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A study of the 'Cradle of Humanity and its history.

The 'Cradle of Humankind' (COH), bordering Gauteng and the North-West Province, was declared a World Heritage Site for the wealth of the human and animal fossils found there. Research based on fossils found in the area as well as signs of early human habitation have shed new light on the evolution of humankind and on the significant role that southern Africa played in the development of modern humans. A Search for Origins aims to provide an overview of the history of the COH, and of the important discoveries that have been made there, for a non-specialist audience. A number of general accounts have been written which have concentrated on the palaeontological discoveries made there. No systematic account written by specialists in their disciplines has, however, been published about the wider history of the COH and surrounding areas. In particular, no overview spanning the evolution of early plant and animal life, human development and recent and colonial history as reflected in discoveries linked to the COH, has been attempted. This edited volume frames the scientific advances that have been made in the COH against the intellectual and political background out of which they emerged. The multi-disciplinary approach - from a wide range of specialists -is innovative and ground-breaking.

Accessing abortion services in rural areas under conditions of liberal abortion legislation is neither straightforward nor simple. As the South African example shows, the liberalisation of abortion legislation was the first step in granting pregnant persons access to abortion care. Despite this and some progress in implementation, many challenges persist resulting in a lack of services, especially in areas where distances and transport costs are a factor.

Drawing on the findings of a study conducted in three rural districts of the Eastern Cape, the authors highlight the complexities involved in understanding problematic or unwanted pregnancies and abortion services within these communities; the reported barriers to, and facilitators of, access to abortion services among rural populations; and preferences for types of abortion services.

A key finding is the conundrum of costs versus confidentiality: lack of confidentiality involves additional costs to access services outside the area; high costs mean that confidentiality may have to be foregone, which leads to stigma. The authors place the findings within a reparative reproductive justice framework and present a comprehensive set of recommendations.

Abortion Services and Reproductive Justice in Rural South Africa is an insightful and informative resource – the first of its kind – for scholars in health and sociology, reproductive health policy makers, national planners, health facility managers and providers, and activists.

Accessing abortion services in rural areas under conditions of liberal abortion legislation is neither straightforward nor simple. As the South African example shows, the liberalisation of abortion legislation was the first step in granting pregnant persons access to abortion care. Despite this and some progress in implementation, many challenges persist resulting in a lack of services, especially in areas where distances and transport costs are a factor.

Drawing on the findings of a study conducted in three rural districts of the Eastern Cape, the authors highlight the complexities involved in understanding problematic or unwanted pregnancies and abortion services within these communities; the reported barriers to, and facilitators of, access to abortion services among rural populations; and preferences for types of abortion services.

A key finding is the conundrum of costs versus confidentiality: lack of confidentiality involves additional costs to access services outside the area; high costs mean that confidentiality may have to be foregone, which leads to stigma. The authors place the findings within a reparative reproductive justice framework and present a comprehensive set of recommendations.

Abortion Services and Reproductive Justice in Rural South Africa is an insightful and informative resource – the first of its kind – for scholars in health and sociology, reproductive health policy makers, national planners, health facility managers and providers, and activists.

Fifteen writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa, focusing on a wide range of perspectives, personalities and theoretical concerns

Contemporary South African society is chronologically ‘post’ apartheid, but it continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism. Acts of Transgression represents the complexity of this moment in the rich potential of a performative art form that transcends disciplinary boundaries and aesthetic conventions. The contributors, who are all significantly involved in the discipline of performance art, probe its intersection with crisis and socio-political turbulence, shifting notions of identity and belonging, embodied trauma and loss. Narratives of the past and visions for the future are interrogated through memory and the archive, thus destabilising entrenched colonial systems.


Collectively analysing the work of more than 25 contemporary South African artists, including Athi-Patra Ruga, Mohau Modisakeng, Steven Cohen, Dean Hutton, Mikhael Subotzsky, Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama, among others, the analysis is accompanied by a visual record of more than 50 photographs. For those working in the fields of theatre, performance studies and art, this is a must-have collection of critical essays on a burgeoning and exciting field of contemporary South African research.

An innovative connection between adaptive behavior and community ecology in herbivores

The adaptation of herbivore behavior to seasonal and geo- graphic variations in vegetation quantity and quality is inadequately modeled by conventional methods. Norman Owen-Smith innovatively links the principles of adaptive behavior to their consequences for population dynamics and community ecology, through the application of a metaphysiological modeling approach. The modeling approach accommodates various sources of environmental variability, in space and time, in a simple conceptual way and has the potential to be applied to other consumer-resource systems.

Evaluates how migration and urban living influences well-being among movers and stayers in the context of rapid social, economic and political change that characterizes most African nations.

This thirteen-chapter volume, based on a conference held in South Africa in June 2003, describes and compares patterns of internal, regional and international migration in Africa, with comparative insights from Asia and Latin America. The authors, an international team of over twenty academics and experts in the field, push the frontiers of current African migration and urbanization research and strive for an original synthesis of insights from ongoing studies. The comparative focus highlights similarities across diverse contexts in order to bring place-specific processes into sharper relief. The study challenges certain traditional notions about migration, revisiting notions of the urban and rural, and explores how communication technology influences movement. Topics considered range from broad comparative perspectives on linkages between population movement, urban structures and economic development to the spread of infectious diseases and the social regulation of migration flows. Issues of gender and ethnic inequities are incorporated and there is a strong focus on internal migration and urban systems within Africa. The study is structured in three sections: migration and urbanization in global and regional contexts; internal migration, employment and gender; and migration and population health.

The story of how Africa’s mammals have helped shape the continent’s landscapes over time to support an amazing diversity of life

Africa is home to an amazing array of animals, including the world’s most diverse assortment of large mammals. These include the world’s largest terrestrial mammal, the African elephant, which still roams great swathes of the continent alongside a host of other well-known large mammals with hooves such as hippopotamuses, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and zebras. African Ark: Mammals, Landscape and the Ecology of a Continent tells the story of where these mammals have come from and how they have interacted to create the richly varied landscape that makes up Africa as we know it today. It gives an equal airing to small mammals, such as rodents and bats, which are often overlooked by both naturalists and zoologists in favor of their larger cousins.

African Ark not only describes the diversity of African mammals and the habitats in which they live; it also explains the processes by which species and population groups are formed and how these fluctuate over time. A book on mammals would not be complete without attention placed on the impact of megafauna on the environment and the important roles they play in shaping the landscape. In this way, mammals such as elephants and rhinoceros support countless plant communities and the habitats of many smaller animals.

The book brings in a human perspective as well as a conservation angle in its assessment of the interaction of African mammals with the people who live alongside them. African Ark is at once scientifically rigorous and accessible for the layperson and student alike, while drawing on the contributions of numerous zoologists, ecologists and conservationists dedicated to the understanding of Africa and its wildlife.

The story of how Africa’s mammals have helped shape the continent’s landscapes over time to support an amazing diversity of life

Africa is home to an amazing array of animals, including the world’s most diverse assortment of large mammals. These include the world’s largest terrestrial mammal, the African elephant, which still roams great swathes of the continent alongside a host of other well-known large mammals with hooves such as hippopotamuses, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and zebras. African Ark: Mammals, Landscape and the Ecology of a Continent tells the story of where these mammals have come from and how they have interacted to create the richly varied landscape that makes up Africa as we know it today. It gives an equal airing to small mammals, such as rodents and bats, which are often overlooked by both naturalists and zoologists in favor of their larger cousins.

African Ark not only describes the diversity of African mammals and the habitats in which they live; it also explains the processes by which species and population groups are formed and how these fluctuate over time. A book on mammals would not be complete without attention placed on the impact of megafauna on the environment and the important roles they play in shaping the landscape. In this way, mammals such as elephants and rhinoceros support countless plant communities and the habitats of many smaller animals.

The book brings in a human perspective as well as a conservation angle in its assessment of the interaction of African mammals with the people who live alongside them. African Ark is at once scientifically rigorous and accessible for the layperson and student alike, while drawing on the contributions of numerous zoologists, ecologists and conservationists dedicated to the understanding of Africa and its wildlife.

African Dream Machines takes African headrests out of the category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category of ‘art’ objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined in terms of western art and archaeological discourses, but this book interrogates these definitions of style and demonstrates the shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive to a single ethnic group.
Among the artefacts made by southern African peoples, headrests were the best known. Anitra Nettleton’s study of the uses and forms of headrests opened up a number of art-historical methodologies in the attempt to gain an understanding of form, style and content in African art objects. Her drawings of each and every headrest encountered become a major part of the project.

Alexandra: A History is a social and political history of one of South Africa’s oldest townships. It begins with the founding of Alexandra as a freehold township in 1912 and traces its growth as a centre of black working-class life through the early years before the Nationalist government, through the struggles of the apartheid era and into the present day. Declared as a location for ‘natives and coloureds’, Alexandra became home to a diverse population where stand owners, tenants, squatters, hostel-dwellers, workers and migrants from every corner of the country converged to make a new life for themselves near the economic hub of Johannesburg. The stories of ordinary people are at the core of the township’s history. Based on numerous life-history interviews with residents and previously unexamined archive sources, the book portrays in vivid detail the daily struggles and tribulations of the people of Alexandra. A significant focus is the rich history of political resistance, in which political organisations and civic movements organised bus boycotts, anti-removal and anti-pass campaigns, and mobilised for housing and a better life for the township’s residents. But the book also tells the stories of daily life, of the making of urban cultures and of the infamous Spoilers and Msomi gangs. Over weekends Alexandra came alive as soccer matches, church services and shebeens vie for the attention of residents. Alexandra: A History highlights the social complexities of the township, which at times caused tension between different segments of the population. Above all else, despite a long history of hardship and adversity, the community spirit of the people of Alexandra, expressed in a fiercely loyal love of their township home, has repeatedly triumphed and endured.

Amal’ezulu (Zulu Horizons), first published in 1945 in the Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series by the University of the Witwatersrand Press, was the second volume of poetry produced by the renowned Zulu author B.W. Vilakazi. It was written during the ten years he spent living in Johannesburg, in ‘exile’ from his birthplace, KwaZulu-Natal. The poems in this collection represent a turning point in Vilakazi’s life; they express yearnings for the beloved land, animals and ancestral spirits of his rural home, as well as expressions of deep disillusionment with the urban life he encountered in the ‘City of Gold’, and in particular the suffering of the black miners who brought this gold to the surface but never experienced the benefits of the wealth it produced for the mine owners. Vilakazi was deeply conscious of the subhuman system that held these miners in its grip, and gave voice to their suffering in many of the poems in the collection, in particular the now famous poem ‘Ezinkomponi’ (‘On the mine compounds’).

Renowned as the father of Nguni literature, Vilakazi was both a traditional imbongi (bard) and a forward-looking poet who could fuse Western poetic forms with Zulu izibongo (praise poetry). In these poems he assumes the role of the voice of the voiceless, and gives poignant expression to the stoic endurance of those caught up in the brutalities of capitalist exploitation of African labour, and the appalling injustices of the migrant labour system.

Amal’ezulu (Zulu Horizons), first published in 1945 in the Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series by the University of the Witwatersrand Press, was the second volume of poetry produced by the renowned Zulu author B.W. Vilakazi. It was written during the ten years he spent living in Johannesburg, in ‘exile’ from his birthplace, KwaZulu-Natal. The poems in this collection represent a turning point in Vilakazi’s life; they express yearnings for the beloved land, animals and ancestral spirits of his rural home, as well as expressions of deep disillusionment with the urban life he encountered in the ‘City of Gold’, and in particular the suffering of the black miners who brought this gold to the surface but never experienced the benefits of the wealth it produced for the mine owners. Vilakazi was deeply conscious of the subhuman system that held these miners in its grip, and gave voice to their suffering in many of the poems in the collection, in particular the now famous poem ‘Ezinkomponi’ (‘On the mine compounds’).

