The first free elections in South Africa's history were held in 1994. Within a year legislation was drafted to create a Truth and Reconcilliation Commission to establish a picture of the gross human rights violations committed between 1960 and 1993. It was to seek the truth and make it known to the public and to prevent these brutal events ever happening again. From 1996 and over the following two years South Africans were exposed almost daily to revelations about their traumatic past. Antije Krog's full account of the Commission's work using the testimonies of the oppressed and oppressors alike is a harrowing and haunting book in which the voices of ordinary people shape the course of history. WINNER OF SOUTH AFRICA'S SUNDAY TIMES ALAN PATON AWARD

In his memoir, Jaki Seroke shares the joys and the sorrows of his life, starting with his childhood in Alex, where he is born as ‘a poor mother’s son’. He recalls the political battles among the various Africanist groupings, his incarceration on the Island and his later work at Skotaville Press, as publisher and poet.

After 1994, having decided that parliamentary politics were not for him, he joined the corporate sector and committed to a new kind of struggle.

Pushing Boulders tells the extraordinary story of a Cape Town man born in an old police station during apartheid, who struggles to overcome immense political and social odds to become one of the first people ever to graduate with master’s degrees from five of the world’s top universities, including Harvard, MIT and Oxford. At the height of his successful international business career, at the age of 40, he foregoes wealth and status, sells his Lamborghini, Rolls Royce, Jaguar and other luxury cars, to pursue his mission to use education to enable and inspire others to thrive. ​

With frequent references to his diaries and letters, the book is written with frankness and candour so often absent in autobiographies. It offers readers a rare insight into the life of a uniquely talented and accomplished person, revealing his doubts and heartaches as well as the secrets to his immense ability to pick himself up and soldier on. The book reveals how his compassion for others changed his life and gave it purpose.

Pushing Boulders is a story about pursuing dreams. It shows that, with self-belief and resilience, you can push aside the boulders that block your path to success. It tells a powerful and inspirational story that will leave you believing that even your most outrageous dreams are possible, and leave you energised to begin pursuing them.

Unrecognised, ignored and forgotten. The Forgotten Scientist: The Story of Saul Sithole is the untold story of a pioneering black scientist who made a great contribution to the fields of anthropology and ornithology in South Africa. Saul Sithole was so committed to his craft that even the weight of apartheid did not stop him from giving 62 years of his life to the scientific world of birds and fossils. Saul never received the official recognition he deserved - until now. This book validates his contribution, sharing his life's work and laying out a story that will inspire future generations of scientists. This book would not have been possible without the support of Biblionef and funding from the National Heritage Council.

Nelson Mandela was one of the most revered figures of our time. He committed himself to a compelling political cause, suffered a long prison sentence, and led his violent and divided country to a peaceful democratic transition. His legacy, however, is not uncontested: his decision to embark on an armed struggle in the 1960s, his solitary talks with apartheid officials in the 1980s, and the economic policies adopted during his presidency still spark intense debate, even after his death. The essays in this Companion, written by experts in history, anthropology, jurisprudence, cinema, literature, and visual studies, address these and other issues. They examine how Mandela became an icon during his lifetime and consider the meanings and uses of his internationally recognizable image. Their overarching concerns include Mandela's relation to 'tradition' and 'modernity', the impact of his most famous public performances, the oscillation between Africanist and non-racial positions in South Africa, and the politics of gender and national sentiment. The volume concludes with a meditation on Mandela's legacy in the twenty-first century and a detailed guide to further reading.

A woman reluctantly takes on the responsibility of putting her eccentric rebellious mother into a retirement home, and managing her care. She has her own daughter to raise and nurture, a marriage and a business to hold together, and her own psychological troubles due in good part to how she was mothered.

My Mother, My Madness is Colleen Higgs’s diary of her mother’s last ten years. It is at once funny, harrowing, mundane, chaotic, and full of insight. It is a rich and moving story which unfolds through its characters like a novel.

