Anne Boni: Welcome and thanks for joining us today. This is part of the Center for the Book's "Books and Beyond" author series, and I'm Anne Boni, standing in for John Cole, the director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Our mission is to promote books, reading, libraries and literacy, and John is in Moscow this week, one of an eight-person delegation from the Library of Congress taking part in the third Russian Book Festival. The book festival there is hosted by Mrs. Putin. The Russian Festival, Biblioblatt, comes on the heels of the seventh U.S. National Book Festival, held September 29th on the National Mall and all previous attendance records were broken. We estimated the crowd at over 120,000 people enjoying the festivities on a beautiful, sunny fall day. You couldn't ask for a better time. The Center for the Book plays a major role in the Book Festival, coordinating author selection and managing the Pavilion of the States. Webcasts of the author talks from all seven Book Festivals can be seen on the Library's Web site at www.loc.gov. And for that matter, all of these programs can be seen on the Library's Web site. Author talks taped in the History and Biography Pavilion are shown periodically on CSPAN, too. It's always a guess of when. Next year's festival is tentatively scheduled for September 20, so mark your calendars. We hope to keep that date. Today's renowned historian and journalist, Martin Meredith, will discuss his new book, Diamonds, Gold and War: The British, the Boers and the Making of South Africa. The program is co-sponsored by the Library of Congress's African section in the African and Middle Eastern division. The program is being taped for later viewing. We look forward to your questions following the presentation; however, if you do ask a question, we take that as permission for us to tape that question also. Mr. Meredith will also be signing his book following the program. There will be book sales, there's a 20 percent discount today, and the Library of Congress sales staff is out there ready to take your orders, charge, cash, they'll take anything. Now here to introduce our speaker is Laverne Page, Reference Specialist in the African section. Laverne? Laverne Page: Thank you, Anne. It's really a pleasure to be here today and to see all of you here. We at the Library of Congress love to have programs like this; we love to hear from writers. We have a very, very good collection, a vast collection, of publications on South Africa, and we really welcome this opportunity to share one of the publications that we have, to hear from one of the writers. And, so, I'm bringing greetings from the African and Middle Eastern Division. I have the privilege of introducing our speaker, Mr. Martin Meredith, who is a scholar, a prolific writer. He has a vivid eye and writes in a very lively and accessible manner, and so reading history is enjoyable. I noted that many of the biographies appear to be a bit sparse. They only say that he's a journalist, biographer and historian. But, there's so much more. Just a few minutes ago, someone approached us outside, right outside the auditorium, and he wanted to talk about Guantanamo Bay and the British system of imprisonment. And, so I was thinking, "This is history, but this book still has relevance today." Mr. Meredith has traveled extensively in Africa for over 40 years, and he obviously has a very great understanding of that continent. We have 11 of his books here in the collection, biographies of Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe, and we have -- I think The Fate of Africa is probably one of the more well-known of his books, so we're very, very pleased and privileged to have Mr. Meredith speak to us today. Martin Meredith: Well, thank you for those kind words. Good afternoon, everyone. In some ways, this book might appear to be about a rather remote place and time. It takes place over 100 years ago, in a continent which most Westerners regard as being rather distant and difficult to understand, complicated, always seemingly involved in violence. But the subject matter of this book does have, indeed, modern relevance. It is a story essentially of great wealth, raw power, deceit and corruption. Now, those are kind of pretty staple diets of human activity. There are all kinds of images which still reflect on, to the sort of modern world, that come from the distant past. The book is about ambitious individuals who gain great wealth and use it to exercise political power. It's also about the way in which empires or governments with huge might behind them use that might to enforce their will around the world. Those are just two examples, as it were, of where this struggle that took place in the past 100 years ago in South Africa has resonances with what goes on in modern times. I'm sometimes personally inclined to believe that human nature actually doesn't move on at all, that we are all kind of consumed by the same emotions and ambitions and desires and hatreds and so on. What does change is just the technology, which is why I find that even history from the past is really quite interesting, because you find, again, it's reflections of what goes on in modern times exist exactly the same as they did 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 