Frontiers

Before apartheid, before the modern state of South Africa, there was the Cape frontier. For a tumultuous century, this volatile borderlands region became the collision point for three distinct worlds: ambitious British imperialists, fiercely independent Boer settlers, and the deeply rooted, highly organized Xhosa nation.In Frontiers, acclaimed historian Noel Mostert delivers a sweeping, definitive account of the hundred-year war that reshaped a continent. From the first skirmishes along the Great Fish River to the catastrophic tragedy of the 1856 cattle-killing movement, Mostert chronicles the nine brutal wars that decided the fate of South Africa. It is a story of high-minded ideals and ruthless ambition, of cultural misunderstanding and profound betrayal.Meticulously researched and breathtaking in scope, Frontiers is more than a military history. It is a haunting, human epic that reveals how the bitter struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries laid the inescapable groundwork for modern segregation.