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Showing 1 - 13 of 13 matches in All Departments
This story of a middle-class white South African family unfolds between the years 1939 and 1964 - a transformative period in South Africa’s political landscape. It is told through the eyes and experiences of the younger son and his rite of passage into a country of racial segregation that gradually opens his eyes to the many injustices imposed upon the majority of the country’s population, coupled with a realization that his white privileges are sustained at the brutal expense of others.
ELSIE is a riveting story told with gut-wrenching reality of a woman's courage set against a torrid period in South African and world history. Growing up in a small diamond-mining village near Pretoria, South Africa, her secure, sheltered environment is shaken with the return of the two men in her life from fighting in German East Africa during the first World War ...a changed shell-shocked boyfriend who commits suicide and an unemployed brother who becomes involved in illicit diamond dealing with dire consequences. Rather than indulge in self-pity she puts her strong pacifist feelings to work by volunteering as a nurse at a military field hospital in Belgium where she meets her husband to be and where exposure to the horrors and futility of industrial warfare changes her worldview and she joins with other women calling for universal suffrage. After the war she is thrown into further conflict when her husband is involved in the bloody confrontations of the 1922 miners' strike in South Africa and she opens a care centre for abused women and single pregnant mothers, giving them protection and hope of a better future.
A white South African boy’s journey into life against a backdrop of prejudice and change, that takes many different paths from birth to his imagined death. It’s an adventure of exciting discoveries about himself, his parents, the social and political order in which he finds himself, and the spiritual avenues into which he is led that are fraught with conflict and disaster. Romance, betrayal, divided loyalties, and religious intolerance are some of the issues that he faces on the way to manhood. He achieves notable success as a radio journalist, news reader, senior academic, playwright, civic leader, arts administrator and television producer. The story is leavened with loads of fun and humour, taking his Irish grandfather’s advice to always sit further back to get a longer ride, and to call the stationmaster should the journey be tough – a stationmaster who could possess both temporal and divine powers.
The truth is, and history will so record it, that England wanted the control of this country because it is the richest in gold in the world. England always puts in a claim where gold is found. New York congressman, William Sulzer, 1900. A riveting story laced with romance, humour, political r1 intrigue and violence against the backdrop of the infamous Jameson Raid that triggered the Anglo-Boer War. Caught up in the turbulence of the time is Brigid O'Meara, a beautiful Irish musical hall performer who arrives in Pretoria in 1895 to have an illegal abortion only to find herself drawn into the intrigues of a group of British Uitlander sympathisers, who are planning the overthrow of Paul Kruger’s Boer Republic. She falls in love with the charismatic leader of the group, a trader who is smuggling weapons into the Transvaal and operating from a small, unpretentious hotel right on the doorsteps of the Raadsaal. The discovery of gold in the Transvaal was a double-edged sword bringing wealth to the impoverished agrarian economy, but adding to the simmering conflict between the Republic and Great Britain. When a burgher announced joyfully to General Joubert that a new gold reef had been discovered, he replied, `You would do better to weep; for this gold will cause our country to be soaked in blood.’
In this Final volume of the Brigid O’Meara trilogy, the heroine, a beautiful Irish music hall dancer/singer, who was drawn into gun smuggling during the 1895 Jameson Raid against Kruger’s Boer Republic, and was incarceratedin a British concentration camp when she sided with the Boers during the AngloBoer War, marries Willie Gray, the British Uitlander and revolutionary who she fell in love with during the turbulent period building up to the war. Now, in the aftermath of the war, Bridgid undergoes a cathartic journey where she is forced to confront the demons of the past that she has kept bottled up inside her. The dark world she is projected into is a harsh one, far removed from the comfortable life she has created with Willie and her son Ritchie, but it is also a world that gives insights into the hypocritical social morals and sanctimonious self-rightiousness of the new rulung British colonials. It is a world which gives Bridgid the freedom to take revenge on past enemies, but also one in which she has to face retribution for actions that have sunk her into a deep abyss from which there seems no escape.
