A NEW HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA.f MR. CORY, who is
a Professor in the Rhodes University College at Grahamstown, has nearly twenty years' experience of South Africa behind him. He has equipped himself for the task of writing history by travelling widely throughout the country, by interviewing old inhabitants, and by investigating old records and buildings. Dr. Theal's learned and voluminous
• The Rise of Louis Napoleon. By F. A. Simpson. With Unpublished Docu- ments and Illustrations. London: John Murray. [12e. net.] t The Rise of South Africa. By G. E. Cory, M.A. 4 vols. Vol. I., "From the Earliest Times to the Year IhiO." London : Longman and Co. [15s.]
works are less history in the ordinary sense than the raw material of history, and South Africa still awaits her true historian. It is possible that Professor Cog may be the man ; at any rate, he has made an excellent beginning with his first volume. Essentially it is a history of the Eastern Province ; but since up to 1857 (the year to which he proposes to bring down his work) all the history was made on the Eastern side, it is also a history of the Colony. The volume now before us ends with 1820, the date of the British settlement at Albany, and is mainly occupied with the troubles between the Border farmers and the Eastern natives. The preliminary chapters on the ethnology of South Africa are well done, and there is a good, clear account of the first Dutch settlement; but it is not till the Graaf Reinet troubles in the first years of the nine- teenth century that Professor Cory begins to write his history in detail. His sympathies, so far as he shows any, are with the much-harassed farmers against the missionary agitation in England ; but he is perfectly fair to the idealism of men like Vanderkemp, however wrong-headed he may think it. This has always been the view held in South Africa, and it seems to be amply warranted by the facts. The great incident in the first volume is of course the Slagter's Nek Rebellion, and Professor Cory gives an account of this episode which is not only rational and fair-minded, but exceedingly vivid. It is too often forgotten that the Judges who pronounced the sentence of death were themselves Dutchmen, and that the whole proceedings were in accordance with the Roman-Dutch law. Professor Cory's style is workmanlike and clear without possessing any special graces. The volume is admirably illustrated, and the work, if completed in the fashion in which it has been begun, will take rank as the authoritative South African history of the period. After 1857 the historical centre of gravity moved to the north.