Old South African history books date the beginning of the country to the arrival of the first Europeans at the tip of the African continent in 1652. The Dutch East India Company needed a refreshment station for its ships while sailing around Africa to trade with its empire in Batavia (Indonesia). However, when Jan Van Riebeek founded the settlement that was called the Cape of Good Hope, the first three dozen company employees did not raise cattle and grow fruits and vegetables on empty territory. Like European colonialists everywhere else, they encountered indigenous people who had lived on the land from time immemorial. The story of South Africa is the dispossession, resistance, liberation, and ultimate reconciliation of foreign intruders with indigenous inhabitants. When and how the colonialists themselves became indigenous—in short, whether there can be white Africans with equal rights and privileges, despite the colonial...