Colleen Higgs is the author of two collections of poetry (Halfborn Woman, 2004, and Lava Lamp Poems, 2011) and a short story collection (Looking for Trouble – Yeoville Stories, 2012). She founded Modjaji Books in 2007 and, after publishing more than 150 books, is still Modjaji’s manager and publisher.

Unrecognised, ignored and forgotten. The Forgotten Scientist: The Story of Saul Sithole is the untold story of a pioneering black scientist who made a great contribution to the fields of anthropology and ornithology in South Africa. Saul Sithole was so committed to his craft that even the weight of apartheid did not stop him from giving 62 years of his life to the scientific world of birds and fossils. Saul never received the official recognition he deserved - until now. This book validates his contribution, sharing his life's work and laying out a story that will inspire future generations of scientists. This book would not have been possible without the support of Biblionef and funding from the National Heritage Council.

Unrecognised, ignored and forgotten. The Forgotten Scientist: The Story of Saul Sithole is the untold story of a pioneering black scientist who made a great contribution to the fields of anthropology and ornithology in South Africa. Saul Sithole was so committed to his craft that even the weight of apartheid did not stop him from giving 62 years of his life to the scientific world of birds and fossils. Saul never received the official recognition he deserved - until now. This book validates his contribution, sharing his life's work and laying out a story that will inspire future generations of scientists. This book would not have been possible without the support of Biblionef and funding from the National Heritage Council.

In this finely observed memoir, Kenneth de Kok writes tenderly yet humorously about the relationship between fathers and sons, about family life, and about childhood.

The work unearths the physical and psychic landscape of Stilfontein, a small mining community in the Western Transvaal, in the 1950s. The narrator gives voice to his own secret pleasures and fears, while vividly recreating the topography that dominates his world.

A sensitive and rare account of the hierarchies, privileges and prejudices of white mining experience, as seen through the eyes of a boy.

Jacana Media is proud to make this important book available again, now with a completely new introduction. First published by Oceanbooks, New York and Melbourne and University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg in 2001, the book was short-listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in 2002.

In the public imagination the struggle that saw the end of apartheid and the inauguration of a democratic South Africa is seen as one waged by black people who were often imprisoned or killed for their efforts. Raymond Suttner, an academic, is one of a small group of white South Africans who was imprisoned for his efforts to overthrow the apartheid regime. He was first arrested in 1975 and tortured with electric shocks because he refused to supply information to the police. He then served 8 years because of his underground activities for the African National Congress and South African Communist Party.

After his release in 1983, he returned to the struggle and was forced to go underground to evade arrest, but was re-detained in 1986 under repeatedly renewed states of emergency, for 27 months, 18 of these in solitary confinement, because whites were kept separately and all other whites apart from Suttner were released. In the last months of this detention Suttner was allowed to have a pet lovebird, which he tamed and used to keep inside his tracksuit. When he was eventually released from detention in September 1988 the bird was on his shoulder. Suttner was held under stringent house arrest conditions, imposed to impede further political activities. He, however, defied his house arrest restrictions and attended an Organisation for African Unity meeting in Harare in August 1989 and he remained out of the country for five months. Shortly after his return, when he anticipated being re-arrested, the state of emergency was lifted and the ANC and other banned organisations were unbanned. Suttner became a leading figure in the ANC and SACP.

The book describes Suttner’s experience of prison in a low-key, unromantic voice, providing the texture of prison life, but unlike most ‘struggle memoirs’ it is also intensely personal. Suttner is not averse to admitting his fears and anxieties.

The new edition contains an introduction where Suttner describes his break with the ANC and SACP. But, he argues, the reason for his rupturing this connection that had been so important to his life were the same – ethical reasons – that had led him to join. He remains convinced that what he did was right and continues to act in accordance with those convictions.

