Blood on the Path: A Saga of the Founding of South Africa 100 Years Ago

by Harvey Tyson

A novel history of the 50 years (1870-1920) depicting the opposing forces who conceived and finally established the South African nation.Two thriller-action events start the story, each based closely on facts about a barehanded fight with a leopard, and death in a whale-boat dragged across False Bay.

Drama and romance sustain the epic history, but fact and fiction are clearly delineated in the text and indices. The facts are viewed through fictional participants in the heavily disputed making of South Africa – so that San hunters, Malay fishermen, boer farmers, black mineworkers and white women without votes may also have their say, along with Rhodes, Merriman, Jabavu, Smuts, Botha, Soga, Hofmeyr and the rest. They show that the rainbow nation should have been twice as big and twice as bright.

564 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2009

About the author

Harvey Tyson is a would-be retired writer who, after travelling round the world several times, finds Hermanus on the edge of Africa the best place on Earth. However he suffers from ‘writing itch’ which makes fishing, whale-counting and shark-diving impossible. This is fortunate, but it also handicaps his hiking, biking, birding and golf. Worse, he is obsessed with a campaign to convince 50 and 15-year-olds that reading is the richest, and most rewarding hobby any woman, child and man can have. Time is short and life is tough in Hermanus.