300 years ago. In my travels around Africa over the past 40 years, as a foreign correspondent and as an independent writer, I've often been struck by the long-term repercussions that come from actions and decisions that were made in the past and still reverberate today. We'll come across those as I go on, but one obvious example is the shape of modern Africa today. This is a bit of a diversion from the book, but you'll see why I'm drawing attention to it. The origins of almost all modern African states lie in the scramble for Africa conducted by European powers at the end of the 19th century. It was at meetings in Berlin, Paris, London and other European capitals that European politicians decided how to carve up the African continent. Their knowledge of Africa at the time was minimal, they actually had no idea of what they were doing. The maps that they used were largely inaccurate. When marking out the boundaries of their new territories, European negotiators frequently resorted to just drawling a straight line on the map, which is why, if you look at the map of Africa, there are just so many straight lines. They didn't actually know where these places were, they just drew a line on the map, sometimes latitude, sometimes longitude. There are some states which have a nice little kind of circle around, just a geometric circle just to incidicate what European negotiators thought was desirable to do. Nearly one half, in fact, of all the borders of Africa are just artificial lines. The result was that nations, or people or tribes were split apart, in some cases. In other cases, they were amalgamated. You've got rival groups, which suddenly found themselves adjacent in the same colony. Some states were created, the Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, which crossed this great divide between the Sahara Region, the Sahel as it is called, between the deserts of North Africa and the tropical countries of equatorial Africa. The result today is that there is this fault line which runs across Africa. Generating any amount of kind of conflict, you get bad governments willing to use that source of instability for their own purposes. You will get endless kind of conflicts. You can see that happening in Sudan except that it's obviously much more complicated than that. You can see it happening in Chad, it has happened in Nigeria, and so on. Today's African leaders, therefore, have to kind of cope with all these stresses and strains. Now, in the case of South Africa, South Africa, too, is an artificial state, it was constructed by the British in the early 20th century. Not by drawing lines on a map, as in the case of most other African states, but by amalgamating an assortment of British colonies and Boer Republics the British had conquered. What prompted the British to provoke a war of conquest against kind of the Boer colonies was the discovery of the world's greatest deposits of gold and, indeed, South Africa still has the world's greatest deposits of gold. So far, they've mined about 40,000 tons, and there is still another 40,000 tons lying under the surface. Britain provoked this war, as many wars are kind of provoked or started, assuming it will be a short war. It was called a "tea time" war. It would be all over by Christmas. Indeed, even today, British politicians, the British prime minister talks about getting the troops, or some troops, back from Iraq by Christmas. It's kind of one of those messages that politicians endlessly resort to if they want to kind of spread around the notion that somehow conflicts can easily be resolved, and we are in control and we know what to do. The war the British provoked lasted for two and a half years. It created an enormous wave of anger and hatred, which continued for generation after generation, and it left the two Boer Republics, which the Boers conquered, decimated. The British were faced with guerrilla warfare. They were great at sort of mobilizing regular armed forces and so on and they soon took control of the Boer capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria and then they were supposedly in charge, but the Boers didn't play the same game. They went and they started kind of raiding depots and sabotaging railway lines and blowing up bridges and so on, defying the British. The British, then, didn't quite know what to do. They hadn't been faced with this kind of warfare before, and what they did is they resorted to "scorched earth" tactics. That is, they went around burning down thousands, quite literally thousands, of homesteads raising whole villages to the ground, rounding out women and children and putting them in what they called British concentration camps. Well, they weren't British concentration camps, they were concentration camps, and generally, laying waste on an appalling scale. Vast herds of cattle, which was the mainstay of the economy those days, were actually destroyed to avoid getting into the hands and therefore sustaining the guerrilla effort. This resulted in an enormous amount of anger, which, in some ways, has only relatively recently been resolved in the 1990s. You can trace the origins of modern Africana nationalism back to the hatred that the British generated against them as a result of the Anglo-Boer War. What this book, Diamonds, Gold and War, sets out to do is to describe the 40-year period that led up to the founding of the modern state of South Africa. 