Like so many of her generation, Lwando Xaso came of age alongside the beginnings and growth of South Africa’s constitutional democracy. Her journey into adulthood was a radically different one from that of earlier generations, marked by hope that changing perceptions would usher in a new and free society.

Made in South Africa – A Black Woman’s Stories of Rage, Resistance and Progress is a vibrant collection of essays in which Lwando examines with incisive clarity some of the events that have shaped her experience of South Africa – a country with huge potential but weighed down by persistent racism and inequality, cultural appropriation, sexism and corruption, all legacies of a complicated history.

As a young lawyer intent on climbing the corporate ladder, Lwando’s life’s direction was changed by a personal experience of the oppressive capacity of a supposedly democratic government when it unjustly fired a close family friend and mentor from a senior government position. She found herself on his legal team and the turmoil the case created within her led her to further her studies in constitutional law, and to pick up her pen and share with a wider audience her views of what was happening in her beloved country.

Her outlook was further shaped by her experience of clerking at the Constitutional Court for Justice Edwin Cameron, which deepened her respect for the South African Constitution, and what it really means for a resilient people to strive continually to live up to its moral and legal standards.

Lwando’s writing reflects her unflinching resolve to live according to the precepts of our groundbreaking Constitution and offers a challenge to all South Africans to believe in and achieve ‘the improbable’.

Zanzibar’s brief and brutal revolution is almost forgotten. During the Cold War, the small archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Tanganyika, became significant in the early ‘60s because of its vulnerability and position at the edge of Africa’s rotting Colonial corpse. As had the early Arab slavers, religious pioneers and Imperial European adventurers, so too the purveyors of Communism and Socialism used Zanzibar as a base for their ambitions in Africa.

From here they began making swift incisions into the carcass and white Southern African tribes began to show concern while the West shrugged.

This book tells the story of a boy’s journey through the turbulent waters of his own young life during these urgent moments in Equatorial East Africa and Southern Africa. It is a tale of love and loss.

When Charlene Wittstock married Prince Albert of Monaco in a starstudded wedding watched by millions across the world in 2011, rumours of her getting cold feet and her unhappiness about his love children swirled around the couple. Ever since then, the statuesque Olympic swimmer has been in the eye of the paparazzi and the centre of endless tabloid speculation and malicious rumour-mongering.

Is the bubbly, down-to-earth South African lonely in glamorous Monaco? Is it a marriage of convenience? What is truth behind her health issues? These are just some of the questions that roil so publicly around her.

Journalist Arlene Prinsloo sifts fact from fiction in this revealing unauthorised biography of Her Serene Highness Princess Charlene. Prinsloo traces her life from humble beginnings in Zimbabwe, Johannesburg and Durban to the Olympic Games, her jet-set romance with the bachelor prince, a ‘fairy-tale’ wedding and becoming a mother to twins.

At its heart, it’s the story of a woman in search of happiness for herself and her family – and also of the beginning of Charlene defining her own space amid the royal protocol.

Shauwn 'Mamkhize' Mkhize is a larger than life personality who, like her father and brother before her, is loved and misunderstood in equal measure. Her combination of political and business acumen runs in her family, and so is her ability to garner the sometimes-grudging admiration of those who have followed her rise to fame and fortune in the democratic dispensation. In her memoir, Mamkhize: My World, My Rules, this remarkable businesswoman shares the details of her cloistered but privileged childhood, which was torn asunder by the assassination of her father and the subsequent quest by her brother to avenge his death. She tells the story of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from her unique vantage point, as a family member of a victim.

As a young accounting graduate freshly returned from an overseas experience, Shauwn lands what initially seems to be a dream job with the multinational corporation that had sponsored her training abroad. It soon dissipates into disappointment - work that receives insufficient pay and she bravely ventures into business. In this book, she dispels the urban legends about her wealth, family, marriage and subsequent divorce. She reflects on the much-publicized story of her reinvention as Mamkhize, the soccer boss, and shares the lessons that she has learned from the experiences that life has given her. A woman with incredible agency, Mamkhize allows the reader a glimpse into her family life and her formative years. She illuminates how they have shaped the woman that she is today.

