The prize was great - not just land, but the riches it held. 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 in 1871, everything changed. Prospectors exploring a remote stretch of sun-scorched scrubland chanced upon the world’s richest deposits of diamonds. Fifteen years later, an itinerant digger stumbled across the Rocky outcrop of a gold-bearing reef on a ridge known as the Witwatersrand. Beneath lay the richest deposits of gold ever discovered.
Suddenly the region was a glittering prize. What followed was a titanic struggle fought by the British to gain supremacy throughout Southern Africa and by the Boers to preserve the independence of their republics.
In this superbly vivid and gripping history of the turbulent years leading up to the founding of the modern state of South Africa in 1910, Martin Meredith portrays the great wealth and raw power, the deceit and corruption that lay behind Britain's empire-building in Southern Africa.
