Modern Western culture is inordinately present-minded. Politicians are ignorant of the past. School curricula foreshorten the historical record by focusing on recent events. People lack a sense of their location in time and fail to perceive that contemporary society is constrained by its cultural as well as its biological inheritance. Many historians of the white South African establishment start their history books with a brief reference to the voyage of
Vascoda Gama round the Cape ofGood Hope in 1497-98 and then rush on to the arrival of the first white settlers in 165~. Other historians are so committed to emphasizing the role of capitalism as the molder of modern Southern Africa that they ignore the processes that shaped society before Europeans began to intrude in the region.