No last place to rest

This book examines the impact of coal mining on the lives of former-labour tenant and rural communities in post-apartheid South Africa.No Last Place to Rest: Coal Mining and Dispossession in South Africa is an exploration of the ongoing struggles faced by families in the Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Na...

Entanglement

This original book is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. Entanglement aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterises the pr...

Students must rise

A detailed account of the incredibly influential Soweto Student Uprising of 1976The Soweto Student Uprising of 1976 was a decisive moment in the struggle against apartheid. It marked the expansion of political activism to a new generation of young activists, but beyond that it inscribed the role ...

Expelled

Expelled is an award-winning drama comedy that unfolds over an explosive week in a privileged South African family.Lou and Rich have staked everything on their son Alex: he has a place at an elite boys' school, is popular, and is on the first rugby team. His status seems untouchable until a reckl...

Needlework in africa

This beautifully crafted book explores needlework; encompassing sewing, embroidery, weaving, quilting, tattooing and more; as a lens for understanding gendered and marginalised histories and identities. Through case studies from across Africa, it highlights the work of fashion designers, weavers,...

Advances in psychological assessment in south africa

Advances in Psychological Assessment in South Africa provides a detailed, practical and critical appraisal of the evolution of psychological testing since the publication of Psychological Assessment in South Africa: Research and Applications (2013). Editors Laher and Cockcroft once again bring to...

Mutant city

Examines how Johannesburg's 21st-century surge in speculative writing and film & fantasy, comics, sci-fi, noir & reflects the city's mutations, anxieties, and imaginative possibilities.

Writing the ancestral river

Writing the Ancestral River is an illuminating and unusual biography of the Kowie River in the Eastern CapeThis tidal river runs through the centre of what used to be called the Zuurveld, a formative meeting ground of different peoples who have shaped our history: Khoikhoi herders, Xhosa pastoral...

Death and compassion

Examines what literature reveals about human attitudes towards elephants and who shows compassion towards them 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...

Lie on your wounds

Selection of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s letters from prison in opposition to South African apartheid This book collates nearly 300 prison letters to and from Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, inspirational political leader and first President of the Pan-Africanist Congress. These letters are testimony to...

Lie on your wounds

Selection of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s letters from prison in opposition to South African apartheidThis book collates nearly 300 prison letters to and from Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, inspirational political leader and first President of the Pan-Africanist Congress. These letters are testimony to ...

The world looks like this from here

Reflecting on the problematics of psychology as a colonial, Euro-American discipline, this book builds a compelling case for thinking and doing psychology differently in and for Africa. This book sets out a situated, pluralising framework for researching, teaching and practising African psycholog...

Conspicuous consumption in africa

Amal’ezulu

Politics and community-based research

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg provides a textured analysis of a contested urban space that will resonate with other contested urban spaces around the world and challenges researchers involved in such spaces to work in creative and politicis...

Organise or die?

Organise or Die? Democracy and Leadership in South Africa?s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is the first in-depth study of one of the leading trade unions in the country. Founded in 1982, the trade union played a key role in the struggle against white minority rule, before turning into a cent...

Like family

An analytic and historical perspective of literary texts to understand the position of domestic workers in South AfricaMore than a million black South African women are domestic workers. Precariously situated between urban and rural areas, rich and poor, white and black, these women are at once i...

Cape radicals

Rogue spying

In South Africa's democracy, the civilian intelligence agency's power has been weaponized to spy on political rivals, the media and civil society, while oversight institutions largely falter. As inquiries into Jacob Zuma's presidency opened doors for intelligence reform, Cyril Ramaphosa's adminis...

A long way home

In no other society in the world have urbanisation and industrialization been as comprehensively based on migrant labour as in South Africa. Rather than focusing on the well-documented narrative of displacement and oppression, A Long Way Home captures the humanity, agency and creative modes of se...

Senkatana

Senkatana is a tragic play adapted from Sotho folk narrative. The play is regarded as a classic of Sesotho literature.Seen as one of the greatest essayists and dramatists writing in Southern Sotho, Senkatana was Mofokeng’s first book, published in 1952 in the African (then Bantu) Treasury Series,...

Pelong ya ka

Pelong ya Ka, a collection of essays and sketches in Sotho was first published in 1962 in the Bantu Treasury Series imprint of Witwatersrand University Press. S. Machabe Mofokeng is regarded as one of the greatest essayist and dramatist in Southern Sotho. His first book, Senkatana (a play) was pu...

Decolonising the human

Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting ‘the human’ in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressionsThe ‘human’ emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it a...

House of truth & bloke and his american bantu

Siphiwo Mahala delves into the lives of iconic figures from South Africa's tumultuous past in this remarkable collection of plays. The collection opens with The House of Truth, which explores the complexity of Can Themba, a fearless journalist, playwright and poet living under an oppressive apart...