1910 is therefore coming up to kind of an anniversary. It's a useful point at which to break off, as it were, the subject of the making of South Africa. There's also a point, there's an epilogue in the book, which explains how you get from 1910 basically to 1994, which is when the first democratic elections were held and when, in a sense, the black struggle for power, which had lasted for 80 years or so, came to an end. What this struggle is about, being these titanic struggles going on for a long time, is really between two white factions, if you'd like, the British and the Boers, for struggle for, in the British case, they wanted supremacy in South Africa, over the whole of what was to become South Africa, against the Boers who were desperate and determined to preserve the independence of their republics. What I do in the book is to look in particular at two characters, which sort of provide a backbone of the book. It's always useful instead of writing, I find, abstract history, or just a political history, is to look for the characters that are involved. A previous book I wrote, The Fate of Africa, did much the same thing by concentrating on African leaders and following their careers and the course of the history of the countries that they ran as a way of explaining the modern state of Africa. I did much the same here: the two characters I chose, one was Cecil Rhodes, who was the son of an English clergyman born and brought up in England, who was sent abroad by his family as many, sort of, junior sons were sent abroad to seek his fortune in a cotton-farming venture in Natal, which was then a separate British colony. He was a strange, eccentric man, but he had great perseverance. He abandoned cotton farming and headed for the diamond mines. The diamond mines, the first diamond mines, were found in1870. By 1871, it was clear that this was a major discovery and, in fact, it's the biggest discovery of diamonds that have ever occurred. After a period of 15 years or so, he managed to climb to the top of the pile, more or less. The diamond mines were rough and raucous places. A lot of people from 49ers, from California, pitched up there. People pitched up from all over the world, Australian gold diggers, people from the back streets of London and so on. So you have these kind of rough mining settlements, which eventually settle down to some fairly steady mining. Rhodes was one of the founders of a monopoly of diamond mining. The problem about diamond mining is that the more you produce, the lower the price goes; therefore, it becomes unprofitable to mine them. Rhodes and various colleagues organized and gained control of a monopoly. It was called DeBeers and the name still exists; it's not a monopoly anymore, but hugely influential and important in the development of South African history. Having acquired great wealth from the diamond mines, Rhodes then developed political ambitions, and his political ambitions were, on the whole, pretty immature. He saw and believed, like many Englishman, young Englishman, at the time, had a great belief in the virtues of the British Empire, and believed that supporting the course of Empire, as well as his own business interest, was the only credible thing to do in life. He cultivated political links in Cape Colony, as it then was, became prime minister at the age of 37, and then set about extending his range of activity further to the North, across the Limpopo River, as it was. He set his sights on acquiring two African territories, one called Matabeleland another called Mashonaland, gained control of those mainly by -- he threw a war of conquest. The British government allowed him to set up his own private-chartered company with his own private army. Again, that was two territories won through a war of conquest. Subsequently, both territories were incorporated and subsequently named as Rhodesia, after Cecil Rhodes, and, indeed, the consequences of that continued more or less until at least 1980, again, after another kind of war against white supremacy. It's within kind of all our lifetime, in a way, the consequence of the British government allowing Rhodes to set up his own chartered company and his own private army and take control of these territories. That continued all the way through the 1970s, when there was an African liberation, up until the point of where the whites basically kind of gave up and handed over control to kind of the black rulers. That's Cecil Rhodes' kind of history, briefly. The other person that I concentrated on was Paul Kruger, who was a very remarkable man, much maligned by the British. Indeed, one of the interests I've always had in Kruger is that quite clearly, modern history, even in this day and age, depicts Kruger as a sort of a cartoon character, somebody who was a backward, back felt farmer, ill-educated, stubborn, greedy, manipulative, you name it. The British sort of thought it all up. One of the first British [ unintelligible ] ever to report on Paul Kruger, a British in Pretoria, this was at the time when Kruger was the president, described him and went on at some length in some