The Presence of the Past in White South Africa : WHITE TRIBE DREAMING <i> by Marq de Villiers (Viking: $19.95; 410 pp.)</i>

This is an insider’s story, full of insider’s insights into 300 years of Afrikaner history. The bare bones are not unfamiliar--how the search for security and fulfillment of one group in South Africa has led to the domination of all the others. But into the tragedy of the development of apartheid, Marq de Villiers has woven the experience of eight generations of his own family. It’s a device that gives his book a unique perspective. “We were there from the very beginning,” writes De Villiers, “and some of us will be there until the end.”

The De Villiers family were a lively lot. The first of them, three brothers, Jacques, Pierre and Abraham, joined the flood of Huguenot refugees from France in the 1680s and took ship for South Africa. Another De Villiers was a transport rider on the route of the Great Trek, the exodus that took Afrikaners away from the British rule in the Cape Province. A relative was impaled on a stake alongside the Voortrekker hero, Piet Retief, after the infamous encounter with the Zulu king, Dingaan. And there was family blood too in the man who helped the Boers get their own back. He was Andries Pretorius, the hero of Blood River, where a laager full of Afrikaners saw off 10,000 Zulus.

The author’s grandmother kept a diary during the Anglo-Boer war when the British were at the Afrikaners’ jugular; his great-aunt corresponded lastingly with Robert Sobukwe when the leader of the Pan African Congress was imprisoned on Robben Island.

In between times, the De Villiers could claim a chief justice, a captain of the South African Rugby team and the composer of the National Anthem. The author’s own father was editor of South Africa’s main afternoon newspaper, one of the most generous-minded liberals Afrikanerdom has produced.

De Villiers’ South Africa is far from that of the sanitized school books he endured during his own boyhood in the Orange Free State. He paints a vivid picture of the early settlement around Cape Town, where his first relatives set foot. The community depended on slaves, women were in short supply, newcomers off the ships regularly called in at the company’s slave lodge that doubled as Cape Town’s semi-official brothel. Small pox came ashore with the dirty washing and decimated the indigenous Khoikhoi. The three De Villiers brothers walked 14 miles each way to their French church on Sundays. Only slowly were they integrated into the evolving Afrikaner community.

Eventually that community developed two distinct types, the settlers, ready to live under the Dutch East India Company’s rules, and the trekkers, irritable with authority, demanding the freedom to be left alone, the freedom to be ignored. Into the vast tracts of land which lay to the east and north they moved. “If a farmer could see his neighbor’s smoke on the horizon it meant the neighbor had come too close.”

By the time substantial contact was made with the black masses on the eastern borders of the Cape Province, De Villiers maintains that the preconditions for Afrikaner nationalism had been set--the rejection of what they saw as foreign rule, the notion that land in this continent of empty horizons was theirs by right, the assumption that black cultures would give way before superior white will and the belief that retreat into the interior was a way to solve some problems.

Echoes from the South African past abound throughout this thought-provoking narrative. Right wing Afrikaners are again talking of their own republic. The idea has been ridiculed but if they trekked before, might they metaphorically do so again and make a place of their own? “Rather go back barefoot over the Drakensberg!” cried the legendary Johanna Smith when the British annexed Natal and dislodged the Afrikaners once again. It’s not just the fanatics of the far right today who will say “bravo” to that.

Nowhere are the parallels with the past more chilling than in the story of the National Party in the 1930s and the assault it faced from Daniel Francis Malan and his so-called purified Nationalists. Prime Minister Barry Hertzog had fused his party with the English. He was renouncing principle for expediency, said Malan, precisely the argument Dr. Andries Treurnicht uses today against President P. W. Botha. Everyone knows that Malan and his right-wing Nationalists won the argument and in 1948 were projected into power. It was the beginning of the 40 years of the apartheid regime.

Now it’s Botha’s pragmatism against Treurnicht’s principles. The parallels are there for all to see. The politics of fear have mobilized Afrikaners before. How influential will they be in resolving South Africa’s present impasses?

The baleful influence of fear is there already, says De Villiers. The continuing arrest of black moderates is creating for the Afrikaner precisely what he fears, “a faceless black mass in whose future there will soon be no room for whites.”

But the outside world is baying for blood, fueled by press and television coverage that De Villiers believes is often stunningly ignorant. The world insists that the survival of the Afrikaner is less important than justice. After all, there are more blacks than whites. But that does not face the political fact that the Afrikaners are in charge. Sanctions, says De Villiers, will only make things worse, contributing, in Alan Paton’s phrase to “the mistaken belief that a ruined economy would lead to political paradise.”

De Villiers is no apologist for Pretoria. His father faced the Nationalists in parliament from the opposition benches and the family knew what it was to be called traitors to the Volk. But they are still Afrikaners. What the author simply asks is for some understanding as his tribesmen try to extricate themselves from the morass they have themselves created. For those in search of such understanding “White Tribe Dreaming” is the very place to start.