Bill freund

The first biography of an eminent historian of South AfricaBill 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 ...

Hidden histories of gordonia

The Gordonia region of the Northern Cape province has received relatively little attention from historians. In Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land dispossession and resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990, Martin Legassick explores aspects of the generally unknown ‘brown’ and ‘black’ history of...

Kielezo cha insha

Kielezo cha Insha is the earliest guide to essay writing in Kiswahili, published by Wits University Press in 1954. After Tanzania's independence in 1961 the book was not available for several decades because of the political and economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa.The ...

Stopping the spies

Is South Africa on its way to becoming a surveillance state, and will it need a whistleblower?In 2013, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents revealing that state agencies like the NSA had spied on the communications of millions of innocent citizen...

Surfacing

An anthology dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist writing influential to today's scholars and radical thinkersSurfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is the first collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. Leading feminist theo...

The times do not permit

This biography of Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904-1980) surveys the unique life, times and music of the first classically educated African composer in southern Africa.

Climate change

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 ...

African archaeology without frontiers

Confronting national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, contributors to African Archaeology Without Frontiers argue against artificial limits and divisions created through the study of ‘ages’ that in reality overlap and cannot and should not be understood in isolation. Papers are drawn from...

Dress as social relations

The history of dress in the South African bushTo dress is a uniquely human experience, but practices and meanings of dress vary greatly among people. In a Western cultural tradition, the practice of dressing ‘properly’ has for centuries distinguished ‘civilised’ people from ‘savages’. Through tra...

The origins of non-racialism

How did South Africa embrace "non-racialism"?After centuries of white domination and decades of increasingly savage repression, freedom came to South Africa far later than elsewhere in the continent - and yet was marked by a commitment to non-racialism. Nelson Mandela's Cabinet and government wer...

Fight for democracy

Fight for Democracy is a penetrating and critical scrutiny of the ANC’s treatment of the print media since the inception of democracy in 1994. In this book, Glenda Daniels does not hide behind a veil of detachment, but instead makes a passionate argument for the view that newspapers and journalis...

Multilingualism and intercultural communication

An in-depth look at the changing sociolinguistic dynamics that have influenced South African society. To date, there has been no published textbook which takes into account changing sociolinguistic dynamics that have influenced South African society. Multilingualism and Intercultural Communicatio...

Thinking freedom in africa

Thinking Freedom in Africa conceives an emancipatory politics beginning from the axiom that ‘people think’. Previous ways of conceiving the universal emancipation of humanity have in practice ended in failure. Marxism, anti-colonial nationalism and neo-liberalism all understand the achievement o...

Psychodynamic psychotherapy in south africa

An accessible text for practitioners, students, and non-specialists about the practice of psychotherapy in South Africa.Psychoanalysis as a long term modality is inaccessible to the average South African. In this book the authors describe how psychoanalytically orientated or psychodynamic psychot...

Fees must fall

This book explores the student discontent a year after the start of the 2015 South African #FeesMustFall revolt#FeesMustFall, the student revolt that began in October 2015, was an uprising against lack of access to, and financial exclusion from, higher education in South Africa. More broadly, it ...

Structure, meaning and ritual in the narratives of the southern san

Analyses texts drawn from the Bleek and Lloyd Archive, arguably one of the most important collections for the understanding of South African cultural heritage and in particular the traditions of the /Xam, South Africas first people. Initially appearing in a now rare 1986 edition and here re-issue...

Why men hurt women and other reflections on love, violence and masculinity

Using conversations, observations, and reflections, psychologist Kopano Ratele meditates on love, violence and masculinityThis book seeks to imagine the possibility of a more loving masculinity in a society where structural violence, failures of government and economic inequality underpin much of...

Dorothea bleek

Dorothea Bleek (1873–1948) devoted her life to completing the ‘bushman researches’ that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This research was partly a labour of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of nineteenth-centu...

How i lost my mother

How I Lost My Mother is a deeply felt account of the relationship between a mother and son, and an exploration of what care for the dying means in contemporary societyThe book is emotionally complex – funny, sad and angry – but above all, heartfelt and honest. It speaks boldly of challenges faced...

Molecular medicine for clinicians

The insights following the wake of the Human Genome project are radically influencing our understanding of the molecular basis of life, health and disease. The improved accuracy and precision of clinical diagnostics is also beginning to have an impact on therapeutics in a fundamental way. This bo...

Bibliography and modern book production

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 typefac...

Black x

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, so...

Bafana republic and other satires

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

Uncovering memory

My interest in site-specific research is not random. My mother escaped through the sewers of Breslau, Germany in 1945 (today known as Wroclaw, Poland). My father was born in a country that no longer exists. Their final destination was Johannesburg, South Africa. This is where I enter the narrativ...