cable about how ugly he was. The propaganda, in a sense, against Kruger started at a very early time and it went on for a very long time. He was, in fact, extremely conservative. He was a sort of religious, dogmatic almost, fanatic. He came from an extreme rightwing, or what would now be called kind of rightwing, church and, indeed, he helped found the church faction which he then kind of subsequently joined. He was ill-educated in that he had three months of education by an itinerant kind of teacher, and that was the limit of his formal education. The only book he ever read was the Bible, but he knew large chunks of it by heart. And indeed, he ran the government very often, and tried to win our political arguments and so on, by constantly referring to the Bible as the source of all legitimacy. He would explain everything in terms of, even warfare and so on, the solution to all the kind of conflicts and difficulties that went on could be found in the Bible. So you have these two kind of -- I should add that, in fact, he was an expert hunter and horseman and guerrilla fighter, who rose to be the Commandant-General of the Transvaal, and who fought in eight campaigns against African chieftains. He was, therefore, a master of the frontier arts except, from the British point of view, he was this backward, ignorant man whom the British didn't like in the first place. But, when he happened to sit in the state that happened to find the gold, the richest sources of gold, the British had, in a sense, even more reason to paint him in rather negative terms. So, these two kinds of characters, one a kind of an arch-capitalist, ruthless, domineering, using people endlessly with no, as he admitted, with no kind of particular principles saw money not just as a way of hoarding it, but as a way to achieve wider ambitions. There's a telling tale that he met another kind of grand imperial figure in South Africa at the time, a man called General Gordon, who was a sort of war hero and involved in putting down the rebellion in China. As a reward, the Chinese offered him roomfuls of gold. Now, Gordon was also a kind of rather straight laced, rightwing religious kind of fanatic, and he turned down the offer of the roomfuls of gold. When Rhodes and Gordon were talking one day in the mountains of Basutuland and Gordon was telling Rhodes of this particular story about how he put down the rebellion and was offered all these roomfuls of gold. Rhodes said, "Well, what did you do?" and Gordon said, "Well of course I turned it down. I couldn't possibly accept. Why, what would you have done?" Rhodes said, "Well, I would have grabbed it. I mean, what's the point of having grand ambitions and grand schemes if you don't have the money to achieve them?" So, there are these two kind of opposing characters: Rhodes, the prime minister of Cape Colony, the chairman of De Beers, the managing director of what was called the British South Africa Company, which was a chartered company that the British government allowed Rhodes to set up Rhodesia with, versus this kind of extreme conservative Boer father figure sitting on top of the world's greatest resources of wealth, basically. I mean, these, the goldmines were phenomenal. And what happened? Well, Rhodes as when he was Prime Minister, plotted to overthrow Kruger. And he did this with the connivance of British ministers. A lot of this was covered up for generations. I mean, indeed, one of the key people involved being interviewed about 30 years subsequently was explaining that it had to be covered up because otherwise the honor of the British Empire would be defaced. A lot of the secrets, the maneuvers, the real role people play in this great titanic struggle have taken an awfully long time to come out. And what happens is that all kinds of theories and notions are allowed to develop and gain popular credibility and then sort of become deeply embedded in the British, or indeed any national kind of psyche until -- and it's very, very difficult to overturn these. You've got to chip away and provide convincing evidence, and even then, the original images last there for an awful long time. If you were to ask the average person in Britain today about Paul Kruger, well they probably know that there was some kind of wildlife park named after him, but otherwise that he would be this kind of rather fat man wearing a stovepipe hat and kind of was ignorant and stupid. And it still exists today. Anyway, the plot that Rhodes launched when he was Prime Minister to overthrow Kruger was a farce. A great deal of it was kind of covered up. But Rhodes himself had to accept responsibility because the trail led more or less down to his doorstep. It's one of his chief aids who was instrumental in organizing an armed invasion of the transferal, and it was pretty obvious where the orders came from. So Rhodes had to resign as Prime Minister, but the British kind of -- because British ministers were involved, they were careful not to punish him severely because otherwise Rhodes was then going to expose the role that British ministers had played, so you had a sort of mutual blackmail going on here where nobody was particularly interested in uncovering it. The problem for the British still kind of remained. They still -- the British that