Eating Bananas in Durban

Eating Bananas in Durban After many years of planning, scheming, and skullduggery, President Kruger launched his invasions of British territory on 11 October 1899, sparking the Boer War and plunging southern Africa into almost three years of misery. Natal was front and centre of Kruger’s dreams of carving out a vast empire in the region; despite latter-day attempts to desperately reinvent this as a ‘defensive’ invasion, towns were looted and renamed, great swathes of the colony were annexed to the republics, and thousands of civilians were driven from their homes. The objective was to grab Natal and, with it, a seaport; indeed, even Louis Botha himself later boasted that only General Joubert’s dithering had prevented him ‘coming to Durban in 1899 to eat bananas’. Written in Ash’s trademark ‘no holds barred’ style, this comprehensive history details the forces involved – republican, British, and Natalian – and covers every aspect of the campaign. Where other accounts tend to focus almost entirely on the British defeats at Colenso and Spion Kop, this new work shows how they fitted into the campaign as a whole and explores how the much-maligned General Buller broke through to relieve Ladysmith, then drove the invaders out in a series of barely known victories. Fully illustrated with specially drawn maps that show both the operational and tactical aspects of the campaign, Ash can stand back to explain the ‘big picture’ but also take the reader into the trenches and sangars with the Tommies and burghers. Written with verve and a soldier’s eye, Ash’s accounts of the various battles place the reader right in the thick of the action; one can almost hear the crack of the Mauser bullets and the pounding of the guns. The cast of remarkable characters who served in Natal are also explored in depth; indeed, the extraordinary personalities involved are one of the many things that make this account so readable and entertaining. This extensively referenced work cuts through the apartheid-era myths, revealing uncomfortable facts and truths that have been denied and glossed over by many in South African academia for decades. But for the intelligent reader who wants to know what really happened during the Boer invasion of Natal, Ash’s new book will prove to be an eye-opener. .

Eating Bananas in DurbanChris ‘Bulldog’ Ash BSc FRGS FRHistS is the author of several other books on the Boer War, including Kruger’s War and The Boer War Atlas. Chris is ex-British Army, a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Geographical Society, a member of the British Cartographic Society, a member of the South African Military History Society, and a CATHSETTA-registered battlefield guide for KwaZulu-Natal. He owns a farm on the Colenso battlefield, and this local knowledge, together with his military background – not to mention the fact that he wasn’t indoctrinated with the myths of the old apartheid regime – make him uniquely qualified to write what is sure to be the definitive account of the Boer invasion of Natal.

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