From the author of The Fate of Africa: A vivid, gripping
history of the turbulent years leading up to the founding of
the modern state of South Africa in 1910.
Southern Africa was once regarded as a worthless jumble of
British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a
troublesome region of little interest to the outside world.
But then prospectors chanced first upon the world's richest
deposits of diamonds, and then upon its richest deposits of
gold. What followed was a titanic struggle between the
British and the Boers for control of the land, culminating
in the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that
Britain had waged in nearly a century, and in the
devastation of the Boer republics.
Martin Meredith's magisterial account of those years
portrays the great wealth and raw power, the deceit,
corruption, and racism that lay behind Britain's
empire-building in southern Africa. Based on significant new
research and filled with atmospheric detail, it focuses on
the fascinating rivalry between diamond titan Cecil Rhodes
and Paul Kruger, the Boer leader whose only education was
the Bible, who believed the earth was flat, yet who defied
Britain's prime ministers and generals for nearly a quarter
of a century. Diamonds, Gold and War makes palpable the cost
of western greed to Africa's native peoples, and explains
the rise of the virulent Afrikaner nationalism that
eventually took hold in South Africa, with repercussions
lasting nearly a century.
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