Not one to reveal every single trick of her trades (after all, she is the business), Shauwn Mkhize manages to regale without spoiling her aura of mystique. While touching the reader with her love for her parents, siblings and children, this memoir displays the dexterity with which she navigates modern life while striving to maintain a sense of tradition that keeps her grounded.

Kan ʼn rock-ster op ʼn Karooplaas bly en werk? Natuurlik, dis presies wat Mianke van den Hever van Hanover is en doen.

Dié besondere plaasnooi, wat met Down-sindroom gebore is, boer en leef haar uit tussen perde, skape, beeste, wild, klein diertjies in die veld, haar honde en die plaasmense op Beestekuil. Pa GP het vertel dat Mianke van kleins af ʼn boek wou skryf, maar dat die verstaan van letters en woorde haar nie beskore is nie. GP vra of ek kan help om dié droom te verwesenlik?

Sy het haar netjies voorbereide storie uit haar kop aan my vertel en dit is hier op skrif gestel, soos sy dit wou hê.

A Man, A Fire, A Corpse tells the story of Captain Amos Maneta: a man who was most often referred to as ‘The Top Cop of Soweto’; as written by his son Rofhiwa Maneta.

The book is a collection of the physical and metaphysical bruises collected by the author’s father in his 30-plus years of working in the police service.

Through his father’s story, Rofhiwa Maneta examines the relationship between police and the public. Maneta’s mix of journalism, remembered history, anecdote and autobiography further discusses the relationship between South Africa and violence; while taking a look at what it takes to be an honest policeman in a department whose groundwater is corruption and maladministration.

Run for the Love of Life is a must-read for anyone who desires to escape the day-to-day sameness of our new pandemic-informed lives, or who seeks to feel alive, inspired, and filled with a renewed enthusiasm for the year ahead.

It recounts the extraordinary journey of South African Erica Terblanche, an ordinary woman who manages to not only achieve – but excel – on the world stage of extreme distance-running in some of the most inhospitable and majestic landscapes across the planet. Raw, honest and infinitely human, this part-memoir, part-travel novel thunders through one exotic race location after the other, as the runners battle the elements and each other across the vastness of the Sahara, Atacama and Namib Deserts, the great Grand Canyon, Turkish Cappadocia and the Kalahari Desert, to name only a few.

But more than just a book on racing, what makes this novel infinitely compelling and rewarding is that in the echoes of Erica’s story, one begins to sense the pulse of one’s own potential and long-forgotten dreams. While you may laugh, cry, and forget to take a breath at times, it is inevitable that Run will spur you on to find your own bliss, that which is buried deep within your soul and body.

At its heart, Run for the love of life is a story about love, forgiveness, perseverance and growth, and about the important things in life that ultimately makes us happy. Told with wit, humour and vulnerability, it is a book that will stay with the reader long after the final page is turned.

As a follow-up to his hugely popular 2016 autobiography Trail Blazer, Ryan Sandes’ new book explores the gripping and often life-threatening adventures this extraordinary ultra-trail runner has experienced around the globe since then. Not only have these projects tested the very edge of human endurance, but on several occasions, Ryan literally had to run for his life.

Along with a 1 500-kilometre Himalayan adventure, read about his attempt at completing the first 700-kilometre solo run up Namibia’s legendary Skeleton Coast – only to stumble upon some very angry Namibian soldiers conducting illegal and, possibly, government-sponsored seal clubbing. And, with his running partner Ryno Griessel, becoming the first people to run the entire circumference of Lesotho, during which they find themselves fighting off an attack from local herdsman armed with rocks and clubs.