Seeing and knowing

The depth and wide geographical impact of David Lewis-Williams. It is largely through the work of David Lewis-Williams that San rock art has come to be understood so well, as a complex symbolic and metaphoric representation of San religious beliefs and practices. The purpose of this volume is to ...

Contradicting maternity

Drawing on rich and poignant interviews with mothers who have been diagnosed HIV-positive, Contradicting Maternity provides a rare perspective of motherhood from the mother’s point of view. Whereas motherhood is often assumed to be a secondary identity compared to the central figure of the child,...

Love, crime and johannesburg

‘Why bother to rob a bank, when you can own a bank?’ asked Bertold Brecht. The question is reiterated in the very Brechtian Love, Crime and Johannesburg, the story of Jimmy ‘Long Legs’ Mangane, a people’s poet involved in the struggle, who is accused of robbing a bank. He passionately asserts hi...

The colour of our future

South Africa is ready for a new vocabulary than can form the basis for a national consciousness which recognises racialised identities while affirming that, as human beings, we are much more than our racial, sexual, class, religious or national identities.The Colour of Our Future makes a bold and...

Anxious joburg

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 cont...

Original apartheid hustler

A powerful literary biography uncovering Dugmore Boetie’s erased legacy, blending archival research, oral history, and decolonial critique to challenge apartheid’s racial and cultural erasures.

Inkondlo kazulu

Inkondlo kaZulu (Zulu Poems), the first volume of poetry by B.W. Vilakazi, was first published in 1935. This was the first book of poems ever published in isiZulu; it also marked the launch of the newly established Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series (published by the University of the Witwate...

Land, law and chiefs in rural south africa

This edited collection illustrates contestations over land and political authority in South Africa’s rural areas, focusing on threats to popular rights and how they are being supported.Who controls the land and minerals in the former Bantustans of South Africa - chiefs, the state or landholders? ...

Dominance and decline

As Jacob Zuma moves into the twilight years of his presidencies of both the African National Congress (ANC) and of South Africa, this book takes stock of the Zuma-led administration and its impact on the ANC. Dominance and Decline: The ANC in the Time of Zuma combines hard-hitting arguments with ...

The people’s paper

This much-awaited volume uncovers the long-lost pages of the major African multilingual newspaper, Abantu-Batho.Founded in 1912 by African National Congress (ANC) convenor Pixley Seme, with assistance from the Swazi Queen, it was published up until 1931, attracting the cream of African politician...

New south african review 4

A series of essays taking an account of the milestones of South African democracy in order to give a multidimensional perspective of South Africa. The death of Nelson Mandela on 5 December 2013 was in a sense a wake-up call for South Africans, and a time to reflect on what has been achieved since...

Richard rive

An empathetic biography of the apartheid author, Richard Rive.Richard Moore Rive (1930-1989) was a writer, scholar, literary critic and college teacher in Cape Town, South Africa. He is best known for his short stories written in the late 1950s and for his second novel, 'Buckingham Palace', Distr...

Fighting an invisible enemy

Fighting an Invisible Enemy narrates the founding in 2002 and growth of the internationally renowned centre of excellence for communicable diseases, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in South Africa. In a continent riven with a panoply of formidable contagious pathogens, the...

Falling monuments, reluctant ruins

This edited collection looks at ruins and vacant buildings as part of South Africa’s oppressive history of colonialism and apartheid and ways in which the past persists into the presentFalling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid interrogates ho...

Ukufa kukashaka

Ukufa kukaShaka is a historical drama by Elliot Zondi, first published in 1960 in the Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series by the University of the Witwatersrand Press. Its plot is based on the events surrounding the assassination of Shaka, the mighty Zulu king, by his two half-brothers, Dingan...

Precarious power

An incisive analysis of South Africa's ANC power-as party, as government, as stateSouth Africa's African National Congress (ANC) is in decline, its hegemony has been weakened, its legitimacy diluted. President Cyril Ramaphosa's appointment suspended the ANC's electoral decline, it also heightened...

Shakespeare and the coconuts

A unique look at Shakespeare's works' influence on South African writingIn this book Natasha Distiller explores historic and contemporary uses of Shakespeare in South African society which illustrate the complexities of colonial and post-colonial realities as they relate to iconic Englishness. Be...

Bones and bodies

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 itselfSouth Africa is famed for its contribution to the study of human evolution. In Bon...

Cuba and africa, 1959-1994

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

I write the yawning void

Sindiwe Magona is a celebrated South African writer, storyteller and motivational speaker known mainly for her autobiographies, biographies, novels, short stories, poetry and children’s books. I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays that highlight her engagement with writing that span ...

Babel unbound

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 th...

Traumatic stress in south africa

Traumatic Stress in South Africa deals with the topic of traumatic stress from a number of angles.Traumatic stress, and posttraumatic stress more particularly, has gained international prominence as a condition or disorder that affects people across the globe in the wake of exposure to extreme li...

