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The Covenant

4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 · rating details · 7,238 ratings · 208 reviews

Adventurers, scoundrels and missionaries. The best and worst of two continents carve an empire out of the vast wilderness that is to become South Africa. For hundreds of years, their rivalries and passions spill across the land. From the first Afrikaners to the powerful Zulu nation, and the missionaries who lived with both--all of them will influence and take part in the w...more

1240 pages

Published (first published January 1st 1980)

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Oct 17, 2007 Becky rated it 5 of 5 stars

My favorite Michener. The story behind South Africa. And when I say behind, that is truly Michener's style. He starts with the beginning of time, how the earth was formed, the first people to populate the area, and on to the present day. An incredible amount of information, but entertaining to read as he masterfully follows several families whose lives cross again and again over centuries.

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Apr 09, 2013 Sally Seymore rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is not a new book, but I'm glad I've found it as James Michener is a master storyteller. In history classes we were taught drips and drabs of our history, so it was interesting to see how it all fits together. This historical novel is obviously based on fact, but the author's own storyline is cleverly interwoven. It gives one a comprehensive account of how South Africa came into being, the different role players involved as well as the dynamics of this multi-cultural and multi-faceted count...more

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Mar 31, 2009 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars

It was very interesting to read this book which ended in 1980. As of 2009 we can now look back at what happened to South Africa and it is wonderful to see that of the 2 scenario's that Michener thought most likely the (relatively) bloodless one emerged. I especially enjoyed his section on South Africa under apartheid. It is a reminder to me of how stupid, brutal and ineffective it was a system. The whites now like to complain about Affirmative Action and BEE but looking at the system that we put...more

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Nov 07, 2012 Jonathan rated it 5 of 5 stars

James Michener's epic book on South-Africa. It tells the story of that land from the early settlements by the Dutch, through the expansion of it by English immigrants and others, to the South-Africa of the Apartheid age, shortly before it was eliminated.

The tumultuous and violent history of South-Africe is told with Michener's careful research and adherence to detail. The people and their struggles and the values that drove them enrich the story and add the personal touch to the sweeping changes...more

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Mar 13, 2012 Dale rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Michener's take on South Africa

Michener's true epics are always worth the time to read. The Covenant is no exception. Michener's take on South Africa and its history is an honest attempt to give some perspective on one of the more complex histories that this history teacher has encountered.

The book starts out strong (my edition was the two-volume hardback). The first volume was vintage Michener, but the second one dragged. Perhaps it was because the subject matter became more and more depressin...more

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Aug 10, 2011 Erin rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

BORING! My dad gave me this book before I left the U.S. to study in South Africa. I got a third of the way through before finally giving up. I love to read and rarely stop reading in the middle, but I found it very difficult to commit to The Covenant. The history is interesting and useful and has been a good companion to my travels in this country, but ultimately the characters are one-dimensional, and the stories seem forced, rather than developing in an organic way. The author seemed more inte...more

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Aug 17, 2007 Lys rated it 5 of 5 stars

A bible of a book - both in terms of size and contents - that retells the history of South Africa through the stories of both fictitous and historic characters. A truly ambitious endeavour in true Michener style, which had a profound effect on me when I read it at the age of 16 - and still does! The book ends in the 1980s, and I am still amazed at Michener´s insight into the shaping of post-apartheid South Africa.

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Sep 17, 2012 Paul Brogan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: south-african

This is simply an extraordinary book. It's long, to be sure, but then South African history is long, older even than Michener's arbitrary starting point of 15,000 years ago. It is also unusually complex. We don't just have one indigenous race being conquered by a civilizing one—as, say, in the USA or Australia—but a whole sequence of such events: the Bushman, Zulu, Xhosa, British, Dutch, Indians, Chinese, Germans, and French, all are treated in turn by Michener in this masterpiece.

The book was p...more

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Aug 27, 2010 Larchip rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is about the history of South Africa. Starting in 1300 B.C. to about the 1970's. I started out really liking the book and loving his characters. As the book went on it became harder to stay interested because I could not love the characters. I couldn't even try to love many of the main ones. I realized I knew little about apartheid as well. I knew about the gross inequality to the blacks but was unaware of what a police state South Africa was during those years. They so despised commun...more

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Aug 03, 2012 Johnny D rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I promised myself when I considered writing a review of this gigantic tome ...

Woah there buddy, isn't it a little redundant to be calling a tome gigantic? If it's a tome it is gigantic by its very definition, or are you saying that it's especially large, even for a tome?

Alright, so when I was considering writing a review of this tome, I made a promise to myself not to use the word epic.

