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A Country At War With Itself
Crime is tearing South Africa apart. Whether it is hijacking or rape, a home robbery or a husband's explosion of rage, violence is so common that few lives have been left untouched by it. The result is a society deformed by its fears. Closeted behind locked doors and high walls, panic buttons at the ready, members of the middle class live lives haunted by fear. The poor, who are both more likely to be victimised and less able to secure themselves, are just as traumatised. A Country at War with Itself is a penetrating exploration of South Africa's crime problem. Getting behind the statistics to offer a sober and sobering account of the scale of the problem and its evolution, it describes how government has sometimes sought to deal with the crisis and sometimes sought to deny its existence. The book ends with some suggestions of what needs to be done to deal with this scourge.
Fruit Of A Poisoned Tree
In June 2005, Fred van der Vyver, a young actuary and the son of a wealthy Eastern Cape farming family, was charged with murdering his girlfriend, Inge Lotz, allegedly bludgeoning her to death with a hammer as she lay on a couch in her lounge. The case against Van der Vyver seemed overwhelming. His behaviour at the time of the murder appeared suspicious and incriminating, and a letter, penned by Inge on the morning of her death, suggested that the two had been fighting. But it was forensic evidence that seemed to prove his guilt: his fingerprints were found at the scene, one of his shoes was matched to a blood stain on the bathroom floor, and traces of blood were found on an ornamental hamme...
Bitter Dawn
The man standing next to me was a tall, good-looking man of Indian heritage in his early 30s. Shrien Dewani seemed calm and composed. The only outward signs of trauma I could notice were the two large, dark purple bags under each of his eyes. I offered him a seat. He accepted and we started to talk. Over the following 45 minutes, the British businessman told me about the murder of his wife, Anni, 40 hours earlier.' So begins Bitter Dawn, Dan Newling's journalistic investigation into a crime that ignited firestorms of outrage across the world. At first the story seems simple enough: Shrien Dewani, a young British businessman on honeymoon in Cape Town, arranges the murder of his newlywed bride...
Our Fathers
In one of Stellenbosch’s most affluent areas an apparent house break-in goes awry, leaving a millionaire property developer’s beautiful wife dead. Inspector Albertus Beeslaar, in town to visit a former colleague, is reluctantly drawn in to the investigation led by the formidable Captain Vuyokazi Qhubeka of the Stellenbosch saps. Soon this picturesque town with its historic white gables, world-famous wineries and big money begins to reveal its dark underbelly. Fifteen hundred kilometres to the north, Sergeant Johannes Ghaap is thrust into a drama of his own as he races to save a kidnapped woman and her child, who are being held captive in Soweto. Fate will steer him to The Fatha – a man capable of such evil that most consider him a mere urban legend ... Our Fathers is the translation of the Afrikaans bestseller Onse vaders, a novel that sees the return of Karin Brynard’s much-loved hero Beeslaar and establishes Brynard as one of the country’s finest writers of crime fiction.
Bringing in the Future
Humans are plagued by shortsighted thinking, preferring to put off work on complex, deep-seated, or difficult problems in favor of quick-fix solutions to immediate needs. When short-term thinking is applied to economic development, especially in fragile nations, the results—corruption, waste, and faulty planning—are often disastrous. In Bringing in the Future, William Ascher draws on the latest research from psychology, economics, institutional design, and legal theory to suggest strategies to overcome powerful obstacles to long-term planning in developing countries. Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Ascher applies strategies such as the creation and scheduling of ta...
Michiel Heyns: Three Novels in One
Lost Ground is a richly textured novel set in contemporary South Africa. The murder of a beautiful woman shatters the rural village peace of Alfredville, and her husband, the police station commander, is jailed as chief suspect. Her cousin Peter, a freelance writer in London, returns to South Africa for the first time in decades - unsettled, curious, but also in search of a career-defining story.As Peter abandons the neatly patterned story he had planned and is forced to participate in a community that he once despised, he begins to reconsider his place in the world. In search of Desirée's story, he now starts to rewrite his own - till events take an even more shocking turn... Lost Ground e...
The Infrastructures of Security
Much of the South African government’s response to crime—especially in Johannesburg—has been to rely increasingly on technology. This includes the widespread use of video cameras, Artificial Intelligence, machine-learning, and automated systems, effectively replacing human watchers with machine watchers. The aggregate effect of such steps is to determine who is, and isn’t, allowed to be in public spaces—essentially another way to continue segregation. In The Infrastructures of Security, author Martin J. Murray concentrates on not only the turn toward technological solutions to managing the risk of crime through digital (and software-based) surveillance and automated information sys...
South Africa in Transition
South Africa in Transition utilises new theoretical perspectives to describe and explain central dimensions of the democratic transition in South Africa during the late 1980s and early 1990s, covering changes in the politics of gender and education, the political discourses of the ANC, NP and the white right, constructions of identity in South Africa's black townships and rural areas, the role of political violence in the transition, and accounts of the democratization process itself.
Bring Me My Machine Gun
Award-winning journalist Alec Russell was in South Africa to witness the fall of apartheid and the remarkable reconciliation of Nelson Mandela's rule; and returned in 2007-2008 to see Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, fritter away the country's reputation. South Africa is now perched on a precipice, as it prepares to elect Jacob Zuma as president - signaling a potential slide back to the bad old days of post-colonial African leadership, and disaster for a country that was once the beacon of the continent. Drawing on his long relationships with all the key senior figures including Mandela, Mbeki, Desmond Tutu, and Zuma, and a host of South Africans he has known over the years - including former activists turned billionaires and reactionary Boers - Alec Russell's Bring Me My Machine Gun is a beautifully told and expertly researched account of South Africa's great tragedy: the tragedy of hope unfulfilled.
