SOURCE: Crais, Clifton C. “The Vacant Land: The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.” Journal of Social History 25, no. 2 (winter 1991): 255-68.

In the following excerpt, Crais explores the genealogy of the dominant political and historical myth posited by Whites in South Africa that the land they settled was empty and that Blacks had no prior claim to the spaces that were colonized, a myth that forged also the negative image of the African as Other.

The historiography of South Africa over the past four decades is impressive for its lack of attention to the study of the changing image of the black in the white eye and the creation and historical transformation of a discourse on and about race. This glaring lacuna is particularly surprising given the obvious and acknowledged power of race in the shaping of the country's past and present. Perhaps because...