Author Hermann Giliomee on books that had the biggest influence on him

In 1959, while still a student, I read a remarkable, slim book 'Ons Verantwoordelikheid', (also published in English as 'Our Responsibility'), by Henry Fagan, who had just retired as chief justice. He argued that as the economy grew in sophistication, the need for communication between groups would become ever more pressing.

Over the long run, whites would lose more than blacks as a consequence of lack of mutual understanding and common loyalty in society.

The second publication is not a book but an article. It was written by the historian Arnold Toynbee and was published in 1959 in the journal Optima. Called History's warning to Africa, it is one of the most perceptive articles ever published on South Africa.

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Toynbee argued that in Spanish and Portuguese colonies the divisions between first- and second-class citizens were not impermeable. After independence whites retained power and influence. By contrast there was a rigid racial division in the colonies founded by the Dutch and the British, with very little opportunity for the oppressed. But numbers would tell and at one point the privileged minority abruptly lost their will to oppress. This happened in India (1947) and Indonesia (1949) and it would happen in South Africa in the early 1990s.

Toynbee spelled out how radical change would be precipitated by poor people in remote regions moving to more affluent towns and cities in search of work and refuge from poverty or instability. He called this momentous development "the annihilation of distance". It was hitting South Africa first, he said, but he predicted that it would strike Europe and the US in full force within the next generation or two.

A third book that influenced me greatly was Swart Verstedeliking (1982) (black urbanisation) by Flip Smit and Jan Booysen, which spelt out the rapid urbanisation that black South Africans were experiencing. At the launch of the book Piet Cillié, a leading Afrikaner opinion-former, said the book spelled the end of the Afrikaners' dream of a land that was all their own. To read this book along with Elsa Joubert's searing novel The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (1981) was to experience the nightmare of the pass laws.

The fourth book is Donald Horowitz's A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (1991). In an earlier book Horowitz explained convincingly that conflict in a deeply divided society is about "group worth". Self-esteem is achieved largely by social recognition. A truly representative government is essential to balance the demands of property-owners and the newly enfranchised who are largely poor and without property.

Finally there is World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2002) by Amy Chua. Here the white minority has accumulated a disproportionate wealth and still dominates the market. But as experience has shown, attacking affluent minorities is the surest way to economic ruin.

I wrote my autobiography like a traveller encountering three revolutions: the cultural advance of Afrikaans, the apartheid revolution, and the ANC-led African liberation. It prompted RW Johnson to call my book a history of our times masquerading as an autobiography.

• Hermann Giliomee wrote 'The Afrikaners: Biography of a People' (2003) and most recently 'Historian: An Autobiography' (2016). Both published by Tafelberg.