Wits University Press

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 politicians, journalists and poets Mqhayi, Nontsisi Mgqweth, and Grendon. In its pages burning issues of the day were articulated alongside cultural by-ways. The People's Paper - comprising both essays and an anthology - explores the complex movements and individuals that emerged in the almost twenty years of its publication. The essays contribute rich, new material to provide clearer insights into South African politics and intellectual life. The anthology unveils a judicious selection of never-before published columns from the paper spanning every year of its life and drawn from repositories on three continents. Abantu-Batho had a regional and international focus, and by examining all these dynamics across boundaries and disciplines, The People's Paper transcends established historiographical frontiers to fill a lacuna that scholars have long lamented.

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.

An interesting look at the combination of paleoanthropological finds and art

Life of Bone brings into sharp relief, and interrogates, the abutting practices of the scientific and the artistic, practices which have coexisted since the beginning of our species. It is based on an exhibition, scheduled to open in May 2011 at the Origins Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand. This exhibition will display the original fossil skull of the Taung child hominid alongside artworks by Joni Brenner, Gerhard Marx and Karel Nel made specifically in response to these evolutionarily significant remains. This unique combination of paleoanthropological finds and art prompts a range of enquiries on the nature of both artistic and scientific disciplines, and encourages a dialogue between the very distant historic and the contemporary. The creative work produced for this exhibition and the commissioned essays seek to explore issues of influence in various ways. Questions around viewing, and the new ways in which one sees the hominid fossils after viewing contemporary responses and re-imaginings of this material, will be foregrounded. The creative and intellectual engagement with this material probes the human fascination with our origins, provoking questions about the human desire to go further and further back in an evolutionary pattern, until one belongs, and can be placed. The skull, specifically, is more than a scientific object; it is the architecture of consciousness. For humans, the grasp of self and the universe occurs in this small, sealed chamber. Engaging with one's origins is to focus on the nature of life and death, absence and presence.

Wide-ranging essays demonstrate how the consequences of inequality extend throughout society and the political economy

Despite the transition from apartheid to democracy, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. Its extremes of wealth and poverty undermine intensifying struggles for a better life for all. The wide-ranging essays in this sixth volume of the New South African Review demonstrate how the consequences of inequality extend throughout society and the political economy, crippling the quest for social justice, polarising the politics, skewing economic outcomes and bringing devastating environmental consequences in their wake. Contributors survey the extent and consequences of inequality across fields as diverse as education, disability, agrarian reform, nuclear geography and small towns, and tackle some of the most difficult social, political and economic issues. How has the quest for greater equality affected progressive political discourse? How has inequality reproduced itself, despite best intentions in social policy, to the detriment of the poor and the historically disadvantaged? How have shifts in mining and the financialisation of the economy reshaped the contours of inequality? How does inequality reach into the daily social life of South Africans, and shape the way in which they interact? How does the extent and shape of inequality in South Africa compare with that of other major countries of the global South which themselves are notorious for their extremes of wealth and poverty? South African extremes of inequality reflect increasing inequality globally, and The Crisis of Inequality will speak to all those general readers, policy makers, researchers and students who are demanding a more equal world.

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 the region. Emphasising the lives of ordinary people, his writing is also in part an exercise in ‘applied history’ – historical writing with a direct application to people’s lives in the present.
Tracing the indigenous history of Gordonia as well as the northward movement of Basters and whites from the western Cape through Bushmanland to the Orange River, the book presents accounts of family histories, episodes of indigenous resistance to colonisation, and studies of the ultimate imposition of racial segregation and land dispossession on the inhabitants of the region. A recurrent theme is the question of identity and how the extreme ethnic fluidity and social mixing apparent in earlier times crystallised in the colonial period into racial identities, until with final conquest came imposed racial classification.

Is South Africa on a long-term decline?


The New South African Review revives the tradition of critical, analytical scholarship developed by the South African Review in the 1970s and 1980s. Accessible to a wide readership and drawing upon authors from well beyond academia, its objective is to be informative, discursive and, at times, downright provocative. It seeks to provide contemporary comment and engage with current controversies. The first volume in the series, 2010: Development or Decline? ranges widely across the implications of the international crisis for the economy, the threats to our fragile ecology of present economic strategies, through to the state of the ANC and the public service, issues around service delivery, migration, HIV-Aids, land reform, crime, the sexual behaviour of our youth, and much more. Posing the provocative question of whether South Africa is embarking upon a long-term decline, the volume simultaneously argues the potential for a society premised upon social equality, social coherence and sustainability. This collection will appeal to both national and international audiences interested in engaging with the multiple dilemmas and challenges facing contemporary South Africa

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 radically questioned the socio-political dispensation resulting from the 1994 social pact between big business, the ruling elite and the liberation movement. The 2015 revolt links to national and international youth struggles of the recent past and is informed by black consciousness politics and social movements of the international left. Yet, its objectives are more complex than those of earlier struggles. The student movement has challenged the hierarchical, top-down leadership system of university management and it’s ‘double speak’ of professing to act in workers’ and students’ interests yet entrenching a regressive system for control and governance. University managements, while on one level amenable to change, have also co-opted students into their ranks to create co-responsibility for the highly bureaucratised university financial aid that stands in the way of their social revolution. This book maps the contours of student discontent a year after the start of the #FeesMustFall revolt. Student voices dissect colonialism, improper compromises by the founders of democratic South Africa, feminism, worker rights and meaningful education. In-depth assessments by prominent scholars reflect on the complexities of student activism, its impact on national and university governance, and offer provocative analyses of the power of the revolt.

