Download or read book Understanding South Africa written by Martin Plaut and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2019 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Nelson Mandela emerged from decades in jail to preach reconciliation, South Africans truly appeared a people reborn as the Rainbow Nation. Yet, a quarter of a century later, the country sank into bitter recriminations and rampant corruption under Jacob Zuma. Why did this happen, and how was hope betrayed? President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is seeking to heal these wounds, is due to lead the African National Congress into an election by May 2019. The ANC is hoping to claw back support lost to the opposition in the Zuma era. This book will shed light on voters' choices and analyze the election outcome as the results emerge. With chapters on all the major issues at stake--from education to land redistribution-- Understanding South Africa offers insights into Africa's largest and most diversified economy, closely tied to its neighbors' fortunes.
Download or read book The Promise written by Damon Galgut and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A modern family saga written in gorgeous prose by three-time Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut. Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt. Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country—one of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones. “Simply: you must read it.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
Download or read book Long Walk to Freedom written by Nelson Mandela and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2008-03-11 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. The book that inspired the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.
Download or read book Surfacing written by Desiree Lewis and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist writing influential to today's scholars and radical thinkers Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is the first collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. Leading feminist theorist, Desiree Lewis, and poet and feminist scholar, Gabeba Baderoon, have curated contributions by some of the finest writers and thought leaders into an essential resource. Radical polemic sits side by side with personal essays, and critical theory coexists with rich and stirring life histories. The collection demonstrates a dazzling range of feminist voices from established scholars and authors to emerging thinkers, activists and creative practitioners. The writers within these pages use creative expression, photography and poetry in eclectic, interdisciplinary ways to unearth and interrogate representations of blackness, sexuality, girlhood, history, divinity, and other themes. Surfacing asks: what do the African feminist traditions that exist outside the canon look and feel like? What complex cultural logics are at work outside the centers of power? How do spirituality and feminism influence each other? What are the histories and experiences of queer Africans? What imaginative forms can feminist activism take? Surfacing is indispensable to anyone interested in feminism from Africa, which its contributors show in vivid and challenging conversation with the rest of the world. It will appeal to a diverse audience of students, activists, critical thinkers, academics and artists.
Download or read book How Long Will South Africa Survive written by Richard William Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most up to date and frank account of the developing South African crisis. An analysis of the criminalization of the South African state. A unique perspective on likely future developments there.
Download or read book The Inheritors written by Eve Fairbanks and published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Lyrical, deep, chilling, and prescient, this is a book we will be talking about for years to come.' - Justice Malala, author and commentator. South Africans face a reckoning: mourn a miracle nation that never came into being, fight on to give it birth, or make something else out of 1994's ashes? In The Inheritors, award-winning writer Eve Fairbanks tells the stories of ordinary people facing this stupendous question. These are the kinds of lives rarely examined in such depth: political activist Dipuo, her born-free daughter Malaika, and Christo, one of the last Afrikaner men drafted to fight for the apartheid regime. All three have to remake their own lives while facing the questions: what do I owe to my forebears, and what does history owe to me? They tell of the unresolved rage, generational guilt, and enduring hope that many South Africans struggle to speak aloud to themselves in private, let alone share. Observing subtle truths about power and inheritance, Fairbanks explores questions that preoccupy so many South Africans today: how can one let go of one's past? How should historical debts be paid? And how can a person live an honourable life in a society that – for better or worse – they no longer recognise?
Download or read book Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa written by M. Eze and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In examining the intellectual history in contemporary South Africa, Eze engages with the emergence of ubuntu as one discourse that has become a mirror and aftermath of South Africa s overall historical narrative. This book interrogates a triple socio-political representation of ubuntu as a displacement narrative for South Africa s colonial consciousness; as offering a new national imaginary through its inclusive consciousness, in which different, competing, and often antagonistic memories and histories are accommodated; and as offering a historicity in which the past is transformed as a symbol of hope for the present and the future. This book offers a model for African intellectual history indignant to polemics but constitutive of creative historicism and healthy humanism.
Download or read book Disgrace written by J. M. Coetzee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative Booker Prize winning novel from Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee "Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." —The New Yorker At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa. 2024 marks the 25th Anniversary of the publication of Disgrace
Download or read book The Alphabet of Birds written by S J Naudé and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé’s voice is something new in South African writing.’ – Damon Galgut From an ancient castle in Bavaria and a pre-War villa in Milan, to a winter landscape in Lesotho and the suburban streets of Pretoria, the stories in The Alphabet of Birds take an acute look at South Africans at home and abroad. In one story, a strange, cheerful Japanese man visits a young South African as he takes care of his dying mother; in another, a woman battles corrupt bureaucracy in the Eastern Cape. A man trails his lover through the underground dance clubs of Berlin, while in London a young banker moves through layers of decadence as a soul would through purgatory. Pulsating with passion, loss, and melancholia, S J Naudé’s collection The Alphabet of Birds is filled with music, art, architecture, myth, the search for origins and the shifing relationships between people.
Download or read book Hlomu the Wife written by Dudu Busani-Dube and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hlomu the wife is essentially a love story that takes its cues from life in a South African township. A young woman named Mahlomu meets Mqhele Zulu and they fall in love. Even though aspects of Mqhele's personality and past make her uncomfortable, Hlomu is happy. Their love is strong and they stand by each other through good and bad. But Mqhele and his seven brothers have a dark and tumultuous past that involves a dead warlord father, mob justice, and lots of unaccounted-for money. The Zulu brothers are rich, handsome, powerful and dangerous. They eventually become one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Johannesburg - but the inherent danger remains.