In between these adventures, Ryan battles to balance a challenging career with a dedicated commitment to his young family. Risk. Run. Reward. is packed with adventure, humour and some fascinating insights into the psyche of an ultra-endurance athlete. Trust me, these people are not like you and me …

How does a middle-class Afrikaans boytjie from Springs, a rebellious product of Christelik-nasionale Opvoeding, end up in the grubby world of protest punk, slap-bang in the middle of the anti-apartheid struggle?

The '80s in South Africa were a mess, a schmangled clusterf*ck of a decade. For some, it was braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet. For others, it was a one-eyed bumbling about in a world without signage, desperately looking for the emergency exit. While the black population was becoming increasingly agitated and militant, the white dorps, towns and leafy suburbs of South Africa’s cities were mostly ignorant in their privileged bliss. Whiteys were like the frog in the cooker, not realising that the temperature was on the rise. Soon they would slowly, to their terminal surprise, turn white belly-up amid the froth of bubbles boiling from below. Soon it would be too late to get the hell out.

But in tiny pockets of white rebellion, the country was beginning to hum with resistant energy in Joburg, Cape Town and Durban. The '80s counter-culture and the music it produced was anti-establishment, anti-government, anti-apartheid, but not self-consciously so. While the state saw this strange white subculture as a hive of hedonists and drugged-up nihilists, this anarchic clutter of guitar-wielding, pill-munching, dope-smoking musicians and their followers were in fact a second front in the struggle against apartheid.

In brilliantly tragic and hilarious detail, Between Rock & A Hard Place is the epic memoir of Carsten Rasch’s role in the South African counter-culture Punk and New Wave scene in the late '70s and early '80s. Through his eyes as a musician, promoter and enthusiastic participant, it tells the story of those tumultuous and giddy times with heartfelt irreverence. Veering between lucid moments of desperate innovation and psychotic adventures on the rim of sanity, all the time riding roughshod at delirious speed over the potholes of “culture”, the reader is introduced to half-forgotten heroes, now fast disappearing into the fog of time, and the band of misfits who attempted to disrupt “the system”.

In the 1980s, Erika Bornman’s family join, and ultimately move to, KwaSizabantu, a Christian mission based in KwaZulu-Natal, which is touted as a nirvana, founded on egalitarian values. But something sinister lurks beneath ‘the place where people are helped’.

Life at KwaSizabantu is hard. Christianity is used to justify harsh punishments and congregants are forced to repent for their sins. Threats of physical violence ensure adherence to stringent rules. Parents are pitted against children. Friendships are discouraged. Isolated and alone, Erika lives in constant fear of eternal damnation.

At 17, her grooming at the hands of a senior mission counsellor begins. For the next five years, KwaSizabantu wages emotional, psychological and sexual warfare on her, until, finally, she manages to break free and walk away at the age of 21.

Escaping a restrictive religious community is difficult, but rehabilitation into ‘normal’ life after a decade of ritual humiliation, brainwashing and abuse is much more painful, as Erika soon discovers. She cannot ignore her knowledge of the grievous human-rights abuses being committed at KwaSizabantu, and so she embarks on a quest to expose the atrocities. With her help, News24 launches a seven-month investigation, culminating in a podcast that will go on to win the internationally renowned One World Media Award for Radio and Podcast in 2021.

In Mission of Malice: My Exodus from KwaSizabantu, Erika chronicles her journey from a fearful young girl to a fierce activist determined to do whatever it takes to save future generations and find personal redemption and self-acceptance.

This book is the story of an exceptional man: David Samaai. The author takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the life of Davy (as he was affectionately known by his peers) who began his career in the streets of a beautiful suburb called the Ou Tuin (Old Garden) on the banks of the picturesque Berg River. Due to the Group Areas Act of the apartheid government they were forced to leave their homes. They had to move to the other side of the river to a new town: Paarl East.

