Kruger, Kommandos & Kak

Debunking the Myths of The Boer War

Chris Ash

• Publisher: 30 Degrees South Publishers
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781928211228
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The second Boer War is the most important war in South African history; indeed, without it, South Africa would likely have not existed. But it’s also one of the least understood conflicts of the era. Over a century of Leftist bleating and insidious, self-serving revisionism, first by Afrikaner nationalists and then by the apartheid regime, has left the layman with a completely skewed view of the war. Incredibly, most people will tell you that the British attacked the Boers to steal their gold, and that when the clueless, red-jacketed Tommies advanced under orders of bumptious, incompetent British generals they were mowed down in their thousands. Others think of the conflict in terms of ‘Britain against South Africa’ and many believe that the Boers actually won the war; the marginally more enlightened explain away the Boer defeat by claiming it took millions of British troops to beat them, or that it was only the ‘genocide’ of the concentration camps which forced the plucky Boers to throw in the towel. It’s all bosh. This book will take everything you thought you ‘knew’ about the war and turn it on its head. From Kruger’s expansionist dream of an Afrikaans empire ‘from the Zambesi to the Cape’, to the murder and devastation wrought on Natal by his invading commandos, to the savage massacres of thousands of blacks committed by the ‘gallant’ bitter-einders, the reader will have his eyes opened to the brutal realities of the conflict, and be forced to reassess previously held notions of the rights and wrongs of the war. Hard-hitting and uncomfortable reading for those who do not want their bubble of ignorance burst, Kruger, Kommandos & Kak exposes that side of the Boer War which the apartheid propaganda machine didn’t want you to know about.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps
• Timeline
• Author’s note
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Making of the Transvaal
• Chapter 2: All about gold
• Chapter 3: Warmongering and the Bond
• Chapter 4: The road to war
• Chapter 5: Arrogance, over-confidence and the Kruger raid
• Chapter 6: Opening shots
• Chapter 7: Black Week and Black Month
• Chapter 8: Guerrilla war or terrorism?
• Chapter 9: Methods of barbarism
• Chapter 10: The concentration camps
• Chapter 11: We rely on your generals
• Chapter 12: The superhuman Boer
• Chapter 13: Hidebound by tradition
• Chapter 14: Who was fighting the white man’s war?
• Chapter 15: A hopeless cause?
• Afterword
• Notes
• Appendix I: Constant changes to the voting rules in the Transvaal
• Appendix II: Imperial Divisional Commanders, October 1899–June 1901
• Appendix III: Imperial Brigade Commanders, October 1899–June 1901
• Appendix IV: Locally raised Imperial South African units
• Bibliography