Download or read book Hidden Johannesburg written by Paul Duncan and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johannesburg: Egoli to some, Jozi to others. Once a mining town, now the most important commercial city in Africa. It’s been home to renegades and rogues, colonialists and capitalists, the dispossessed and the newly enriched. Today it’s populated by those who call themselves Africans or Afrikaners, by blacks, whites and every shade in between, and by immigrants from all over. There are suburbs where the daily rituals of Jewish culture rival New York’s; elsewhere, the tone is more Lagos than laid-back. Remnants of the colonial era stand alongside contemporary steel and glass. In a town that prides itself on the pursuit of fortune, it’s a challenge to preserve heritage, and it is against this background that Hidden Johannesburg offers a snapshot of 28 notable buildings. From the stately mansions of the Randlords to their downtown headquarters, the clubs where they socialised and the churches where they worshipped, the architecture of early Johannesburg lives on in sandstone, granite, marble and slate. But this is a city that constantly reinvents itself, and where the old is all-too-readily demolished to make way for the next ‘big thing’. Some buildings will survive, others will be consigned to memory. Hidden Johannesburg reveals fragments of the history of this vibrant city but, perhaps, the book also tells us something about our future, for if we allow our heritage to be swept away in the name of progress, are we advancing at all?
Download or read book At Home with Apartheid written by Rebecca Ginsburg and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid’s most repressive years. In At Home with Apartheid, Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg’s middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960–1975) and incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family. More subtly but no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration. Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over territory and power. Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and racial geographies produced by the workers’ detached living quarters, designed by builders and architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg’s suburbs. What distinguished these neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively white areas. The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book’s strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and residents it examines vividly to life.
Download or read book The Hidden History of South Africa s Book and Reading Cultures written by Archie L. Dick and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures shows how the common practice of reading can illuminate the social and political history of a culture. This ground-breaking study reveals resistance strategies in the reading and writing practices of South Africans; strategies that have been hidden until now for political reasons relating to the country's liberation struggles. By looking to records from a slave lodge, women's associations, army education units, universities, courts, libraries, prison departments, and political groups, Archie Dick exposes the key works of fiction and non-fiction, magazines, and newspapers that were read and discussed by political activists and prisoners. Uncovering the book and library schemes that elites used to regulate reading, Dick exposes incidences of intellectual fraud, book theft, censorship, and book burning. Through this innovative methodology, Dick aptly shows how South African readers used reading and books to resist unjust regimes and build community across South Africa's class and racial barriers.
Download or read book Secret Johannesburg written by C. L. Bell and published by Editions Jonglez. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far from the crowds and the usual clichés, Johannesburg is filled with hidden treasures revealed only to residents and visitors who leave the beaten track behind.An indispensable guide for all those who thought they knew the city well or would like to discover its other facets.
Download or read book Hidden Pretoria written by Johan Swart and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite being South Africa’s capital city, Pretoria has often played a supporting role to bold and brash Johannesburg and Cape Town’s cosmopolitan charms. However, when it comes to architectural heritage, the Jacaranda City is well-endowed. From the skyline-dominating Union Buildings and Voortrekker Monument, to the imposing edifices of its administrative precincts, Pretoria might be deserving of a second moniker: the city of sandstone, brick and granite. But when you look beyond the impressive façades, soaring columns and linear planes of buildings that were intended to convey power and authority, you’ll find light-filled interiors embellished with decorative touches that are only hinted at from the outside. Murals, mosaics, domes, galleries, stained-glass windows, gleaming brass and impressive woodwork are often hidden from view behind doors that are closed to the public. And even those museums, buildings and places of worship that are open to all have noteworthy architectural and design features that are easily overlooked. The history of the city, and of the country, has been played out in many of the buildings featured in Hidden Pretoria. This book captures facets of our diverse heritage, historic and contemporary, so that a new generation might recognise the need to embrace the past in order to build our common future.
Download or read book Hidden Cape Town written by Paul Duncan and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique look ‘inside’ 30 of Cape Town’s most notable buildings. If you have ever wondered what lies behind an interesting façade, or wished you could peek behind a closed door, Hidden Cape Town is the book for you. The author and photographer have collaborated to reveal the architectural secrets and artworks that lie behind the doors of some well-known, and lesser known, landmark buildings in and around the ‘Mother City’. These buildings are part of our collective heritage, reflecting the myriad cultural influences that have shaped our country.
Download or read book The Unspoken Alliance written by Sasha Polakow-Suransky and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the Six-Day War, Israel was a darling of the international left, vocally opposed to apartheid and devoted to building alliances with black leaders in newly independent African nations. South Africa, for its part, was controlled by a regime of Afrikaner nationalists who had enthusiastically supported Hitler during World War II. But after Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, the country found itself estranged from former allies and threatened anew by old enemies. As both states became international pariahs, a covert—and lucrative—military relationship blossomed between these seemingly unlikely allies. Based on extensive archival research and exclusive interviews with former generals and high-level government officials in both countries, The Unspoken Alliance tells a troubling story of Cold War paranoia, moral compromises, and startling secrets.
