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

A long silence, perhaps mistaken for slagging effort or the allowance of creeping ignorance was, instead, the wages of working through the latest tome of Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa.

True to it's titling, the focus is on the white presence in what is now South Africa -- and the countries of Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Botswana -- from the mid nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Boer War, with the narrative generally emphasizing the "Great Men" in shaping the development of the Union. It is, not surprisingly, almost universally men -- though interestingly, Olive Schreiner is a recurring figure which sparked memories of reading her Trooper Peter Halket as a photocopied packet for a class early in my graduate career, and being quite struck by the power of the book, much moreso than her Story of an African Farm; the other woman to recur in the latter pages is Princess Catherine Radziwill, as Cecil Rhodes's late-life spook... er... biographer -- or alternately, "stalker", as the Wikipedia entry not incorrectly asserts.

Meredith has been amazingly prolific in recent years: in addition to Diamonds, Gold, and War, he has revised and republished an earlier work on Zimbabwe as Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe (read) and published the sprawling and well-received The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (not read, but on the pile).

Janet Maslin in the Times considers Meredith's writing to be more "perfunctory" than in The Fate of Africa -- I'm not entirely sure what she means by that. Regardless -- and despite the fact that I wish there were more than merely perfunctory coverage of the non-white role in the shaping of the southern African states (but I suppose that is wishing for something that the book never purports to be -- and this particular "lack" is reflective of the way that these communities were essentially treated, both rhetorically and in law and practice) -- Meredith provides a compelling picture of the way in which we stumble, bumble, bulldoze, cajole, bribe, war, and otherwise cobble together countries.

Yup, we just sort of throw these things together...