"I wrestled with life and lost." So begins the story of Michael, a corporate lawyer known to his colleagues and associates as Sir Marvin, who picks his way – sometimes delicately, but more often in his own blundering way – through the unfathomable intricacies that make up a life: love and anger, humility and ambition, trust and distrust, selfishness and selflessness. A flawed individual with an acute understanding of the roads that must be navigated to achieve even the slightest insight into the human condition.

In this study in introspection, embroidered with lyrical prose and astonishing intuition, the hero, meditative and melancholic, is at once both tragic and comic.

The second offering in the Gerald Kraak Annual Anthology, As You Like It, is a collection of the short-listed entries submitted for the award. Showcasing some of the most provocative works of fiction, poetry, journalism, photography and academic writing created by allies of the LGBTQI+ community; fierce defenders of human rights. The existence of this anthology is an act of protest, affirmation and love. The award is a joint initiative by Jacana Literary Foundation and the Other Foundation named after Gerald Kraak (1956-2014), who was a passionate champion of social justice and an anti-apartheid activist.

A magisterial and masterful addition to the tradition of South African narrative non-fiction, Christa Kuljian’s Sanctuary offers a welcome woman’s voice in a genre distinguished by Jonny Steinberg, Antony Altbeker and Anton Harber.

After years of sporadic media attention and posturing by politicians, Kuljian has made it her business to find out exactly what has been going on at the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg, where the Church acts as a gateway to the city – an Ellis Island for South Africa, the place where many migrants first go to get their bearings. How did a place of worship turn into a shelter for thousands of refugees? Where did they come from? Why are they still there?

Seeking to answer such questions, Kuljian fluently combines many elements: interviews with members of the refugee community and residents of the Church, and key figures like Bishop Paul Verryn, who has often been at the centre of the storm; historical material on the church and its role in the city since the early years; and an understanding of urban dynamics, migrancy, and South African and southern African politics.

The result is a complex, open-eyed book that grapples with some of South Africa’s most urgent social problems as they are refracted through one appalling, frustrating, inspiring place.

Now in its 9th year, the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award is a launching pad for upcoming poets. From slam poetry to formal rhyme, the anthology is a celebration of language and cultural diversity. Assembled by a brilliant team of judges, from a blind selection, this year's compilation contains the best poems from over 600 entries, in 10 of the 11 South African languages. Named after Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876-1932), the award recognises the life and vision of this highly respected political and social activist. We always hope that it reveals the political and social attitudes of our time and reflects the complex, nuanced and uncomfortable truths of life in South Africa.

This fourth volume in the Hidden Voices Series is about Oukasie, a township in the Madibeng municipality. At various times in its history, its inhabitants have struggled against problems such as forced removals, terrible living conditions and corrupt officials.

Bonds of Justice: The Struggle for Oukasie tells the story of a dedicated young group of people who were motivated by their belief that accountable and responsible leadership was needed to improve the situation of their community and its members. Before and after apartheid, they worked together to bring much-needed change to their community. This book tells the stories of those struggles in the 1980s and 1990s, and goes on to describe the problems faced by Oukasie and the wider community when the ethics of accountability were forgotten.

The book has many lessons for South Africa today – the benefits that accountable governance can achieve, and what the costs are when a more selfish approach takes root.

Through the Best loved tales for Africa, we aim to grow a love of reading. "Refilwe, Refilwe, let down your locks, So I can climb the scraggy rocks!" In a cave high up on a craggy cliff, beautiful Refilwe is allowed to see no one but the witch who locked her away. One day, Prince Tumi hears Refilwe singing as he is riding his horse near her cave and he searches for the owner of the magical voice. Will Refilwe ever be free from the evil witch? Will she ever find true love? An African retelling of the classic fairy tale Rapunzel by one of our best loved authors, Zukiswa Wanner, with magical illustrations by Tamsin Hinrichsen will keep all children entranced, and grow a love of reading. Read aloud, read together, read alone, read forever!

The Jacana series of pocket guides is meant for those who are looking for a brief but lively introduction to a wide range of relevant topics of South African history, politics and biography. Written by some of the leading experts in their fields, the individual volumes are informative and accessible, inexpensive yet well produced, slim enough to put in your pocket and carry with you to read.

Steve Biko is often seen as the charismatic leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, who played a useful stopgap role in South African politics in the late 1960s and 1970s. This biography of Biko shows, on the contrary, just how fundamental he was to the transformation of South Africa in the second half of the 20th century – and just how relevant he remains today.

After working closely with the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation in shaping and writing his memoir, author Hassen Ebrahim and Jacana Media are proud to publish this important record of a life that was spent in service to South Africa.