Download or read book A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg written by Harry Kalmer and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg is Harry Kalmer’s spellbinding ode to Johannesburg and its people. This is the story of Sara, who poses stiffly for a photo with her four children at Turffontein concentration camp in 1901, and of Abraham, who paints the street names on Johannesburg’s kerbs. It is the tale of their grandson Zweig, a young architect who has to leave Johannesburg when he falls in love with the wrong person, and of Marceline, a Congolese mother who flees to the city only to be caught up in a wave of xenophobic violence. Spanning more than a hundred years, A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg is a novel that documents and probes the lives of the inhabitants of this incomparable African city – the exiled, those returning from exile, and those who never left.
Download or read book Hidden Karoo written by Patricia Kramer and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Karoo is big sky country; a land of vast open plains punctuated by flat-topped mountains, conical hills and secluded valleys, a land of scrubby bushes and hardy trees, where pioneers carved roads out of rock to set down roots in an unforgiving environment. Here dreams are born, legends are made, and outcasts find sanctuary. It is also an ancient place, whose story is revealed through geology, fossils and artefacts, and whose human lineage predates any written history. Today, the people who inhabit it must manifest the same fortitude that sustained those who left their footprints in the primieval mud. In Hidden Karoo you will find all this, and more. Through a series of superb photo-essays, this majestic place is revealed as a land where conservation and neglect are seldom far apart, where one town boasts splendidly restored buildings, while along a dusty back road lie forgotten villages waiting for ... something. Could it be a renewal, or a slow death? There’s nothing novel about the movement of people from country to city, and the Karoo mimics other parts of the world where rural areas become derelict as they are depopulated. Hidden Karoo presents a snapshot of the region as it is now, offering a glimpse into towns and villages, farmsteads and churches, important buildings and humble homes, all against a backdrop of awe-inspiring landscapes. Through words and pictures, it prompts us to consider what was, what is and, perhaps, what might be. One constant about the Karoo is change. A book can do no more than capture a moment in time or depict fragments of a place, but in doing so, it bears witness to the past and offers the hope that there may yet be a future for this unparalleled part of our country.
Download or read book Johannesburg Then and Now written by Marc Latilla and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In less than a century, the jumble of shabby tents and lean-tos that constituted Johannesburg’s first settlement has grown into a modern metropolis of towering office buildings, high-rise apartments and sprawling suburbs. Its rapid development has been in no small measure the result of the fabulous wealth that lay in the goldrich deposits of the now-famous Witwatersrand basin. The story of gold is also the story of Johannesburg, and in a fascinating series of photographic juxtapositions, Johannesburg Then and Now chronicles the city’s expansion from dusty mining camp to economic powerhouse. Rare archival photographs, dating from the 1880s to the 1940s, are contrasted with vivid scenes of the modern city, providing a hitherto untold portrait of the Place of Gold. Where possible, the modern-day photographs have been shot from the same locations as the originals. Detailed captions provide fascinating comparisons between the old and the new, while also illuminating features that have remained the same. Johannesburg Then and Now is a superb collection of images and text that will delight both local residents and visitors. Sales points: Fascinating portrait of early and modern Johannesburg; Rare archival photographs (1880–1950), many never published before; Informative and well-researched text; Beautiful and elegantly designed coffee-table book; Excellent gift and keepsake; Companion volume to the successful Cape Town Then and Now.
Download or read book Anxious Joburg written by Nicky Falkof and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary account of the life of Johannesburg, South Africa's "global south city" Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global South city. Global South cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. This is often imagined in terms of the global North’s anxieties about the South: migration, crime, terrorism, disease and environmental crisis. Anxious Joburg invites readers to consider an intimate perspective of living inside such a city. How does it feel to live in the metropolis of Johannesburg: what are the conditions, intersections, affects and experiences that mark the contemporary urban? Scholars, visual artists and storytellers, all look at unexamined aspects of Johannesburg life. From peripheral settlements to the inner city to the affluent northern suburbs, from precarious migrants and domestic workers to upwardly mobile young women and fearful elites, Anxious Joburg presents an absorbing engagement with this frustrating, dangerous, seductive city. It offers a rigorous, critical approach to Johannesburg revealing the way in which anxiety is a vital structuring principle of contemporary life. The approach is strongly interdisciplinary, with contributions from media studies, anthropology, religious studies, urban geography, migration studies and psychology. It will appeal to students and teachers, as well as to academic researchers concerned with Johannesburg, South Africa, cities and the global South. The mix of approaches will also draw a non-academic audience.
