Africana range available on website

Books include tomes on the history of the Cornish miners on the Witwatersrand at the turn of the 20th century, and on the Viedge family, who for generations were traders in the Transkei, as well as books by Denys Reitz and Percy Fitzpatrick.

Cornish Immigration to SA (reserve price $30) by Graham B Dickason tells of the important, but now largely forgotten, role played by the Cornish miners in the development of SA.

The miners, or Cousin Jacks as they were called, flocked to the Transvaal after the discovery of gold, and according to the Cornish World Mining Heritage website, by 1905 7000 miners from Cornwall were on the Witwatersrand gold mines, more than a quarter of the white workforce.

These miners remitted more than £1m every year to their families at home.

Mining was not their only contribution to SA. They brought with them their passion for rugby, and were largely responsible for establishing the game as a national sport. Further evidence of their sojourn here is the Cornish pasty and names like Baragwanath.

Among interesting Africana books on offer are My Life in Basutoland (35) by Eugene Casalis; Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa, in two volumes (400) by Francois le Vaillant; The Viedge Story — A Transkei Trader by Michael Clark (25); Footprints in the Karoo, Story of Farming Life by Joan Southey (30); and Frederick I'Ons, Artist by JJ Redgrave and Edna Bradlow (30).

The Viedge Story is the history of a remarkable family who built up a trading empire in the Transkei, which they controlled from Viedgesville, their headquarters about 15km from Mthatha. The Viedges traded continuously in the Transkei from the latter part of the 19th century to about 1967, when the family sold their chain of trading stations, wholesale companies and businesses to the Transkei Development Corporation. The selling price was well more than R1m, making them one of the first, if not the first, Transkei trading families to attain millionaire status.

Siegfried, The Nazis' Last Stand ( $20) by Charles Whiting is a history of the Siegfried Line, as the Allied forces renamed the West Wall, built opposite the Maginot Line as a defensive line by the Germans before the Second World War.

It was 630km long and about 5km deep, and was studded with antitank traps and 3000 concrete pillboxes as well as tunnels and bunkers. But according to Wikipedia, it fell into disuse after France was occupied by the Germans and it was only after the Normandy landings in 1944 that fighting took place on the Siegfried Line. After the Battle of the Bulge in the northern spring of the following year, the line was overrun by the Allied forces.

It is said that when American general George Patton was asked what he thought about the Siegfried Line, he replied: “Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity.”

Source: Business Day