is -- still wanted to get their hands on the gold fields. And essentially what happened is that they organized a war to get a hold of the gold fields. They, as their correspondents revealed, they kept on saying, "We don't really have an excuse for a war. We need agitation here," or "Let's think of some kind of dispute here. How can we manipulate events so that we can actually then have a war, and it will only be a short war, and it'll only be a short war. It'll be over by Christmas." And that's essentially kind of what the British did. Now, this in a sense goes back to where I started from, which was that this war had horrific consequences for the Boer populations of the [ unintelligible ] and the Orange Free State. It ignited Africana nationalism, which has sort of emerged really in the 1870s, but was in fits and starts and didn't really have any kind of great motor behind it. But as a result of this devastation, and indeed as a result of British policies in the post-war era, the main architect of the war was a man called Sir Alfred Milner, who was a British high commissioner in South Africa, and his aim as he said in private letter, was to knock the bottom out of the great Africana nation forever and ever amen. That's what his policy was. And in a sense he succeeded in doing it. But of course it didn't work. What it actually did was almost the opposite. It ignited Africana nationalism. The concentration camps that the British set up were so badly run -- there was no particularly evil intent, it was just mainly kind of military incompetence. But 26,000 women and children died in those concentration camps, mainly from disease and malnutrition, most of them under the age of 16. And, those kind of legacies last for a very, very long time, particularly if the communities involved are intent on ensuring that they last. The basis on which South Africa was founded was in a sense quite troublesome. But, at the end of it all, there were four British colonies, two of them conquered, the Cape Colony and Natal, and the two other British colonies, the Chancefire and the Orange River Colony, the Orange Free State, and they were amalgamated. The British having spent this kind of enormous amount of money and costs, the British lost 22,000 men in lines too, military lines. Having spent this enormous effort, the British thought, "Well, the only way we can do it is to amalgamate more and make them into a union of South Africa." That's where the modern origins of South Africa lie, in 1910. And, it was all done with a certain amount of kind of good will, both with Africana leaders and the kind of British colonial leaders at the time got on kind of fairly well. Basically, the resentment of British rule, of being part of the British empire rather then being part of an independent Boer republic lingered on, and, indeed, as a foreign correspondent in my life I've interviewed women who can graphically describe to me their memories of being six years old and in a concentration camp with people dying like flies with dysentery around them. The point is to -- there are various kind of points behind this book, but one is that I've written a history from 1910 onwards to the apartheid era. It's called "In the Name of Apartheid," which explains the other conflict which then broke out between white and black. In this particular book, I've looked at the conflict between white and white, and it's true, in a sense, although there are various events in which blacks feature, it is essentially a study of these two white groups striving for supremacy. The way in which it was all prompted by the discovery of diamonds and gold, if there had been no diamonds and gold, there would have been no war. There would have been no point in having a war. So that's, in a sense, why the books called Diamonds, Gold and War, and, in a very kind of broad brushstroke, that's what the book is about. Thank you. [ applause ] Ok, we're open for questions. If anybody has any questions, would you just summarize them and -- Martin Meredith: Yes, yes, I'll try. Sir. Male Speaker: Could you tell me where you did most of your research? In British museums, in South African archives, in other places, in the Library of Congress, archives in London, talk about -- Martin Meredith: How I went about it? Well, in a sense, sorry, the question was where did I do the research. I spent on and off kind of 40 years wandering around Southern Africa and so a lot of, if you like, background influences come from that. Of books that I've read, of episodes that I've researched and so on. In terms of doing the research for the book, most of it was done in Oxford. It is indeed, there is a place, indeed to Oxford University's -- Oxford University itself has benefited greatly from Rhodes' own activities and, indeed, your own former President, Bill Clinton, is a former Rhodes scholar. Rhodes having made all this money, then left it to all kinds of what he thought would be good causes and so on, one of the things he wanted to do was to encourage education as he saw it, and he went about it in a rather bizarre way. One of the consequences of that was he left huge sums of money to the Rhodes Foundation, which sponsors Rhodes fellows at Oxford University. There is a Rhodes house in Oxford, and a lot of original