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A.B. Xuma: Autobiography and Selected Works. Edited by Peter Limb. Second Series, no. 43. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society for the Publication of Southern African Historical Documents, 2012. Pp. xxxi, 402; photographs, bibliography, index. R275.
This latest volume from the Van Riebeeck Society, which publishes scholarly editions of primary sources in this field, draws on the extensive papers of Alfred Xuma held at the University of the Witwatersrand's Cullen Library, as well as documents and published ephemera held elsewhere in South Africa and beyond. Short of going to Johannesburg, the only access to the Xuma Papers was hitherto via the microfilmed edition, held at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus, or available through research university libraries which are members of the Cooperative Africana Microform Project.
Editor Peter Limb, a historian and Africana bibliographer at Michigan State University, has produced several studies on black South African political history, including a recent biography of Nelson Mandela. Xuma is less well known, not least because he was the last African National Congress president associated with the strategy of deputations and petitions, which had very little success. His rejection of mass protests, advocated by ANC Youth League leaders such...