Newsflash, genius, you are writing a review and you just used the word epic. Mission failed, promise to self br...more

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Dec 24, 2010 Christine Ward rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The last time I read this book was about six years ago, and I remember thinking that Michener was overly sympathetic to the Afrikaners, and thus, to their cause - apartheid. Finding that morally repugnant, I decided I was done with this book and done with Michener.
Currently, I'm experiencing a Michener-revival, and after watching "Invictus", thought I'd give this book another try.
Like all Michener books, this is incredibly well-researched, and very involved, with characters that span hundreds...more

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Dec 01, 2012 Shane rated it 4 of 5 stars

A panoramic novel, spanning centuries, where the tragic heroine is Mother South Africa, whose children are unable to live together in peace. I wish my school history books had been written like this, with the insertion of fictional characters to bring story and life into what is normally a dull narrative.

After a preface on the early Bushman who inhabited the land since pre-historic times, the story follows the lineage of the Afrikaner Van Doorn, English Saltwood and Zulu Nxumalo families, from t...more A panoramic novel, spanning centuries, where the tragic heroine is Mother South Africa, whose children are unable to live together in peace. I wish my school history books had been written like this, with the insertion of fictional characters to bring story and life into what is normally a dull narrative.

After a preface on the early Bushman who inhabited the land since pre-historic times, the story follows the lineage of the Afrikaner Van Doorn, English Saltwood and Zulu Nxumalo families, from the arrival of the first Europeans in the mid 17th century to the end of the 1970’s. Dominant members of each of these families shape and are shaped by the history of the country. There are dozens of stories within this book, tragic, dramatic, humorous and downright inhuman, all extremely interesting and well rendered. The intent of the novel in its 1100 pages seems to be to capture the history South Africa and therefore we see characters enter and exit quickly along with their stories, with only a few like Tjaart and Detleef Van Doorn, Hillary and Laura Saltwood, Jonathan and Daniel Nxumalo and the timeless General Paulus De Groot leaving larger footprints than their relatives.

The clash of white and black cultures is evident from the beginning when the Europeans land in Cape Town in the mid 17th century and migrate north as far as the boundary with Zimbabwe over generations, while the blacks in the form of the resident Hottentots, the Xhosa from across the Great Fish River, and their northern Zulu cousins separated by the Drakensburg range, all drift south seeking boundless grazing land for their herds. The Dutch Afrikaner and his nomadic cousin, the Boer, are portrayed as fierce, independent individuals, willing to fight against insurmountable odds, who in their Calvinistic faith believe that this land was given to them, by God’s covenant and that like the different colours of jelly, the various colours of race shouldn’t mix. The English, who arrive in 1805, are more interested in empire and the abolition of slavery, while the blacks simply want their land back, and the Coloureds reflect the sin of miscegenation. Mixed in with the fictional characters are real life individuals, three in particular: Shaka of the Zulu, Cecil Rhodes and Lord Kichener, men who never married, wreak havoc in the country in their misguided intention of maintaining order.

Loyalties shift between the ethnic groups during each generation as they jockey for pole position. There is even a time when the Afrikaners throw in their lot with the Germans during the two world wars of the 20th century to be rid of the British, while the Xhosa starve themselves to death under the illusion that the Russians are coming to their aid after the Crimean War. The British are no better and open concentration camps at the end of the Boer War where many women and children die of typhoid, dysentery and other diseases.

All this evolution only leads to South Africa’s darkest phase, when the Afrikaner Nationalist Party gains control in 1948 and institutes a form of Nazism called Apartheid. Horrible things happen during this time: whites have to carry Life Books with them detailing every incident in their life to protect their racial purity, Coloureds are to be deprived of their vote, blacks are given “Bantustans” (segregated homelands), transgressors of any colour are “banned” from public life indefinitely, and suspicion rules the land – for instance, the lack of freckles could imply that you are Coloured. The irony is that when racial investigations are initiated, even the “purest of the pure” are found to have some miscegenation somewhere up their family tree, making the whole issue of racial purity, in a land where early European male settlers could not find wives easily, a bit of a joke.

It’s a pity that Michener ends his narrative in 1979, with Apartheid at its worst, with scores of the best and brightest fleeing the country for places like Canada and Australia, with blacks massing for revolution over in Mozambique, and with 400 years of evolution leading the country only to its worst boiling point. God’s Covenant, indeed - Calvin would be turning in his grave!

We all know that Apartheid ended in the 1990’s and South Africa still lurches trying to find its feet under its new balance of power, and therefore this story has no ending, yet. Michener shows hope however, when he parallels Phillip Saltwood’s tireless search for diamonds, which finally yields the possibility of a find, to the search for peace in the land by its various leaders who are mining for diamonds in their fellow citizens’ souls.

