You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In 1976, when he was imprisoned on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela secretly wrote the bulk of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. The manuscript was to be smuggled out by fellow prisoner Mac Maharaj, on his release later that year. Maharaj also urged Mandela and other political prisoners to write essays on southern Africa’s political future. These were smuggled out with Mandela’s autobiography, and are now published for the first time, 25 years later, in Reflections in Prison. This collection of essays provides a unique ‘snapshot’ of the thinking of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada and other leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle on the eve of the 1976 So...
None
None
Describes and depicts the life and times of the South African president who spent twenty-seven years in jail for his political beliefs, and includes interviews by such figures as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Bono.
When President F.W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of the liberation movements on 2 February 1990, he opened the door to negotiations that would end apartheid and pave the way to democracy. But how did this moment come about? What power struggles and secret talks had brought the country to this point? Written by two ANC veterans who were close to these events, Breakthrough sheds new light on the process that led to the formal negotiations. Focusing on the years before 1990, the book reveals the skirmishes that took place away from the public glare, as the principal adversaries engaged in a battle of positions that carved a pathway to the negotiating table. Drawing from material in the pris...
More than 25 years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political violence, and the memory of the trauma has faded. Nevertheless, some 20 500 people were killed between 1984 and 1994. Conventional wisdom has it that most died as a result of the ANC's people's war. Many books have been written on South Africa's political transition, but none has dealt adequately with the people's war. This book does. It shows the extraordinary success of the people's war in giving the ANC a virtual monopoly on power, as well as the great cost at which this was done. The high price of it is still being paid. Apart from the terror and killings it sparked at the time, ...
Vague references to the 'war on terror' and the 'threat to national security' are frequently used by venal politicians to cover-up criminal associations and covert illegal activity, ranging from money-laundering, narcotics trafficking, abduction and murder to the wholesale slaughter of non-combatant civilians - glibly dismissed as 'collateral damage' in mainstream media coverage of state terror, from the Caucuses to the Middle East and the streets of European capitals, while locally, in towns and villages that never make headlines, predatory Catholic clergy and radical Islamic academics and imams abuse trust to accommodate their personal agendas of greed, lust and revenge. The issues in Unde...
This tell-all memoir reveals the details behind Sunday Times journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika's exposure of the R1.7 billion lease scandal between police commissioner Bheki Cele and property tycoon Roux Shabangu, for which he was infamously arrested in 2010. It is also the riveting account of how a neglected boy in an unknown village became one of South Africa's most awarded investigative reporters and found himself at the receiving end of the corruption that had defeated those he helped put in power. Fearless in the face of corrupt authorities with sinister political motives, and fervent about justice, Wa Afrika's life was characterised by resistance to oppression and inequality from an early age. Destined to defend and uphold the principles of democracy, his story is the inspiring tale of an ordinary man, armed with a pen, who challenged the proverbial giant.
Table of contents
Abraham and Constand Viljoen were identical twins who took starkly different paths in life. One was a deeply religious man, who opposed apartheid; the other was a man of war, who became head of the SADF. But together they would play a crucial role in preventing South Africa from descending into civil war. In the early 1990s, Constand came out of retirement to head the Afrikaner Volksfront, which opposed the negotiations with the ANC and made plans for military action. Realising that war would destroy their country, Abraham approached his estranged brother and urged him to consider the alternative: talks with the ANC. What followed was a series of secret meetings and negotiations that ultimately prevented civil war. Brothers in War and Peace documents the crucial yet largely unheralded role the Viljoen brothers played in ensuring peace in South Africa. Based on interviews with the brothers and other key political figures, the book gives new insights into a time when the country’s future was on a knife-edge.