A Rainbow in the Night

By Dominique Lapierre
Da Capo, $26.00, 270 pages

In 1652, Jan van Reibeeck headed a small group of farmers that landed on the cape of what is now South Africa. They were sent by the Dutch East India Company with strict orders to cultivate vegetables and fresh meat for the sailors who were dying by the hundreds from scurvy. They were told not to attempt to educate, convert, or subjugate the natives. In fact, they were told not to come in contact with them at all, aside from bartering for supplies. But the mission turned beyond agricultural. Planting a double row of wild almond trees across the narrow peninsula was perhaps the first act of racial segregation perpetrated by whites against blacks in South Africa.

Within decades, several of the colonists broke to the North, setting in motion centuries of conquest, war, and oppression. The Calvinist beliefs of the Dutch settlers convinced them that they were God’s chosen people, destined to rule over the heathen masses of the continent. In 1948, fueled by ideologies tested by the Nazis, the Purified National Party came to control the South African government. Apartheid—a system of segregation marked by horrors second only to those of Hitler’s Germany—was made law.

Tracing the history of South Africa from its European colonization to the end of apartheid, Dominique Lapierre’s A Rainbow in the Night: The Tumultuous Birth of South Africa reveals that throughout its violent history, the country has been one of heroes, both radical and quiet. From Nelson Mandela (the political activist imprisoned for 27 years who would user in a new age as president) to Helen Lieberman (a white speech therapist who risked her freedom and life to bring adequate medical care to black children), Lapierre uses extensive personal and secondary research to recount the human elements behind the rise and fall of one of the most unjust political and social systems the world has ever seen.

A Rainbow in the Night shows us the atrocities the government inflicted on its own people—strange “tests” that could reclassify race, secret programs with the goal of killing or sterilizing entire black districts—but its focus is on the triumph of the anti-apartheid movement as it introduces to us the people who, through spirit and resilience, built the country now known as the Rainbow Nation.

Reviewed by Dominique James