EVEN if you don't believe, as Bob Geldof keeps asserting, that where Africa goes we go, or that all human existence came from Africa, marching out of the sun when continents were joined, Martin Meredith's incisive Diamonds Gold And War, is thrilling, enlightening reading for anyone seeking an understanding not just of the history of South Africa but also of the modern world.

There have been libraries of books written about that vast, troubled continent and the historical exploitation of its colossal riches and natural resources. But what makes Meredith's book such a pleasure is the clarity with which it penetrates and contrasts southern Africa's beauty and grandeur with the astounding colonial treachery and imperial savagery in the 100 years leading up to the formation of the new state of South Africa in 1910.

Meredith's impressively thorough and compelling book looks unflinchingly at the making of South Africa out of British political duplicity and a series of blood-soaked battles for control of its diamonds and gold. Like much of Africa, its demise and glory was predicated by its riches, which perversely led to inequality, environmental degradation, dysfunctional governments, tyrants and despots.

Having written 10 previous books on Africa, Meredith follows his widely praised The State Of Africa with a fast-moving yet voluminous story about the continent he knows intimately. His deft style is embellished with atmospheric accounts from journals and diaries of the time, illuminating the narrative like bright spotlights into a past wonderfully populated with grandiose characters and which goes far beyond the most outrageous fiction.

Meredith pointedly explains that, for a century before the founding of the modern state of South Africa, few outsiders much cared about the southern tip of the continent, generally regarded as a stopping point on the way to India, the jewel in the British empire's crown, A jumble of the British Cape Colony, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, it was a troublesome region of little interest where tribal nations clashed with the settlers in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, occupied by the most powerful "white tribe", descendants of Dutch settlers, the Boers.

Then in 1871, prospectors discovered large deposits of diamonds just under the surface of sun-scorched scrubland in Griqualand, an area colonised by mixed race proudly named Baastards, just outside Britain's Cape Colony boundaries. Further digging revealed the world's richest diamond deposits.

A few years later, an English digger, George Harrison, stumbled across a rocky outcrop in the Transvaal, under which lay the richest gold deposits ever found, immediately transforming the "impoverished rural republic" of the Boers into a "glittering prize". What began as an adventure playground for Victorian explorers and white hunters had become the African Eldorado.

From that moment on, the fate of southern Africa was sealed. Britain promptly snatched territory from the Orange Free State and "diamond and gold fever" brought an invading army of prospectors from around the world, including an English clergyman's son, Cecil Rhodes, and his brothers in search of riches "beyond imagining".

Two men bestride Meredith's book: English politician and diamond mining giant Rhodes and the stoic guerrilla fighter and Boer President of the Transvaal, Paul Kruger, who defied British rule for nearly a quarter of a century. Rhodes was the imperialist incarnate. The founder of the world's largest diamond company, De Beers and, later, prime minister of the Cape Colony, he was set on subjugating the Transvaal, and its rough, rogue president, Kruger.

You can almost feel the twist of the knife when the British manufactured a war with the Boers to ensure access to the Transvaal's gold and minerals. The conflict, which takes up much of the book, would lead to the devastation of the Boer republics and the introduction of the world's first concentration camps invented by the British to inter Boer women and children, who died in their thousands from hunger and exposure.

A masterclass in shifting mountainous research into a gripping narrative, the book's sole problem is the lack of indigenous African voices. The Africans themselves are reduced to shadowy ghost armies moving behind the giant figures of Rhodes and Kruger.

But the overriding and deeply saddening lesson is the deceit, corruption, and racism that lay behind Britain's empire-building. It has rarely been so starkly stated that the British empire did not rule by kind words and missionaries.

I finished this book thrilled, moved and ashamed, with the haunting words of Paul Kruger ringing: "Every ounce of gold will have to be weighed up with rivers of tears."