BOOR REVIEW People's Struggles in Southern Africa WILFRED BURCHETT, SOUTHERN AFRICA STANDS UP, K P Bagchi, Calcutta, 1980, pp XXXVIII+320, Rs 40. SOUTHERN AFRICA STANDS UP by Wilfred SBurchett is a valuable addition to the historical record of experience of revolutionary struggles of oppressed peoples. As an account of recent history this book will be of immense help to all peoples engaged in the revolutionary struggle for a fundamental restructuring of social relations. The book deals with the time relationship between the political ferment and the launching of armed struggles in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia, on the one hand, and the general and particular conditions under which these movements had to develop, sustain and advance, on the other. In the post-World War II era, the western colonial Powers, exhausted by war and having tasted, under the impact of the rising tide of national liberation struggles in Afro-Asia and Latin America, what lay ahead if they tried to defend each colony by force of arms, endeavoured to shed off their colonies in an effort to cut their losses. This was yet another device to leave bridge-heads unhampered, wherever possible, for the return of tclcguidcd colonialism and to bind the freed colonies to their former masters by a myriad of visible and invisible threads. On occasions, de-stabilization was manoeuvred with the help of armed forces trained and put in place by the colonial power and left intact after the handing over of power. But in the Portuguese African colonies, in South Africa where a type of internal colonialism held sway, in Namibia which was illegally ruled as a colony of South Africa under the same racist laws, and in the British colony of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) where a white racist minority held illegally seized power, even a change of form was perversely resisted by an intermingling of