15 tweets from “A Rainbow in the Night: The Tumultuous Birth of South Africa” (by Dominique Lapierre)

1. Holland’s only objective was to gain a foothold on a piece of supposedly uninhabited southern Africa and supply its ships sailing to the Indies with fresh produce.
2. The disappointed young Dutchman setting out to plant lettuce could never have imagined he was writing the first chapter in the history of a country: South Africa.
3. The settlers of Dutch descent were known locally as Boers, or “farmers.”
4. Holland had just opened to a handful of its children the doors of a continent on whose soil they would soon write the most grandiose and ferocious of colonial epics.
5. Young Hendrik Bidault replied fiercely, “Be off with you! We are no longer Dutch but Afrikaners!” That day the white tribe severed its ties with its mother country.
6. The Broederbond became the backbone of rigid Afrikaner nationalism and a racist ideology that would bring South Africa near disaster.
7. Malan was sure of having the instrument for one day imposing on the country his diabolical vision of a South Africa free of the black menace.
8. At the end of the 1940s that Verwoerd and his antlike team were prepared to promulgate 1,750 pieces of legislation designed to give whites sole rule in South Africa.
9. Just when ideas of equality and dignity were spreading throughout the colonized world, white South Africa was moving in the opposite direction.
10. Basson had suggested to his bosses the idea of manufacturing chemical products to lower the fertility rate of people of color.
11. A huge scandal engulfed the man who tried to sell apartheid to the West like shaving cream.
12. Mandela: “The apartheid system had not only physically divided the inhabitants of my country. It had stamped hatred in their hearts.”
13. Mandela: “We must do everything we can to persuade our white compatriots that a new, nonracial South Africa would be a better place for all."
14. As Mandela entered the small house at 8115 Orlando West with Winnie, he suddenly felt that he had really left prison.
15. In his mind it was the place of intimate reunion with his wife after twenty-seven years of separation.
16. Through all those 27 years of incarceration home had occupied the center of his imaginary world, “the place marked with an X in my mental geography.”

Dominique Lapierre

A Rainbow in the Night: 

The Tumultuous Birth of South Africa 

Da Capo Press, 2009 

320 pages