Renowned as the father of Nguni literature, Vilakazi was both a traditional imbongi (bard) and a forward-looking poet who could fuse Western poetic forms with Zulu izibongo (praise poetry). In these poems he assumes the role of the voice of the voiceless, and gives poignant expression to the stoic endurance of those caught up in the brutalities of capitalist exploitation of African labour, and the appalling injustices of the migrant labour system.

Two very different women meet during a long wait to buy subsidized rice and discover they have more in common than their poverty; an old man and a child share a last loving waltz; a cynical, disabled gangster learns humanity from a committed social worker, and a young girl finds her missing father and her role in the political struggle.
This collection of stage plays, one radio play and a cinepoem, captures the essence of Zakes Mda’s method as a dramatist- a slow but intimate process of revelation (on the part of the characters). It is an artistic cooperation of the most pleasurable kind.

Critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers

Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction criticality interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.

This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope, and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects.

Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

Critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers

Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction criticality interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.

This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope, and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects.

Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

An interdisciplinary account of the life of Johannesburg, South Africa's "global south city"

Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global South city. Global South cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. This is often imagined in terms of the global North’s anxieties about the South: migration, crime, terrorism, disease and environmental crisis. Anxious Joburg invites readers to consider an intimate perspective of living inside such a city. How does it feel to live in the metropolis of Johannesburg: what are the conditions, intersections, affects and experiences that mark the contemporary urban?

Scholars, visual artists and storytellers, all look at unexamined aspects of Johannesburg life. From peripheral settlements to the inner city to the affluent northern suburbs, from precarious migrants and domestic workers to upwardly mobile young women and fearful elites, Anxious Joburg presents an absorbing engagement with this frustrating, dangerous, seductive city. It offers a rigorous, critical approach to Johannesburg revealing the way in which anxiety is a vital structuring principle of contemporary life.

The approach is strongly interdisciplinary, with contributions from media studies, anthropology, religious studies, urban geography, migration studies and psychology. It will appeal to students and teachers, as well as to academic researchers concerned with Johannesburg, South Africa, cities and the global South. The mix of approaches will also draw a non-academic audience.

An interdisciplinary account of the life of Johannesburg, South Africa's "global south city"

Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global South city. Global South cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. This is often imagined in terms of the global North’s anxieties about the South: migration, crime, terrorism, disease and environmental crisis. Anxious Joburg invites readers to consider an intimate perspective of living inside such a city. How does it feel to live in the metropolis of Johannesburg: what are the conditions, intersections, affects and experiences that mark the contemporary urban?

Scholars, visual artists and storytellers, all look at unexamined aspects of Johannesburg life. From peripheral settlements to the inner city to the affluent northern suburbs, from precarious migrants and domestic workers to upwardly mobile young women and fearful elites, Anxious Joburg presents an absorbing engagement with this frustrating, dangerous, seductive city. It offers a rigorous, critical approach to Johannesburg revealing the way in which anxiety is a vital structuring principle of contemporary life.

The approach is strongly interdisciplinary, with contributions from media studies, anthropology, religious studies, urban geography, migration studies and psychology. It will appeal to students and teachers, as well as to academic researchers concerned with Johannesburg, South Africa, cities and the global South. The mix of approaches will also draw a non-academic audience.

This intriguing memoir details in a quiet and restrained manner with what it meant to be a committed black intellectual activist during the apartheid years and beyond. Few autobiographies exploring the ‘life of the mind’ and the ‘history of ideas’ have come out of South Africa, and N Chabani Manganyi’s reflections on a life engaged with ideas, the psychological and philosophical workings of the mind and the act of writing are a refreshing addition to the genre of life writing. Starting with his rural upbringing in Mavambe, Limpopo, in the 1940s, Manganyi’s life story unfolds at a gentle pace, tracing the twists and turns of his journey from humble beginnings to Yale University in the USA. The author details his work as a clinical practitioner and researcher, as a biographer, as an expert witness in defence of opponents of the apartheid regime and, finally, as a leading educationist in Mandela’s Cabinet and in the South African academy.
Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist is a book about relationships and the fruits of intellectual and creative labour. Manganyi describes how he used his skills as a clinical psychologist to explore lives – both those of the subjects of his biographies and those of the accused for whom he testified in mitigation; his aim always to find a higher purpose and a higher self.

On 28 June 1984 a parcel bomb sent by the apartheid security police exploded in an apartment building in Lubango, Angola, killing 36-year-old Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter Katryn. The Schoons were members of the revolutionary underground, exiled from South Africa and committed to both the African National Congress and to socialism. What many political activists had feared or suspected at the time was confirmed during the 1990s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the bomb targeting the Schoons was sent by Craig Williamson, an apartheid spy and high-ranking member of the South African security service.

Apartheid Spies and the Revolutionary Underground is the first book-length account of the assassination of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon. Jeanette Curtis Schoon and Craig Williamson first met in 1973 on the Wits University campus. Jeanette was a passionate student radical and part of a network of white radicals fighting apartheid. Williamson had successfully infiltrated the student movement and rose within its ranks. He held positions of trust, first within the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and then, after pretending to ‘flee’ the country, as an office-bearer of the International Universities Exchange Fund in Sweden, which helped fund many South Africans in exile.

The book uncovers how the lives of a group of white radicals intersected with and were impacted by the undercover security police and their operations both within and outside of South Africa. Intensifying political oppression caused many young radicals to flee South Africa in 1976; many of them, like Jeanette and her partner Marius Schoon, joined the African National Congress in exile. Williamson and the Schoons’ paths, and those of their comrades, continued to cross: he was a guest in their homes, a supplier of funds for their projects, a witness for the prosecution in political trials and, ultimately, the hand that directed targeted assassinations.

Williamson received amnesty for his role in the Schoons’ murder, among other crimes. For the friends and family of the Schoons – and for all those seeking social justice – this was an unacceptable outcome and Williamson continues to walk a free man. This book attempts to show the limits of the TRC process to render healing from South Africa’s apartheid past. That justice has not been served to the Schoons remains a tragedy in this story of the struggle against apartheid.

Reveals the little known details of the assassination of an anti-apartheid activist by an apartheid spy and undercover police officer

On 28 June 1984 a parcel bomb sent by the apartheid security police exploded in an apartment building in Lubango, Angola, killing 36-year-old Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter Katryn. The Schoons were members of the revolutionary underground, exiled from South Africa and committed to both the African National Congress and to socialism. What many political activists had feared or suspected at the time was confirmed during the 1990s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the bomb targeting the Schoons was sent by Craig Williamson, an apartheid spy and high-ranking member of the South African security service.

Apartheid Spies and the Revolutionary Underground is the first book-length account of the assassination of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon. Jeanette Curtis Schoon and Craig Williamson first met in 1973 on the Wits University campus. Jeanette was a passionate student radical and part of a network of white radicals fighting apartheid. Williamson had successfully infiltrated the student movement and rose within its ranks. He held positions of trust, first within the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and then, after pretending to ‘flee’ the country, as an office-bearer of the International Universities Exchange Fund in Sweden, which helped fund many South Africans in exile.

The book uncovers how the lives of a group of white radicals intersected with and were impacted by the undercover security police and their operations both within and outside of South Africa. Intensifying political oppression caused many young radicals to flee South Africa in 1976; many of them, like Jeanette and her partner Marius Schoon, joined the African National Congress in exile. Williamson and the Schoons’ paths, and those of their comrades, continued to cross: he was a guest in their homes, a supplier of funds for their projects, a witness for the prosecution in political trials and, ultimately, the hand that directed targeted assassinations.

Williamson received amnesty for his role in the Schoons’ murder, among other crimes. For the friends and family of the Schoons – and for all those seeking social justice – this was an unacceptable outcome and Williamson continues to walk a free man. This book attempts to show the limits of the TRC process to render healing from South Africa’s apartheid past. That justice has not been served to the Schoons remains a tragedy in this story of the struggle against apartheid.

On 28 June 1984 a parcel bomb sent by the apartheid security police exploded in an apartment building in Lubango, Angola, killing 36-year-old Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter Katryn. The Schoons were members of the revolutionary underground, exiled from South Africa and committed to both the African National Congress and to socialism. What many political activists had feared or suspected at the time was confirmed during the 1990s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the bomb targeting the Schoons was sent by Craig Williamson, an apartheid spy and high-ranking member of the South African security service.

Apartheid Spies and the Revolutionary Underground is the first book-length account of the assassination of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon. Jeanette Curtis Schoon and Craig Williamson first met in 1973 on the Wits University campus. Jeanette was a passionate student radical and part of a network of white radicals fighting apartheid. Williamson had successfully infiltrated the student movement and rose within its ranks. He held positions of trust, first within the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and then, after pretending to ‘flee’ the country, as an office-bearer of the International Universities Exchange Fund in Sweden, which helped fund many South Africans in exile.

The book uncovers how the lives of a group of white radicals intersected with and were impacted by the undercover security police and their operations both within and outside of South Africa. Intensifying political oppression caused many young radicals to flee South Africa in 1976; many of them, like Jeanette and her partner Marius Schoon, joined the African National Congress in exile. Williamson and the Schoons’ paths, and those of their comrades, continued to cross: he was a guest in their homes, a supplier of funds for their projects, a witness for the prosecution in political trials and, ultimately, the hand that directed targeted assassinations.

Williamson received amnesty for his role in the Schoons’ murder, among other crimes. For the friends and family of the Schoons – and for all those seeking social justice – this was an unacceptable outcome and Williamson continues to walk a free man. This book attempts to show the limits of the TRC process to render healing from South Africa’s apartheid past. That justice has not been served to the Schoons remains a tragedy in this story of the struggle against apartheid.

In this timely, original and sophisticated collection, writers from the Global South demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied

The notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of imaginings of democracy and often centers on the ideal of the public sphere. But this imagined foundation of how we live collectively appears to have suffered a dramatic collapse across the world, with many democracies apparently unable to solve problems through talk – or even to agree on who speaks, in what ways and where. In the 10 essays in this timely, original and sophisticated collection, writers from southern Africa combine theoretical analysis with the examination of historical cases and contemporary developments to demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied. They propose new concepts and methodologies to analyse how public engagements work in society.

Babel Unbound examines charged examples from the Global South, such as the centuries old Timbuktu archive, Nelson Mandela as a powerful absent presence in 1960s public life, and the challenges to the terms of contemporary debate around the student activism of #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall. These show how issues of public discussion span both archive and media, verbal debates in formal spaces and visual performances that circulate in unpredictable ways.

In this timely, original and sophisticated collection, writers from the Global South demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied

The notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of imaginings of democracy and often centers on the ideal of the public sphere. But this imagined foundation of how we live collectively appears to have suffered a dramatic collapse across the world, with many democracies apparently unable to solve problems through talk – or even to agree on who speaks, in what ways and where. In the 10 essays in this timely, original and sophisticated collection, writers from southern Africa combine theoretical analysis with the examination of historical cases and contemporary developments to demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied. They propose new concepts and methodologies to analyse how public engagements work in society.

Babel Unbound examines charged examples from the Global South, such as the centuries old Timbuktu archive, Nelson Mandela as a powerful absent presence in 1960s public life, and the challenges to the terms of contemporary debate around the student activism of #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall. These show how issues of public discussion span both archive and media, verbal debates in formal spaces and visual performances that circulate in unpredictable ways.

