About the Author

Martin Legassick is an Emeritus Professor in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape, where he lectured between 1992 and 2005. He studied at the universities of Oxford, Ghana, and California, Los Angeles, obtaining his PhD at the latter university in 1969. He lectured at the universities of Santa Barbara in California, Sussex and Warwick in Britain before resigning to full-time work on the liberation of South Africa between 1981 and 1991. He has written extensively on South African history, from the pre-colonial period to the present day.