[2] The text is divided into 14 chapters, each accompanied by local fauna (which sometimes feature in the events of that chapter): Michener writes largely from the point of view of the Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers, German immigrants, and French Huguenots who traveled to South Africa to practice freedom of worship in the Calvinist tradition, and other European groups, all of whom were absorbed by the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch Reformed Church.

The Afrikaners, whose Dutch ancestors first established a trading and resupply stop at Cape Town in the 17th century to service ships moving between Holland and Java, considered themselves the "New Israelites".

Their strict, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible supported them through the Great Trek of the 19th century; battles against Zulu and other Bantu tribes, who also laid claim to lands to the north; the Anglo-Boer War (when after the British won the war on the conventional battlefield and took all the main Boer towns and cities, a few Boer commandos of a few hundred Afrikaner farmers continued to hold out in isolated pockets of the veld until the cessation of hostilities, despite tens of thousands of British regulars combing the countryside in pursuit of them); and their institution of Apartheid in the 20th century, when they insisted on racial purity, separatism, and white supremacy, per the moral expectations of the God of Israel in the Old Testament and their own determination to keep political power in the hands of White Africans of European descent.

[3] Michener suggests that the Afrikaner oppression of Blacks was partly due to Dutch animosity towards the English, who assumed political and financial control of southern Africa in 1795 and fought against the traditional way of life, including slavery, pursued by Afrikaner farmers, or Boers.

Though Michener lived to see the end of Apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa, by then he was too old and ill to undertake a revision of the book and the addition of a final chapter.