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 Feast Famine and Potluck written by Karen Jennings and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2014-06-14 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling collection from across the African continent and diaspora here SHORT STORY DAY AFRICA has assembled the best nineteen stories from their 2013 competition. Food is at the centre of stories from authors emerging and established, blending the secular, the supernatural, the old and the new in a spectacular celebration of short fiction. Civil wars, evictions, vacations, feasts and romances the stories we bring to our tables that bring us together and tear us apart.
Download or read book Black Africa written by V. Klima and published by Springer. This book was released on 1976 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 1972, our Czech-written book Literatury eerne Afriky (Literatures of Black Mrica) was published in Prague, presenting a survey of an extensive field. The publication, which was signed at that time by all three authors, differed from most contemporary introductions to the study of Mrican literatures in a threefold way: a) The authors attempted to cover various literacy and literary efforts in the area roughly delimited by Senegal in the west, Kenya in the east, Lake Chad in the north and the Cape in the south. We were well aware-even at that time-that neither technically nor linguistically would it be possible to cover all literary efforts within that area. We did try, however, to include in our survey both the literacies and literatures written in the Indo-European linguae francae (English, French, Portuguese) and in at least several of the major African languages of the area. We did not attempt an exhaustive description, but wished, rather, to show the mutual relationships which emerge, if the literatures of thii\ area, written either in the major linguae francae or in the African languages, are studied not as isolated phenomena, but as mutually complementary features. b) As two of us were linguists and one was a literary historian, we did not limit our analysis of the developing literacies and literatures to the purely cultural and literary aspects. Our intention waR to deal-whcre and if it was relevant-not only with the process of African literary development, but also with the simultaneous, complementar.
Download or read book Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa written by Leslie Bank and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the impact of Covid-19, and the associated state lockdown, on rural lives in a former homeland in South Africa. The 2020 Disaster Management Act saw the state sweep through rural areas, targeting funerals and other customary practices as potential ‘super-spreader’ events. This unprecedented clampdown produced widespread disruption, fear and anxiety. The authors build on path-breaking work concerning local responses to West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, and examine the HIV/AIDS pandemic, to understand the impact of the Covid crisis on these communities, and on rural Africa more broadly. To shed light on the role of custom and ritual in rural social change during the pandemic, Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa applies long-term historical and ethnographic research; theories of people’s science, local knowledge and the human economy; and fieldwork conducted in ten rural South African communities during lockdown. The volume highlights differences between developments in Southern Africa and elsewhere on the continent, while exploring how the former apartheid homelands–commonly, yet problematically, represented as former ‘labour reserves’–have since been reconstituted as new home-spaces. In short, it explains why rural people have been so angered by the state’s assault on their cultural practices and institutions in the time of Covid.
Download or read book Between Two Worlds written by Miriam Tlali and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2004-02-13 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Soweto outside Johannesburg, Between Two Worlds is one of the most important novels of South Africa under apartheid. Originally published under the title Muriel at Metropolitan, the novel was for some years banned (on the grounds of language derogatory to Afrikaners) even as it received worldwide acclaim. It was later issued in the Longman African Writers Series, but has for some years been out of print and unavailable. This Broadview edition includes a new introduction by the author describing the circumstances in which she wrote Between Two Worlds.
Download or read book Nostalgia after Apartheid written by Amber R. Reed and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engaging book, Amber Reed provides a new perspective on South Africa’s democracy by exploring Black residents’ nostalgia for life during apartheid in the rural Eastern Cape. Reed looks at a surprising phenomenon encountered in the post-apartheid nation: despite the Department of Education mandating curricula meant to teach values of civic responsibility and liberal democracy, those who are actually responsible for teaching this material (and the students taking it) often resist what they see as the imposition of “white” values. These teachers and students do not see South African democracy as a type of freedom, but rather as destructive of their own “African culture”—whereas apartheid, at least ostensibly, allowed for cultural expression in the former rural homelands. In the Eastern Cape, Reed observes, resistance to democracy occurs alongside nostalgia for apartheid among the very citizens who were most disenfranchised by the late racist, authoritarian regime. Examining a rural town in the former Transkei homeland and the urban offices of the Sonke Gender Justice Network in Cape Town, Reed argues that nostalgic memories of a time when African culture was not under attack, combined with the socioeconomic failures of the post-apartheid state, set the stage for the current political ambivalence in South Africa. Beyond simply being a case study, however, Nostalgia after Apartheid shows how, in a global context in which nationalism and authoritarianism continue to rise, the threat posed to democracy in South Africa has far wider implications for thinking about enactments of democracy. Nostalgia after Apartheid offers a unique approach to understanding how the attempted post-apartheid reforms have failed rural Black South Africans, and how this failure has led to a nostalgia for the very conditions that once oppressed them. It will interest scholars of African studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and education, as well as general readers interested in South African history and politics.
Download or read book Class Race and Inequality in South Africa written by Jeremy Seekings and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. In this book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the midtwentieth century to the early twenty-first century. They show that the basis of inequality shifted in the last decades of the twentieth century from race to class. Formal deracialization of public policy did not reduce the actual disadvantages experienced by the poor nor the advantages of the rich. The fundamental continuity in patterns of advantage and disadvantage resulted from underlying continuities in public policy, or what Seekings and Nattrass call the “distributional regime.” The post-apartheid distributional regime continues to divide South Africans into insiders and outsiders. The insiders, now increasingly multiracial, enjoy good access to well-paid, skilled jobs; the outsiders lack skills and employment.
