author
R. D. (Roelof Daniel) Mc Donald
1873–1949
Best known as the co-author of an Anglo-Boer War memoir, he wrote from direct experience and helped preserve a Boer perspective on a brutal conflict. The surviving record suggests a life rooted in South Africa, from Bethulie to Wellington.
1 Audiobook
In the Shadow of Death
by P. H. (Pieter Hendrick) Kritzinger, R. D. (Roelof Daniel) Mc Donald
About the author
R. D. Mc Donald, short for Roelof Daniel Mc Donald, was a South African writer remembered chiefly for In the Shadow of Death, a memoir of the Anglo-Boer War written with General P. H. Kritzinger. Project Gutenberg and other catalog records list him as 1873–1949, and genealogy-based records identify him as born in Bethulie and dying in Wellington, Cape Province.
A church-history archive in South Africa says he was born on 15 February 1873, attended school in Wellington, and completed an admission course at Stellenbosch in 1897. Those details fit the picture of an educated Afrikaner writer whose best-known book grew out of the upheavals of the war years.
Because reliable biographical material on him is limited online, most modern references focus on that single book rather than on a larger literary career. Even so, In the Shadow of Death has kept his name in circulation as part of the historical literature of the Second Boer War.