The African National Congress is light years beyond the liberation movement of old. It remains a juggernaut, but its control and dominance are no longer watertight. The ANC lives the contradictions of weaknesses, cracks and factions while retaining its colossal status. As a party-movement it draws on its liberation credentials, and extracts immense power from its deep anchorage in South Africa’s people. It is immersed in electoral politics that marks the state of its overwhelming power cyclically. As government the ANC is the object of protest, but not protest designed to bring the ruling party to its knees. The ANC is in command of the state, yet fails to definitively counter the deficits that make South Africa’s democracy seem so diluted. Its incredulous and thus far trusting supporters condemn but only rarely punish deployees who do not ‘pass through the eye of the needle’.
The ANC and the Regeneration of Political Power unpacks these contradictions. It focuses on four faces of the ANC’s political power – the organisation, the people, political parties and elections, and policy and government – and explores how the ANC has acted since 1994 to continuously regenerate its power.
By 2011-12 the power configurations around the ANC were converging to a conjuncture holding vexing uncertainties. This book presents insights into how South African politics – in many ways synonymous with the politics of the ANC – is likely to unfold in years and possibly decades to come.

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 journalists play a significant role in the deepening of democratic principles.
Glenda Daniels examines the pattern of paranoia that has crept into public discourse about the media and the ANC, and their conflictual relationship. She analyses this fraught relationship through various popular media stories, such as Manto and Mondli, Zapiro and Zuma. Her argument is that there is some hysteria on the part of the ruling party and its allies, for instance the SACP, regarding the media’s exposés, which partially rests on the problem of conflating party, state and ‘the people’. Daniels presents her argument against the backdrop of the impending clamp down on media freedom, the twin threats of the Protection of State Information Bill (Secrecy Bill) and the media appeals tribunal, both of which, she asserts, signify closures in South Africa’s democracy. The book challenges the view held by the ANC that journalists are anti-transformation and that they take instruction from the owners of the media houses; that they are ‘capitalist bastards’ and ‘enemies of the people’.

A companion to People of Eland that allows an overview of Drakensberg rock art

Only 1000 copies of People of the Eland were printed in 1976. It was neither reissued nor reprinted. It has become one of the rarest and most expensive of all books on the African past. One of the things that most disturbed Patricia Vinnicombe while she was working at the Rock Art Research Institute at Wits University in the early 2000s was that students could not access her book. As in many libraries, Wits University locks People of the Eland away in its rare and valuable book section. In 2002, Pat started to explore the possibility of republication. But, she did not feel that the book could be reissued without adding additional sections to explain how knowledge had expanded in the decades since the publication of the book. Tragically, Pat died in March 2003 before she could start work on the new sections. Peter Mitchell and Ben Smith have taken up this challenge and brought together the leading scholars in the field to write new sections to explain both how knowledge has changed since the publication of People of the Eland, and how current research is still influenced by this landmark volume. The Eland's People is thus intended as a companion volume to People of the Eland and it is hoped that this new volume will provide a richer appreciation of the importance of Pat's original work, as well as allowing readers an overview of current understandings of Drakensberg rock art.

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.

Explores the anomalous spaces and practices generated by this influx of people and aid, and shows how they have transformed the politics and governmental practices of the region.

Since the mid-1990s, Western Tanzania has hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees living in massive refugee camps sustained by millions of dollars of humanitarian aid. In more than 14 months of research, Loren Landau found that the refugee influx did not produce the deleterious economic and environmental effects often assumed. Outside the camps, a Tanzanian population long at the margins of their own country's economics and politics became incorporated into systems of power and authority which linked them to Dar es Salaam, central Africa, Geneva, Washington, and the grain farmers of the American Midwest. Amidst the violence and conflict surrounding the camps, they became "Tanzanian" as never before by exalting the territory, the nation and a political leadership that delegated responsibility for security and services to others: the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, and the citizenry. The result was a hybridized regime of power shaped by history, contingency, self-interest and perception: a political form that questions models of rural transformation and the functional basis of the modern nation-state. The Humanitarian Hangover is a valuable resource for scholars of displacement, political scientists and sociologists concerned with how displacement and humanitarianism can serve as primary catalysts for social, political, and economic change.

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).

The Fundamentals of Human Embryology covers embryonic development, with a unique focus on adult anatomy. Its goal is to impart to students a comprehensive overview of how the human embryo forms, not only as a basis for the student of human anatomy, but also as a link to abnormalities they may encounter in their clinical careers. Extensively illustrated with labeled line drawings, now enlarged for better visibility, this concise manual will meet the needs of both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Human Sciences.
Special features include:
• Separate chapters on the neural crest, the skull and osteogenesis
• In-depth coverage of head and neck embryology, including the development of the tooth, for students of dentistry, and speech and audiology
In this Second Edition of the manual at the request of students and teachers, the authors have made the following changes:
• Increased the size of the diagrams
• Revised the text to comply with the Federative International Committee on Anatomical Terminology changes to the Terminologia Embryologica
• Altered the sequencing of some topics to allow the development to flow more logically
• Included an appendix of coloured photographs of congenital abnormalities to help students form a more realistic idea of developmental abnormalities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea’s commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she called‘bushmen’.
How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to learn all she could about the bushmen? Or was she conservative, a researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as lazy and improvident?
These are some of the questions with which Jill Weintroub starts her thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea Bleek’s life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her fieldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in South Africa. The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman’s life, and argues that Dorothea’s life work – her study of the bushmen – was also a sometimes surprising emotional quest.

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

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.

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.