experience is that recent history has portrayed the exchanges and mutual evolution that biomedicine and African medical systems have enjoyed in the past. Thus, Africans were never passive recipients of coercive colonial medical inquisition but have consciously engaged it in various constructive ways, thereby creating hybrid practices—afro-constructivism.

As Baranov in Hadfield asserts:

There is no doubt that the practice of Xhosa medicine is more holistic in focusing on pluralistic causes of ill-health as against what obtains in Western medicine, where the single cause of ill-health is the method of practice.

The book’s first two chapters state the problematic, background and the contextualization of the issues. In the first chapter, issues of the historical background of Xhosa medicine and the evolution of Western biomedicine as it interacted with Ciskei nursing from British colonialism up till the 1950s are discussed. In the second chapter, the author examines the cumulative impact of apartheid vis-à-vis homeland restructuring on the development trajectories of the Ciskei healthcare systems through the 1960s to 1980s. What is of prominent relief here is the exercise of the agency of the Ciskei nurses in navigating the problematic and financial basis of the growth in comprehensive community health care.

In Chapter Three, the author used oral historical interviews to overlay the experiences of the nurses interviewed. These experiences were rewarding as they cultivated proper relationships with both patients and community leaders. There is no doubt that the trainings and commitments of these nurses gave quantum leap in the successes they experienced as they contributed to healthcare given these complicated circumstances.

The author explores, in Chapter Four, the impacts of Xhosa medical practices and beliefs of these nurses as they shared, negotiated, and contested these practices. Given the diametrically opposed systems of healthcare in South Africa, the author explores the differing approaches as to the methods used in working with the beliefs of patients. Of high expose in this chapter is the limitations placed by culture on the role of women in their capacities as nurses in rural Xhosa communities.

In Chapter Five, the author discusses the intersection of the roles of nurses as professionals and family people and how they created balance between the two responsibilities in order to contain family concerns in a system that did not accommodate such concerns. The chapter also examines the changing marital expectations and tension that the performance of nurses introduced to the Xhosa families. Naturally, some families felt increased tension, leading to chaos, while others had understanding husbands who helped in building support for the necessary balances between family and profession. Hadfield sheds light on the struggles of balancing commitment to career and family lives during an oppressive apartheid system. The book fills an important gap for scholars studying the history of women, nursing, and healthcare in South Africa, illuminating the humanity of healthcare workers. Suggestions were offered as to the influence of family in both the staffing and quality of care that individual nurses provided for the system.

The author concludes the work by examining the challenges that the postapartheid era enthroned. These were seen in the challenges of the end of the Ciskei era healthcare, transforming healthcare into the postapartheid era, and the dissatisfaction expressed in the democratic era to the nursing profession in South Africa. From the above experiences, the author x-rayed advice from pieces of advice from the older nurses to the present-day nurses for optimum efficiency. In the author’s words:

There is no doubt that African nurses have played key roles in the expansion and development of healthcare services in rural South Africa. In using the stories of retired African nurses who worked in the Ciskei between 1950 and 1980, Hadfield documents and contextualizes the achievements of these remarkable women. Bringing forth the stories of these nurses in their own voices, A Bold Profession is a homage to their dedication to the well-being of their communities.

In When They Came for Me, John R. Schlapobersky tells a concise story of human endurance, survival, repair, and transcendence in human experience. The experience is that of storytelling as a means of healing from terrible experiences by turning negativity to positivity. This is innocence presented and captured by the pen of one who is truly innocent of a crime for which he was punished unjustly. Schlapobersky was naively not prepared for the struggle he fell into, unlike some other anti-apartheid activists. Schlapobersky’s issue is more pathetic as his white community saw him as a traitor “stirring up the blacks” who ought to be content with their experiences of suppression and repression under apartheid. This was worsened as he was stereotyped as a Jew in a society structured on white supremacy. This book tells the story from the build-up to that event, to what happened to him in police custody, and draws out the lessons he learnt. But it is many things besides a linear narrative drawn from apartheid’s darkest moments.

Schlapobersky volunteered in the anti-racist struggle and thus bore the consequences of this choice. A fundamental guiding principle in the lives of those in the struggles for the liberation of South Africa was never to compromise the dignity of the human person no matter whose ox is gored. Schlapobersky is not interested in revenge, but in answering those who tormented him with understanding and reconciliation, if not quite forgiveness. It is no surprise, then, that Albie Sachs—another activist in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle who has championed the idea of “soft vengeance”—provided the foreword to the book. Thus, there was no room for vengeance. Sach captures this thus:

Personal integrity had to be inviolate. This work embodies immense issues in the constitution in such a way that those efficacious methods are derivable from it in order to reduce the pains of the past and engender hope for an uplifted future. Worthy of note is that Schlapobersky’s reparation project though different from “soft vengeance” has the psychological purpose of the entitled restoration of dignity, hope, and pride for every unjustly grieved individual. Schlapobersky would discuss the role of music in the liberation struggle in the following ways:

Schlapobersky had a background which helped in a way to spine his resistance of apartheid ignobilities. Though his parents coped with the rules of the apartheid practices that they encountered, yet they opposed the policies and principles on which they were based. This would nudge Schlapobersky into the calm resistance of apartheid in his later life.

