South African War Books

Tracing the roots of the conflict into the first half of the nineteenth century, Dr. Smith shows how the conflict between Britain and the Transvaal republic intensified after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The resulting wealth and the influx of foreign, mainly British, Uitlanders transformed what had been a poor land-locked Boer republic into the hub round which the future of South Africa was to turn.

A detailed account of Canadian involvement in South Africa's Anglo-Boer War and the impact it had on the country during the years 1899-1902 and beyond. Includes a few bandw photographs. Canadian card order no. C92-090380-0. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Explores how the Anglo-Boer War shaped South Africa s future and how it has come to be remembered in a post-apartheid South Africa.

This text brings together contributions from scholars in South African and imperial history to examine the international dimensions of the war, including a historiographical review of a century of writing on the origins of the war.

This exciting new book marks a major shift in the study of the South African War. It turns attention from the war's much debated causes onto its more neglected consequences. An international team of scholars explores the myriad legacies of the war - for South Africa, for Britain, for the Empire and beyond. The extensive introduction sets the contributions in context, and the elegant afterword offers thought-provoking reflections on their cumulative significance.

Of all the books about South Africa's 21-year 'Border War' - fought on both sides of Angola's frontier with present-day Namibia - South Africa's Border War has always been rated as among the best. A significant, full-color volume, it originally sold 31,000 copies in South Africa alone and has been out of print for decades. This version is the first re-issue of the original, written by Willem Steenkamp. Almost all the photos were taken by Al J. Venter who covered that conflict intermittently for almost two decades. Both Steenkamp and Venter have gone on to produce other works on that bitter conflict, but neither they nor anybody else has been able to match this beautiful coffee-table volume. Both agree that the book should be regarded as a tribute to a generation of fighting men, where sons often followed in the footsteps of their fathers, serving in the same units a generation apart. Though South Africa's 'Border War' started slowly with the first major clash of the conflict taking place on South West African soil at Omugulugwombashe in August 1966, hostilities escalated steadily, to the point where Moscow provided the Marxist Luanda government with all the military hardware it needed. Tens of thousands of Cuban troops were drafted into Angola after Portugal had abandoned its African territories. The conflict then entered several conventional phases that involved long-range South African armored strikes into Angola's interior and several major tank battles that eventually brought hostilities to an end. Luanda by then had already used chemical weapons on a limited scale and Pretoria was considering deploying its newly-developed nuclear arsenal. Willem Steenkamp, a seasoned war correspondent, covers all these historical issues in South Africa's Border War, as well as ancillary military strikes in several other black African countries that included Zambia and Mozambique. The book is exceptionally well illustrated, with hundreds of color as well as black-and-white photos; truly a valuable addition to recent African military history.