Respected historian Hermann Giliomee takes a fresh and incisive look at five influential Afrikaner leaders - from H F Verwoerd, John Vorster, PW Botha, F Van Zyl Slabbert to FW de Klerk - and how and why their plans went tragically and horrifically wrong.Giliomee offers a fresh and stimulating political history which attempts to understand why these men did what they did. Interviews with aging former leaders have brought much new information to light on the inner workings of the apartheid era and the heyday and waning of white rule.