Excerpt: In 1899, against the backdrop of the Second Boer War, F.W. Reitz, the Afrikaner State Secretary of the South African Republic, issued A Century of Wrong. Primarily authored by Jan Smuts, who would later become the founding father of apartheid South Africa, the book laid out a long-running list of grievances against Britain, above all defending the right of Afrikaner settlers to independence and self-government: “The hour has struck which will decide whether South Africa, in jealously guarding its liberty, will enter upon a new phase of its history, or whether our existence as a people will come to an end, whether we shall be exterminated in the deadly struggle for that liberty which we have prized above all earthly treasures”.