Out of the collapse of European supremacy in Africa has emerged a modern phenomenon - the white African. For generations, through colonialism and settlement and through apartheid in South Africa, the whites sought to preserve their ancestral links with Europe, to maintain an identity separate from the indigenous majority and to dominate them. The fall of colonialism and apartheid has, however, left some five million whites finally severed from their European roots and facing a new identity as Africans. At the same time they face an uncertain future as an ethnic minority, having surrendered the power they once held to the people they or their forebears dominated and often exploited.

The negotiated transfer of power in apartheid South Africa was the last act in the dismantling of white supremacy in the continent. While opening a new era for the whites in Africa, it closed an earlier one that contains some of the most dramatic and colorful episodes in world history. In telling the story of that era and of the making of the white Africans, the full saga of the Europeans in Africa is recounted here for the first time in a single book, necessarily in brief but in vivid description and with fresh analysis.

The story is traced through the Europeans' exploration and settlement, through their slavery and economic exploitation, their conquest and colonization, through decolonization and the liberation struggles in Kenya, Algeria, the Portuguese territories, Rhodesia and Namibia to the negotiation of democracy in South Africa. Eschewing both past falsities and recent distortions, the book seeks the truth of the European experience, whether benign or malign. Always it pursues the reasons for actions and events. It examines the present situation of the white Africans and, finally, looks at what might lie ahead for them.