This collection of satirical sketches takes readers on a sometimes cynical, sometimes hilarious trip through many of the issues that face democratic South Africa

The seed of this collection was sown in 2007 when South Africa won the right to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The debate about huge amounts of public funds being spent on a 'vanity project' instead of being used to improve the lives of the majority of the country’s citizens inspired Mike van Graan, one of South Africa's leading contemporary political playwrights, to use sport as an entry point for satirical commentary. Van Graan follows this with piercing attention towards matters of the state. With themes ranging from the World Cup to the political football of land, from the violent abuse of women to state capture, this selection of satirical sketches takes readers on a rollercoaster trip through many of the issues that face democratic South Africa. The sketches come from six one-person revues, Bafana Republic (2007), Bafana Republic: Extra Time (2008), Bafana Republic: Penalty Shootout (2009), Pay Back the Curry (2016), State Fracture (2017) and Land Acts (2018). Van Graan uses a potent mix of comedy, poetry and drama to make points that hit hard at core issues which 21st-century South Africans are struggling with. Readers will laugh and cringe and sometimes cry, but one thing they will not be able to do is remain unaffected.

This revised edition of a book first published in 2010 supplements the original account of the 116 bat species then known to be found in Southern and Central Africa with an additional eight newly described species.

The chapters on evolution, biogeography, ecology and echolocation have been updated, citing dozens of recently published papers. The book covers the latest systematic and taxonomic studies, ensuring that the names and relationships of bats in this new edition reflect current scientific knowledge. The species accounts provide descriptions, measurements and diagnostic characters as well as detailed information about the distribution, habitat, roosting habits, foraging ecology and reproduction of each species. The updated species distribution maps are based on 116 recorded localities. A special feature of the 2010 publication was the mode of identification of families, genera and species by way of character matrices rather than the more generally used dichotomous keys. Since then these matrices have been tested in the field and, where necessary, slightly altered for this edition. New photographs fill in gaps and updated sonograms aid with bat identification in acoustic surveys. The bibliography, which now contains more than 700 entries, will be an invaluable aid to students and scientists wishing to track down original research.

This vivid evocation of the lives of 32 boys from a Johannesburg township is essential reading for anybody wishing to understand black masculinity in South Africa

Becoming Men is the story of 32 boys from Alexandra, one of Johannesburg's largest townships, over a period of twelve seminal years in which they negotiate manhood and masculinity. Psychologist and academic Malose Langa has documented graphically what it means to be a young black man in contemporary South Africa. The boys discuss a range of topics including the impact of absent fathers, relationships with mothers, siblings and girls, school violence, academic performance, homophobia, gangsterism, unemployment and, in one case, prison life. Dominant themes that emerge are deep ambivalence, self-doubt and hesitation in the boys' approaches to alternative masculinities that are non-violent, non-sexist and non-risk-taking. The difficulties of negotiating the multiple voices of masculinity are exposed as many of the boys appear simultaneously to comply with and oppose the prevalent norms. Providing a rich interpretation of how emotional processes affect black adolescent boys, Langa suggests interventions and services to support and assist them, especially in reducing the high-risk behaviours generally associated with hegemonic masculinity. This is essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of gender studies who wish to understand manhood and masculinity in South Africa. Psychologists, youth workers, lay counsellors and teachers who work with adolescent boys will also find it invaluable.

This vivid evocation of the lives of 32 boys from a Johannesburg township is essential reading for anybody wishing to understand black masculinity in South Africa

Becoming Men is the story of 32 boys from Alexandra, one of Johannesburg's largest townships, over a period of twelve seminal years in which they negotiate manhood and masculinity. Psychologist and academic Malose Langa has documented graphically what it means to be a young black man in contemporary South Africa. The boys discuss a range of topics including the impact of absent fathers, relationships with mothers, siblings and girls, school violence, academic performance, homophobia, gangsterism, unemployment and, in one case, prison life. Dominant themes that emerge are deep ambivalence, self-doubt and hesitation in the boys' approaches to alternative masculinities that are non-violent, non-sexist and non-risk-taking. The difficulties of negotiating the multiple voices of masculinity are exposed as many of the boys appear simultaneously to comply with and oppose the prevalent norms. Providing a rich interpretation of how emotional processes affect black adolescent boys, Langa suggests interventions and services to support and assist them, especially in reducing the high-risk behaviours generally associated with hegemonic masculinity. This is essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of gender studies who wish to understand manhood and masculinity in South Africa. Psychologists, youth workers, lay counsellors and teachers who work with adolescent boys will also find it invaluable.

An annotated edition of a classic text by South Africa's first black psychologist, a collection of essays reflecting on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years

Being-Black-in-the-World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi’s first publications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change and renewed resistance to the brutality of apartheid rule and the emergence of Black Consciousness in the mid-1960s. Manganyi is one of South Africa’s most eminent intellectuals and an astute social and political observer. He has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race. In 2018 Manganyi’s memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist was awarded the prestigious ASSAf (The Academy of Science of South Africa) Humanities Book Award. Publication of Being-Black-in-the-World was delayed until the young Manganyi had left the country to study at Yale University. His publishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces would prohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, for being a ‘radical revolutionary’. The book found a limited public circulation in South Africa due to this censorship and original copies were hard to come by.

This new edition is an invitation to a younger generation of citizens to engage with early decolonialising thought by an eminent South African intellectual. While the essays in this book are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regarding black subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality, the persistence of a racial (and racist) order and the possibilities of a renewed de-colonial project. Each of these short essays can be read as self-contained reflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. Manganyi is a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from making incisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to make sense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to black suffering. Ahead of its time, the ideas in this book are an exemplary demonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous de-colonial critique should entail. The re-publication of this classic text is enriched by the inclusion of a foreword and annotation by respected scholars Garth Stevens and Grahame Hayes respectively, and an afterword by public intellectual Njabulo S. Ndebele.

An annotated edition of a classic text by South Africa's first black psychologist, a collection of essays reflecting on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years

Being-Black-in-the-World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi’s first publications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change and renewed resistance to the brutality of apartheid rule and the emergence of Black Consciousness in the mid-1960s. Manganyi is one of South Africa’s most eminent intellectuals and an astute social and political observer. He has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race. In 2018 Manganyi’s memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist was awarded the prestigious ASSAf (The Academy of Science of South Africa) Humanities Book Award. Publication of Being-Black-in-the-World was delayed until the young Manganyi had left the country to study at Yale University. His publishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces would prohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, for being a ‘radical revolutionary’. The book found a limited public circulation in South Africa due to this censorship and original copies were hard to come by.

This new edition is an invitation to a younger generation of citizens to engage with early decolonialising thought by an eminent South African intellectual. While the essays in this book are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regarding black subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality, the persistence of a racial (and racist) order and the possibilities of a renewed de-colonial project. Each of these short essays can be read as self-contained reflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. Manganyi is a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from making incisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to make sense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to black suffering. Ahead of its time, the ideas in this book are an exemplary demonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous de-colonial critique should entail. The re-publication of this classic text is enriched by the inclusion of a foreword and annotation by respected scholars Garth Stevens and Grahame Hayes respectively, and an afterword by public intellectual Njabulo S. Ndebele.

How the story of how missonary schools adopted the Bantu education reforms gives insight into the ongoing legacy of the apartheid in the South African educational system

The transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid era has highlighted questions about the past and the persistence of its influence in present-day South Africa. This is particularly so in education, where the past continues to play a decisive role in relation to inequality. Between Worlds: German Missionaries and the Transition from Mission to Bantu Education in South Africa scrutinises the experience of a hitherto unexplored German mission society, probing the complexities and paradoxes of social change in education. It raises challenging questions about the nature of mission education legacies. Linda Chisholm shows that the transition from mission to Bantu Education was far from seamless. Instead, past and present interpenetrated one another, with resistance and compliance cohabiting in a complex new social order. At the same time as missionaries complied with the new Bantu Education dictates, they sought to secure a role for themselves in the face of demands of local communities for secular state-controlled education. When the latter was implemented in a perverted form from the mid-1950s, one of its tools was textbooks in local languages developed by mission societies as part of a transnational project, with African participation. Introduced under the guise of expunging European control, Bantu Education merely served to reinforce such control. The response of local communities was an attempt to domesticate – and master – the ‘foreign’ body of the mission so as to create access to a larger world. This book focuses on the ensuing struggle, fought on many fronts, including medium of instruction and textbook content, with concomitant sub-texts relating to gender roles and sexuality. South Africa’s educational history is to this day informed by networks of people and ideas crossing geographic and racial boundaries. The colonial legacy has inevitably involved cultural mixing and hybridisation – with, paradoxically, parallel pleas for purity. Chisholm explores how these ideas found expression in colliding and coalescing worlds, one African, the other European, caught between mission and apartheid education.

Bibliography and Modern Book Production is a fascinating historic journey through the fields of print history, librarianship and publishing. It covers key developments from 1494 to 1949 in bibliography and book production from the history of scripts and paper manufacture to the origins of typefaces and printing. Although not a textbook, the book was a guide for library students in the 1950s on the essential literature of librarianship.

As the first librarian appointed to Wits University in 1929, Percy Freer’s near encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject of bibliography enabled him to develop a key resource for relevant library examinations in South Africa and abroad. Due to its immense value as a historic record, and to acknowledge Freer’s contributions as scholar, librarian and publisher, it is being reissued as part of the Wits University Press Re/Presents series to make it accessible to scholars in book histories, publishing studies and information science.

Bibliography and Modern Book Production is a fascinating historic journey through the fields of print history, librarianship and publishing. It covers key developments from 1494 to 1949 in bibliography and book production from the history of scripts and paper manufacture to the origins of typefaces and printing. Although not a textbook, the book was a guide for library students in the 1950s on the essential literature of librarianship.

As the first librarian appointed to Wits University in 1929, Percy Freer’s near encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject of bibliography enabled him to develop a key resource for relevant library examinations in South Africa and abroad. Due to its immense value as a historic record, and to acknowledge Freer’s contributions as scholar, librarian and publisher, it is being reissued as part of the Wits University Press Re/Presents series to make it accessible to scholars in book histories, publishing studies and information science.

The first biography of an eminent historian of South Africa

Bill Freund, the late social historian and leading analyst of African history, passed away in 2020 soon after finishing his autobiography. Often described as the academy’s ‘outsider insider’, he was an eminent South African historian who published prodigiously in the areas of labour, capital and economic history. What influenced this American-educated academic to become such an astute and trusted observer of the political economy in Africa?

We follow Bill’s intellectual journey from a modest Jewish home in Chicago in the 1950s to the Universities of Chicago, Yale, Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, and finally to a permanent teaching position at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. Peppered in between the commentaries on academic life are stories of his travels, poems he wrote for loved ones, and endearing anecdotes of friendships that shaped his life. As an ‘outsider’, both in the United States and abroad, he is able to offer rich insights into the world of Africanists and their scholarship on different continents. His thoughtful and balanced observations on late- and post-apartheid South Africa are especially interesting and refreshing. This posthumously published autobiography will give deeper insight into this unusual man and the world that shaped him – and which he in turn influenced through a deep commitment to rigorous scholarship. It includes a select bibliography of Bill Freund’s many publications as well as a foreword by Robert Morrell on the making of this autobiography.

The first biography of an eminent historian of South Africa

Bill Freund, the late social historian and leading analyst of African history, passed away in 2020 soon after finishing his autobiography. Often described as the academy’s ‘outsider insider’, he was an eminent South African historian who published prodigiously in the areas of labour, capital and economic history. What influenced this American-educated academic to become such an astute and trusted observer of the political economy in Africa?

