1. South Africa

The Cape of Good Hope, c. 1700, with a view of Table Mountain and the surrounding sea. The mountain was known by local herders as Hoerikwaggo or, literally, the “Mountain of the Sea”. The ill-fated battle took place on the beach, seen here at bottom left, before any European settlement had been established.

The book begins with the chance discovery of a mass grave on Cape Town’s foreshore. The skeletons belong to victims of the first recorded battle and earliest known memorial in South African history. While the 1510 massacre of Viceroy D’Almeida and sixty other compatriots is a sadly neglected affair—and invariably cast as the country’s first racial conflict—the event itself changed the course of southern Africa’s history. Were it not for this one incident, Portugal may have controlled the sub-continent for the next 450 years, from the mouth of the Congo River to the Mozambique Channel. Given those circumstances, southern Africa may well have become a second Brazil. But instead, the colonies and republics that gave rise to South Africa were influenced by developments and individuals in Western Europe: by pragmatic Dutch protestants, German missionaries, enlightened French thinkers and, inter alia, hardened English industrialists. In turn, South Africa’s extraordinary wealth bolstered the British Commonwealth and contributed to the outcome of WWI and the Versailles peace treaty. To follow Sonja’s first discoveries in South Africa, click Unravel the clues.