Afrikaner Odyssey

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 Martin Meredith interweaves Reitz's experiences, taken from his unpublished notebooks, with the wider story of Britain's brutal suppression of Boer resistance.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.

Martin Meredith is a journalist, biographer and historian who has written extensively on Africa and its modern history. He is the author of several bestselling books including The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence; Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe, and Mandela: A Biography. His 2002 book Fischer's Choice, which documents the life of anti-apartheid activist Bram Fischer, was published as a revised edition earlier this year.