As for the fate of the panoramic novel, I think it has less hope than South Africa has, given the shrinking of attention spans these days. I took nearly a month to finish this book, engrossing though it was, and am unlikely to pick up another Michener tome for a long time to come. Mich would have to drastically alter his writing strategy were he still alive today.
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Mar 20, 2007 Mara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Harrowing review of South African history, eye opening and foundational for understanding today's country but chilling and disheartening in many ways as yet another example of human's confounding ability to stigmitize and ostracize each other.

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Aug 22, 2007 Lara rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is extremely long, but it details the history of South Africa. I found it fascinating and think about it constantly to this day.

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Mar 30, 2013 Gus rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: africa

We are traveling to South Africa in Sept and everyone who has been there insisted we read this first. I used to be a big Michener fan, back when the books were first published, but never read this one, so I knew it would be good, and it is. Great historical novel with the detailed level of research you expect from JM. But, I wanted some of the character's stories to finish, and particularly in the beginning, they ended too soon for me. The last quarter of the books seemed rushed, as if he was an...more

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Mar 24, 2012 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

I used to love reading Michener's books, some of which started at the beginning of human history and then slowly made their way up to the present. One of my all time favorite books has to be his The Source, during which an archaelogical tel (hill) was excavated in Israel. An omniscient artist drew a picture of the hill, (along with all the relics discovered) from each chapter, starting with cavemen and ending with a bullet from the Israeli War of Independence. What was especially important about...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Theresa Rugel rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is me favorite book by Michener, and I own and have read all of his books. It is a compelling tale of the history and people of South Africa. It gave me a new prospective of the peoples and cultures that existed before the geo-political changes that occurred in this part of the world. This book shows the havoc the more powerful societies of the world bring to others when they try to conform them to their liking.
Michener also paints beautiful scenes of landscapes and a people living with wha...more

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Jun 07, 2009 Daniel Villines rated it 5 of 5 stars

An understatement of the truth would be to say that reading Michener is an investment in time. However, this novel is a must-read for anyone who wants to have a working understanding of the inhabitants, the history, and the culture of South Africa. From day-one to the date of publication, the people of South Africa are illuminated by consecutive stories of the period and the land. Everything is presented without bias and is brought to light by the words of Michener’s prose.

I read this book befo...more

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Feb 03, 2013 Adam Fleming rated it 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps the most interesting thing to reflect upon 32 years after Michener wrote this book: he postulated that Apartheid could continue through the year 2000. I wonder if Michener's voice, coupled with many journalistic voices around the world, wasn't part of the reason Apartheid ended so much sooner than even Michener supposed it might. The power of an epic historical novel is the ability to see how attitudes are handed down through generations, beginning with Dutch attitudes towards their colo...more

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Mar 29, 2012 ElenTikvah (Lea Coville) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction

As usual with most of Michener's books, I learned a ton! Loved the origin of "the gold of Ophir." This was my first real exposure to the Dutch Jan Compagnie & the Lords XVII. I found the overview of the interactions between the Portuguese, Dutch and English traders quite interesting.

The trekkers (both Trekboers and Voortrekkers) were an amazing group of people...'nuff said.

Prior to this reading, I had no idea of the origins of Apartheid. Unfortunately, this book was published during the mids...more

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May 01, 2012 Sunny rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: african-literature

massive book. but brilliant. i zipped through the first 600 pages in no time but the last few dragged on a bit i thought. its about the history of south africa simply. talks predominantly about how the dutch adn french adn english invaded the country their intrarivalries as well as the rivalries they had in teh past with teh zulu and xhosa (and other african tribes). if you think youve read the long walk to freedom and my tritors heart and think you know south africa then think again. this book...more

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Jul 02, 2012 Shawn Thrasher rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read almost all of The Covenant by James A. Michener - for the second time. Maybe third? Certainly the last time I read it was many, many years ago. I have to be completely honest - I didn't finish it. Skimmed to the end. The despicable characters in the last three chapters and the origins of their racism - the stripping open of South African's racist past -- were blunt and horrible. What ugly people. I needed some heroes, and these people weren't it. Small and ugly. Luckily, I have the advant...more

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Aug 30, 2011 James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction

James Michener built his reputation as a writer with his histories of contested lands: Israel (The Source), Korea (The Bridges at Toko-Ri), Hawaii, Mexico, Poland, Afghanistan (Caravans), and so on. By examining the land from the first—often before men had even come into the country—he was able to bring a perspective to these conflicts. By writing history as fiction, he communicates these perspectives in a very accessible way.
In 1978 I spent six weeks in South Africa living in Johannesburg for...more James Michener built his reputation as a writer with his histories of contested lands: Israel (The Source), Korea (The Bridges at Toko-Ri), Hawaii, Mexico, Poland, Afghanistan (Caravans), and so on. By examining the land from the first—often before men had even come into the country—he was able to bring a perspective to these conflicts. By writing history as fiction, he communicates these perspectives in a very accessible way.
In 1978 I spent six weeks in South Africa living in Johannesburg for business. So I was intrigued when two years later Michener's historical fiction about South Africa was published and I read it. The Covenant is Michener's novel of South Africa, from the time when only the nomadic San peoples (later called "Bushmen") lived there; to the coming of the Zulu tribes from the north at the same time as Dutch Huegenots settled at the southern tip of the continent; the arrival of the British colonial settlers; the passive rebellion of the Boers (Voertrekkers who left their rich colonial coast farms for the stony inner provinces) and their active rebellion (the Boer War, which the British nominally won); the clever way in which the former Boer general Oom Paul Kruger and his staff managed to wrest victory from that defeat, imposing apartheid on the nation; and the multicultural society that developed in the 80s when the fence between blanks (whites) and nie-blanks (non-whites) was finally broken.

So in The Covenant, we meet the San and learn their depth of understanding of this land and its animals; this is their land by virtue of their command of its powers. The Boer is described with his forthright assumption of the covenant of Adam and Moses; this is his land by virtue of his willingness to invest the sweat of his brow in it. And the Zulu tribes and their drive south to acquire grazing for their cattle are presented; it is their land by virtue of their blood and the blood of their children shed for it. Michener also discusses some of the motivations for British colonialism and the savage investment English-speaking settlers made in the Boer War; for these people, "British" is what their grandfather was—what they are is South African, and this is their land, too.

I enjoyed the book and learned more about the history of the land I had visited but was not impressed enough to become a Michener fan.
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Jan 10, 2009 Natasha rated it 4 of 5 stars

Even though this book took me several months to read, it wasn't because it was boring or difficult to get into. This book was compelling the whole way through and only started dragging toward the end. This was mostly because I really wanted to finish reading it before taking a trip and I didn't want to have to bring this book and a fresh one so I could conserve packing space.

The Covenant is about South Africa and is broken down into segments of time starting with the early peoples of South Afri...more

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Jan 13, 2008 Jill rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jill by: my parents!??!?!?!

This is tied for first in the "My Favourite Book" category.

It's historical fiction (my favourite), it's about South Africa, going back as far as thousands of years BC, starting with the San Bushmen of southern africa. It finishes around the Apartheid generation.

It took me a year to read it, but not because it isn't riviting and unbelievably brilliant... but rather because I moved countries and didn't have enough reading time at that point. (It's thousands of pages)

I will read this one again at s...more

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Jun 30, 2012 Rebekah rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Rebekah by: my professor

Shelves: classic, fiction

This book is VERY in depth, to say the least. I read it as an academic requirement before studying abroad in South Africa for 3.5 months. I found myself wondering how much truth there was to the story Michener was telling. Turns out, a lot of it was quite relevant and accurate. However, I was frustrated with the overwhelming amount of detail the author put into little side-stories sprinkled throughout the entire novel. Overall, very well-written, but not my type of book.

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Aug 20, 2011 Jean rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have spent a total of 2 years in South Africa. With the help of James A. Michener who provided the historical backdrop for this beautiful part of the world, I developed an enduring love for the country and its peoples. The richness of the narrative coupled with an incredibly fascinating insight into the trials of the characters kept me completely absorbed on those cold winter nights in Cape Town. I have read the book twice and a third reading must be waiting in the wings.

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Jun 15, 2012 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

South Africa, Michener style. If you know him, you know this tells the story of a part of this world from the beginning on through to modern time. He follows fictional people and families through the history of what ever place his book takes us. Hawaii, the Chesapeake Bay area, Colorado, the holy land, Texas, etc. This is fairly heavy reading and is not for everyone. But I would recommend that everyone at least try him!

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Jun 25, 2011 V. rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Michener book I've read. I like his style- the characters are secondary to the setting (at least in this book). It was exactly the thing I was looking for when I went in search of a book that could shed some light on South Africa's history. Too bad the book ended before the era of Mandela. It would have been interesting to include him (and the last 20 years) and see where the characters ended up.

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Dec 19, 2010 Sharon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction

It took me a long while to get through this book (my edition has 1,235 pages), but it was well worth it.

Michener's 1980 novel covers the history of South Africa from prehistoric times up until the late 1970s -- which means that it misses out the Mandela presidency and other events associated with the dismantling of apartheid. However, it does detail the historical events leading up to those discriminatory laws.

I was fascinated by Michener's presentation of South Africa's very rich, multi-cultura...more

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About James A. Michener

James Albert Michener is best known for his sweeping multi-generation historical fiction sagas, usually focusing on and titled after a particular geographical region. His first novel, Tales of the South Pacific , which inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Toward the end of his life, he created the Journey Prize, awarded annually for th...more

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