In the early 1850s, in despair, following a series of disastrous wars and repeated betrayals by the British colonial government, the Xhosa, South Africa's most important and sophisticated black nation, began listening to some strange prophecies. If they killed all their cattle and destroyed all their food stocks, the prophecies said, heaven would give everything back to them tenfold - huge new herds, an abundance of corn, rich pasturelands from which the white man would be expelled. The appointed day came, and passed; the Xhosa died in tens of thousands. It was, in the words of one missionary, "a sad horror". Yet in fact it was only the cruel climax of a much greater narrative that started hundreds of years before, with the entry of Xhosa ancestors from central Africa into the Cape, and the arrival of the first white men from Europe. This book tells the story of the Xhosa people. The book encompasses a huge range of events, from the first Portuguese probes into the Southern Ocean to the black African migrations south, from the Dutch settlement of the Cape to the development of the Boer mentality, from the bizarre and sometimes heroic actions of the colonial governors and generals to the desperate frontier wars that broke the Xhosa people. Noel Mostert is the South African author of "Supership". His research for this book extended into many archives in Britain and South Africa, and his story features an array of characters who include soldiers, warriors, renegades, missionaries, frontiersmen, settlers, black kings and white politicians.