material about Rhodes can be found in Oxford. I'm a former research fellow at Oxford, so it sort of fits in with that. The other places where I did the research were the South African archives both in Capetown and in Pretoria. Otherwise, there is, in fact, there is a very, very good range of material that has already been published. What I've done with this book is not to - most of the sort of materials is in the sort of public domain and very accessible. There have been all kinds of rather general history of South Africa, some of which have been very good. There have been all kinds of people who have looked at the diamond mines, they've looked at the gold mines, they've looked at the growth of apartheid, they've looked at the origins of the Boer War or they've describe a narrative of the Boer War. People have tended to specialize in certain areas, if you like, South African history. What I saw an opportunity to do, in a sense, to join up the docks, therefore using all the work that other people had diligently produced over a period of about 80 years. A lot of the original material in a sense, a lot of it came from Oxford, and, indeed, from previous books of my own. I believe this is the sixth book I've written on South Africa. You can't write about South Africa, in a sense, without spreading yourself through various labyrinths of its past. You can't understand where apartheid came from and all the various odd explanations were given for why it occurred in South Africa, why such a system occurred in South Africa, without actually going back into the past and finding out who was responsible. If anybody was responsible for laying the sort of theoretical foundations for it, it was the British. In the years after the Boer War, the British set up a government commission to discover what to do towards what was called the Native Quest, in other words the policy with the black population. This government commissions, which consisted mainly of English-speaking people who were regarded as being "pro-native" it was called, i.e. they weren't hostile to the black population. They recommended basically that the only lasting and durable solution to the native question was segregation. This commission, what it did, it made segregation respectable. That is is that, and indeed segregation was respectable in the country, in many quarters, at that particular time. Indeed, if you go out to the sort of modern times, if you look at South Africa, it's very often the national party, in a sense, which gets the total blame for instituting apartheid. Indeed, it was a national name that they adopted and it was the National Party victory in 1948 which enabled the National Party to institute all these policies of white supremacy and apartheid and so on. But, if you compare the racial policies of South Africa in 1948 to the racial policies that were pursued by European powers who then controlled virtually the whole of Africa at the time. The difference is one of tone, rather than a sort of difference of bodies, a difference of emphasis. I spent a long time answering your question, but I hope I've answered it to the fullest. Sir? Male Speaker: Our President Hoover was a mining engineer, and I know he was involved in developing mining areas in Australia. Did he take any interest in Africa? Martin Meredith: The answer is I'm afraid I don't know. There were, but to sort of broaden the question again, there was an American involvement in South African mining right from the very beginning. I mentioned the 49ers from California. The American mining engineers, who came to South Africa after the discovery of gold in 1885, were the most advanced engineers around at the time. And Cecil Rhodes' good fortune was to hire one of them, a man called John Hays Hammond, to -- Rhodes hired several key Americans. The expertise of American mining engineers opened up the whole possibility of what was called "deep-level gold mining" in South Africa. It was there, it was the theory that they worked out, and then they went and put it into practice. The intellectual input, as well as the sort of engineering expertise, of American mining engineers in the development of the South African gold mines was very considerable indeed. As for Hoover, I suspect he came along at a later stage when most of these things were probably -- by that time, the South African gold mining industry in a sense was able to stand on its own feet. Sir? Male Speaker: Are there similarities or great differences between mining diamonds and mining gold? They both are deep underground -- Martin Meredith: It depends in a sense how they occur. Diamond mining until the until the development of the South African mines were thought to be alluvial, that is they were washed down. Places like Brazil or India at the time, they were alluvial. And, indeed, what started off the original diamond rush was finding odd diamonds in riverbeds and so on. Nobody had ever discovered anything like what happened in modern-day Kimberley before. These were pipes that came out of extinct volcanoes. That's essentially kind of what Kimberley is all about. And the deeper you went, the richer and richer it became. You could start off with a spade and shovel and then eventually you actually had to end up in deep-level mining. The