The Domination Of The Draka
![[Draka Symbol]](../picts/draka.gif)
Major Patrick Ferguson, according to the printout, had been killed in the British defeat at the battle of King's Mountain in 1779. Ken called up memory: a Major - later General - Patrick Ferguson had won the battle of King's Mountain in 1779. He'd also invented the first workable breech-loading rifle; the Loyalist exiles who founded the Domination-to-Be in southern Africa had used it on the natives there, immortalized it as "the Gun That Broke the Tribes". Here, breech-loaders hadn't come into common use for seventy years after that.
"Ahh," he said, leafing through the sheaves of printout again.
In this Earth's Timeline, Ferguson had been badly wounded and died during the American retreat from Long Island, in 1776; the unit equipped with his new rifle had been broken up. In the Domination Timeline's history, he'd only been slightly wounded and his riflemen had continued to be a thorn in the American side. In that timeline's history, France and the Dutch had entered the war against the British in 1779. In this timeline, the Dutch had stayed neutral until 1781. In the Domination Timeline, the British had seized the Cape Colony, and used it to resettle the Loyalists and Hessians after the surrender at Yorktown in 1781. Over a hundred thousand of them, joined a little later by the French refugees from the Negro uprising in Santo Domingo.
That had been the seedbed of the Domination - a slave-based caste society of ferocious aggressiveness - spreading out over southern Africa in the next generation. On this Earth, the Cape remained Dutch for another two Generations, and never received the mass migration that started it on the road to world power. Eventually the natives took it over again. The great gold and diamond mines stayed undiscovered for a full century, until the 1880's; in the Domination's world they'd been exploited from the 1790s, and financed the industrialization of Africa.
Fascinating. The changes broadened out from there. This Earth was a more innocent world than his; poorer, more troubled in some respects, backward technologically, but without the monstrous weight of victorious totalitarianism that had crushed his ancestors at the end of the twentieth century.
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