A White Man's War

By: Graham Watkins

Narrated by: Graham Watkins

Length: 3 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's Summary

Sir,

It is understood that you have armed Bastards, Fingoes, and Baralongs against us - in this you have committed an enormous act of wickedness...reconsider the matter, even if it cost you the loss of Mafeking...disarm your blacks, and thereby act the part of a white man in a white man's war.

Signed,

General Cronje, October 29, 1899

General Cronje's orders are clear; take Mafeking and drive the British out of Africa, but Colonel Baden-Powell, Mafeking's commanding officer, is no ordinary soldier, and his defense of the town will be no ordinary fight.

Themba Jabulani is a victim of a white man's war. A war where there are strange rules. A war where innocents will be sacrificed and heroes will be made. Jabulani is one of the innocents, struggling to survive with his wife and young child. Cronje's letter signals the start of the Boer War and a siege that will last seven months, claiming an unknown number of lives.

A White Man's War is a story that takes place during that siege, the Siege of Mafeking. The defenders of Mafeking were commanded by an unconventional man who played to win, regardless of the cost. Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, B-P to his friends was an experienced soldier and a ruthless maverick. The Boer War and Mafeking in particular would make him more famous than his godfather, the railway engineer he was named after. It would make him a Baron and change the way future wars would be conducted.

Sir,

It is understood that you have armed Bastards, Fingoes, and Baralongs against us - in this you have committed an enormous act of wickedness...reconsider the matter, even if it cost you the loss of Mafeking...disarm your blacks, and thereby act the part of a white man in a white man's war.

Signed,

General Cronje, October 29, 1899

General Cronje's orders are clear; take Mafeking and drive the British out of Africa, but Colonel Baden-Powell, Mafeking's commanding officer, is no ordinary soldier, and his defense of the town will be no ordinary fight.

Themba Jabulani is a victim of a white man's war. A war where there are strange rules. A war where innocents will be sacrificed and heroes will be made. Jabulani is one of the innocents, struggling to survive with his wife and young child. Cronje's letter signals the start of the Boer War and a siege that will last seven months, claiming an unknown number of lives.

A White Man's War is a story that takes place during that siege, the Siege of Mafeking. The defenders of Mafeking were commanded by an unconventional man who played to win, regardless of the cost. Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, B-P to his friends was an experienced soldier and a ruthless maverick. The Boer War and Mafeking in particular would make him more famous than his godfather, the railway engineer he was named after. It would make him a Baron and change the way future wars would be conducted.

Ignoring conventional principles of war, B-P invented new ways to defend the town. Outnumbered and outgunned, his men would thwart the Boers time and again. Mafeking was a strange gentleman's war punctuated by truces, cricket matches, and ferocious fighting. The price for holding Mafeking would be enormous, but it wouldn't be the Christian white people who would pay the largest share, it would be the natives, the innocent bystanders caught up in the white man's fight for South Africa. A White Man's War is a story of a siege, regarded by some as a great adventure.

©2015 Graham Watkins (P)2016 Graham Watkins