We follow Bill’s intellectual journey from a modest Jewish home in Chicago in the 1950s to the Universities of Chicago, Yale, Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, and finally to a permanent teaching position at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. Peppered in between the commentaries on academic life are stories of his travels, poems he wrote for loved ones, and endearing anecdotes of friendships that shaped his life. As an ‘outsider’, both in the United States and abroad, he is able to offer rich insights into the world of Africanists and their scholarship on different continents. His thoughtful and balanced observations on late- and post-apartheid South Africa are especially interesting and refreshing. This posthumously published autobiography will give deeper insight into this unusual man and the world that shaped him – and which he in turn influenced through a deep commitment to rigorous scholarship. It includes a select bibliography of Bill Freund’s many publications as well as a foreword by Robert Morrell on the making of this autobiography.

What does it mean to be Black in an anti-Black world?

In Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Tendayi Sithole offers a compelling example of how to engage South Africa differently. Set in the Black point of view as a site of critical reflection, he confronts the question of colonial conquest, social cohesion and justice. Since South Africa is a name given to the country by its conquerors, not by its indigenous inhabitants, for true liberation, a renaming needs to occur. The concept of Azania holds this emancipatory gesture.

The post conquest, post 1994 liberal narratives mute the prevalence of racism while valorizing non-racialism and the transcendence of race. To indicate this silencing, the book deploys the concept of X, both as a signifier of repression and dehumanization of the Black subject, and as an empty signifier that holds the opportunity for radical and compassionate rehumanization.

The book examines these strands of erasure and hope for the Black subject. Sithole scrutinizes the colonial contract, arguing that it is not a contract since there has never been an agreement between the indigenous people and the settler colonialists. This brings into focus the land question, specifically land dispossession and its existential connection to black life. The relevance of Black Consciousness to the Azanian existential tradition is based on Steve Biko’s case that Marxism ignores Black ontological misery through its valorization of class and failure to include anti-Black racism in its analysis of power. Finally, Sithole analyses Mabogo P. More’s philosophical meditations around what it means to be Black in an anti-Black world.

In erasing the idea of South Africa and inscribing an open-ended naming of X, the book opens the way for something new to take its place that is imbued with greater humanity. This gesture opens up the potential to think about liberation in this country that is yet to rename and redefine itself.

What does it mean to be Black in an anti-Black world?

In Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Tendayi Sithole offers a compelling example of how to engage South Africa differently. Set in the Black point of view as a site of critical reflection, he confronts the question of colonial conquest, social cohesion and justice. Since South Africa is a name given to the country by its conquerors, not by its indigenous inhabitants, for true liberation, a renaming needs to occur. The concept of Azania holds this emancipatory gesture.

The post conquest, post 1994 liberal narratives mute the prevalence of racism while valorizing non-racialism and the transcendence of race. To indicate this silencing, the book deploys the concept of X, both as a signifier of repression and dehumanization of the Black subject, and as an empty signifier that holds the opportunity for radical and compassionate rehumanization.

The book examines these strands of erasure and hope for the Black subject. Sithole scrutinizes the colonial contract, arguing that it is not a contract since there has never been an agreement between the indigenous people and the settler colonialists. This brings into focus the land question, specifically land dispossession and its existential connection to black life. The relevance of Black Consciousness to the Azanian existential tradition is based on Steve Biko’s case that Marxism ignores Black ontological misery through its valorization of class and failure to include anti-Black racism in its analysis of power. Finally, Sithole analyses Mabogo P. More’s philosophical meditations around what it means to be Black in an anti-Black world.

In erasing the idea of South Africa and inscribing an open-ended naming of X, the book opens the way for something new to take its place that is imbued with greater humanity. This gesture opens up the potential to think about liberation in this country that is yet to rename and redefine itself.

Alan G. Morris critically examines the history of evolutionary anthropology in South Africa, uncovering the often racist philosophical motivations of these physical anthropology researchers and the discipline itself

South Africa is famed for its contribution to the study of human evolution. In Bones and Bodies Alan G. Morris takes us back over the past century of anthropological discovery in South Africa and uncovers the stories of the individual scientists and how they contributed to our knowledge of the peoples of southern Africa, both ancient and modern. Not all of this history is one which we should feel comfortable with, as much of the earlier anthropological studies have been tainted with the tarred brush of race science. Morris critically examines the work of Raymond Dart, Thomas Dreyer, Matthew Drennan, and Robert Broom who all described their fossil discoveries with the mirror of racist interpretation, as well as the life and times in which they worked.

Morris also considers how modern anthropology tried to rid itself of the stigma of these early racist accounts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald Singer and Phillip Tobias introduced modern methods into the discipline that jettisoned much of what the public wished to believe about race and human evolution. Modern methods in physical anthropology rely on sophisticated mathematics and molecular genetics but are difficult to translate and sometimes fail to challenge preconceived assumptions.

In an age where the authority of the expert and empirical science is questioned, this book shows the battle facing modern anthropology in how to explain science in a context that seems to be at odds with life experience. In this highly accessible insider account, Morris examines the philosophical motivations of these researchers and the discipline itself. Much of the material draws on old correspondence and interviews as well as from published resources.

Alan G. Morris critically examines the history of evolutionary anthropology in South Africa, uncovering the often racist philosophical motivations of these physical anthropology researchers and the discipline itself

South Africa is famed for its contribution to the study of human evolution. In Bones and Bodies Alan G. Morris takes us back over the past century of anthropological discovery in South Africa and uncovers the stories of the individual scientists and how they contributed to our knowledge of the peoples of southern Africa, both ancient and modern. Not all of this history is one which we should feel comfortable with, as much of the earlier anthropological studies have been tainted with the tarred brush of race science. Morris critically examines the work of Raymond Dart, Thomas Dreyer, Matthew Drennan, and Robert Broom who all described their fossil discoveries with the mirror of racist interpretation, as well as the life and times in which they worked.

Morris also considers how modern anthropology tried to rid itself of the stigma of these early racist accounts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald Singer and Phillip Tobias introduced modern methods into the discipline that jettisoned much of what the public wished to believe about race and human evolution. Modern methods in physical anthropology rely on sophisticated mathematics and molecular genetics but are difficult to translate and sometimes fail to challenge preconceived assumptions.

In an age where the authority of the expert and empirical science is questioned, this book shows the battle facing modern anthropology in how to explain science in a context that seems to be at odds with life experience. In this highly accessible insider account, Morris examines the philosophical motivations of these researchers and the discipline itself. Much of the material draws on old correspondence and interviews as well as from published resources.

Challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism

BRICS is a grouping of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Volume five in the Democratic Marxism series, BRICS and the New American Imperialism challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism. It offers novel analyses of BRICS in the context of increasing US induced imperial chaos, deepening environmental crisis tendencies (such as climate change and water scarcity), contradictory dynamics inside BRICS countries and growing subaltern resistance.

The authors revisit contemporary thinking on imperialism and anti-imperialism, drawing on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theorists after Marx, who attempted to understand the expansionary nature of capitalism from the heartlands to the peripheries. The richness of Luxemburg’s pioneering work inspires most of the volume’s contributors in their analyses of the dangerous contradictions of the contemporary world as well as forms of democratic agency advancing resistance.

While various forms of resistance are highlighted, among them water protests, mass worker strikes, anti-corporate campaigning and forms of cultural critique, this volume grapples with the challenge of renewing anti-imperialism beyond the NGO-driven World Social Forum and considers the prospects of a new horizontal political vessel to build global convergence. It also explores the prospects of a Fifth International of Peoples and Workers.

Challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism

BRICS is a grouping of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Volume five in the Democratic Marxism series, BRICS and the New American Imperialism challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism. It offers novel analyses of BRICS in the context of increasing US induced imperial chaos, deepening environmental crisis tendencies (such as climate change and water scarcity), contradictory dynamics inside BRICS countries and growing subaltern resistance.

The authors revisit contemporary thinking on imperialism and anti-imperialism, drawing on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theorists after Marx, who attempted to understand the expansionary nature of capitalism from the heartlands to the peripheries. The richness of Luxemburg’s pioneering work inspires most of the volume’s contributors in their analyses of the dangerous contradictions of the contemporary world as well as forms of democratic agency advancing resistance.

While various forms of resistance are highlighted, among them water protests, mass worker strikes, anti-corporate campaigning and forms of cultural critique, this volume grapples with the challenge of renewing anti-imperialism beyond the NGO-driven World Social Forum and considers the prospects of a new horizontal political vessel to build global convergence. It also explores the prospects of a Fifth International of Peoples and Workers.

When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele, the idea of Mphahlele’s death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a kind awaited Mphahlele, in the very coming and going of those who remember him and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele, the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa’s public sphere.
That death has now come and we mourn it. Manganyi’s words at the time have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, ‘the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time’. The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its record of Mphahlele’s rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader will find many facets of the private man translated back into the marketplace of public memory.
Despite the personal nature of the letters, the further horizons of this volume are the contours of South Africa’s literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States.
This selection of Mphahlele’s own letters has been greatly expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of letters from Mphahlele’s correspondents, among them such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Nadine Gordimer. It seeks to illustrate the networks that shaped Mphahlele’s personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy, intellectual inquiry, of friendship, scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over
the years. The letters cover the period from November 1943 to April 1987, forty-four of Mphahlele’s mature years and most of his active professional life. The correspondence is supplemented by introductory essays from the two editors, by two interviews conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and by Attwell’s insightful explanatory notes.

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection consists of the notebooks in which William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd transcribed and translated the narratives, cultural information and personal histories told to them in the 1870s by a number of /Xam informants. It represents a rare and rich record of an indigenous language and culture that no longer exists, and has exerted a fascination for anthropologists and poets alike. Yet how does one begin reading texts that are at once so compromised and so unique? Bushman Letters is an important book for it examines not only the /Xam archive, but also the critical tradition that has grown up around it and the hermeneutic principles that inform that tradition. Wessels critiques these principles and offers alternative modes of reading. He shows the problems with the approaches employed by previous critics and, in the course of his own detailed and poetic readings of a number of narratives, suggests what their interpretations have left out. The book must be described as metacritical: it is criticism about the critical tradition that has grown up around the /Xam archive and in the fields of folklore and mythology more widely. Bushman Letters addresses a curiously neglected area in the burgeoning literature on the Bleek and Lloyd Collection: the texts themselves. In doing so, the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of oral narratives in general and to the theoretical discourse that informs such studies.

Mahala's biography gives insight into the life and writing of Can Themba (1924–1967), an iconic figure of the South African literary world and Drum journalist who died in exile

This rich and absorbing biography of Can Themba, iconic Drum-era journalist and writer, is the definitive history of a larger-than-life man who died too young. Siphiwo Mahala's intensive and often fresh research features unprecedented archival access and interviews with Themba's surviving colleagues and family.

Mahala’s biography takes a critical historical approach to Themba’s life and writing, giving a picture of the whole man, from his early beginnings in Marabastad to his sombre end in exile in Swaziland. The better-known elements of his life – his political views, passion for teaching and mentoring, family life and his drinking – are woven together with an examination of his literary influences and the impact of his own writing (especially his famous short story 'The Suit') on modern African writers in turn. Mahala, a master storyteller, deftly follows the threads of Themba's dynamic life, showcasing his intellectual acumen, scholarly aptitude and wit, along with his flaws, contradictions and heartbreaks, against a backdrop of the sparkle and pathos of Sophiatown of the 1950s.

Can Themba’s successes and failures as well as his triumphs and tribulations reverberate on the pages of this long-awaited biography. The result is an authoritative and entertaining account of an often misunderstood figure in South Africa's literary canon.

