African History
From the Archives: And Speaking of the Siege of Mafeking…
…as I believe we were just the other day, I was recently introduced to a vision of the siege that is very different from Lord Baden-Powell’s casually stiff upper lip. Sol T. Plaatje was a twenty-three-year-old African court interpreter for the Resident Magistrate when the Boers besieged Mafeking, and its African older sister, the adjacent…
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From the Archives: Word with a Past: Maffick
The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) started badly from the British point of view. British troops, supposedly the best trained and best equipped in the world, suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Boer farmers. (Anyone else hear echoes of another colonial war that pitted farmers against British regulars?) The only bright…
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Hero of the Empire
I don’t always get to books when they first come out.* And that’s not a bad thing. Speaking as a writer, I want people to continue to find and read my books long after their publication date.** Speaking as a reader, I love digging into the backlist of authors who have newly crossed my path.…
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