The Irish Boer Woman is the second volume of the Brigid O’Meara trilogy (the first part was England Wants Your Gold, printed in 2015) that follows the life of an adventurous young Irish woman who is drawn into the intrigues and violence of the Jameson Raid of 1895, and later incarcerated in a British concentration camp during the Anglo Boer War for assisting active Boer commandos. As an Irish nationalist, Brigid finds herself in the midst of a clash of cultures and worldviews. She is drawn into the conflict of the Anglo Boer War by identifying and entering the struggle of the Boers of the Transvaal to retain their independence, putting her into direct conflict with British authorities representing an expanding global empire. Adding to her emotional turmoil is her romantic involvement with a British Uitlander, who is facing charges of high treason by the Transvaal Boer Government. Through the characters, the reader enters the harrowing realities of a war in which the two Boer Republics mobilized every man between 16 and 60 with no uniform, no money and no formal training to take on the might of the British Empire.
Three young professionals set off on a hiking trail to a campsite in the upper regions of the Drakensberg mountains in KwaZulu-Natal little knowing what lies ahead when a stranger who has been following them lures them into performing a bizarre mind game which has a concealed dark intent. What unfolds against the spectacular mountainous amphitheatre is the stranger’s journey into South Africa’s historical landscape in which he manipulates the hikers into taking on the identity of key role players in shaping the country’s destiny, scripted in such a way as to serve his sense of disillusionment of a political ideal that has come to nothing. His feelings of betrayal and anger merge with a past personal vendetta that he has with one of the hikers to the point that the mind game takes on threatening undertones. In The Rainbow Epilogue Neville Herrington moves away from the personal experience of living in a country undergoing socio-political change in his autobiographies Growing up in White South Africa and Growing Old in Black South Africa to a more objective, critical perspective of a South Africa in which the aspirations encapsulated in the Rainbow Nation, (a term coined by Desmond Tutu and used by Mandela at the end of apartheid), have for many failed to materialise, as it has for his central character, Reginald Taylor, who supported an ideal that has not only failed to deliver, but turned on him destroying everything that is meaningful in his life.
The author’s story is a fresh, houmorous and poignant journey which
starts in 1964 with the imprisonment of Mandela, followed by the
oppressive years of apartheid to the new dawn of a democratic South
Africa and beyond. It is not written through the lens of a
political analyst, but from the perspective of an average white
male citizen who was born and bred in the country, and will most
likely die in it.
Growing up in 'White' South Africa is a delightful journey back
into the past that brings alive an era that should resonate with
those who lived through it, and fascinate those who didn’t. The
author captures the sounds, smells, nuances, events and special
characteristics of a post war age that remain etched in his memory.
His poignant recounting of the period of his youth against the
background of a world that was rapidly undergoing change both at
home and abroad is imbued with touches of humour, that comes with a
retrospective view of the follies of youth.
Looks at a young man, straight out of school, who fought in the East African campaign in 1916. It outlines the depiction of the equatorial environment and the health challenging conditions under which the war was fought. Is a gripping story of war, intrigue, romance, humour and spiritual awakening. The year is 1916, and, at age 19 Ritchie is launched into a world conflict that he doesn't fully comprehend. It is a time when the opposing sides in World War 1 are European countries that have drawn on their colonies to assist in their continental dispute. Ritchie volunteers for service in East Africa, and, although excited by the prospects of a great adventure, soon begins to feel like a pawn in a game of chess that is being manipulated by external forces to their own advantage. The intolerable conditions of the East African campaign, where more soldiers died of dysentery and malaria than of battle wounds, revives memories of his traumatic experience as a 5-year old when he and his Irish-born mother were incarcerated in an Anglo Boer War British concentration camp. It was to be the strong bond between mother and son, along with her indomitable spirit that kept him alive in an environment of insurmountable human suffering, disease and hunger. But it was a bond that was to be sorely tested and ultimately broken by circumstances which come back to haunt him as he retreats inwards after a near-death experience during the war in German East Africa. On his return from the war, he sets out to discover the truth about his mother that leads him into a dangerous encounter with kidnappers and criminals, and a liaison with a woman who was indirectly responsible for his mother's downfall and demise.
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