We Now Know: Reform, Revolution and Race in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Comment‪)‬

In 1997, an eminent American historian of the Cold War named John Lewis Gaddis wrote a book titled We Now Know: rethinking Cold War history. (1) The historian's premise was simple: the collapse of the Soviet Union had allowed historians access to previously unreachable archives of the Soviet Union and its satellites and, based on these, old assumptions could be shed, and new lessons learnt. South Africa did not experience the kind of revolution that inspired Gaddis to tell the world what it knew but there is something to be said for the application of his confident and rather self-assured title to an examination of what we now know about the period leading up to the formal end of apartheid in 1994 and the first three years after that. What do we know now and how does that knowledge measure up against the four articles under review in this brief paper? The articles cover a 10-year span, with the first one published in 1987 and the last one in 1997. This was arguably one of the most dramatic periods in South African history and the review essayed here will consider the four articles chronologically. The review concludes that the articles have held up well on the whole and that, with one notable exception, the limit to what the respective authors knew and could know at the time the articles were written has not undermined the articles in any significant way. Reform versus revolution: Friedman on the promise of reform