MARTIN MEREDITH

The odyssey of the Reitz family passes like a thread through the tapestry of South African history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originally Dutch-Afrikaner gentry from the Cape, the family moved to the frontier settlement of Bloemfontein and played a key role in the building of the Orange Free State. At the heart of this tale is the extraordinary career of Deneys Reitz, whose account of his adventures in the field during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), published as Commando, became a classic of irregular warfare. Martin Meredith interweaves Reitzs experiences, taken from his unpublished notebooks, with the wider story of Britains brutal suppression of Boer resistance. Concise and readable, and featuring rare photographs from the family archives, Afrikaner Odyssey is a wide-ranging portrait of a distinguished Afrikaner family whose presence is still marked on the South African landscape.

La nueva África surgida de la independencia parecía destinada a brillar en el mundo. Líderes jóvenes y entusiastas se comprometían a fomentar la educación, la sanidad, el empleo y la tierra para todos. En un mundo en pleno boom económico, las nuevas naciones afrontaban el futuro rebosantes de recursos naturales. África parecía destinada a una era de progreso sin precedentes. ¿Cómo es posible que aquel sueño se truncara de forma tan brutal? ¿Por qué el continente africano se ha convertido hoy en sinónimo de pobreza, guerra, corrupción y confl ictos tribales? Meredith nos sumerge en los últimos cincuenta años de historia africana en busca de las raíces del problema, en un estudio tan apasionado como exhaustivo que, sin olvidar la responsabilidad de las potencias occidentales, también señala a las elites corruptas surgidas de la propia África. Y vemos el papel decisivo de las grandes personalidades, desde líderes comprometidos con su pueblo como Senghor en Senegal o Mandela en Sudáfrica hasta los controvertidos guías carismáticos como Nasser, Mugabe o Lumumba. Un libro imprescindible no sólo para comprender la realidad de África y su actual situación, sino también para plantear el urgente y necesario debate sobre su futuro.

Martin Meredith documents the remarkable life of Bram Fischer in his biography Fischers Choice. Fischer was born into an aristocratic Afrikaans family but became one of South Africas leading revolutionaries. Regarded in his youth as having a brilliant career ahead of him, he rebelled not only against the apartheid system but also against his own Afrikaner people. As a defence lawyer, Fischer managed to save Mandela from the death penalty demanded by state prosecutors for his sabotage activities. He played a remarkable role in the underground movement aimed at overthrowing the government. To the very last, even when all the other conspirators had been arrested or fled into exile, Fischer held out, sought for months by the security police. His single-handed efforts ended inevitably in failure. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was cast into solitary confinement, the government continued to regard him as a potentially dangerous influence even when he was dying of cancer, refusing all appeals to release him until the last few weeks of his life. Set against the dramatic background of two massive historical struggles, one by the Afrikaans, the other by the Africans, Fischers life contains all the ingredients of a political thriller.

Yet elephant history has been dominated by periods of brutality and persecution, used in gladiatorial combat, as weapons of war (most notably by Hannibal) and for their ivory, prized since ancient times as a symbol of wealth and status. As the ivory trade continued there are now only five countries with sizeable elephant populations, where a few hundred years ago there were forty-six before the European hunters arrived.|Acclaimed African expert Martin Meredith has written the first full biography of the elephant - wide-ranging, moving and never less than fascinating in his travels through the history and present of Nature s great masterpiece (John Donne).

As a narrative of Africa's political trajectory since independence, this book is hard to beat... Elegantly written as well as unerringly accurate' Financial Times'Meredith has given a spectacularly clear view of the African political jungle' Spectator'You cannot even begin to understand contemporary African politics if you have not read this fascinating book' Bob GeldofAfrica is forever on our TV screens, but the bad-news stories (famine, genocide, corruption) massively outweigh the good (South Africa). Ever since the process of de-colonialisation began in the mid-1950s, and arguably before, the continent has appeared to be stuck in a process of irreversible decline. Constant war, improper use of natural resources and misappropriation of revenues and aid monies contribute to an impression of a continent beyond hope.How did we get here? What, if anything, is to be done? Fully revised and updated and weaving together the key stories and characters of the last sixty years into a stunningly compelling and coherent narrative, Martin Meredith has produced the definitive history of how European ideas of how to organise 10,000 different ethnic groups has led to what Tony Blair described as the 'scar on the conscience of the world'. Authoritative, provocative and consistently fascinating, this is the seminal book on one of the most important issues facing the West today.