As we Americans celebrate a small group of European settlers who landed on our shores, it's worthwhile to stop and look at the impact of another group of settlers who landed on the the cape that is now South Africa in 1652. They were noble in their mission, but within decades a small group that broke off set in motion centuries of conquest, war and oppression. The Dutch settlers of South Africa convinced themselves that whey were God's chosen people, destined to rule over the masses of the continent. By 1948, the Purified National Party came to control the South African government and Apartheid came into being. It was a system of segregation marked by horrors second only to those of Hitler's Germany. This system became the law of the land. Now humanitarian and historian
Dominique Lapierre in his book
A Rainbow in the Night: The Tumultuous Birth of South Africa tells the story of this violent history and the heroes that changed it. If only such heroes existed today in the Middle East.
My conversation with Dominque Lapierre:
