|
Courtney Novels
''The Courtney Novels'' are a series of twenty four novels published between 1964 and 2024 by Wilbur Smith. They chronicle the lives of the Courtney family, from the 1660s through until 1987. The novels used to be divided into three parts; however, they can now be split into five parts; the original trilogy of novels follow the twins Sean and Garrick Courtney from the 1860s until 1925. The second part is five books which follows Centaine de Thiry Courtney, her sons and grandchildren between 1917 and 1987. The third part follows the Courtney family from the 1660s through until 1820, focusing on successive generations of the family. The third part can also be split into the Birds of Prey 'original' series and the extended series. The fourth part combines the Courtney narrative with that of Smith's other family saga, ''The Ballantyne Novels'' and is set between 1880 and 1899. The fifth part follows Leon Courtney and his daughter between 1906 and post World War II. Books The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilbur Smith
Wilbur Addison Smith (9 January 1933 – 13 November 2021) was a Northern Rhodesian-born British-South African novelist specializing in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries. He gained a film contract with his first published novel, ''When the Lion Feeds'', which encouraged him to become a full-time writer. He went on to write three long chronicles of the South African experience, which became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick's advice to "write about what you know best"; his work focuses on southern African ways of life, with emphasis on hunting, mining, romance, and conflict. By the time of his death in 2021, he had published 49 books. They have sold at least 140 million copies. Early life Smith was born in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, (now Zambia), as was his younger sister Adrienne, to Elfreda (née Lawrence, 1913 – ) and Herbert James Smith. He was named after the aviator Wilbur Wright. His f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ossewabrandwag
The ''Ossewabrandwag'' (OB) (, from and - ''Ox-wagon Sentinel'') was a pro-Nazi Afrikaner nationalist organization with strong ties to National Socialism, founded in South Africa in Bloemfontein on 4 February 1939. It was strongly opposed to South African participation in World War II and vocally supportive of Nazi Germany.The “Ossewabrandwag” is founded 30 September 2019 In late 1940, the Ossewabrandwag plotted a pro-German insurrection against Prime Minister , albeit the plan was aborted. The OB carried out a campaign of sabotage against state infrastructure, resulting in a government crackdown. The unpopularity of that crackdown has been proposed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Khartoum
Khartoum or Khartum is the capital city of Sudan as well as Khartoum State. With an estimated population of 7.1 million people, Greater Khartoum is the largest urban area in Sudan. Khartoum is located at the confluence of the White Nile – flowing north from Lake Victoria – and the Blue Nile, flowing west from Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Divided by these two parts of the Nile, the Khartoum metropolitan area is a tripartite metropolis consisting of Khartoum proper and linked by bridges to Khartoum North ( ) and Omdurman ( ) to the west. The place where the two Niles meet is known as ''al-Mogran'' or ''al-Muqran'' (; English: "The Confluence"). Khartoum was founded in 1821 by Muhammad Ali of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, north of the ancient city of Soba (city), Soba. In 1882 the British Empire Anglo-Egyptian War, took control of the Egyptian government, leaving the administration of Sudan in the hands of the Egyptians. At the outbreak of the Mahdist War, the British attempted to evacu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Muhammad Ahmad
Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah bin Fahal (; 12 August 1843 – 21 June 1885) was a Sudanese religious and political leader. In 1881, he claimed to be the Mahdi and led a war against Egyptian rule in Sudan, which culminated in a remarkable victory over them in the Siege of Khartoum. He created a vast Islamic state extending from the Red Sea to Central Africa and founded a movement that remained influential in Sudan a century later. From his announcement of the Mahdist State in June 1881 until its end in 1898, Holt, P.M.: "The Mahdist State in Sudan, 1881–1898". Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. p. 45. the Mahdi's supporters, the Ansār, established many of its theological and political doctrines. After Muhammad Ahmad's unexpected death from typhus on 22 June 1885, his chief deputy, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad took over the administration of the nascent Mahdist State. The Mahdist State, weakened by his successor's autocratic rule and inability to unify the populace to resist the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dutch East India Company
The United East India Company ( ; VOC ), commonly known as the Dutch East India Company, was a chartered company, chartered trading company and one of the first joint-stock companies in the world. Established on 20 March 1602 by the States General of the Netherlands amalgamating Voorcompagnie, existing companies, it was granted a 21-year monopoly to carry out trade activities in Asia. Shares in the company could be purchased by any citizen of the Dutch Republic and subsequently bought and sold in open-air secondary markets (one of which became the Amsterdam Stock Exchange). The company possessed quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, strike Coinage of the Dutch East India Company, its own coins, and establish colonies. Also, because it traded across multiple colonies and countries from both the East and the West, the VOC is sometimes considered to have been the world's first multinational corporation. St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cape Of Good Hope
The Cape of Good Hope ( ) is a rocky headland on the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. A List of common misconceptions#Geography, common misconception is that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern tip of Africa, based on the misbelief that the Cape was the dividing point between the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean, Indian oceans. In fact, the southernmost point of Africa is Cape Agulhas about to the east-southeast. The currents of the two oceans meet at the point where the warm-water Agulhas current meets the cold-water Benguela current and turns back on itself. That oceanic meeting point fluctuates between Cape Agulhas and Cape Point (about east of the Cape of Good Hope). When following the western side of the African coastline from the equator, however, the Cape of Good Hope marks the point where a ship begins to travel more eastward than southward. Thus, the first modern rounding of the cape in 1487 by Portuguese discoveries, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oman
Oman, officially the Sultanate of Oman, is a country located on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula in West Asia and the Middle East. It shares land borders with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Oman’s coastline faces the Arabian Sea to the southeast and the Gulf of Oman on the northeast. The exclaves of Madha and Musandam Governorate, Musandam are surrounded by the United Arab Emirates on their land borders, while Musandam’s coastal boundaries are formed by the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman. The capital and largest city is Muscat. With a population of approximately 5.46 million and an area of 309,500 km2 (119,500 sq mi), Oman is the Countries with highest population, 123rd most-populous country. From the 18th century, the Omani Sultanate was Omani Empire, an empire, competing with the Portuguese Empire, Portuguese and British Empire, British empires for influence in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. At its peak in the 19th ce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prester John
Prester John () was a mythical Christian patriarch, presbyter, and king. Stories popular in Europe in the 12th to the 17th centuries told of a Church of the East, Nestorian patriarch and king who was said to rule over a Christian state, Christian nation lost amid the pagans and Muslims in the Orient. The accounts were often embellished with various tropes of medieval popular fantasy, depicting Prester John as a descendant of the Three Magi, ruling a kingdom full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures. At first, Prester John was imagined to reside in India. Tales of the Nestorian Christians' evangelistic success there and of Thomas the Apostle's subcontinental travels as documented in works like the ''Acts of Thomas'' probably provided the first seeds of the legend. As Europeans became aware of the Mongols and their empire, accounts placed the king in Central Asia, and eventually Portuguese explorers came to believe that the term was a reference to Ethiopian Empire, Ethiopia, by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west, and Sudan to the northwest. Ethiopia covers a land area of . , it has around 128 million inhabitants, making it the List of countries and dependencies by population, thirteenth-most populous country in the world, the List of African countries by population, second-most populous in Africa after Nigeria, and the most populous landlocked country on Earth. The national capital and largest city, Addis Ababa, lies several kilometres west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African Plate, African and Somali Plate, Somali tectonic plates. Early modern human, Anatomically modern humans emerged from modern-day Ethiopia and set out for the Near East and elsewhere in the Middle Paleolithi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Professional Hunter
A professional hunter (less frequently referred to as market or commercial hunter and regionally, especially in Britain and Ireland, as professional stalker or gamekeeper) is a person who Hunting, hunts and/or manages Game (hunting), game by profession. Some professional hunters work in the private sector or for government agencies and manage species that are considered overabundant, others are self-employed and make a living by selling hides and meat, while still others guide clients on Big-game hunting, big-game hunts. Australia In Australia several million kangaroos are shot each year by licensed professional hunters in Culling, population control programmes, with both their meat and hides sold. Germany German professional hunters (''Berufsjäger'' or ''Berufsjägerinnen'' Grammatical gender in German#Professions, depending on gender) mostly work for large private forest estates and for state-owned forest enterprises, where they control Browsing (herbivory), browsing by re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South African Border War
The South African Border War, also known as the Namibian War of Independence, and sometimes denoted in South Africa as the Angolan Bush War, was a largely asymmetric conflict that occurred in Namibia (then South West Africa), Zambia, and Angola from 26 August 1966 to 21 March 1990. It was fought between the South African Defence Force (SADF) and the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), an armed wing of the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO). The South African Border War was closely intertwined with the Angolan Civil War. Following several years of unsuccessful petitioning through the United Nations and the International Court of Justice for Namibian independence from South Africa, SWAPO formed the PLAN in 1962 with material assistance from the Soviet Union, China, and sympathetic African states such as Tanzania, Ghana, and Algeria. Fighting broke out between PLAN and the South African security forces in August 1966. Between 1975 and 1988, the SADF staged m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
