Donker stroom

Eugène Marais, poet, lawyer and editor of the paper Land en Volk, is remembered as an Afrikaner hero, yet his five years in London around the Anglo-Boer War were long thought impossible to reconstruct. Starting from two references in the files of the Inner Temple, where Marais enrolled to read law, one of them by Percy FitzPatrick, the book follows a trail of letters across archives. It finds Marais close to the mining magnates and the imperialists who pushed for war, advising Lord Milner and meeting Joseph Chamberlain. Along the way it catches him in lie after lie, about his age, his studies, his exams and why he never came home to fight, and asks what drove a man who fought Kruger's government so fiercely and still played the patriot.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Nonfiction

Length

608 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, War (assigned by AI)

Set in

United Kingdom, South Africa, 1896–1901

First published

2015 by Tafelberg

ISBN

9780624073420 (original)