BOOK REVIEW
Martin Meredith: “Diamonds, Gold and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa”
By Martin Rubin, Special to The LA Times
January 1, 2008

THE story of how the discovery of diamonds and then of gold transformed the agrarian backwater of South Africa has been told many times before, but never with more vividness, clarity and verve than in the engrossing “Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa” by Martin Meredith.

Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War (book cover) Filled with colorful characters and fascinating events, this book has an energy and authority that will engage readers who want to find out about this corner of history. Even those who are more conversant, like this reviewer who has been reading about this subject for 50 years, will find a freshness in this illuminating historiographical enterprise.

When Britain occupied the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa during the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the 19th century, there was a small settler population of mixed Dutch and French Huguenot descent there since the 17th century. These Afrikaners — the Dutch word for African — continued to speak Dutch and run their fruit and wine farms with slaves of mixed African, Asian and European extraction.

But when slavery became illegal in the British Empire in 1834, many, but not all, Afrikaners moved to the interior of South Africa beyond the reach of British rule. By the early 1850s, they had founded two isolated nations, the South African Republic (also known as the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. These were oligarchies run along democratic lines for the white populations: blacks and those of mixed race had no political rights, unlike in the British-ruled parts of South Africa where there was a colorblind suffrage based on property and education and small but significant numbers of nonwhite voters. Under pressure from Britain, though, there was no actual slavery in the two Boer (the Dutch name for farmer) republics.

Britain was happy to maintain this status quo as long as there was nothing it wanted in the Boer territories. But as Meredith pithily puts it:

“Then, in 1871, prospectors exploring a remote area of sun-scorched scrubland in Griqualand, just outside the Cape [Colony]’s borders, discovered the world’s richest deposits of diamonds. Britain promptly snatched the territory from the Orange Free State. Fifteen years later, an itinerant English digger . . . stumbled across the rocky outcrop of a gold-bearing reef on a ridge named by Transvaal farmers as the Witwatersrand [Reef of White Waters]. Beneath the reef lay the richest deposits of gold ever discovered. The gold strike transformed the Transvaal from an impoverished rural republic into a glittering prize. . . .

—To read the full review in the LA Times, click here.