The Joanne Goodman Lectures were established at the University of Western Ontario in 1975 to honour the memory of the elder daughter of the Honourable Edwin A. Goodman and Mrs Goodman, of Toronto. Each year the university invites a scholar to deliver three lectures on some aspect of the history of the English-speaking peoples, particularly those of the Atlantic Triangle of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that will be of interest to members of the university community and the general public. The list of those who have participated over two decades indicates the distinction of the lectures...

Machiavelli proclaimed in hisDiscoursesthat when faced with a crucial political choice, humankind invariably chooses the least sensible course, which also appears at the time to be the most heroic.¹ He was not always right about this. The story told in these pages is one in which abrasive words and violent actions that might have been expected to plunge a demoralized country into civil war were often used by people of vision to kick-start a new stage of a difficult negotiating process. So far, this has gone on for seven years. During this time, South Africa has changed from...

It is not at all easy to combine the two operations of making peace and drafting a constitution. Far easier is it to beat the enemy and then impose terms. In South Africa there had been no formal war, but we had had the next best thing – informal frontier conflict across the continent from Angola to Mozambique, which had been pictured as ʹtotal onslaughtʹ by the government in power in order to justify cross-border raids involving the use of air power, armoured vehicles, and heavy artillery, in addition to the violent suppression of resistance on the home front. A...

The formation of the union of south africa in 1909–10 Was a coming together of four colonies (two of them previously Boer republics) on terms which they had agreed among themselves. The Westminster parliament enacted as the South Africa Act only those provisions which the coloniesʹ dominant parties and official oppositions had proposed and tested in their separate legislatures (and, in Natal, also with a votersʹ referendum).

The thirty parliamentarians belonging to government and opposition parties who met round the table to draft a constitution for the Union of South Africa were all white. It was a meeting of...

The general election and presidential inauguration of 1994 brought the new South Africa into being. The adoption of a democratic constitution at the end of 1996 gave it a legal identity. But the process of peacemaking, referred to in chapter 2, was not completed with the adoption of that new constitution in December 1996. There were tell-tale signs at the political level that consolidation still needed to happen.

The Government of National Unity, in which seats were shared on a pro rata basis by the African National Congress (anc), the National Party (np) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (ifp), took...