Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa, Paperback/Martin Meredith

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 upon the world s richest deposits of diamonds and gold, setting off a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the land. The result was the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and the devastation of the Boer republics. The New Yorker calls this magisterial account of those yearsan] astute history. Meredith expertly shows how the exigencies of the diamond (and then gold) rush laid the foundation for apartheid.