Devereux (R.)

SIDE LIGHTS ON SOUTH AFRICA

Published: No Place, 1900

Stock Number: #1798

Price: R750

Second edition: 74 pp., colour folding map, pages unopened, orig. red cloth slightly worn.

Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography, volume 1, page 455: 'The authoress expresses her opinions on South African politics with considerable vigour, comparing the "grotesquely mismanaged" South African League, with the "marvellous" organisation of the Bond, and observing that while Mr. Hofmeyr "rules his lieutenants ... with a rod of iron", Captain Brabant "thinks a great deal about the League, and very little about South Africa, with the result that the tactics of his society rather recall the ladies' committee of a charitable institution than the executive of a serious political organisation". After a short stay at Pretoria and Johannesburg she was severly critical of the "manifold restrictions which hedge the liberty and enterprise of the alien population located there"... In her description of Mr. Kruger she remarks that "by some strange process of atavism, Paul Kruger seems to reincarnate the elemental forces of ignorance and superstition that dominated the primitive ages of the world"'..