In his monumental ''Frontiers,'' Noel Mostert, a white South-African author residing in Tangier, has self-administered a cathartic cure for a kind of disorder only traditional doctors or herbalists may remedy: the angst of exile. Exacerbated here by the agony of abiding Afrikaner affection for Africa, this angst is coupled with the carnage that has sealed Afrikaner claims to it. But Mostert makes clear that there is ample enough blame to go around.
In classic cadences, ''Frontiers'' ushers us through spectacular visions of the Xhosa heartland, one of the linguistic subdivisions of the Nguni subgroup of the Southern Bantu-speaking peoples who, with their Zulu-speaking counterparts, played prominent roles in the 19th Century history of South Africa. Dispossessed and outdone by both internal and external forces, Xhosa- speakers faced an irruptive settler presence with apocalyptic, millennarian weapons. Against a background of ceaseless imperial aggression, they heeded the alarm of perennial prophecy in the form of one Nongqawuse, a Xhosa maiden who dreamed she foresaw a way out of their dilemma.
But this was the end of a process whose antecedents lay in the 17th and early 19th Centuries, when Holland and Britain respectively sought to reconfigure South Africa in strategies that eventually led to white migration. Of the two, Britain`s was much the more damaging.
Clashes of culture, ethics, beliefs and essential goals led to a poignant juxtaposition: subjugation of many African peoples set against a phoenix-like prophecy of a permanent settler presence. But the drama in which outwardly separate racial and societal destinies became inextricably bound is Mostert`s secondary concern. More evident is the subtle manner in which this son of the Huguenot diaspora traces his clan`s forebears to the earliest era of Cape society.
Mostert tells a story well and achieves an admirable degree of balance in the presentation, having grounded himself in rich primary sources. The result fuses Michener with Michelet (the great 19th Century historian of France) and salves Mostert`s own sestiger conscience-sestigers (sixties) being the term for Afrikaner and Anglo-South Africans who sought to escape their baleful homeland during the 1960s.
Since that time, and especially as the anti-apartheid opposition grew in strength and authority in the mid- to late-1980s, the stance of the sestiger has seemed increasingly mainstream in the white emigre community, its ideological center moving ever more leftward as a kind of corrective to traditional right-wing politics. Within the same two decades South African historiography has undergone a revolution of revision, at home and abroad. Forced to come to terms with the struggles of the black majority, and unwilling to suffer consignment to perennial pariahdom, historians have started to think differently.
Mostert had to be touched by all this; his spiritual odyssey resembles theirs. And thus, though he left home in 1947, ''Frontiers'' is a sestiger work. On a canvas as capacious as the veld itself, in strokes as broad and majestic as those routinely reserved for the movies, it strives to tell a story of how settlers and the indigenous population collide, cohabit, conflict and cooperate.
To be sure, difficulties abound here. Mostert purports to relate contrasting chronicles of ''conquering'' and ''conquered'' nations in one narrative, seeking to erect a level platform from which each has its say. But even as an honest broker he retains specific advantages that remind us that this playing field has never been an even one.
The settlers were at once repelled and fascinated by the indigenous residents of the Western Cape, for cultural reasons Mostert graphically illustrates. This oscillation between abhorrence and reverence parallels the feeling the Dutch and later their English antagonists held for the land itself, terrain as alluring and unforgiving as the siren`s haunting song. Frontier realities created a ruthless, raw, rebellious run of renegades who grudgingly admired their Xhosa predecessors in what Boers saw as their Promised Land, fighting them and one another at every turn.
The bulk of the four parts of ''Frontiers'' covers in unsparingly excruciating detail those campaigns that led to the decay of the Xhosa and an apocalyptic cataclysm in 1857, situating this against the background of Anglo- Boer cultural warfare. It is an epic of perfidy and genocide very like the westward expansion of Manifest Destiny in North America, which was undertaken with equivalent zeal.
(farmers) were Africanized by their testy new frontier environment. Boers would regularly trek to the interior, seasonally or permanently. Miscegenation was rife, giving rise to ''Coloured'' people of mixed race and giving the lie to Afrikaner pretense of ethnic purity.
Mostert`s treatment of the Xhosa is reverential but unsentimental. He portrays their cosmology, mores, social organization, political and spiritual ideas, as well as memorable leading figures in human terms.
Although their roots undoubtedly reach back into the far more distant past, modern Xhosa history begins in the 18th Century, with the passing of Tshiwo, great-great-great grandfather of Ngqika. This precipitated a succession crisis that rapidly escalated into civil war. Mdange, uncle and regent of Tshiwo`s designated heir, Phalo, won it. Later, within Phalo`s rule, marital indiscretion caused another schism. The Xhosa split into three, following Phalo or his sons Gcaleka and Rarabe. By the 1770s five Xhosa polities lay in the path of the Boer colonists. A turf battle waged by these parties was the first Xhosa frontier war.
What began as a simple conflict over land was exacerbated by the entry onto a South African stage of new European geopolitical factors. The Dutch East India Company, supporters of limited colonization in the 1600s, were virtually bankrupt by the late 1700s. The Netherlands, a sometime ally and frequent rival of Britain in the previous century, was confronted, like the rest of Europe, by Napoleon, and Britain used this as an excuse to undertake a limited occupation of the Cape. A fragile Batavian Republic was briefly allowed to resume Dutch control, before a second and much more thorough British return in the early 1800s.
Those ostensibly external forces intensified local conflict, as Boer settlers were joined by uitlanders, colonists coming under British aegis. This led to a shaky alliance between Boer and ''Briton'' and a struggle over how to deal with ''Natives,'' increasingly regarded as a problem. It took an entire century, nine frontier wars, two Anglo-Boer wars and a mineral revolution to resolve each of these vexing questions. In settler eyes, the Xhosa were obstacles to their endeavor. What happened between them set the tone for what South Africa is.
''Frontiers'' would be a courageous work for anyone to write at any time, but it is a most necessary one to read at this moment, as apartheid begins its death-although, like all tyrannies, its demise could take decades. Noel Mostert provides a mirror of the last hundred years and serves as a missal to help us in mourning the victims of the past five centuries.