Writes Mac Maharaj in his foreword in the book: “Hassen Ebrahim is one of those many seldom heard of foot soldiers of the 1976 generation who joined the underground and was linked to the ANC structures operating from Botswana. He has been at the coalface of so many facets of South Africa’s march to freedom. He was there during the times when involvement in the struggle against apartheid carried the risk of death; he was involved in our negotiated transition to democracy; he was the chief executive of the elected Constitutional Assembly which wrote and adopted our Constitution; thereafter and until 2007 he served in the Department of Justice.”

From Marabastad to Mogadishu: The Journey of an ANC Soldier chronicles an all-too familiar story of those unsung cadres from the struggle we’ve forgotten to honour for their sacrifices. Those foot soldiers do not feature in our collective memory, they do not find themselves or their stories recorded in the pages of history books, and they are not remembered for their selfless acts of bravery.

The bravery and sacrifice of the ordinary teenager who dropped out of school, the cadre who risked life and limb, and the freedom fighter who exiled himself or herself to countries far and wide must be given a chance to live on book pages, find expression on film reels and all other mediums of historic memory collection.

From Marabastad to Mogadishu: The Journey of an ANC Soldier signals the resolve by the author, his peers, Jacana Media and support organisations such as the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation to bring the ordinary cadre’s story to the fore, to acknowledge his or her sacrifices, and to recognise their contribution to South Africa’s democracy.

A Native of Nowhere: The Life of Nat Nakasa tells the story of how a quiet, serious African boy growing up in the sleepy coastal city of Durban in the 1940s became part of the generation of outspoken black South African journalists in the 1950s and 1960s who challenged state-sponsored segregation in that way that only writers can, simply by keeping a detailed record of its existence. In doing so, this story provides an alternative way of thinking about early resistance to apartheid, loosing it from the bonds of the organised opposition movement. For a man like Nat, freedom was not the end point of a long struggle arching toward justice. Rather it was something you took for yourself, day in and day out - one conversation, one interview, one multiracial party at a time. Born Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa on May 12, 1937 like many South Africans of his generation, leaving his homeland was not simply a matter of deciding to go. It was also a matter of deciding never to come back. Not yet 30 years old, Nat had to look into his future and decide that being legally barred from his homeland was a price worth paying to see the world beyond its borders. This book tells the story of that short life. In doing so, it seeks in part to answer the troubling question of how Nat found himself in that New York City window in July 1965, desperate to the point of no return. But life, like history, cannot be read backwards, and so any biography of Nat Nakasa must begin with the acknowledgement that he was no simple martyr, no fallen hero of the anti-apartheid cause, but rather an ambitious, talented and flawed man whose life had the cold fortune of colliding with one of the most racially repressive regimes in the modern world. Attempts to bring Nakasa’s body home bore no fruit, and he was buried at the Ferncliff cemetery in upstate New York. A headstone placed by the Nieman Foundation 30 years later simply reads: Nathaniel Nakasa May 12 1937 - July 14 1965. Journalist, Nieman Fellow, South African. 1038 (the tombstone number). Many await the repatriation of Nat Nakasa’s body to South African.

“When I get tired, I like lazing in the sun like a lizard, or wallowing warm like a hippo, and feeling cuddly like a lamb.” Jafta, a young boy growing up in Africa, describes some of his everyday feelings by comparing his actions to those of various African animals. The book is filled with rich illustrations and clever similes to explain all sorts of feelings and actions.

Winner of the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award for 2019.

When 11-year-old Chimuka and her younger brother, Ali, find themselves orphaned in the 1990s, it’s clear that their seemingly ordinary Zambian family is brimming with secrets, from HIV/AIDS, to infidelity, to suicide. Faced with the difficult choice of living with their abusive extended family or slithering into the dark underbelly of Lusaka’s streets, Chimuka and Ali escape and become street kids.

Against the backdrop of a failed military coup, election riots and a declining economy, Chimuka and Ali are raised by drugs, crime and police brutality. As a teenager, Chimuka is caught between prostitution and the remnants of the fragile stability that existed before her parents’ death.

The Mourning Bird is not just Chimuka’s story, it’s a national portrait of Zambia in an era of strife. With lively and unflinching prose, Kalimamukwento paints a country’s burden, shame and silence, which, when juxtaposed with Chimuka’s triumph, forms an empowering debut novel.

As a photojournalist, Feni spends a lot of time photographing service delivery strikes and protest in the townships. Often the images that make it into the newspapers are only of the looting and burnings. Renting a backyard room in an informal settlement, Feni was troubled by this kind of portrayal of the lack of service delivery and the life of the marginalised.

As he says, “I live at the back of an RDP house in Mfuleni on the Cape Flats. I experience issues like poor sanitation, access to clean water and the flooding first hand”. Photographing the lack of sanitation was not pleasant for him, but he did not want a photographer from outside the community telling their stories while he watched on. “That too would be a Drain on Our Dignity and that’s what inspired this project”.