Mahala's biography gives insight into the life and writing of Can Themba (1924–1967), an iconic figure of the South African literary world and Drum journalist who died in exile

This rich and absorbing biography of Can Themba, iconic Drum-era journalist and writer, is the definitive history of a larger-than-life man who died too young. Siphiwo Mahala's intensive and often fresh research features unprecedented archival access and interviews with Themba's surviving colleagues and family.

Mahala’s biography takes a critical historical approach to Themba’s life and writing, giving a picture of the whole man, from his early beginnings in Marabastad to his sombre end in exile in Swaziland. The better-known elements of his life – his political views, passion for teaching and mentoring, family life and his drinking – are woven together with an examination of his literary influences and the impact of his own writing (especially his famous short story 'The Suit') on modern African writers in turn. Mahala, a master storyteller, deftly follows the threads of Themba's dynamic life, showcasing his intellectual acumen, scholarly aptitude and wit, along with his flaws, contradictions and heartbreaks, against a backdrop of the sparkle and pathos of Sophiatown of the 1950s.

Can Themba’s successes and failures as well as his triumphs and tribulations reverberate on the pages of this long-awaited biography. The result is an authoritative and entertaining account of an often misunderstood figure in South Africa's literary canon.

The history of a radical group of intellectuals who founded the New Era Fellowship, which shaped human rights precedents and social justice policy in South Africa

In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa, embarked on a project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). In doing so they sought to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and ‘race’ – on which they were based. In different forums – public debates, lectures, study circles and cultural events – the seeds of radical thinking were planted, nurtured and brought to full flower. Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society’s responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping people of colour of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid in all its ruthless effectiveness. In subsequent narratives of liberation their significance has been overlooked, even disparaged, and has never been fully understood and acknowledged. By shining a contemporary light on the NEF and locating its contribution in current sociological and political discourse, educationist Crain Soudien shows how its members were at the forefront of redefining the debate about social difference in a racially divided society.

The history of a radical group of intellectuals who founded the New Era Fellowship, which shaped human rights precedents and social justice policy in South Africa

In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa, embarked on a project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). In doing so they sought to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and ‘race’ – on which they were based. In different forums – public debates, lectures, study circles and cultural events – the seeds of radical thinking were planted, nurtured and brought to full flower. Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society’s responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping people of colour of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid in all its ruthless effectiveness. In subsequent narratives of liberation their significance has been overlooked, even disparaged, and has never been fully understood and acknowledged. By shining a contemporary light on the NEF and locating its contribution in current sociological and political discourse, educationist Crain Soudien shows how its members were at the forefront of redefining the debate about social difference in a racially divided society.

The contributors to this volume draw on a non-dogmatic Marxist approach to explain the systemic and conjunctural dynamics of crisis inherent in global capitalism. Their analysis asks what is historically specific to capitalism's crises while avoiding catastrophic or defeatist claims. At the same time the volume situates left agency within actual patterns of resistance and class struggle to clarify the potential for transformative change.
The cycle of resistance strengthened by the World Socal Forum and transnational activism is now punctuated by the experience of the Arab Spring, the agency of anti-systemic movements, left think tanks, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, labour unions, left parties in Europe such as Syrizia and Podemos and peoples' budgeting in Kerala, India. On the down side, we are witnessing the waning of the Workers Party in Brazil and serious challenges for South Africa's once powerful labour movement and still formative social justice activism. All these developments are assessed in this volume.
This is the second volume in the Democratic Marxism series. It elaborates on crucial themes introduced in the first volume, Marxism in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique and Struggle (edited by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar).

A coffee-table book full of amazing pictures of unique fossils of early hominids

The unique fossils featured in Caves of the Ape-Men were excavated at cave sites which today are clustered within the first World Heritage Site to be proclaimed in South Africa under the auspices of UNESCO. This full-color, coffee table book includes excellent visuals of the area, a brief account of its history, and an accessible assessment of its importance for understanding the emergence of hominids - the early creatures transitional between the great apes and man - and, later, some of the earliest representatives of our own species. The publication is based on short text boxes interspersed with illustrations of key fossil specimens as old as four million years. Also included are reconstructions of how these hominids might have appeared and the dramatic landscapes within which they were discovered. Three scientific books on different aspects of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site have appeared recently. No informative, lavishly illustrated book has, however, been produced for purchase by the many international and local tourists who visit the area. As Sterkfontein is the richest single fossil hominid site in the world it deserves to be promoted as one of the foremost tourist attractions in Africa, along with half a dozen other local sites also immensely rich in fossil specimens. Together, these sites proclaim South Africa as one of the key areas which saw the emergence of human ancestors in the distant past.

As the dynamo of South Africa’s economy, Johannesburg commands a central position in the nation’s imagination, and scholars throughout the world monitor the city as an exemplar of urbanity in the global South. This book offers detailed empirical analyses of changes in the city’s physical space, as well as a host of chapters on the character of specific neighbourhoods and the social identities being forged within them. Informing all of these is a consideration of underlying economic, social and political processes shaping the wider Gauteng province. A mix of respected academics, practising urban planners and experienced policymakers offer compelling overviews of the rapid and complex spatial developments that have taken place in Johannesburg since the end of apartheid, along with tantalising glimpses into life on the streets and behind the high walls of this diverse city. The book has three sections. Section A provides an overview of macro spatial trends and the policies that have influenced them. Section B explores the shaping of the city at district and suburban level, revealing the peculiarity of processes in different areas. This analysis elucidates the larger trends, while identifying shifts that are not easily detected at the macro level. Section C is an assembly of chapters and short vignettes that focus on the interweaving of place and identity at a micro level.
With empirical data supported by new data sets including the 2011 Census, the city’s Development Planning and Urban Management Department’s information system, and Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s substantial archive, the book is an essential reference for planning practitioners, urban geographers, sociologists, and social anthropologists, among others.

A psychologist’s guide for parents, care-givers and health care practitioners to the emotional challenges facing children and their parents today

Current research shows that certain childhood mental disorders are diagnosed more frequently today than in previous generations. Many of today’s children and teenagers are more unhappy, anxious and distressed than young people used to be. In this highly informative book, child psychologist Jenny Perkel explores in depth why this might be so, highlighting what modern-day South African children and adolescents are experiencing and the environment in which they are being raised.

Children in Mind presents a broad range of up-to-date findings from psychological, neurobiological, genetic, psychiatric, sociological and epidemiological research related to the diagnosis and treatment of children’s mental health problems. Theoretically informed but not theoretically dense, the book cites both local and international studies to increase awareness and understanding of children’s mental health.

Perkel discusses a broad spectrum of issues faced by today’s children and adolescents: the Covid-19 pandemic, the influence of electronic media, diverse family structures, stress and trauma, and difficult socio-economic circumstances. While offering no easy answers or formulaic solutions to the problems of troubled children, she shows how to think about children’s mental well-being in today’s South Africa.

Children in Mind is an invaluable resource for all those who work with troubled children and adolescents: psychologists, social workers, counsellors, educators and parents. The author’s informed and compassionate approach will help equip professionals and parents to help young people navigate complex issues and make adjustments in their behavior in order to live more balanced and happier lives.

A psychologist’s guide for parents, care-givers and health care practitioners to the emotional challenges facing children and their parents today

Current research shows that certain childhood mental disorders are diagnosed more frequently today than in previous generations. Many of today’s children and teenagers are more unhappy, anxious and distressed than young people used to be. In this highly informative book, child psychologist Jenny Perkel explores in depth why this might be so, highlighting what modern-day South African children and adolescents are experiencing and the environment in which they are being raised.

Children in Mind presents a broad range of up-to-date findings from psychological, neurobiological, genetic, psychiatric, sociological and epidemiological research related to the diagnosis and treatment of children’s mental health problems. Theoretically informed but not theoretically dense, the book cites both local and international studies to increase awareness and understanding of children’s mental health.

Perkel discusses a broad spectrum of issues faced by today’s children and adolescents: the Covid-19 pandemic, the influence of electronic media, diverse family structures, stress and trauma, and difficult socio-economic circumstances. While offering no easy answers or formulaic solutions to the problems of troubled children, she shows how to think about children’s mental well-being in today’s South Africa.

Children in Mind is an invaluable resource for all those who work with troubled children and adolescents: psychologists, social workers, counsellors, educators and parents. The author’s informed and compassionate approach will help equip professionals and parents to help young people navigate complex issues and make adjustments in their behavior in order to live more balanced and happier lives.

Civilising Grass is a socio-cultural analysis of the lawn on the South African highveld, exploring the complex relationship between landscape and power in the country’s colonial, modernist and post-apartheid eras

Drawing from eco-criticism, queer theory, art history and postcolonial studies, this book offers a lively and provocative reading of texts and illustrations to reveal the racial and gendered aspects of ‘natural’ environments. It argues that the lawn, an ordinary and often overlooked feature of South African everyday life, is neither natural nor innocent. Rather, like other colonial landscapes, the lawn functions as a site of commonplace violence, of oppression, dispossession and segregation. This book explores an eclectic archive of artistic, literary and architectural lawns between 1886 and 2017, analysing poems, maps, gardening blogs, adverts, ethnographies and ephemera, as well as literature by Koos Prinsloo, Marlene van Niekerk and Ivan Vladislavic. In addition, Civilising Grass includes colour reproductions of lawn artworks by David Goldblatt, Lungiswa Gqunta, Pieter Hugo, Anton Kannemeyer, Sabelo Mlangeni, Moses Tladi and Kemang Wa Lehulere. Examination of these and other works reveals the organic relationship between lawn and wildness, and between lawn and human/non-human actors – thereby providing rich and unexpected insights into South African society past and present.

Civilising Grass is a socio-cultural analysis of the lawn on the South African highveld, exploring the complex relationship between landscape and power in the country’s colonial, modernist and post-apartheid eras

Drawing from eco-criticism, queer theory, art history and postcolonial studies, this book offers a lively and provocative reading of texts and illustrations to reveal the racial and gendered aspects of ‘natural’ environments. It argues that the lawn, an ordinary and often overlooked feature of South African everyday life, is neither natural nor innocent. Rather, like other colonial landscapes, the lawn functions as a site of commonplace violence, of oppression, dispossession and segregation. This book explores an eclectic archive of artistic, literary and architectural lawns between 1886 and 2017, analysing poems, maps, gardening blogs, adverts, ethnographies and ephemera, as well as literature by Koos Prinsloo, Marlene van Niekerk and Ivan Vladislavic. In addition, Civilising Grass includes colour reproductions of lawn artworks by David Goldblatt, Lungiswa Gqunta, Pieter Hugo, Anton Kannemeyer, Sabelo Mlangeni, Moses Tladi and Kemang Wa Lehulere. Examination of these and other works reveals the organic relationship between lawn and wildness, and between lawn and human/non-human actors – thereby providing rich and unexpected insights into South African society past and present.

Climate change affects us all, but it can be a confusing business. In this book, three scientists with several decades of experience in assessing the potential effects of climate change for the southern African region share their insights. Complex issues are dealt with in plain language, without oversimplification and with attention to accuracy. The material is up-to-date as is possible in such a fast-developing field.
Climate Change: Briefings from Southern Africa takes the form of 55 'frequently-asked' questions', each with a brief and clear reply. It is illustrated with colour diagrams and photographs, and examples are tailored to the regional context. The authors' introduction provides an overview of current national and international policies aimed at regulating climate change. The content is divided into four sections, which take the reader through the science of how climate system works; the projected impacts in southern Africa during the twenty-first century; what this means for the South African economy and society; and what can be done to avoid harm. The briefings can be read alone or in sequence.
The year 2015 is regarded as a watershed for global climate change action if a global average temperature rise of more than two degrees abbove the pre-Industrial level is to be avoided. This book provides compelling evidence that the impact on agriculture, fisheries, water resources, human health, plants and animals as well as sea levels will be dangerous. However, the book ends on a positive note by offering advice on how the world can avoid such bleak outcomes, while allowing a good life for all.
The volume is aimed at interested non-scientists, including business people, decision-makers, ordinary citizens and students

Essays that address the question: how can people and class agency change this destructive course of history?

Capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels is heating our planet at a pace and scale never before experienced. Extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels and accelerating feedback loops are a commonplace feature of our lives. The number of environmental refugees is increasing and several island states and low-lying countries are becoming vulnerable. Corporate-induced climate change has set us on an ecocidal path of species extinction. Governments and their international platforms such as the Paris Climate Agreement deliver too little, too late. Most states, including South Africa, continue on their carbon-intensive energy paths, with devastating results. Political leaders across the world are failing to provide systemic solutions to the climate crisis. This is the context in which we must ask ourselves: how can people and class agency change this destructive course of history? Volume three in the Democratic Marxism series, The Climate Crisis investigates eco-socialist alternatives that are emerging. It presents the thinking of leading climate justice activists, campaigners and social movements advancing systemic alternatives and developing bottom-up, just transitions to sustain life. Through a combination of theoretical and empirical work, the authors collectively examine the challenges and opportunities inherent in the current moment. This volume builds on the class-struggle focus of Volume 2 by placing ecological issues at the centre of democratic Marxism. Most importantly, it explores ways to renew historical socialism with democratic, eco-socialist alternatives to meet current challenges in South Africa and the world.

Positions the history and inner workings of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) against the canvas of the major political developments in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s up to the first democratic elections in 1994

Following a hiatus in the 1960s, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in South Africa was revived in 1971. In fascinating detail,
Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed bring the inner workings of the NIC to life against the canvas of major political developments in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, and up to the first democratic elections in 1994.

The NIC was relaunched during the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, which attracted a following among Indian university students, and whose invocation of Indians as Black led to a major debate about ethnic organisations such as the NIC. This debate persisted in the 1980s with the rise of the United Democratic Front and its commitment to non-racialism. The NIC was central to other major debates of the period, most significantly the lines drawn between boycotting and participating in government-created structures such as the Tri-Cameral Parliament. Despite threats of banning and incarceration, the NIC kept attracting recruits who encouraged the development of community organisations, such as students radicalised by the 1980s education boycotts and civic protests. Colour, Class and Community, The Natal Indian Congress, 1971—1994 details how some members of the NIC played dual roles, as members of a legal organisation and as allies of the African National Congress’ underground armed struggle.

Drawing on varied sources, including oral interviews, newspaper reports, and minutes of organisational meetings, this in-depth study tells a largely untold history, challenging existing narratives around Indian ‘cabalism’, and bringing the African and Indian political story into present debates about race, class and nation.

Positions the history and inner workings of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) against the canvas of the major political developments in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s up to the first democratic elections in 1994

Following a hiatus in the 1960s, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in South Africa was revived in 1971. In fascinating detail,
Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed bring the inner workings of the NIC to life against the canvas of major political developments in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, and up to the first democratic elections in 1994.

The NIC was relaunched during the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, which attracted a following among Indian university students, and whose invocation of Indians as Black led to a major debate about ethnic organisations such as the NIC. This debate persisted in the 1980s with the rise of the United Democratic Front and its commitment to non-racialism. The NIC was central to other major debates of the period, most significantly the lines drawn between boycotting and participating in government-created structures such as the Tri-Cameral Parliament. Despite threats of banning and incarceration, the NIC kept attracting recruits who encouraged the development of community organisations, such as students radicalised by the 1980s education boycotts and civic protests. Colour, Class and Community, The Natal Indian Congress, 1971—1994 details how some members of the NIC played dual roles, as members of a legal organisation and as allies of the African National Congress’ underground armed struggle.

Drawing on varied sources, including oral interviews, newspaper reports, and minutes of organisational meetings, this in-depth study tells a largely untold history, challenging existing narratives around Indian ‘cabalism’, and bringing the African and Indian political story into present debates about race, class and nation.

Composing Apartheid is the first book ever to chart the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. It explores how music was produced through, and was productive of, key features of apartheid’s social and political topography, as well as how music and musicians contested and even helped to conquer apartheid. The collection of essays is intentionally broad, and the contributors include historians, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as ethnomusicologists, music theorists and historical musicologists. The essays focus on a variety of music (jazz, music in the Western art tradition, popular music) and on major composers (such as Kevin Volans) and works (Handel’s Messiah). Musical institutions and previously little-researched performers (such as the African National Congress’s troupe-in-exile, Amandla) are explored. The writers move well beyond their subject matter, intervening in debates on race, historiography, and postcolonial epistemologies and pedagogies.

A collection of essays examining cultures of consumption on the African continent

From early department stores in Cape Town to gendered histories of sartorial success in urban Togo, contestations over expense accounts at an apartheid state enterprise, elite wealth and political corruption in Angola and Zambia, the role of popular religion in the political intransigence of Jacob Zuma, funerals of big men in Cameroon, youth cultures of consumption in Niger and South Africa, queer consumption in Cape Town, middle-class food consumption in Durban and the consumption of luxury handcrafted beads, this collection of essays explores the ways in which conspicuous consumption is foregrounded in various African contexts and historical moments.

The essays in Conspicuous Consumption in Africa put Thorstein Veblen’s concept under robust critical scrutiny, delving into the pleasures, stresses and challenges of consuming in its religious, generational, gendered and racialised aspects, revealing conspicuous consumption as a layered set of practices, textures and relations. This volume shows how central and revealing conspicuous consumption can be to fathoming the history of Africa’s projects of modernity, and their global lineages and legacies. In its grounded, up-close case studies, it is likely to feed into current public debates on the nature and future of African societies – South African society in particular.

A collection of essays examining cultures of consumption on the African continent

From early department stores in Cape Town to gendered histories of sartorial success in urban Togo, contestations over expense accounts at an apartheid state enterprise, elite wealth and political corruption in Angola and Zambia, the role of popular religion in the political intransigence of Jacob Zuma, funerals of big men in Cameroon, youth cultures of consumption in Niger and South Africa, queer consumption in Cape Town, middle-class food consumption in Durban and the consumption of luxury handcrafted beads, this collection of essays explores the ways in which conspicuous consumption is foregrounded in various African contexts and historical moments.

The essays in Conspicuous Consumption in Africa put Thorstein Veblen’s concept under robust critical scrutiny, delving into the pleasures, stresses and challenges of consuming in its religious, generational, gendered and racialised aspects, revealing conspicuous consumption as a layered set of practices, textures and relations. This volume shows how central and revealing conspicuous consumption can be to fathoming the history of Africa’s projects of modernity, and their global lineages and legacies. In its grounded, up-close case studies, it is likely to feed into current public debates on the nature and future of African societies – South African society in particular.

In South African higher education, the images of dysfunction are everywhere. Student protests. Violence. Police presence. Rubber or real bullets. Class disruptions. Burning tyres. Damaged buildings. Injury and sometimes death. Reports of wholesale corruption. Year after year, often in the same set of universities; the problem of routine instability seems insoluble.

The financial, academic and reputational costs of ongoing dysfunction are high, especially for those universities caught-up in the never-ending struggle to overcome apartheid legacies. Any number of explanations have been ventured, including a lack of resources, shortage of capacity, rural location, corrupt officials, and endemic conflict. Corrupted takes a deeper look at dysfunction in an attempt to unravel the root causes in a sample of South African universities.

At the heart of the problem lies the vexed issue of resources or, more pertinently, the relationship between resources and power: who gets what, and why? Whatever else it aspires to be—commonly, a place of teaching, learning, research and public duty—a university in an impoverished community is also a rich concentration of resources around which corrupt staff, students and those outside of campus all vie for access.

Taking a political economic approach, Jonathan Jansen describes the daily struggle for institutional resources and offers accessible, sensible insights. He argues that the problem won’t be solved through investments in ‘capacity building’ alone because the combination of institutional capacity and institutional integrity contributes to serial instability in universities. Rather, durable solutions would include the depoliticisation of university councils and appointments of academics with integrity and capacity to manage and lead these fragile institutions.

This groundbreaking and long overdue study will offer a promising way forward for universities to better serve their communities and the country more broadly.

In South African higher education, the images of dysfunction are everywhere. Student protests. Violence. Police presence. Rubber or real bullets. Class disruptions. Burning tyres. Damaged buildings. Injury and sometimes death. Reports of wholesale corruption. Year after year, often in the same set of universities; the problem of routine instability seems insoluble.

The financial, academic and reputational costs of ongoing dysfunction are high, especially for those universities caught-up in the never-ending struggle to overcome apartheid legacies. Any number of explanations have been ventured, including a lack of resources, shortage of capacity, rural location, corrupt officials, and endemic conflict. Corrupted takes a deeper look at dysfunction in an attempt to unravel the root causes in a sample of South African universities.

At the heart of the problem lies the vexed issue of resources or, more pertinently, the relationship between resources and power: who gets what, and why? Whatever else it aspires to be—commonly, a place of teaching, learning, research and public duty—a university in an impoverished community is also a rich concentration of resources around which corrupt staff, students and those outside of campus all vie for access.

Taking a political economic approach, Jonathan Jansen describes the daily struggle for institutional resources and offers accessible, sensible insights. He argues that the problem won’t be solved through investments in ‘capacity building’ alone because the combination of institutional capacity and institutional integrity contributes to serial instability in universities. Rather, durable solutions would include the depoliticisation of university councils and appointments of academics with integrity and capacity to manage and lead these fragile institutions.

This groundbreaking and long overdue study will offer a promising way forward for universities to better serve their communities and the country more broadly.

A history of Atlantic solidarity between Cuba and Africa, in struggle for African independence from colonial powers

The Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the people of Africa. The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom, and justice, unparalleled for its principled and selfless character.’

As Nelson Mandela states, Cuba was a key participant in the struggle for the independence of African countries during the Cold War and the definitive ousting of colonialism from the continent. Beyond the military interventions that played a decisive role in shaping African political history, there were many-sided engagements between the island and the continent. Cuba and Africa, 1959-1994 is the story of tens of thousands of individuals who crossed the Atlantic as doctors, scientists, soldiers, students and artists. Each chapter presents a case study – from Algeria to Angola, from Equatorial Guinea to South Africa – and shows how much of the encounter between Cuba and Africa took place in non-militaristic fields: humanitarian and medical, scientific and educational, cultural and artistic.

The historical experience and the legacies documented in this book speak to the major ideologies that shaped the colonial and postcolonial world, including internationalism, developmentalism and South–South cooperation.

Approaching African–Cuban relations from a multiplicity of angles, this collection will appeal to an equally wide range of readers, from scholars in black Atlantic studies to cultural theorists and general readers with an interest in contemporary African history.

A history of Atlantic solidarity between Cuba and Africa, in struggle for African independence from colonial powers

The Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the people of Africa. The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom, and justice, unparalleled for its principled and selfless character.’

As Nelson Mandela states, Cuba was a key participant in the struggle for the independence of African countries during the Cold War and the definitive ousting of colonialism from the continent. Beyond the military interventions that played a decisive role in shaping African political history, there were many-sided engagements between the island and the continent. Cuba and Africa, 1959-1994 is the story of tens of thousands of individuals who crossed the Atlantic as doctors, scientists, soldiers, students and artists. Each chapter presents a case study – from Algeria to Angola, from Equatorial Guinea to South Africa – and shows how much of the encounter between Cuba and Africa took place in non-militaristic fields: humanitarian and medical, scientific and educational, cultural and artistic.

