With the discovery of gold and diamonds and later, with the growth of industry, the dependence on black African labor mushroomed. The British interned Afrikaner women and children in the Boer War in concentration camps, starving them in the hopes of persuading their men to surrender. Today, the Trek is revered, as are other memorials, as their idea of nationhood. The Afrikaners were mostly farmers who were driven farther inland by their fierce independence and dislike of the English. The land that they originally settled was largely unappealing to others except as a way station for ships making the long journey around the Cape of Good Hope. They were either at wax with the native population or the English or both. The Afrikaners' current racial policies, says Lapping, can be seen as the distillation of more than 300 years of persecution, as well as a fervid nationalism arising from their singular spiritual and intellectual isolation. The story is complex, tragic and often bloody. The various sides in the conflict among Africans, colonialists and English imperialism are well presented here. A concise history of the development of apartheid beginning with the initial settlements of the Dutch in southernmost Africa in the late-16th century.
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