A Drain On Our Dignity echoes the ground-breaking images produced by Ernest Cole in the early 1960s, showing black life under apartheid. It is a sensitive and honest look at what lack of services is, what it does to a community and what it does to a people.

Without the screaming, fighting or burning – these captivating images compel the reader to look at what is happening in the Cape Town townships.

African Muckraking is the first collection of investigative and campaigning journalism written by Africans about Africa. The editors delved into the history of modern Africa to find the most important and compelling pieces of journalism on the stories that matter.

This collection of 41 pieces of African journalism includes passionate and committed writing on labor abuses, police brutality, women’s rights, the struggle for democracy and independence on the continent and other subjects. Each piece of writing is introduced by a noted scholar or journalist who explains the context and why the journalism mattered. Some of the highlights include: Feminist writing from Tunisia into the 1930s, exposés of the secret tactics planned by the South African government during apartheid, Richard Mgamba’s searing description of the albino brothers in Tanzania who fear for their lives, and the reporting by Liberian journalist Mae Azango on genital cutting, which forced her to go into hiding.

Many African Muckrakers have been imprisoned and even killed for their work. African Muckraking is a must-read for anyone who cares about journalism and Africa.

This biography of Govan Mbeki (1910-2001), activist and intellectual, goes beyond the narrative details of his long life. Drawing on lengthy interviews with 'Oom Gov', it analyses his thinking, expressed in his writings over 50 years. This helps establish what is distinctive about him: as African nationalist and as committed Marxist - more than any other leader of the liberation movement, he sought to link theory and practice, ideas and action. The biography also explores controversial aspects of Mbeki's personality and career: his reputation as a hardliner, the personal and psychological price paid for militancy, and his role in the tensions within the ANC leadership on Robben Island.

Best known as a novelist and political activist, Alex la Guma (1925–85) was also a journalist, comic strip artist, reviewer, sketcher, painter, short story writer and travel writer. Born in Cape Town's famous multiracial District Six, he was a founding member of the South African Coloured People's Organisation and a leading member of the Congress Alliance during the 1950s and 1960s. Due to his political activity he was detained without trial, shot at, placed under house arrest, and ultimately tried for treason in 1956–61.

He reluctantly went into exile in 1966, where he continued his writing and political work for the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party, travelling widely as an ANC spokesperson on cultural matters. In 1979 he became the ANC's Chief Representative in Central and Latin America and moved to Havana, where he died in 1985.

La Guma attracted the attention of critics and literary scholars from the time his first short stories appeared in the 1950s, and he has been hailed by such important literary figures as Achebe, Soyinka and J.M. Coetzee. His novels continue to sell steadily and inspire comments by literary critics, who have studied different aspects of his work, but who have left the rest of his life and his literary and political influences relatively untouched. Drawing on a far wider range of his writing and artwork, some previously unpublished, this book combines biography with literary and political analyses to offer fresh insights into his major texts: A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967), In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1972), A Soviet Journey (1975) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979).

In 2001, in Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth, Dumisa Ntsebeza and Terry Bell complained that 'like so much of South Africa's recent brutal history, we shall probably never know exactly how many people were banished and what happened to all of them'. Saleem Badat's The Forgotten People: Political Banishment under Apartheid answers many questions about banishment and shines a bright and welcome light on a largely hidden and unknown aspect of our indeed 'brutal history'. It shows how apartheid's political opponents from rural areas were condemned to the living hell of banishment: a weapon used to expel rural opponents to distant and often arid and desolate places for unlimited periods. These rural opponents were plucked from their families and communities and cast, in the late Helen Joseph's words, 'into the most abandoned parts of the country, there to live, perhaps to die, to suffer and starve, or to stretch out a survival by poorly paid labour, if and when they could get it'. They were strangers in strange areas who could not speak the local language, and often had little in common with the locals and even less in common with those under whose surveillance they fell. This is the first study of an important but hitherto neglected group of opponents of apartheid set in a global, historical and comparative perspective. It looks at the reasons why people were banished, their lives in banishment and the efforts of a remarkable group of activists, led by Helen Joseph, to assist them. Indeed, this book originated in a promise made by the author to Helen Joseph, who had undertaken an epic journey in 1962 to visit all those banished across the length and breadth of South Africa. The work is illustrated with stunning photographs by Ernest Cole, Peter Magubane and others.

Metropolises often evoke images of flashy high-rise buildings, permanent background noise, backed-up cars and people moving quickly in all directions in their masses. New York, Tokyo, London, Sao Paulo. But what about Cairo? Lagos? Nairobi, Kinshasa, Johannesburg? More than half of the world's population lives in cities. Countries of the South in particular are facing fast-paced globalisation, with the highest rates of urbanisation taking place in African cities. Beyond Western models of urban development, African cities are creating their own urban structures, topography and cultures. How do these structures work? How do the residents of these cities organise their daily lives? What discussions are taking place in Africa about the history and future of cities? And how are artists thinking about and representing urban life in Africa? Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Afropolis is the product of an exhibition developed by the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, Germany. The book focuses on the Big Five of African cities: Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa and Johannesburg, and brings together positions of artistic and cultural studies, as well as detailed histories and the specific dynamics of these African cities, in order to expand our understanding of the concept of urbanity and the phenomenon of the City from an African perspective. This is the first time the book is available in English.

