A Battlement of Spears 12+

📒 A century ago, one of the five most recognizable names in the world was arguably that of Paul Krüger, president of the Transvaal Republic-a small Southern African country inhabited by a white tribe-who took on the overwhelming superiority of the mighty British Empire in defense of his people's sovereign independence. It was a David and Goliath story. As most of the world-including the US-cheered the Boers on, they fought a desperate war to the bitter end (1899-1902) against colonialism, until their country lay smoldering in ruins and an estimated 27, 929 Boer women and children, as well as an untold number of blacks, had died in British concentration camps.Yet within little more than half a century, those same Afrikaners had squandered their political capital and gone from being the world's favorite underdog to one of the most reviled names in history. Their subsequent social engineering project known as apartheid became an abhorrent concept in the eyes of the international community. Bernard Botes Krüger is a fifth-generation descendant of the wartime president, Paul Krüger. He is an Afrikaner who lived most of his life in the turmoil and conflict that has dominated his country's history. His new historical novel, A Battlement of Spears, tells the remarkable story of how not only the Afrikaners, but also the many other former sovereign nations within the redrawn borders of the postwar South Africa struggled to come to terms with a common identity, often with deva...