South Africa

Discovery of a Living Fossil

The coelacanth, believed to have been extinct for 70 million years, was rediscovered by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer on 22 December 1938.

No More Windfalls

Uprisings, strikes, protests and massacres in South Africa, from the Boer War to the present day. 

The Murder of Hintsa

The death and mutilation of the chief of the Xhosa in 1835 at the hands of the British was a ‘barbarous’ deed, concealed by the perpetrators in a web of lies. 

Livingstone’s Rhodesian Legacy

Many missionary hopes in Africa were disappointed, writes W.F. Rea, but Livingstone and his colleagues achieved some successes along the Zambezi river.

John Mackenzie and Southern Africa

Cecil Northcott describes how Mackenzie’s dream of a liberal empire south of the Zambezi met opposition from Cecil Rhodes and from the Boers.

Villebois-Mareuil and the Boers

The most distinguished of the three thousand foreign volunteers who fought against Britain during the Boer War, writes Roy Macnab, was a brilliantly gifted French soldier.

The Boer Rebellion of 1914

When Great Britain entered the First World War, writes N.G. Garson, memories of their struggle for independence were still fresh in the minds of many Afrikaners; rather than accept its decision to follow the Empire’s lead, they took up arms against their own government.

Buller in South Africa

Julian Symons describes how, in the year of South African crisis, 1899, Buller, once regarded as the ablest of British commanders, was stricken by a strange failure of nerve.

Trek and Counter-Trek in South Africa

The inward movement of European peoples and the southward migration of Bantu tribes supply the key to South African history and, write Edna and Frank Bradlow, to the problems that confront the country today.