THE UNCROWNED KING OF THE TRANSVAAL

Sammy Marks, a Russian Jewish immigrant to South Africa, landed in Cape Town in the mid-nineteenth century. Within a decade he had made a fortune on the Kimberley diamond fields. A legendary figure in the history of modern South Africa, Marks went on to make a second fortune in the Transvaal as the founder of the great Highveld coal industry, as the creator of the South African steel industry, as a landowner on a magnificent scale, and as the proprietor of a notorious liquor distillery near Pretoria.

The biography is based on an extraordinary cache of tens of thousands of personal and business letters, hidden till a few years ago in a strongroom at Marks’s country house outside Pretoria. These letters reveal a Victorian husband who dominated his wife, yet allowed he an unusual degree of responsibility for family matters, an immigrant father who went his children to public school in England to be transformed into gentlemen and then agonised at long distance about their health and moral well-being, a Jew who, unlike many of his wealthy Jewish compatriots, proudly acknowledged his Jewishness yet practised a very pale Judaism, and a political eminece grise who spun a web of influence around Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal, yet helped to persuade the Boers to abandon their hopeless struggle against Britain in 1902.

Richard Mendelsohn teaches history at the University of Cape Town. His interests lie in modern South African history, Jewish history and the history of the family.