The historical experience and the legacies documented in this book speak to the major ideologies that shaped the colonial and postcolonial world, including internationalism, developmentalism and South–South cooperation.

Approaching African–Cuban relations from a multiplicity of angles, this collection will appeal to an equally wide range of readers, from scholars in black Atlantic studies to cultural theorists and general readers with an interest in contemporary African history.

The sweeping scientific and social history of the humble dung beetle

The humble and industrious dung beetle is a marvelous beast: the 6,000 species identified so far are intricately entwined with human history and scientific endeavor. These night-soil collectors of the planet have been worshipped as gods, worn as jewelry, and painted by artists. More practically, they saved Hawaii from ecological blight, and rescued Australia from plagues of flies. They fertilize soil, cleanse pastures, steer by the stars, and have a unique relationship with the African elephant (along with many other ungulates). Above all, they are the ideal subject for biological study in an evolving world.

In this sweeping history of more than 3,000 years, beginning with Ancient Egypt, scientist Marcus Byrne and writer Helen Lunn capture the diversity of dung beetles and their unique behavior patterns. Dung beetles’ fortunes have followed the shifts from a world dominated by a religion that symbolically incorporated them into some of its key concepts of rebirth, to a world in which science has largely separated itself from religion and alchemy. With over 6,000 species found throughout the world, these unassuming but remarkable creatures are fundamental to some of humanity’s most cherished beliefs and have been ever present in religion, art, literature, science and the environment. They are at the center of current gene research, play an important role in keeping our planet healthy, and some nocturnal dung beetles have been found to navigate by the starry skies. Outlining the development of science from the point of view of the humble dung beetle is what makes this charming story of immense interest to general readers and entomologists alike.

The sweeping scientific and social history of the humble dung beetle

The humble and industrious dung beetle is a marvelous beast: the 6,000 species identified so far are intricately entwined with human history and scientific endeavor. These night-soil collectors of the planet have been worshipped as gods, worn as jewelry, and painted by artists. More practically, they saved Hawaii from ecological blight, and rescued Australia from plagues of flies. They fertilize soil, cleanse pastures, steer by the stars, and have a unique relationship with the African elephant (along with many other ungulates). Above all, they are the ideal subject for biological study in an evolving world.

In this sweeping history of more than 3,000 years, beginning with Ancient Egypt, scientist Marcus Byrne and writer Helen Lunn capture the diversity of dung beetles and their unique behavior patterns. Dung beetles’ fortunes have followed the shifts from a world dominated by a religion that symbolically incorporated them into some of its key concepts of rebirth, to a world in which science has largely separated itself from religion and alchemy. With over 6,000 species found throughout the world, these unassuming but remarkable creatures are fundamental to some of humanity’s most cherished beliefs and have been ever present in religion, art, literature, science and the environment. They are at the center of current gene research, play an important role in keeping our planet healthy, and some nocturnal dung beetles have been found to navigate by the starry skies. Outlining the development of science from the point of view of the humble dung beetle is what makes this charming story of immense interest to general readers and entomologists alike.

The sweeping scientific and social history of the humble dung beetle

The humble and industrious dung beetle is a marvelous beast: the 6,000 species identified so far are intricately entwined with human history and scientific endeavor. These night-soil collectors of the planet have been worshipped as gods, worn as jewelry, and painted by artists. More practically, they saved Hawaii from ecological blight, and rescued Australia from plagues of flies. They fertilize soil, cleanse pastures, steer by the stars, and have a unique relationship with the African elephant (along with many other ungulates). Above all, they are the ideal subject for biological study in an evolving world.

In this sweeping history of more than 3,000 years, beginning with Ancient Egypt, scientist Marcus Byrne and writer Helen Lunn capture the diversity of dung beetles and their unique behavior patterns. Dung beetles’ fortunes have followed the shifts from a world dominated by a religion that symbolically incorporated them into some of its key concepts of rebirth, to a world in which science has largely separated itself from religion and alchemy. With over 6,000 species found throughout the world, these unassuming but remarkable creatures are fundamental to some of humanity’s most cherished beliefs and have been ever present in religion, art, literature, science and the environment. They are at the center of current gene research, play an important role in keeping our planet healthy, and some nocturnal dung beetles have been found to navigate by the starry skies. Outlining the development of science from the point of view of the humble dung beetle is what makes this charming story of immense interest to general readers and entomologists alike.

A collection of Robert Sobukwe's political writings, speeches and court testimonies

There are several accounts of Robert Sobukwe’s courageous role in contesting South Africa’s system of apartheid and of his incarceration on Robben Island after the Anti-Pass Campaign that led to the tragic events of Sharpeville in March 1960. Far less attention has been paid to the years the leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress spent in Kimberley, between 1969–1978, after his release from the Island. Darkest Before Dawn, the follow-up to Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, captures the story of the post-prison years of Sobukwe’s life.

This latest compilation complete with a biographical narrative by the editors and enriched with images from Sobukwe’s life in this period of his life demonstrates the many challenges Sobukwe faced as well as his continued political resolve to fight for an end to apartheid. This is captured in the many meetings he had in spite of banning orders and letters he exchanged with friends and admirers, including the celebrated novelist Bessie Head whose letters to Sobukwe are published here for the first time. Sobukwe continued to meet political allies, such as Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, he pursued a legal career and played host to international visitors. The portrait of Sobukwe that emerges is that of a highly ethical man, a figure of dignity and fortitude, and a wise elder whose commitment to the people of Africa and to the vision of Pan-Africanism who remained undeterred, despite his being forced to live, in his final years, under near impossible conditions.

To do justice to Sobukwe’s legacy, his intellectual contribution and his unfailing desire to pursue liberation for the African people, we need to view his biography against the backdrop of his words. Darkest Before Dawn includes a definitive collection of his political writings, speeches, unpublished court testimonies, interviews with Gail Gerhart and Joe Thloloe, and expansive annotations by the compilers. The book ends with a reflective essay which highlights the ongoing pertinence of Sobukwe's legacy.

A collection of Robert Sobukwe's political writings, speeches and court testimonies supplemented by an account of his years in Kimberley following release from Robben Island.

There are several accounts of Robert Sobukwe’s courageous role in contesting South Africa’s system of apartheid and of his incarceration on Robben Island after the Anti-Pass Campaign that led to the tragic events of Sharpeville in March 1960. Far less attention has been paid to the years the leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress spent in Kimberley, between 1969–1978, after his release from the Island. Darkest Before Dawn, the follow-up to Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, captures the story of the post-prison years of Sobukwe’s life.

This latest compilation complete with a biographical narrative by the editors and enriched with images from Sobukwe’s life in this period of his life demonstrates the many challenges Sobukwe faced as well as his continued political resolve to fight for an end to apartheid. This is captured in the many meetings he had in spite of banning orders and letters he exchanged with friends and admirers, including the celebrated novelist Bessie Head whose letters to Sobukwe are published here for the first time. Sobukwe continued to meet political allies, such as Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, he pursued a legal career and played host to international visitors. The portrait of Sobukwe that emerges is that of a highly ethical man, a figure of dignity and fortitude, and a wise elder whose commitment to the people of Africa and to the vision of Pan-Africanism who remained undeterred, despite his being forced to live, in his final years, under near impossible conditions.

To do justice to Sobukwe’s legacy, his intellectual contribution and his unfailing desire to pursue liberation for the African people, we need to view his biography against the backdrop of his words. Darkest Before Dawn includes a definitive collection of his political writings, speeches, unpublished court testimonies, interviews with Gail Gerhart and Joe Thloloe, and expansive annotations by the compilers. The book ends with a reflective essay which highlights the ongoing pertinence of Sobukwe's legacy.

A collection of Robert Sobukwe's political writings, speeches and court testimonies supplemented by an account of his years in Kimberley following release from Robben Island.

There are several accounts of Robert Sobukwe’s courageous role in contesting South Africa’s system of apartheid and of his incarceration on Robben Island after the Anti-Pass Campaign that led to the tragic events of Sharpeville in March 1960. Far less attention has been paid to the years the leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress spent in Kimberley, between 1969–1978, after his release from the Island. Darkest Before Dawn, the follow-up to Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, captures the story of the post-prison years of Sobukwe’s life.

This latest compilation complete with a biographical narrative by the editors and enriched with images from Sobukwe’s life in this period of his life demonstrates the many challenges Sobukwe faced as well as his continued political resolve to fight for an end to apartheid. This is captured in the many meetings he had in spite of banning orders and letters he exchanged with friends and admirers, including the celebrated novelist Bessie Head whose letters to Sobukwe are published here for the first time. Sobukwe continued to meet political allies, such as Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, he pursued a legal career and played host to international visitors. The portrait of Sobukwe that emerges is that of a highly ethical man, a figure of dignity and fortitude, and a wise elder whose commitment to the people of Africa and to the vision of Pan-Africanism who remained undeterred, despite his being forced to live, in his final years, under near impossible conditions.

To do justice to Sobukwe’s legacy, his intellectual contribution and his unfailing desire to pursue liberation for the African people, we need to view his biography against the backdrop of his words. Darkest Before Dawn includes a definitive collection of his political writings, speeches, unpublished court testimonies, interviews with Gail Gerhart and Joe Thloloe, and expansive annotations by the compilers. The book ends with a reflective essay which highlights the ongoing pertinence of Sobukwe's legacy.

Traces the literary history of the elephant, and its role in South Africa's cultural imaginary

Elephants are in dire straits – again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a while in the heyday of late-colonial conservation efforts in the twentieth. Now, according to one estimate, an elephant is being killed every 15 minutes. This is at the same time that the reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now so well-known that they have become almost a cliché: their high intelligence, rich emotional lives including a capacity for mourning, caring matriarchal societal structures, that strangely charismatic grace. Saving elephants is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time.

As a society we must aspire to understand how and why people develop compassion – or fail to do so – and what stories we tell ourselves about animals that reveal the relationship between ourselves and animals. This book is the first study to probe the primary features, and possible effects, of some major literary genres as they pertain to elephants south of the Zambezi over three centuries: indigenous forms, early European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, game ranger memoirs, scientists’ accounts, and poems. It examines what these literatures imply about the various and diverse attitudes towards elephants, about who shows compassion towards them, in what ways and why. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect.

Traces the literary history of the elephant, and its role in South Africa's cultural imaginary

Elephants are in dire straits – again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a while in the heyday of late-colonial conservation efforts in the twentieth. Now, according to one estimate, an elephant is being killed every 15 minutes. This is at the same time that the reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now so well-known that they have become almost a cliché: their high intelligence, rich emotional lives including a capacity for mourning, caring matriarchal societal structures, that strangely charismatic grace. Saving elephants is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time.

As a society we must aspire to understand how and why people develop compassion – or fail to do so – and what stories we tell ourselves about animals that reveal the relationship between ourselves and animals. This book is the first study to probe the primary features, and possible effects, of some major literary genres as they pertain to elephants south of the Zambezi over three centuries: indigenous forms, early European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, game ranger memoirs, scientists’ accounts, and poems. It examines what these literatures imply about the various and diverse attitudes towards elephants, about who shows compassion towards them, in what ways and why. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect.

In this collection of case studies and stories from the field, South African scholars come together to trade stories on how to decolonise the university

Shortly after the giant bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes came down at the University of Cape Town, student protestors called for the decolonisation of universities. It was a word hardly heard in South Africa’s struggle lexicon and many asked: What exactly is decolonisation? This edited volume brings together the best minds in curriculum theory to address this important question. In the process, several critical questions are raised: Is decolonisation simply a slogan for addressing other pressing concerns on campuses and in society? What is the colonial legacy with respect to curriculum and can it be undone? How is the project of curriculum decolonisation similar to or different from the quest for postcolonial knowledge, indigenous knowledge or a critical theory of knowledge? What does decolonisation mean in a digital age where relationships between knowledge and power are shifting?