The cruelty inflicted by Theunis Swanepoel, an apartheid police detective, on detainees was brutal. If there appeared to be evidence of anti-government stance against anyone under investigation, it was confirmatory; but the absence of evidence also meant culpability. Either way, there was no escape from Swanepoel’s indictive investigations against any victim. Such was the fate of Schlapobersky in the hands of Swanepoe. From all intent and purpose, the apartheid government has sinister seizure of all the arms of government such that even the judiciary that ought to be the last hope of the common man perverted justice in favour of the state. Schlapobersky poetically states this as it concerns James Lenkoe’s (one of the anti-apartheid activists who died in detention) “murder” thus:

If humankind understands that the highest values reside in relationships, all these negative racial categories would evaporate. Schlapobersky expresses this thus: “Yours is the hand of humanity that reaches out to save me from drowning in my sorrow” (p. 134).

Perhaps one of the most sordid things that happen with government absolutism is the active connivance of the press and security agencies without understanding that everybody is affected in one way or the other by keeping necessary information. If people understand that keeping information would elongate ills and ipso facto affect everybody willy nilly, it could be avoided.

Schlapobersky’s “hidden diary” is a 100-page narrative of his 56-day imprisonment, interrogation, torture, solitary confinement, negotiation, release, and movement to exile. Worthy of note is that the source of the narrative is constructed from memory and fragmentary jottings, as the state archives yielded very little on the case.

Schlapobersky’s mother’s resourcefulness and diplomatic prowess smoothened the way for his release, which was conditional on his repatriation to Israel. This also involved the Israeli consul general in South Africa, who had instructed Schlapobersky on the tarmac before putting him on the flight to Tel Aviv. The book is a first-hand narrative of the life experience that had brought the then 21-year-old, who was raised by Johannesburg’s then bustling Jewish community, to Wits. Although the family’s relocation to Swaziland, and his subsequent acquisition of British citizenship, didn’t affect his feelings of belonging to Johannesburg—a city whose suburbs, streets and cultural delights he lovingly recalled.

In his revealing and informative epilogue Schlapobersky espouses the lessons of those never-to-be-forgotten days in the hands of an authoritarian state. As a psychotherapist, this has helped him to establish a centre (in the UK) for political refugees from other troubled polities across the world who experienced the same torture as he did to be rehabilitated. He used six brief case-notes as evidence that telling stories of torment can help to rehabilitate people who have been tortured by authoritarianism, and survived.

Of particular interest to us, his readers, is the fact that previous narratives of imprisonment and torture under apartheid all too readily serve narrow political ends but this author is an exception. As such, this narrative will need to do much more lifting on that ever-expanding South African vision of understanding its experience and forgiveness.

In Mxolisi R. Mchunu’s Violence and Solace: The Natal Civil War in Late-Apartheid South Africa, the author, and another survivor of an internecine violence in Natal Midland in South Africa, captures the origin and the spread of such violence. In the ensuing violence that left many dead, injured, homeless, and emotionally wounded, Mchunu exposes the impact of the emergence of provincial and national leaders as complex actors who negotiated a chaotic society without the possibility of any predictable outcome on women and children. The work is best described as dealing with transitional violence at the twilight of apartheid South Africa. This violence took its root from the electoral victory of the Afrikaner-led National Party in 1948 that birthed the ignoble apartheid policy: “a social engineering project that categorized four groups—Europeans, Colored, Asians and Africans—and subjected them to differentiated legislation as unassimilable population”Footnote ³ (p. xi).

Fr Michael Lapsley in his foreword to the book encapsulates the essence of the book in the following words:

Worthy of note is that most of the works as this written by non-Black Africans lack the compelling interiority of participant observation as they do write from lack of understanding of the language of the culture in discourse. This is why Mchunu calls his “the inside story of Kwanshange, told by two of its survivors”—his mother and himself. This is unique as the book provides a new addition to a growing body of auto-ethnographic studies by African researchers.

