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Lost on the Map
For 250 years the author's family spread across the globe, helping to expand the British Empire and paint the map red. This is a personal reckoning with that dubious legacy, echoing down to the present in South Africa. It begins with the 'discovery' of Tahiti in 1767 by an ancestor, from whose log book Rostron reveals that his sailors were exchanging the ship's nails for sex with Tahitian maidens so that HMS Dolphin began, literally, to fall apart. After the Anglo-Boer war, having emigrated to South Africa, one grandfather became editor of the Sunday Times, voicing racist opinions, and later of the Rand Daily Mail, at that time a voice of the Randlords. Ironically, his other grandfather worked for the Communist Party and printed revolutionary pamphlets for the violent 1922 Rand Revolt. In a bizarre twist, Rostron's father managed the 1936 South African boxing team at the Berlin Olympics, where from under his nose their star boxer was recruited by the Nazis. Uncovering family secrets and mistaken myths, Rostron offers a unique insight into modern-day South Africa's colonial past.
Black Petals
A cautionary tale about organized crime in modern South Africa, this thrilling mystery introduces unassuming archivist Macaulay Vogel, who is examining a recently discovered cache of old police archives. Sorting out the documents, Vogel is jolted when he comes upon a surveillance file about himself. It’s a terrible shock: he doesn’t recognize this person at all. Had he suffered a memory loss in his youth? Had someone stolen his identity? To find some answers, he seeks out old friends: a lover, former comrades, and even his nemesis, Boschard, an eerie former security policeman. At the same time Vogel is making his rounds, there are signs of growing racial anger over the excavation of a mysterious accumulation of bones in the center of Cape Town, which might be a secret human burial pit. Amidst the personal and civic confusion, Vogel begins to crack, despairing of his lapsed hopes and the lost love of a woman named Marda.
A Three-Cornered Life
A biography of a 20th-century Australian historian and an outstanding scholar in the humanities and social science fields, this thorough account highlights the accomplishments of W. K. Hancock. Compelling and informative, this chronicle features the scope of Hancock's work across three continents, including his mission to Uganda on behalf of the British government in 1954, his tracking of British mobilizations during World War II, and his founding of the Australian National University. Illuminating an extraordinary life and career, this examination celebrates the author of Australia.
The Ranter's Guide To South Africa
Ever wondered what waffle like 'accountability', 'site of contestation' or 'The National Democratic Revolution' really means? Here, in an irreverent nutshell, is your answer. The Ranter's Guide to South Africa pinpoints and defines some of the most overused and abused words, acronyms, piffle and jargon that noisily bamboozle our daily life. It is a satirical dictionary for our times, encompassing politics, business, culture, sport, history and that relentless, buzzing swarm of clichés that assault us every day. At last, comic relief is at hand in this indispensible A-Z digest with its short and sharp definitions that will puncture the bombast, bias and rampant populism circulating on all sides. Keep this subversive manual close by, it could save your sanity ...
Till Babylon Falls
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The Transplant Men
An investigation within an investigation, this richly imagined tale follows an organ recipient, Guy Hawthorne, and the person who performed his heart transplant. The mystery opens with an unexplained violent death and a video tape left with the body, leading to a story of modern medicine and the psychological twists that lie at the heart of celebrity and obsession. Infused with the halfway modern spirit of South Africa in the 1960s, this poetic and haunting thriller captures the tensions of the times, weaving together fiction and fact in a gripping storyline.
From Apartheid to Democracy
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings can be considered one of the most significant rhetorical events of the late twentieth century. The TRC called language into action, tasking it with promoting understanding among a divided people and facilitating the construction of South Africa’s new democracy. Other books on the TRC and deliberative rhetoric in contemporary South Africa emphasize the achievement of reconciliation during and in the immediate aftermath of the transition from apartheid. From Apartheid to Democracy, in contrast, considers the varied, complex, and enduring effects of the Commission’s rhetorical wager. It is the first book-length study to ana...
Transforming Cape Town
This study provides a window into the lives of ordinary South Africans more than ten years after the end of apartheid, with the promises of the democracy movement remaining largely unfulfilled. Catherine Besteman explores the emotional and personal aspects of the transition to black majority rule by homing in on intimate questions of love, family, and community and capturing the complex, sometimes contradictory voices of a wide variety of Capetonians. Her evaluation of the physical and psychic costs to individuals involved in working for social change is grounded in the experiences of the participants and illu-minates two overarching dimensions of life in Cape Town: the aggregate forces determined to maintain the apartheid-era status quo, and the grassroots efforts to effect social change.
Africa and Beyond
“Africa and Beyond: Arts and Sustainable Development is a massive undertaking by thoughtful theorists and practitioners in the creative/cultural industry. The combined effect of the volume is to disabuse the fixed, prevailing conception of the role of culture in society; a view that consigns the arts to the periphery of social life, devoid of any meaningful contribution to the alleviation of poverty and general development. Contrary to this view, the volume presents a more comprehensive, meaningful, insightful set of perspectives and paradigms that ascribe agency to creative/cultural products in all facets of human development. The usefulness of the volume extends beyond the industry itself. It is meant for a broader readership and is therefore highly recommended for specialists and the public at large.” – Professor Mokubung Nkomo, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa
Violent Accounts
Violent Accounts presents a compelling study of how ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative analysis of perpetrator testimony, the volume reveals the individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. Th...
