For two decades before a railway system linked southern Africa's principal cities in the mid-1890's, the world's richest supplies of diamonds and gold were transported by coach and horses to distant ports for export.
Charles van Onselen is one of South Africa's most widely respected historians and the acclaimed author of 'The Small Matter of a Horse' 'The Fox and the Flies' and 'The Seed is Mine' the latter of which won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. A graduate of Rhodes University Grahamstown and St Antony's College Oxford he has published extensively in leading international journals devoted to historical studies and has been honoured with visiting fellowships at Harvard Yale Cambridge and Oxford. He is currently a Research Professor at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria.
