The Afrikaners - John Fisher (First edition)

For nearly three hundred years the Afrikaners, white South Africans whose mother-tongue is Afrikaans, have battled to survive. In the eighteenth century they rebelled against the Dutch-born Governors who exploited them for the profit of the Dutch East India Company. In the nineteenth century, after they had withdrawn into the wilderness during the Great Trek, they clashed with the Bantu tribes who raided their farms and stole their cattle. At the turn of the twentieth century they were "Freedom Fighters" in the Boer War against John Bull's colonialist imperialism, which made them the darlings of the British Liberals and Socialists. And today, as the driving force behind South African politics, unleavened and relatively unloved, the Afrikaners are still struggling to preserve in South Africa, their only home, the political, economic, social and religious ascendancy that they have achieved since the departure of the British.

John Fisher, the author of this book, is an Oxford History scholar and Diplomatic Correspondent for a group of British newspapers. In South Africa he has visited Afrikaner homes, Afrikaner farms, Afrikaner battlefields, the tribal areas, the mountains and the deserts of South Africa. He has drawn on the libraries, the small country museums and secondhand bookshops of South Africa. He has discussed with leading South African historians the Afrikaner's own interpretations of history and also the much disputed history of the Afrikaans language. He has stayed in the Transkei, the embryonic Xhosa "State" which the South African Government is striving to create for the Xhosa people in the fertile territory between East London and Durban.

Through these pages march the Afrikaners. In them we see a blend of ruthlessness in politics and war combined with sentimentality at home, of self-sufficiency on the one hand and gnawing anxiety on the other, of other-worldliness and practical realism.

Among the Afrikaners we meet Piet Retief, who almost won Natal for the Afrikaners but who was clubbed to death while watching a Zulu dance; Paul Kruger, who defied Rhodes, Miler and even Queen Victoria; Louis Botha, who tried and failed to reconcile Boers and Britons after the war was over; Barry Hertzog, a good fighter, a good hater and a good friend; Jan Smuts, twice his friend and twice his foe; Dr. Daniel Malan and many others, including one Englishwoman, Emily Hobhouse, who, although not an Afrikaner, has been proudly claimed by the Afrikaners as one of themselves.

The Afrikaners, the first study of its kind, is a work of historical importance in so far as it interprets the Afrikaners to the English and vice versa. It places the situation in South Africa today in a new perspective and offers a fast-moving, readable and eventful story from one of the most dramatic and colourful corners of the world.