Daniel Villines's Reviews > The Covenant

I first read The Covenant nearly twenty years ago. The book was recommended to me by a South African associate when I mentioned that I was traveling to South Africa for an upcoming vacation. At the time, apartheid had already died a surprisingly peaceful death and Nelson Mandela had completed a relatively quiet and apparently successful five years in office as the first president of a new government. At the time, I took the book very superficially. After all, the entire content of The Covenant had happened in the past.

With this second reading, some twenty years later, my older mind was awed by the mountain of South African history that parallels that of the United States. Both nations overran and subjugated their native inhabitants, both nations established governments that placed power exclusively in the hands of their colonists, and both governments codified their beliefs in white supremacy.

The laws in effect in both nations were similar in their desire to repress those with non-white backgrounds. The difference was that South Africa needed to be more draconian. South Africa was repressing a majority of its people while the United States focused on a minority. In both cases, however, the beliefs that drove these injustices were fueled by greed, self-serving religious interpretations, and peer-based circular reasoning.

In 1994, more than a decade after the story in The Covenant ends, reality landed in the lap of the white South African government. And to its credit, their leaders cooperated with the majority of South Africans to bring about a peaceful end to their institutional racism. Some may argue that the US did the same thing much earlier. However, the reality is that freedoms in the US allowed for the circumvention of laws by pushing minority repression underground. Racially discriminatory laws were transformed into racially biased unwritten codes of conduct that still permeate US society today.

In continuing with the parallels between the two countries, the most alarming aspect of this book is the process that the South African minority used to enact their racial agenda. As white Americans slowly diminish into a new minority, their actions look very much like those of the South African minority of the past. They are using the constructs of government to secure power including gerrymandering control of state legislatures and congressional districts, passing laws aimed at disenfranchising non-white voters, and electing nationalists leaders who display a obvious racial favoritism towards the emerging white minority.

South Africa could serve as a tangible model for the new white minority in the US to gain control of the nation. And even more concerning is that the government of the United States still possesses a built in favoritism towards the rural states where most of the new minority reside; a favoritism that is not unlike the one that existed in South Africa prior to 1994.

The Covenant, as a work of historical fiction, is very long (like this review). However, the long detailed history imparted by Michener all leads up to the book’s ending at the zenith of apartheid and the beginnings of its downfall. The book gives the reader a true sense of the beliefs and fallacies that were fermented and reaffirmed over centuries in the minds of the Afrikaners who ended up governing the nation, and leaves no room for speculation as to why apartheid came into being.