The book combines strong conceptual analyses with novel case studies of attempts to ‘do decolonisation’ in settings as diverse as South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Mauritius. Such a comparative perspective enables reasonable judgements to be made about the prospects for institutional take-up within the curriculum of century-old universities.

In this collection of case studies and stories from the field, South African scholars come together to trade stories on how to decolonise the university

Shortly after the giant bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes came down at the University of Cape Town, student protestors called for the decolonisation of universities. It was a word hardly heard in South Africa’s struggle lexicon and many asked: What exactly is decolonisation? This edited volume brings together the best minds in curriculum theory to address this important question. In the process, several critical questions are raised: Is decolonisation simply a slogan for addressing other pressing concerns on campuses and in society? What is the colonial legacy with respect to curriculum and can it be undone? How is the project of curriculum decolonisation similar to or different from the quest for postcolonial knowledge, indigenous knowledge or a critical theory of knowledge? What does decolonisation mean in a digital age where relationships between knowledge and power are shifting?

The book combines strong conceptual analyses with novel case studies of attempts to ‘do decolonisation’ in settings as diverse as South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Mauritius. Such a comparative perspective enables reasonable judgements to be made about the prospects for institutional take-up within the curriculum of century-old universities.

Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting ‘the human’ in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressions

The ‘human’ emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it allows for the social, political and economic elevation of those who are centred within its magic circle, and the degradation, marginalisation and immiseration of those excluded as the different and inferior Other, the less than human.

Speaking from Africa, a key site where the category of the human has been used throughout European modernity to control, exclude and deny equality of being, the contributors use decoloniality as a potent theoretical and philosophical tool, gesturing towards a liberated, pluriversal world where human difference will be recognised as a gift, not used to police the boundaries of the human. Here is a transdisciplinary critical exploration of a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and decolonial studies.

Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting ‘the human’ in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressions

The ‘human’ emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it allows for the social, political and economic elevation of those who are centred within its magic circle, and the degradation, marginalisation and immiseration of those excluded as the different and inferior Other, the less than human.

Speaking from Africa, a key site where the category of the human has been used throughout European modernity to control, exclude and deny equality of being, the contributors use decoloniality as a potent theoretical and philosophical tool, gesturing towards a liberated, pluriversal world where human difference will be recognised as a gift, not used to police the boundaries of the human. Here is a transdisciplinary critical exploration of a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and decolonial studies.

A history of the erosion of democracy across the globe

Democracy is being destroyed. This is a crisis that expresses itself in the rising authoritarianism visible in divisive and exclusionary politics, populist political parties and movements, increased distrust in fact-based information and news, and the withering accountability of state institutions. Over the last four decades, democracy has radically shifted to a market democracy in which all aspects of human, non-human and planetary life are commodified, with corporations becoming more powerful than states and their citizens. This is how neoliberal capitalism functions at a systemic level and if left unchecked, is the greatest threat to democracy and a sustainable planet.

Volume six of the Democratic Marxism series focuses on how decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded the global democratic project and how, in the process, authoritarian politics are gaining ground. Scholars and activists from the political left focus on four country cases – India, Brazil, South Africa and the United States of America – in which the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled and highlighted the pre-existing crisis. They interrogate issues of politics, ecology, state security, media, access to information and political parties, and affirm the need to reclaim and re-build an expansive and inclusive democracy.

Destroying Democracy is an invaluable resource for the general public, activists, scholars and students who are interested in understanding the threats to democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the global south and the global north.

A history of the erosion of democracy across the globe

Democracy is being destroyed. This is a crisis that expresses itself in the rising authoritarianism visible in divisive and exclusionary politics, populist political parties and movements, increased distrust in fact-based information and news, and the withering accountability of state institutions. Over the last four decades, democracy has radically shifted to a market democracy in which all aspects of human, non-human and planetary life are commodified, with corporations becoming more powerful than states and their citizens. This is how neoliberal capitalism functions at a systemic level and if left unchecked, is the greatest threat to democracy and a sustainable planet.

Volume six of the Democratic Marxism series focuses on how decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded the global democratic project and how, in the process, authoritarian politics are gaining ground. Scholars and activists from the political left focus on four country cases – India, Brazil, South Africa and the United States of America – in which the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled and highlighted the pre-existing crisis. They interrogate issues of politics, ecology, state security, media, access to information and political parties, and affirm the need to reclaim and re-build an expansive and inclusive democracy.

Destroying Democracy is an invaluable resource for the general public, activists, scholars and students who are interested in understanding the threats to democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the global south and the global north.

A history of the erosion of democracy across the globe

Democracy is being destroyed. This is a crisis that expresses itself in the rising authoritarianism visible in divisive and exclusionary politics, populist political parties and movements, increased distrust in fact-based information and news, and the withering accountability of state institutions. Over the last four decades, democracy has radically shifted to a market democracy in which all aspects of human, non-human and planetary life are commodified, with corporations becoming more powerful than states and their citizens. This is how neoliberal capitalism functions at a systemic level and if left unchecked, is the greatest threat to democracy and a sustainable planet.

Volume six of the Democratic Marxism series focuses on how decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded the global democratic project and how, in the process, authoritarian politics are gaining ground. Scholars and activists from the political left focus on four country cases – India, Brazil, South Africa and the United States of America – in which the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled and highlighted the pre-existing crisis. They interrogate issues of politics, ecology, state security, media, access to information and political parties, and affirm the need to reclaim and re-build an expansive and inclusive democracy.

Destroying Democracy is an invaluable resource for the general public, activists, scholars and students who are interested in understanding the threats to democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the global south and the global north.

Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara is a translation into Setswana of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, by the renowned South African thinker, writer and linguist Sol T. Plaatje, who was also a gifted stage actor. Plaatje first encountered the works of Shakespeare when he saw a performance of Hamlet as a young man; it ignited a great love in him for the works of the Elizabethan dramatist. Many years later he translated several of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana in a series called Mabolelo a ga Tsikinya-Chaka (‘The Sayings of Shakespeare’.) Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara went to print five years after Plaatje’s death, in 1937, published in the Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series by the University of the Witwatersrand Press.



His translations of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana helped to pioneer and popularise a genre, the drama script, that was previously not well known in Southern Africa. It also showcased the rich range of Setswana vocabulary and served Plaatje’s aim of developing the language.
Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara ke phetolelo ya Setswana ya Julius Caesar ya ga Shakespeare ka mokwadi, moakanyi wa MoAforika le seitseanape sa puo Sol T. Plaatje, yo gape e neng e le modiragatsi yo o nang le bokgoni wa serala. Plaatje o rakane la ntlha le ditiro tsa ga Shakespeare fa a bona tiragatso ya Hamlet e sa le lekawana, mme seo se ne sa tsosa lerato le le boitshegang mo pelong ya gagwe la ditiro tsa mokwadi yoo wa MoElisabeta. Dingwaga di le dintsi morago ga foo o fetoletse diterama tsa ga Shakespeare di balwa mo puong ya Setswana mo dikgatisong tsa Mabolelo a ga Tsikinya-Chaka (‘The Sayings of Shakespeare’). Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara e gatisitswe dingwaga di le tlhano morago ga loso lwa ga Plaatje, ka 1937. E gatisitswe mo metseletseleng ya Bantu (moragonyana African) Treasury Series ya Univeristy of the Witwatersrand Press.



Go fetolela diterama tsa ga Shakespeare mo Setswaneng go thusitse go godisa le go naya serodumo mokwalo wa boitlhamedi wa diterama o o neng o sa tlwaelega thata mo malobeng. Go bontshitse gape khumo le nonofo ya tlotlofoko ya Setswana mme ga thusa Plaatje go tlhabolola puo ya gaabo jaaka e ne e le maikaelelo a gagwe.

Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara is a translation into Setswana of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, by the renowned South African thinker, writer and linguist Sol T. Plaatje, who was also a gifted stage actor. Plaatje first encountered the works of Shakespeare when he saw a performance of Hamlet as a young man; it ignited a great love in him for the works of the Elizabethan dramatist. Many years later he translated several of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana in a series called Mabolelo a ga Tsikinya-Chaka (‘The Sayings of Shakespeare’.) Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara went to print five years after Plaatje’s death, in 1937, published in the Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series by the University of the Witwatersrand Press.



His translations of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana helped to pioneer and popularise a genre, the drama script, that was previously not well known in Southern Africa. It also showcased the rich range of Setswana vocabulary and served Plaatje’s aim of developing the language.
Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara ke phetolelo ya Setswana ya Julius Caesar ya ga Shakespeare ka mokwadi, moakanyi wa MoAforika le seitseanape sa puo Sol T. Plaatje, yo gape e neng e le modiragatsi yo o nang le bokgoni wa serala. Plaatje o rakane la ntlha le ditiro tsa ga Shakespeare fa a bona tiragatso ya Hamlet e sa le lekawana, mme seo se ne sa tsosa lerato le le boitshegang mo pelong ya gagwe la ditiro tsa mokwadi yoo wa MoElisabeta. Dingwaga di le dintsi morago ga foo o fetoletse diterama tsa ga Shakespeare di balwa mo puong ya Setswana mo dikgatisong tsa Mabolelo a ga Tsikinya-Chaka (‘The Sayings of Shakespeare’). Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara e gatisitswe dingwaga di le tlhano morago ga loso lwa ga Plaatje, ka 1937. E gatisitswe mo metseletseleng ya Bantu (moragonyana African) Treasury Series ya Univeristy of the Witwatersrand Press.



Go fetolela diterama tsa ga Shakespeare mo Setswaneng go thusitse go godisa le go naya serodumo mokwalo wa boitlhamedi wa diterama o o neng o sa tlwaelega thata mo malobeng. Go bontshitse gape khumo le nonofo ya tlotlofoko ya Setswana mme ga thusa Plaatje go tlhabolola puo ya gaabo jaaka e ne e le maikaelelo a gagwe.

A collection of photographs of a symbol of cruelty and inhumanity suffered by the people of South Africa

In the varied architectural landscape of District Six in Cape Town lived a close-knit community of artists, musicians, writers, politicians, priests, sheikhs, workers, gangsters, sportsmen, housewives and business people. The Avalon, the British and National cinemas entertained the locals and two photographic studios in Hanover Street recorded their social life. There were restaurants, grocery stores, butchers, tailor shops, drapers and a large fish market offering a wide selection of sea produce at very reasonable prices. When, in February 1966, the National Party government announced that District Six was to be razed to the ground in order to make space for a new 'white area', the poet James Matthews suggested to George Hallett and Clarence Coulson that they photograph the area before the bulldozers came in. As young students of photography they produced an intimate portrait of District Six under the guidance of Peter Clarke and Sakkie Misbach, who also provided Hallett with film for the project. In the 1960s Jackie Heyns ran a weekly column in the Golden City Post called 'Aunt Sammy's', which he illustrated with his own photographs. The columns - three of which are reproduced here - were based on the real Aunty Sammy, a shebeen owner living in District Six with her white husband and a rich source of local stories. Gavin Jantjes was a student at Michaelis Art School who lived in District Six with his parents; his pictures were taken during his wanderings in the area. Finally Wilfred Paulse, a free-lance photographer, covered the district shortly before its destruction, along with the bleak new developments on the Cape Flats where most of the inhabitants ended up against their will. District Six Revisited is set to become the definitive collection of photographs of this vibrant suburb, whose destruction became a symbol of the cruelty and inhumanity suffered by the people of this country. It attempts to reconstruct the spirit of the place from important historic photographs, some of which are published here for the first time.