Volume 26, Number 19 · December 6, 1979
The War that Made South Africa
By Neal Ascherson
The Boer War
by Thomas Pakenham
Random House, 718 pp., $20.00
The Boer War of 1899-1902 was Alfred Milner's war, as surely as the Second World War was Hitler's. He himself said to Lord Roberts, the British commanding officer, 'I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late.' As Britain's proconsul at Cape Town, ruling the British colonies of the Cape and Natal, Milner was determined to provoke a war with the two independent Afrikaner republics to the north, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. He wanted, he said, to 'knock the bottom out of 'the great Afrikander nation' for ever and ever Amen.'
Review, 2557 words
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