James A. Michener · 1980 · overland

James Michener's 1980 novel of South Africa, following three families over five centuries - Dutch settlers who become Afrikaners, a Zulu line that rises with Shaka, and English missionaries and settlers. It runs from the first landing at the Cape through the Great Trek and Blood River to Sharpeville and the machinery of apartheid.

1. 1
   Cape Town

   The Van Doorns come ashore at the Cape as company servants and become farmers, and the pattern of the whole book is set: land taken, worked and then defended as though it had always been theirs.

2. 2
   The Great Fish River

   On the eastern frontier the trekboers meet the Xhosa coming the other way, and a century of border wars begins - and the arrival of British administration and British missionaries makes the Boers feel governed by strangers.

3. 3
   Blood River

   The Great Trek takes the wagons north out of British reach, and at Blood River in 1838 a laager of five hundred breaks a Zulu army - and the covenant sworn before the battle becomes the founding article of Afrikaner nationalism.

4. 4
   Pretoria

   The Boer republics are established in the interior and then fought over twice, and the second war ends with farms burned and women and children in camps - which is remembered, and paid back, for the next century.

5. 5
   Johannesburg

   Gold turns the Witwatersrand into the economy of the country and brings everyone to the same city on unequal terms - and the last part of the book is the Broederbond, the 1948 election, Sharpeville and the laws that followed.