Many thought that it was the end. On the contrary, it was anything but game set and match. Because of inspirational leadership, they managed to overcome apartheid and even excelled! David led by example. First, he conquered Wimbledon and then he led his community rebuilding their town, their schools, the mosque and the church. In fact, they rebuilt their entire lives.

Eventually it turned out to be a chronicle of the political emancipation of a community to which David Samaai was an inspiration, not because he was a legendary tennis player, a gifted musician or a committed school principal and teacher, but because he was and still is an example to any South African.

He left a legacy that with hard work and perseverance you can achieve your dream.

Yusuf Daniels brings this book to life with some epic stories from falling in love for the first time, parading in his orange Speedo on Clifton Beach to travelling the world as a flight attendant, experiencing life like you have never seen before.

"We are all different and we all have been through many experiences in life. Some good and some not so good. What I have discovered is that this journey which is filled with laughter, tears, regrets, mistakes, and multiple chapters in our life, prepares us for later in life. If all of this didn’t happen to me, I would not have finished my second book. If you told me this just over a year ago, that I would be releasing my second book, I would have told you that you are crazy. It is our legacy and we need to leave it behind so it can be told by our great grandchildren one day. Don’t be scared to tell your story, don’t be scared to write it the way you feel it should be written. You don’t need a degree to be able to write your stories. Just look at me. There is no ONE way of writing, as we are all individuals and all unique. Don’t listen to the naysayers as they are just there to stall your growth and take you with them on their negative path. Stay positive, be true to yourself and just be you, because there’s only one of you. So, make the best of you and keep on LIVING LEKKA."

Nosipho Siwisa-Damasane is a black female success story in modern South Africa. From humble apartheid-era beginnings in Peddie in the Ciskei, she now heads up one of the leading coal export terminals in the world and influences the upper strata of corporate South Africa. But stories like hers are all too rare, even in an age of increasing female empowerment. Passionate about women (and youth) development in Africa, she wants to hasten the change and see more women thrive.

In Finding The Woman Within, Siwisa-Damasane recounts the struggles of her upbringing and the lessons she has learnt in her path to the top, from the challenges of completing her schooling after becoming a teenaged mother to managing corporate dynamics when she’s the only woman in the room.

The book offers simple lessons for transformational leadership from a woman in a man’s world covering, among other topics, the importance of personal responsibility, inclusive leadership, employee engagement, positive management of corporate politics, work-life balance and continuous learning.

In Namibia the 1980s were a dark decade of human rights abuses by South African security forces. Judge David Smuts, then a young Windhoek lawyer, felt compelled to take on the system.

His gripping memoir details several dramatic cases, including the freeing of detainees that had been held secretly for six years, proving that torture was used to extract ‘confessions’ and that Koevoet knowingly killed civilians. Working with the likes of Sydney Kentridge, Geoff Budlender and Arthur Chaskalson, Smuts won legal victories and established a legal centre in the far North, where many misdeeds had taken place. Smuts also takes a fresh look at the assassination of Anton Lubowski, anti-apartheid activist and his close friend.

This highly readable real-life thriller about standing up for what is right sheds light on a shocking, largely untold part of our recent history.

It begins with the endearing story of a young girl's childhood and coming of age as a minister's daughter in turbulent South Africa; and, it draws a compelling picture of the good and evil that surrounded her and their impact on her heart and life.

The contrast between the stunning natural beauty of South Africa and the pervasive violence and fear that she encounters play out on the pages of this story, as does her relationship with God as she navigates ordeals of deep loss and severe trials. The division of South Africa and the effect on the lives of her family are also lightly addressed. The second half of the book depicts their struggles and setbacks, as she and her family attempt to carve out a new life in the United States. However, she also shares the laughter enjoyed with friends and the comfort that only a cup of hot tea can bring.

Reminiscent of the writing style of Frank McCourt, Jenny's captivating story depicts her journey with candor and openness. We can relate and are encouraged because most of us have encountered trials and struggles on our journey. Jenny is one of us.