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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 1997
It is hard to put a single categorical label on Carmel Schrire's Digging Through Darkness. It is at once a chronicle of her personal development as an archaeologist and a critique of the colonial dialectic through which indigenous peoples and European invaders have come to be intertwined. Schrire, as a white South African woman, is a product of this process, adding texture to a skilfully written book interlaced with the kind of earthy irony often intrinsic to multi-cultural dialogue in southern Africa. The book ranges from panoramic discussions of European expansion and colonization to introspective essays on the contradictions of growing up Jewish in South Africa, ‘a minority within the larger white group ... [that] endure[d] the persistent effort of certain factions to ally with the Nazis’, while at the same time taking advantage of an entrenched, colour-coded caste system under which ‘the Jewish population cashed in the chips of their appearance’ (p. 30).