Before apartheid was declared officially dead, people used to puzzle over two big questions. One was whether the 1948 electoral victory of the National Party really represented a 'parting of the ways' from the preceding segregationist years. Another was how had the apartheid state managed to contain the resistance of the vast majority of the population. Ivan Evans' book answers both questions for the period extending roughly from the late thirties to the early sixties, focusing mainly on the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1940s the Department of Native Affairs [DNA] had been a "vacillating liberal outpost" staffed with paternalists, and after the 1948 election it gradually became an "arrogant apartheid fortress". The later, infamous phase flowed fairly smoothly, Evans argues, from the former, more benign one.

Evans shows the DNA, the bureaucracy responsible for African administration, enforcing obedience by many means other than force. Choosing three foci of the administrative process-labor bureaux, planned urban locations, Bantustans-Evans demonstrates how the DNA normalized coercion and conditioned African compliance. He reveals the philosophical and practical disjuncture between rural and urban administration, the former retaining its paternalistic bias while in the 1950s the latter became the galvanizer of apartheid. He sharpens our awareness of the fact that authoritarian regimes do not work by force and terror alone. The 1950s were particularly marked by the growth of the mundane workings of the newly centralized and authoritarian state administration. (This decade stands in contrast to the periods from 1960 to 1976, when repressive forces like labor control boards and internal security apparatus ruled, and from 1978 to 1989 when repression was mixed with reform.) Apartheid worked initially because it was dispersed into the routine details of daily life.

No one should be surprised that a book with "bureaucracy" in the title reflects the language and tone of people who work in offices. Abstractions (such as "the African elite") abound, voices are often passive, and the impact of policies on people's lives is muted by bland words. Individual profiles rarely intrude to enliven matters. These barriers to a lively read could be said to go with the territory. From an analytical point of view, the sources may limit the book's revelations in a couple of ways. First, the immiseration of African rural life is stated in a blanket fashion as having been true for the entirety of the inter-war years rather than acknowledged to have been temporally, geographically, and personally variable. The focus on the Transkei, accompanied by references to indirect rule in Natal, effectively excludes discussion of rural administration in other African reserves. Secondly, the "curious" blindness of magistrates to the complexities of rural life is asserted rather than probed. Administrative ideology goes only so far in explaining this myopia; we need also broader some exploration of contemporary ideology which would include racism and scientism.

Evans' work joins several recent studies of South African administration, all drawing a far more complex picture of racial oppression than the simple paradigms of domination and resistance that flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. He sees little support for radical theories, put forward by Harold Wolpe, Frederick Johnstone and Marion Lacey, that posit a state obediently and efficiently serving the needs of capital. His approach provides an effective sequel to Saul Dubow's study of the DNA during its segregationist years (1919-1936). Like Deborah Posel, Evans rejects the view that the state is an undifferentiated "black box", preferring to accept that administrators have their own interests and power. He suggests, however, that she has underplayed the National Party constituency's "zealous predilection for grand plans" and overplayed the ad hoc development of apartheid policies. (While Posel's work focused more narrowly on labor bureaux, her title-The Making of Apartheid-fits Evans' book perfectly). Like Adam Ashforth, he is fascinated by the logic of administrators. Unlike Ashforth, who used seminal government reports to analyse the "politics of official discourse", Evans employed Native Affairs Department files, perforce up to the mid-1950s, to reconstruct the process of administration and not just its rationale.

The fact that a few top-down studies of apartheid's actual operation have appeared for the first time in the 1990s is a sign of how intently scholars used their profession to attack the regime's legitimacy during the apartheid years. (It is also a sign of archival restrictions, hence Evans' inability to extend his use of the DNA files past the mid-1950s.) Until recently, this topic might have been misunderstood to be an apologia. Now that apartheid is officially over and scholarly enquiry has become more free of pressures to be politically relevant, Evans has provided specialists with an excellent resource. His book will allow them to check readily which apartheid credos were actually enacted and why. It will help them gain a view of the making of apartheid policy that is truly "dynamic", a word much favored by Evans. He discusses, for example, how policy-makers responded to African nationalism and conservatism and in turn influenced their development. His clearly written book embraces an important sweep of time, issues and context rather than focusing narrowly on partial problems as so many monographs do. He takes into account the better part of three decades and situates problems within the context of British imperial policy, the local political economy based on cheap labor, and even Nazi bureaucracy. Evans closes his book with the provocative suggestion that today's state cadres might learn from Minister of Native Affairs Verwoerd's ability to get things done in the 1950s, if they can force themselves to search beyond the regime's racist authoritarianism.

Diana Wylie
Boston University, Department of History