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Lulu Phezulu (or 'Lulu on top') is the name of the home of Leigh ('Lulu') Voigt, the well-known artist and book illustrator who lives with her artist husband in the house they built for themselves on a mountain top in a nature reserve in Mpumalanga. This treasure of a book is at one level a personal account of her and her family's move from the city to the country and their serendipitous encounters with nature and the local people. It is also a breathtakingly beautiful natural history notebook filled with Leigh's watercolours and drawings as well as a wealth of anecdotes, curiosities, lore, and legend about the natural world. Lulu Phezulu has grown over many years out of Leigh's need to express, in both words and pictures, the bush and its fascination, highlighting the oddities and complexities of some of its engaging characters, both human and animal. It will appeal to all who have a love of nature and a love of life, both the ordinary and the extraordinary.
"Barbara Jeppe, botanical artist extraordinaire, began work on the paintings in July 1971 and for the next 28 years she collected and painted over 200 species of Amaryllidaceae. After her death in 1999, her daughter, Leigh Voigt, a versatile and highly acclaimed artist herself, picked up where she left off and painted most of the subsequently described species. This thorough easy-to-use guide is the first book dedicated entirely to the 18 genera in the family Amaryllidaceae in southern Africa. Apart from the over 240 exceptional watercolour plates there are detailed distribution maps and magnificent photographs showing plants in typical habitat conditions. The text has been written by one of...
When lighthouse keeper Hannes Harker is posted to a remote island with his young wife, he discovers something long-hidden in the tower that causes him to lose his footing and fall. Seriously injured, Hannes is evacuated to hospital and nursed back to health by Sister Rika, to whom he haltingly tells the story of his life: of his mother's mysterious death, of his wild young wife, Aletta, and of the desolate island inhabited only by the lighthouse keepers and guano workers - two communities confined together, yet rigidly separated in one of the bleakest places on earth. With the arrival of a figure from Aletta's past, her own secrets erupt into the present, just as the simmering tensions and injustices endured for so long by the guano workers erupt into a single, shocking act of violence. Written in the exquisite, haunting prose for which Marguerite Poland is renowned, The Keeper is the story of two generations of lighthouse keepers - men obsessed by their duty to the light - and the wives who accompany them into a life of frightening isolation. The Keeper is a novel about the power of secrets, the power of love, and the power of stories.
This book presents a novel account of the aesthetics of animals. The author argues that the appreciation of animal beauty carries profound ethical consequences for our relations to our fellow creatures.
The Big Cat Man - wildlife autobiography of Jonathan Scott, holiday reads and travel literature, including the BBC's Big Cat Diary, Paramount's Wild Things, and Elephant Diaries. Also included are photographs and illustrations by Jonathan and Angela Scott, plus coverage of the Maasai Mara and Serengeti, Antarctica, and travels to India and Bhutan.
St Matthias Mission 1902: 'There are men who know that when you are finished with this war of yours and have raised your flag to the glory of your Empire - the one that we, as black men, are supposed to revere for having bestowed on us education, faith, prosperity and all the other high-sounding gifts - that you will sell us out - perhaps against the advance of metaphorical cattle - and say it is expedient. You will sacrifice our rights in order to secure your peace with the Boers and shrug us off. It is for this expedience that men like Tom and Reuben and Sonwabo Pumami are dead. There will be thousands like them in the time to come. ' Against a backdrop of drought, the rinderpest pandemic,...
"Why are you learning Zulu?" When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu, Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. Sanders combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history. Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, Sanders reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning—from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth c...
Charlie Fraser. For some, just a name, just a boy. For some, not even a remarkable boy. Call it devotion. It was as good a word as any. Why Charlie?Why not Dan or Mac or dear old Sparrow? Herbert only knew it to be so - for Charlie Fraser, despite his odd detachment, had presence. Presence. And whatever presence was, it ensured absolute devotion ... The year is 1913, the place a boys' school in colonial South Africa. For every boy, the heart of the school is his own House, his Housemaster and his particular Hero. And, for every newboy coming through the hallowed doors, there are two commandments. The first: Silence and Denial. The second: Not to fail at Footer. Validation lies in honouring these. At whatever cost.
In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof. Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.
For the first time, the 92-metre frieze of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, one of the largest historical narratives in marble, has been made the subject of a book. The pictorial narrative of the Boer pioneers who conquered South Africa’s interior during the 'Great Trek' (1835-52) represents a crucial period of South Africa’s past. Conceptualising the frieze both reflected on and contributed to the country’s socio-political debates in the 1930s and 1940s when it was made. The book considers the active role the Monument played in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the development of apartheid, as well as its place in post-apartheid heritage. The frieze is unique in that it provi...