gold, as it occurs in South Africa, is very, very complex in that it is in minute traces in very hard rock. But, what marks it out especially is that it goes on and on and on forever, for 150 miles or so. It's an extraordinary kind of reef. It's like, I can't remember the exact terms, I can read it to you because I'll be able to find it in the book, but the Chamber of Mines describe it as being like a thousand page encyclopedia. And, what you're looking for is a single full stop out of that kind of 1,000-page encyclopedia as to where you find the gold. It's very, very complex, very expensive, but in other places, you can look at the Eastern Congo, for example, where you can almost kind of pick it out of the rivers. So, it rather depends on those two different -- I'm not a mining expert by any means, so all I in a sense know is the difference between South Africa diamond mining and South African gold mining. Male Speaker: Could you talk about Winston Churchill's role in the war? Martin Meredith: Sorry? Oh, the question was, "What role did Winston Churchill play in the war in South Africa?" He was a young lad, well he wasn't young, but he was a lad, in search of adventure and he became a war correspondent. He went on a railway journey in an area, which is supposed to be under British control in Natal. The railway coaches were ambushed by a Boer patrol under the leadership of a man called Louis Botha, who subsequently became the first prime minister of the union of South Africa. A very remarkable figure, he was a farmer, a very considerable military officer. Anyway, Botha captured him. Churchill was then hauled off for interrogation and appeared before a Transvaal leader named called Jan Smuts, who subsequently became prime minister. Churchill was in one of his kind of outraged moods and so on, "How dare you arrest me; I'm a war correspondent," and so on. Smuts pointed out that when he was arrested he was actually armed with a pistol, which is not supposedly what war correspondents did. Anyway, because of that he was then incarcerated in Pretoria; this was before, obviously, the British got there. He then escaped from Pretoria, hid himself in bales of hay, made it out of the Transvaal to what was then Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique to Moputu. He then actually kind of took a boat and then reappeared on the Natal front just in time to witness a disastrous campaign in the Boer war called Spionkop, which was a humiliating British defeat. Churchill is one of those who witnessed that and wrote quite memorably about it and, indeed, in the book it quotes Churchill. Only because it actually describes him going up this great hill, with British soldiers in retreat going kind of down it, describing essentially the kind of the panic and the daze. It's a very good description of men under prolonged gunfire brought to their end of their abilities to sustain it. It's the fatigue that overtakes them, and that was something that Churchill pointed out in rather graphic terms. So, his role was sort of a war correspondent who became famous because he escaped. The British loved those kind of bits of daring do. Again, there are lots of British defeats and humiliation in South Africa, sometimes at the hand of kind of spear-waving tribesmen, the British kind of always know how to deal with retreats. They don't actually disguise the retreat, but what they do is try and kind of promote the heroism that goes along with it. The Battle of Islandlwana, which is one of the most humiliating defeats the British army has ever endured, nearby there was an actions called Rorke's Drift, which was an outpost which held out against one wave of attacks by Zulus after another. And, in a sense, to kind of cover the humiliation of Islandlwana, the British awarded 11 Victoria crosses to the men who'd defended Rorke's Drift. I'm not denying that they were brave, and, indeed some of them were extraordinary courageous and so on, but the way the British sort of handled these things was you promote your own heroism to slightly disguise the humiliation of the defeat. And, the British are very good at that; the British have been fighting wars around the world for centuries, and they know how to handle it. It's called "spin" these days. [ laughter ] Sir? Oh, sorry, yes. Male Speaker: There's a famous reef called Witwatersrand. Is that all gold reef? Martin Meredith: That's where it starts. That's where it reaches the surface. It's called the Witwatersrand, and it means, in Afrikaans "ridge of white waters," because the rock which comes to the surface glistens after a rainfall. It was named by Boer farmers as the Witwatersrand because, from a distance, it all appears to be gleaming river waterfall, and it's just the sun bouncing off the wet rock. It runs for about 80 miles, so you've got a stretch of 80 miles, which is where the reef, the gold reef, breaks to the surface. The first gold was discovered there in 1886. The man who discovered it was sort of an itinerant British digger, English digger called George Harrison. He was one of those who kind of, a lot of people used to wander around that part of the world, not aimlessly; it's a bit like the American West, people just kept on the move essentially because they liked it. Anyway, he