We Are No Longer At Ease is a collection of personal articles, essays, speeches and poetry mainly from voices of young people who were part of the student-led protest movement known as #FeesMustFall which began in 2015. It tells the journey of a youth that participated in a movement that redefined politics in post-apartheid South Africa and is the evidence of a “born free” generation telling their own story and leading discourse as well as action on transforming South Africa.

The collection includes works by the young student leaders turned academic and public commentators such as David Maimela, Thapelo Tselapedi and Sisonke Msimang; student newspaper journalists that were covering the protests like Natasha Ndlebe; public writing commentators with aims to inform and teach the broader South African society about the aspects of the movement like Yamkela Spengane and Rofhiwa Maneta; lecturers who were assisting the students articulate and find clarity in the way they shaped and voiced their ideas such as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and then of course others were foot soldiers on the ground leading students through the police brutality of rubber bullets and pepper spray like Loverlyn Nwandeyi, Ntokozo Qwabe and Ramabina Mahapa.

The Johannesburg Art Gallery opened the Thami Mnyele and Medu Art Ensemble exhibition in the last months of 2008 under the curatorship of the gallery's Director, Clive Kellner. Jacana is proud to present Thami Mnyele & Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective, a book which brings together the myriad artworks exhibited and the stories of the original members of Medu who created them in a generously illustrated work. In the aftermath of the Soweto uprisings an association of exiled artists was formed in Botswana where its members felt safe to practice their craft out of reach of the apartheid government in a time when violent military action was the order of the day in South Africa. The group of artists, who preferred to call themselves "cultural workers" due to the political framework of their creative skills, became known as Medu, the Sepedi word for "roots". Within this informal community of political exiles the condemnation of apartheid through images and poetry was a common means of expression and Medu soon set up exhibitions, music, and theatre performances at the University of Botswana and the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana and ultimately performed as the cultural wing of the ANC. Medu was originally considered as a possible front for more overt, violent, means of resistance, with many of its members already actively involved in the operations of UmKhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. But founding members, Wally Serote and Keorapetse (Willie) Kgositsile, now South Africa's poet laureate, introduced the group to the idea of art itself as a resistance front, an effective tool through which the perceptions of the people might be changed and one that was not easily countered by the militarized South African government. Rather than the clandestine activities preferred by MK, it was decided that the cultural resistance to apartheid would have to conduct its activities in the open in order to be effective. The ensemble consisted of five units - Publication and Research, Theatre (including music and dance), Graphic Arts and Design, Photography and Film. Soon, however, music became an active and effective branch of its own, with musicians such as Hugh Masekela swelling the Medu ranks. Although each of the units had its own specific field of activities, the products of the Medu artists were often an organic result of cross pollination and collaboration between the units. The aesthetic sensibilities of these "cultural workers" were expertly turned to more intentionally political ends and their personal experiences, so subtly expressed in much of their work, were developed to greater effect in more overtly propagandistic creations. Thami Mnyele & Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective affords the reader an intimate portrayal of the creatively prolific years between the rise of Medu in 1977 until their violent end in Botswana at the hands of the South African Police in 1985.

Celebrated and honoured across the globe for its bearer’s selfless role in the liberation of South Africa, the name Mandela has become an iconic brand. Nelson Mandela’s life was dedicated to politics and achieving freedom for the oppressed in the country, which left him little time with his children and loved ones. It was not easy growing up a Mandela.

Ndileka Mandela is a social activist, former ICU nurse and the head of a rural upliftment organisation known as the Thembekile Mandela Foundation. Born to Madiba Thembekile Mandela (Nelson Mandela’s first born), who died in a car accident while his father was in prison, and the eldest grandchild of Nelson Mandela, Ndileka has lived a challenging life – a labyrinth of highs and lows.

I Am Ndileka tells the story of a woman who has made great stride in society, but still faces many challenges. Even though South Africa has been emancipated from the apartheid regime and so-called gender inequality structures have been removed, women still face oppression and abuse. In October 2017, as part of the #MeToo campaign to denounce sexual violence, Ndileka disclosed for the first time that she had been raped by her then partner in her own bed five years before. Follow Ndileka on her journey as she deals with death in her family, patriarchy, motherhood, depression, being homeless and surviving rape and abuse.

Along the journey of tackling challenges and expectations that come with her last name – things that she did not ask for but are asked of her nonetheless – Ndileka finds her voice.