Mchunu presents a historical exegesis of the internecine war in Villindela, Kwanshange area in South Africa by exposing what happened at the period of the politically engineered violence by recording the survivors. This is a psychological account of survivors’ strategies of coping and otherwise thus creating a social psychology of the manner Kwanshange internecine war survivors have applied their experience to the world of their existence. The author’s aim of writing this book is stated thus:

The author did not focus on the activities of warlords of the United Democratic Front (UDF) or Inkatha people who used vigilantism to perpetrate violence; rather he recounted sacrifices, emotional trauma, and their psychological impacts on victims, namely women and children who were not recognized. There is no doubt that the apartheid government instigated this violence as they gained in two ways: 1) They watched opponents kill one another, thus depleting anti-apartheid activists and their ranks; 2) It created a situation in the Natal Midland where no alternative or anti-apartheid groups were able to develop organizational capacities to challenge the covert state backing of the Inkatha Freedom Party in Kwazulu Natal.

The work, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, presents a historical overview of the violence in Vulindlela, Kwanshange Location, known as udlame, between 1985 and 1996. What Mchunu refers to as the Natal civil war is a recourse to the conflict between the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the African National Congress (ANC)-aligned United Democratic Front (UDF), which led to the estimated death of almost 12,000 people and the displacement of nearly 500,000 others. Mchunu’s narrative locates the men, women, and children whose experiences present an understanding of the violence, how they survived it, how they have found healing two decades after the end of the conflict, and how survivors have found no justice.

Mchunu, an eight-year-old participant observer when the conflict started, combines his training as a historian with his personal experience of the horrendous atrocities that defined his childhood and forever changed his community in writing this book. Mchunu avers that both “Inkatha and the UDF were equally vicious with each other and the [apartheid] state exacerbated the situation.” Both groups were controlled, at least in part, by warlords, and Mchunu observes that “to date, there is no warlord in the Midlands who has accepted blame for violence committed by their supporters.”

He used the roles of four prominent local men in evaluating how national politics played out in Kwanshange, thereby leading to “the breakdown of the community into civil war.” He used the examples of Moses Ndlovu and Philip Thabethe, who had “belonged to one church, played for one soccer team and exercised together as young men.” Two others, Nunu Mchunu and Chris Hlengwa, were friends before becoming political rivals.

By examining the evolution of violence in Kwanshange, Mchunu makes a significant contribution to a growing scholarship that illuminates the national and local manifestations of udlame, namely civil war, whose “legacies” endure. For Mchunu, the men and the boys were the combatants while the women were “non-combatants” and “witnesses” in a war that “moved out of the battlefield into every other corner of civil life.”

Mchunu also considers the use of muthi and ritual murder to provide a language for what he called, in an earlier pu b lication, a “conspiracy of silence … concerning the continuation of ritual murder and the use of body parts in war-doctoring” during the violence. He outlines the central role played by izangoma (diviners) and izinyanga (traditional healers), who are alleged to have “sold body parts” to this end. Among the ritual murders he describes are ukuqaqa, which is the “custom of disembowelling a fallen enemy,” and ukuhlabana, which is the “stabbing of the corpse after it was dead”—a ritual that was historically used when a group of men succeeded in hunting down a dangerous animal: “the act of participation was recognized when the men each came up and stabbed the dead beast.”Footnote ⁴

As would every traditional African society, the people of Kwanshange, as Mchunu indicates, believe that this era of bloodshed should have been followed by a ritual cleansing propitiation (after the demise of apartheid). Instead, known perpetrators of the violence were rewarded with political office by the major political parties and leaders; none have accepted responsibility or held accountable.

Since Mchunu survived the internecine violence in Natal, his narrative reflects on his childhood experiences and the complex political maneuvers in his homelands between 1985 and 1996. He traced individual and local factors with regional and national forces that exacerbated the conflict. He entwines autobiographical reflections with historical scholarship to explain the political violence that rocked parts of Natal. While provincial and national leaders emerge as complex actors in the chaotic Natal Midlands with no predictable outcomes, Mchunu illuminates the brightest spotlight on women and children who were the actual victims of the conflict. The result is this seminal work on transition violence during the twilight of apartheid.

From the foregoing, one can discern that apartheid is the use of wrongful categorization of people based on color to justify mankind’s inhumanity to others. There is no doubt that for the world to develop equitably, the universal principle of justice and fair play must be adapted and adopted in society. There must be equal balance of justice in such a way that the negative categorization based on color would be removed. All these books show that there are many senses in which the multifarious challenges of the apartheid era emanated from this color category mistake.

All these books add to the existing insights on South Africa’s apartheid system, and they echo Nelson Mandela’s proclamation in his inaugural address as the first democratically elected president of the Republic of South Africa, that never again shall the country experience and condone man’s inhumanity to his fellows.