FRONTIERS-The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People

The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People. A standard and definitive work.

In its scale and richness the account is extraordinary, encompassing a vast range of time and characters from the initial stunned contacts between shipwrecked sailors and black indigenes to the imprisonment of the last Xhosa chiefs on barren Robben Island. Here are the first Dutch settlers camping miserably below Table Mountain, beset by weather and hunger and the terrors of the countryside: the wild frontier Boers venturing further and further into the wilderness in search of elephants to shoot and land to graze: the Xhosa and other black peoples learning to mistrust white promises, and the first small-scale wars over stolen cattle or petty insults: the British seizing the Cape as a strategic base, and then finding themselves wirh an unmanagable- and unwanted- colony on their hands. We witness the arrival of the missionaries, borne on a tide of good will and enthusiam, only to become entangled in politics: the successive colonial governors dispatched from London, almost to a man veterans of the Peninsular campaigns against Napolean and confident-at first-in their use of force: and the soldiers themselves, marching uncomfortably in full battle kit(scarlet coat, pipe-clayed straps and all) through the scorching bush.

The story belongs to the Xhosa, too, to the warriors who continued to fight after repeated defeats, and to the great chiefs from Ngqika to Dandile, whose grace and patience in the face of what must have seemed inexplicable enmity lends the tale a frankly tragic dimension.

Unclipped dustcover- xxix plus prologue/maps 1355 pages text and supporting data and photographs. Very clean copy/