This uneven volume on the state of academic historiography in South Africa stems from a 2002 conference sponsored by the Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Eighteen chapters cover topics from school curricula and textbooks, to land restitution, the poetics of autobiography, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), museums and economics. In taking on a much wider task than reviewing notions of history attendant on the work of the TRC (as in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee [eds.], Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa [Oxford, 1998]), the book's patchiness obscures its better contributions. For the sake of coherence, the volume's introduction by Hans Erik Stolten might have more thoroughly highlighted the commonalities and differences of the contributions. Instead, Stolten grapples mainly with the once-fierce debates between liberal and revisionist historiography (prominent proponents of both feature in the volume), and declares that a kind of truce now obtains as the wind has unexpectedly gone out of the sails of both arguments.

The first of the book's three sections, ‘The Role of History in the Creation of the New South Africa’, shows the extent to which academic history in South Africa has become what contributor Martin Legassick calls ‘applied history’ – history related to policy-making. This close relationship is the source of secret pride for South African historians – they can influence the course of social events – and of the continuing fascination of the country's historiography for outsiders. In a transition from apartheid's crimes against humanity to a lauded if complex example of political tolerance, the extent of social change can only be evaluated against a historical past. Notions of transformation require historical indicators. Ironically, the new state decided (as is well chronicled by several contributors) to downgrade history in the school curriculum and shut off university and teachers' college bursaries to aspiring history teachers, starving the historical profession of new recruits. Thus, academic history became most relevant to policy at the same time that it became a social albatross. It remains to be seen if rescue efforts will succeed.

The next section addresses heritage, a newer form of historical practice brought forth by a combination of the legacy of local, ‘people's history’ productions of the 1970s and 1980s, and the power of the tourist dollar. Monuments, memorials, museums, street names: how have these most visible forms of history been marked by understandings of public participation, geography, visuality, profitability and social progress? The chapters by Martin Murray on the ‘stylized pleasure domes’ of South Africa's new capitalist playground architecture, and by Georgi Verbeeck on the roller coaster/theme park/museum to apartheid in Johannesburg, provide solid critiques of South Africa's odd, new, thoroughly Disney-like public cultures.

The final section muses on the trajectories of South African historiographies. It brings together works such as a paper of Wessel Visser's (that has been bouncing around the Internet for a while) on the nexus between Afrikaner apartheid politics and the production of anti-communist literature, and Catherine Burns's discussion of university history practice in (what one hopes will not become a popular appellation) ‘post-anti-apartheid’ South Africa. This chapter in particular speaks to the future of South African historiography, as Burns suggests that a dodge-ball type of history is alive and well at the University of KwaZulu/Natal, where the history department has nimbly disguised itself in order to survive.

There is a general lack of interest in pre-twentieth-century history in South Africa; it is striking that topics in archaeology and even narrations of events and processes before roughly 1900 are absent from this volume. Saul Dubow's excellent chapter on progressions and digressions in the ways that people have understood themselves to be South Africans is the exception. The histories discussed in the book are thus generally very contemporary; in some cases, events and processes examined are so new that the dust has barely had time to settle. South African historians should perhaps consider how close they might be coming to writing historical sociology sans theory, and be re-warned of the dangers of running aground on the shoals of anecdotalism.

The embodied discourses of race do not receive much attention in this volume; and as is often the case in South African historiography, 16 of the book's 18 contributors are white. Bernard Magubane passionately calls, once again, for history to be based on ‘African memory’ but, as Stolten points out, it is hard to see how differently focused histories of African people will be produced under prevailing circumstances. There are not very many postgraduate history students registered in South African programs, and there is a continuing lack of wider cultural capital in their language and conceptual training.

Discerning research students and specialists may be engaged by updates to older works and debates, such as Merle Lipton's review of her perspectives on the relationship between business and apartheid, or Colin Bundy's thoughts on the changes in history's institutional fortunes. Other readers may find the book's lack of focus unhelpful.