THE MAKING OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICA: THE DEVELOPMENT OF AFRICAN SOCIETY SINCE 1800. 2ND ED. Bill Freund. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., Boulder, 1998. Pp. 333, Paperback: $ 19.95.^©

Encouraged, so the author notes, by "many teachers of African history who have found it helpful and stimulating as a text," Freund has now produced a new edition. He has added a two and a half page section on "The End of Apartheid" to the "Southern Africa in Crisis" chapter that concluded the first edition, as well as providing a new concluding chapter on "The Age of Structural Adjustment." Freund has also updated the annotated bibliography to include texts published through 1994.

Unfortunately, these revisions do not go far enough. Indeed, they leave the new edition less useful for teaching purposes than the original. To begin with, 90 percent of the text is a verbatim reprint of the original. That would be fine if this was a specialist monograph that had gone out of print, but for a textbook such a publishing decision immediately dates the information. This becomes particularly apparent in reading the bibliography and comparing the comments there with the discussion in the main text. Whereas in the first edition Freund noted that the "relations between men and women have only begun to receive the attention they deserve and rarely with much historical precision" (1st ed., p. 316), and reports in the second edition that the "literature specifically on African women and their modern history is now highly developed" (2nd ed., p. 293), the main body of the text remains exactly the same as it appeared almost two decades ago. What, therefore, is a student to conclude as to the impact of this now "highly developed" body of literature on the interpretation of the role of women? And, for another example, what is a student expected to make of a sentence like the following that concludes the historiographical chapter of the second edition? "In the last twenty years … a variety of currents from throughout the world, including the impact of Marxism, the revitalisation of Trotskyism and other directions of Marxist thought, have made a revival [of Marxist writing on Africa] possible." (2nd ed., p. xiv). Exactly the same sentence appeared in the first edition, but then it was referring to the literature of the 1960s and 1970s, not to that of the 1980s and 1990s. Then it made sense, now it does not.
Moreover, the added text hardly compensates for the cost of buying a new copy. It is hard to explain the fall of apartheid in two and a half pages, and even then it would be helpful if Freund would explain a little further what he means when he writes that "my assessment of the southern African region and the real and potential shifts in it has become very much soberer and more conservative over time" (2nd ed., p. x).

Conservative in what way? In the sense that the legacy of apartheid produces problems even greater than anyone had expected? In the sense, so common among South African academics, that change has not moved in the way that they thought it should have? Alternatively, some other meaning? In addition, the new concluding chapter is less new than it might seem since of the twenty one pages of text, six were published originally in the penultimate chapter of the first edition. The Making of Contemporary Africa was a stimulating book when it first appeared and the 1984 edition remains so. As a textbook, the version republished (or rather reprinted) is a period piece.

William H. Worger
Department of History
University of California, Los Angeles