Mbeki and after

For nearly ten years – indeed more if we include his period of influence under Mandela’s presidency – Thabo Mbeki bestrode South Africa’s political stage. Despite attempts by some in the new ANC leadership to airbrush out his role, there can be little doubt that Mbeki was a seminal figure in Sout...

Ties that bind

Intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance within the histories of apartheid and colonialism. What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South ...

Climate crisis, the

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 ...

Dintshontsho tsa bo – juliuse kesara

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...

Good jew, bad jew

Shows how anti-Semitism has been distorted to serve the Israeli stateGood Jew, Bad Jew is a critique by one of South Africa’s foremost political theorists of mainstream understandings of Jewishness. Steven Friedman offers a searing analysis of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in service of poli...

Rick turner's politics as the art of the impossible

Revisits the work of Rick Turner, a South African political theorist, and addresses contemporary debatesRick Turner was a South African academic and anti-apartheid activist who rebelled against the apartheid state at the height of its power. For this he was assassinated in 1978, at just 32 years ...

San elders speak

This richly illustrated book documents indigenous knowledge and uses of San material culture and artefacts collected a century ago, as described by KhoiSan elders to the authors.

Decolonisation in 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 universityShortly after the giant bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes came down at the University of Cape Town, student protestors called for the decolonisa...

Print, text and book cultures in south africa

An explanation of the unique role of the book and book collecting in South Africa due to the apartheidThis book explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives- historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultu...

Remains of the social

An interdisciplinary volume of essays that engages with what ‘the social’ might mean after apartheid. Remains of the Social is an interdisciplinary volume of essays that engages with what 'the social' might mean after apartheid; a condition referred to as 'the post-apartheid social'. The volume g...

And wrote my story anyway

Critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writersStudying 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 narr...

Doing plays for a change

These five plays by one of South Africa’s foremost black playwrights were written between 1979 and 1986, a period in the country’s history marked by intense repression and escalating violence. Several of Maponya's works fell foul of the censorship system. The works included in this collection - ‘...

Transnational families in africa

This is the first book to capture the poignant stories of transnational African families and their use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in mediating their experiences of migration and caring across distance. Transnational Families in Africa analyses the highs and lows of famil...

In the shadow of policy

Notions of land and agrarian reform are now well entrenched in post-apartheid South Africa. But what this reform actually means for everyday life is not clearly understood, nor the way it will impact on the political economy. In the Shadow of Policy explores the interface between the policy of la...

Public intellectuals in south africa

This edited collection gives voice to neglected public intellectuals in the arts, humanities, and journalism in South Africa who gave voice and presence to those who have been marginalized and silenced in South African historyEdward Said described a public intellectual as someone who uses accessi...

Troubling images

Troubling Images explores how art and visual culture helped to secure hegemonic claims to the nation-state via the construction of a unified Afrikaner imaginary.

Colour, class and community - the natal indian congress, 1971-1994

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 1994Following a hiatus in the 1960s, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in South Afric...

Rock art of the waterberg

Rock Art of the Waterberg: Rites and Transformation is a landmark archaeological study that unveils the nuanced world view and rituals practised by local Bushman groups living in the Waterberg area of northern South Africa millennia ago. Through unprecedented documentation of 130 rock art sites; ...

War against ourselves

A look at nature and how to re-evaluate our relationship with itFor many people "nature" means wilderness and wild animals. It is experienced indirectly through magazines and television programs or through visiting the highly managed environments of national parks. Nature, however, is not externa...

When water wants to

During embalming an arm jerks and strikes a mortician, leaving him unmoored. A pastor’s wife encounters a young congregant in her kitchen wearing her apron and preparing breakfast. A man’s attempt to make sense of why a tornado picked him up leads to a showdown with a cult leader. A daydreaming, ...

What is slavery to me?

A study of slave memory in South Africa using feminist, postcolonial and memory studiesMuch has been made about South Africa's transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. 'Memory' features prominently in the country's reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouri...

Ethnographies of power

Working with key concepts from theorist and human geographer Gillian Hart, this book argues for an ethnographic and geographic approach to critically engage contemporary political-economic processes in the context of real world struggles.

Becoming worthy ancestors

Why does it matter that nations should care for their archives, and that they should develop a sense of shared identity? And why should these processes take place in the public domain? How can nations possibly speak about a shared sense of identity in pluralistic societies where individuals and g...

Making a life

Making a Life explores the dynamic everyday life-making strategies of young men in Zandspruit, a sprawling informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In many ways Zandspruit typifies the precariousness of life within South Africa, where two-thirds of young people lack waged employment....

Can themba

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 exileThis rich and absorbing biography of Can Themba, iconic Drum-era journalist and writer, is the definitive history of a la...