Download or read book The South African Gandhi written by Ashwin Desai and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-07 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography detailing Gandhi’s twenty-year stay in South Africa and his attitudes and behavior in the nation’s political context. In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. “India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma,” goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi’s first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi’s racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history. The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals. Praise for The South African Gandhi “In this impressively researched study, two South African scholars of Indian background bravely challenge political myth-making on both sides of the Indian Ocean that has sought to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the struggle for equality there. They show that the Mahatma-to-be carefully refrained from calling on his followers to throw in their lot with the black majority. The mass struggle he finally led remained an Indian struggle.” —Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India “This is a wonderful demonstration of meticulously researched, evocative, clear-eyed and fearless history writing. It uncovers a story, some might even call it a scandal, that has remained hidden in plain sight for far too long. The South African Gandhi is a big book. It is a serious challenge to the way we have been taught to think about Gandhi.” —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
Download or read book The Hidden Star written by K. Sello Duiker and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2011-11-27 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven-year-old Nolitye's granny used to say: if you mess with a woman, you mess with a stone. When Nolitye finds a magical stone on the dusty streets of Phola, her granny's words take on a new meaning. Along with her two friend - the somewhat pampered Bheki, and Four Eyes, a reformed member of the Spoilers gang led by Rotten Nellie - Nolitye puts the powers of the stone to good use: for the first time the threesome can stand up to the Spoilers; Nolitye can save the life of Rex, the leader of a pack of talking township mutts; and dare to look scary MaMtonga with her living brown-and-green snake necklace in the eye. But soon Nolitye finds out that the purplish-blue magic stone is but five stones needed to put right things that started to go wrong the day her father died in a mining accident when she was five years old. Or so she was told by her mother... By merging a cast of characters straight out of African myth folklore with everyday township life, K. Sello Duiker created a magical world and a truly wondrous quest, a timeless tale that will appeal to an ageless audience.
Download or read book Portrait with Keys The City of Johannesburg Unlocked written by Ivan Vladislavic and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dazzling portrait of Johannesburg is "one of the best things ever written about a great, if schizophrenic, city, and an utterly true picture of the new South Africa" (Christopher Hope).
Download or read book When They Came for Me written by John R. Schlapobersky and published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. This book was released on 2021-06-02 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'An intriguing story of endurance and survival. A reminder of times, and the people who resisted them, that should never be forgotten.' – GILLIAN SLOVO In 1969, while a student at Wits University, John Schlapobersky was arrested for opposing apartheid. Thrown into a world that it is hard to believe ever existed, he was tortured, detained in solitary confinement and eventually deported. Half a century later, John sat down to write about what happened to him at 21. Calling on memory and two diaries he kept at the time – one written on toilet paper and the other in the Bible he was allowed – he describes being interrogated through sleep deprivation day and night and later writing secretly in solitary confinement. He remembers the singing of the condemned prisoners, and revisits the poetry, songs and texts that saw him through his ordeal. He reconstructs, in moving detail, the struggle for survival that finally transformed his life and supplements this with detailed research. He is now a leading psychotherapist and author and works closely with those who have similar histories. When They Came For Me is a vital historical document: a record of its time with lessons for ours.
Download or read book Hidden History written by Gerry Docherty and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think you know about British history and the causes of the First World War? Think again. This fascinating and gripping study of events at the turn of the Twentieth Century is a remarkable insight into how political and social factors that we widely accept to be the causes of The Great War, were really just a construct put together by a very small, but powerful, political elite... 'Thought-provoking . . . Docherty and Macgregor do not mince their words . . . their arguments are powerful' -- Britain at War 'Simply astonishing' -- ***** Reader review 'Very illuminating' -- ***** Reader review 'You simply MUST read this book' -- ***** Reader review 'This is a page-turner' -- ***** Reader review *********************************************************************************** Hidden History uniquely exposes those responsible for the First World War. It reveals how accounts of the war's origins have been deliberately falsified to conceal the guilt of the secret cabal of very rich and powerful men in London responsible for the most heinous crime perpetrated on humanity. For ten years, they plotted the destruction of Germany as the first stage of their plan to take control of the world. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was no chance happening. It lit a fuse that had been carefully set through a chain of command stretching from Sarajevo through Belgrade and St Petersburg to that cabal in London. Our understanding of these events has been firmly trapped in a web of falsehood and duplicity carefully constructed by the victors at Versailles in 1919 and maintained by compliant historians ever since. The official version is fatally flawed, warped by the volume of evidence they destroyed or concealed from public view. Hidden History poses a tantalising challenge. The authors ask only that you examine the evidence they lay before you . . .
Download or read book The Hidden Form of Capital written by Peter L. Berger and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Hidden Form of Capital' presents evidence from several parts of the changing world about how the realm of the spirit affects the economy. The idea that societies have economic cultures as well as aesthetic, literary, and artistic cultures is well-embedded in a number of major studies attempting to identify the origins of national wealth and progress. This book provides an original contribution to the debate, by discussing the relationship between religion and the economy not via further theoretical speculation, but through the presentation of analytical evidence from real-life case studies in Europe, Asia, Africa, Russia, and the United States. There is currently a major re-assessment of assumptions about the foundations of societal progress, as the market rationality model is exposed for its moral weaknesses. The emergence of socio-economics as a scholarly field, as well as the embracing of complexity theory and the societal effect in economic analysis, brings the question of cultural effects to the forefront. This collection of studies offers more practical and tangible evidence, especially unique and useful for its comparative aspect. The book skilfully combines this comparative and descriptive character with an accessible writing style intended for a wide audience.
