A thoughtful portrait of Kas Maine, an African farmer, healer, and tribal patriarch, describes life for disenfranchised blacks under South African apartheid and the effects of tribal custom and tradition on his life. According to the official South African record, Kas Maine never was. This groundbreaking social history tells of a black sharecropper and his family over the last century, people who were central to the shaping of South Africa but whose personal daily stories have been blurred and lost in the sweep of laws and events. Based on years of interviews with Maine, his friends and family, and his neighbors and employers, van Onselen (an academic at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) traces the history of a strong, resilient Sotho patriarch in a white-dominated world who was driven off the land, first to a resettlement slum and then to the segregated poverty of an apartheid Bantustan. Looked at closely, it's an account not only of white oppressors and black victims, but also of shifting relationships between farmers, traders, and workers as mechanization drove thousands off the land. The documentation is detailed (nearly 100 pages of notes at the end), but it's unobtrusive. Like the image of the refugee family with household possessions piled on an ox wagon, the extraordinary particulars of one person's life tell us about displacement everywhere. Hazel Rochman Charles van Onselen is director of the institute for Advanced Social Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. Used Book in Good Condition