discovered it and put in the first claim, and he was awarded the claim by Kruger's government, but he got tired of it and sold it for ten pounds. [ laughter ] Sir? Oh, Madam, sorry, yes. Female Speaker: My family was in Swaziland for about five years leading up to black rule, and spent a lot of time in South Africa, and it seems as though the relevancy of the Boer culture was waning. From here in the states it looks as though it's really taken quite -- the relevancy of the culture has really taken quite a nosedive. I'm just wondering if that's your impression, too, because it seems as though the dialogue seemed to be between black Africans now and people of British origin or very Anglicized Boers, and I'm just wondering if that's your impression. Martin Meredith: The country has changed obviously dramatically, because of the loss of political influence. But, that's what's changed; the real culture, in a sense, is undergoing something of a resurgence, because it's felt to be under threat again. It was the feeling, the resentment and apprehension about British rule, stimulated the sense of, if you right, Africana national consciousness. In some ways, it's not that that same theme is being repeated, but, the Africanas, because they've lost political influence, understand that if they are to retain their culture, they're going to have to work twice as hard to get it. That's very widely understood. Now, it may be that it's a small minority group, in a sense, white Africanas, but you've said there were a lot of brown Africanas in a sense as well. But it may be that the end result is that it does wane; but one of the features of modern South African, post-apartheid South Africa, is this growing determination to hang on to what they've got, and that occurs almost all over the place. You can look at the Cornish culture in England, or almost anything. The same reflex goes on, and it's very, very deep culture. The Afrikaans language is much loved. It's a modern language; I mean, it's only sort of emerged in the early 20th century out of Dutch and so on. It has very, very deep strong roots. All cultures undergo terrible, not terrible, but all cultures undergo change. Modern American culture apart from [ unintelligible ] . Female Speaker: It used to be we'd watch South African television, and there would be one announcer on every show who'd be speaking English and another who'd be speaking Afrikaans, and it was very -- you almost had to be bilingual to understand a lot of the programming. And I'm wondering if after now, black rule is still the same ... Martin Meredith: Yes. It is, but, in a sense, it's because most television is, or a lot of television, has state control. It's a question of -- it comes down as a political decision almost as to whether they will sustain so many programs in Afrikaans. The government, and this is Mandela's influence when he was president, was to cultivate Africanas. Mandela has great respect for the Africanas. The extraordinary thing, when he was in prison he insisted, to the mortification of everyone around him, that he should learn Afrikaans. This was the language of the oppressor; nobody could understand it. When he first met, there was a South African prime minister called Botha, who eventually let him briefly out of jail for a visit and so on. It was Mandela who, in a sense, broke the ice by talking about the 1940 Africana rebellion against government. He made the point of understanding Africana culture and language, because he had to, if you like, know the mind of the enemy. Except he never really regarded them as being the enemy. They were, in a sense, the oppressor; they certainly weren't the enemy. It's that instinct that Mandela had will probably wane, and if that political instinct wanes, there won't be so many government resources put into the promotion of Afrikaans. But, that's a very long-term thing. Incidentally, there is a chapter there about Swaziland, in case you were kind of -- and the way in which it became Kruger's protector. Ann Boni: Ok, any more questions. One more, if you have one, otherwise we're going to go out and Mr. Meredith is going to sign books for us. Female Speaker: Did Mr. Rhodes ever get married? And, if not, why not? Martin Meredith: Mr. who? Female Speaker: Cecil Rhodes. Did he ever get married? Martin Meredith: Oh Rhodes, sorry, gosh [ unintelligible ] [ laughter ] No, he never married. He feared women, I think. He preferred the company of almost invariably young men. He said he wasn't a practicing homosexual, and there's no indication whatever of homosexual thoughts ever crossing his mind, but he certainly preferred the company of men, and he never married, and he explains why in the book. The irony is that right at the very end of his life, he was tormented by a Russian princess who was trying to inveigle him into marriage, and it's a long complicated story. But, for a man who spent his whole lifetime manipulating other people, avoiding marriage and having kind of great wealth to go with it, he then faced himself under charges of fraud, along with this woman at the very end of his life. But he never married, no. His money went to Oxford University [ laughs ] . [ laughter ] Ann Boni: Ok, thank you very much [ end of transcript ] LOC - 071011ctb1200 9 4/1/08