For Africa to realise its potential and create the socio economic conditions that its people aspire to, it needs organisations that can compete in a fast changing, complex global environment. This will only be achieved if African organisations grow their talent and leadership skills to add to the pool of skills and talent on the continent. In the modern economy countries, cities and organisations, both public and private sector, need to make themselves “talent attractive” since talent and skills are a prerequisite for sustainable investment.

This book provides insight into what leading thinkers and organisations do to build, develop and retain talent. The contributors comprise academics, consultants and organisational leaders, all of whom have a wealth of expertise and experience in talent management. The contributors provide high level strategic frameworks as well as practical tools to implement talent management processes. Of particular interest are the comprehensive case studies from some of South Africa’s leading companies, all of whom have had extensive experience in Africa and globally. They are truly South Africa’s “premier league” organisations.

Case Studies From Woolworths, Nedbank, Discovery, Coca-Cola Sabco, Unilever.

Shaping Africa’s Talent is a “must read” for Executives, leaders, HR professionals and academics who are responsible for building the continents next generation of organisations and talent.

Shaping the Strategic Landscape:

• Talent Management in Africa – A Contextual Overview – Wilhelm Crous, Knowledge Resources
• Talent Framework and Key issues in Talent – Terry Meyer, Leadership SA
• Strategic Thinking: Future-focused Competence for African Leadership Talent - Morne Mostert, Institute for Futures Research
• Talent and Technology: Your Business Should Be Social – Andre Horak
• Growing Leaders for a Connected World - Terry Meyer, Leadership SA
• Talent Development for Sustainable Competitiveness - Samuel Njenga
• Developing a Compelling Employer Value Proposition To Attract Africa’s Top Talent - Jenali Skuse and Madeline Lass, Universum
• Executive Talent in Africa – Allen Shardelow & Debbie Farnaby, Heidrick & Struggles
• A Comprehensive Talent Management Framework in Action – Johan Ludike,

African Talent Strategies Case Studies:

• “Feeling the magic”: Woolworths Career Paths Project: A Case Study - Chantal Butler, Woolworths
• The role of organizational culture in the attraction and retention of Talent – the Nedbank Story – Abe Thebyane, Nedbank
• Discovery’s Informal and Innovative Talent Management –Terence Okeke Taylor, Discovery
• Home Grown African Bottler Shows Winning Spirit and Culture: Coca-Cola Sabco – Tracy Potgieter, Coca-Cola Sabco

Leading Talent processes:

• The role of Business Schools in building Africa’s talent – Terry Meyer, Leadership SA
• Building Africa's Technical & Vocational Skills – Nazrene Mannie
• Designing and implementing a graduate development programme – James Hu, Unilever
• From Potential to Performance: Assessing Talent and Leadership Potential – Lisa Ashton & Jacques Haworth, BIOSS Southern Africa
• Coaching for Leadership Impact – Sarah Babb
• Building learning paths - Lydia Cillie Schmidt, The Talent Hub

Terry Meyer is a consultant, academic, author and presenter. He specialises in strategy and organisational design, leadership, change and human capital strategy.

Creating Effective Boards and Committees provides a valuable resource for new and seasoned directors of companies.

The book offers practical guidance to optimise preparation time and meeting participation. The author share tools and knowledge in the book and makes it a must-read for all seeking empowerment to become active influencers of company strategy and success. Sindi’s Board and Committee Effectiveness Model (BCem) will guide Directors in analysing and decision making within their fiduciary roles.

In applying the model directors will understand the business and industry better, be able to interrogate and listen better; follow through and identify and raise red flags.

The new, updated edition of this bestselling investment book will show readers that financial freedom is possible for everyone. It has been updated to include the current hot topics of investing offshore and online, while setting out distinct guidelines on how to do both carefully and prudently. Also new is the special chapter on analysing and understanding investment risk so that readers can figure out their own comfort level of where to invest their hard-earned money.

Aimed at the financial novice who needs clear basic guidelines on how to deal with money, the book covers all aspects of investment that a normal person would encounter in his or her life, from earning their first salary cheque, up to and including retirement. Readers will learn where and how to invest, how to diversify, whom to trust, how to save on costs, which investments perform the best, and so much more.

A highly accessible must-read for everyone who wants a financially secure future.

Increasingly, the Chief Human Resources Officer is being challenged to add value to the organisation’s strategy, to focus more on the transformational as opposed to the transactional, and to provide effective leadership. The Role of the Chief Human Resources Officer provides clear guidelines to HR executives charged with taking the HR function to the next level.

The text, which consists of 23 chapters, focuses on the challenges which modern-day CHROs face, regardless of the type of organisation they serve.

Amongst the contributing authors are renowned industry leaders and academics such as Theo Veldsman, Shirley Zinn, Steve Bluen, Frank Horwitz, Nolitha Fakude, Penny Abbott, Mark Bussin, Barney Jordaan, Clifford van der Venter, Tjaart Kruger, Linda van der Colff, Johan Ludike, Johann Coetzee, Amanda Glaeser, Dave Duarte, Tony Davidson, Lele Mehlomakulu, Seshni Samuel, Linda Fine, Peter Warrener and Tjaart Minnaar who share their extensive knowledge gained through years of practise in the HR field. While some chapters follow an analytical approach, others are more conversational in nature, yet collectively they offer the reader a wide range of fascinating perspectives and valuable insights.

From the early days of her career, the leadership approach taken by South African businesswoman Nosipho Siwisa-Damasane has been to work with what she found. She realised that to achieve success in an organisation one needs to be “on the ground” and to interact with those at shop-floor level. Equipped with determination and empathy, and bolstered by her father’s belief that she could do anything her brothers could, she faced down any potential prejudices against her because she was black and female, irrefutably showing those labels to be irrelevant in contemporary business.

Hers is an extraordinary story but, as she shows, it doesn’t have to be a unique story. Drawing from her own experience, she has formulated a leadership philosophy of valuing diversity and engaging employees as fully as possible.

It’s a template whose seven steps are clear and accessible, and its results empowering.

This book will help you transform your leadership coaching practice. Helping the coach and client deepen their “mastery of practice”, Leadership Coaching for Results propels us into the best possible practices for leadership coaching in the twenty-first century. Leadership now isn’t what we considered it in the past – increasingly diverse and decentralised organisational teams, and continuing economic turmoil, demand a different style of leadership development. Starting with a broad-ranging and indispensable review of the literature on leadership, this book examines current cutting-edge practices in coaching. It moves on to a comprehensive and practical global description of leadership coaching, and concludes by offering several challenging scenarios of what the next ten years may hold. This book will give you a myriad of perspectives, insights and pearls of wisdom to use in strengthening your practice and your leadership. Dr Sunny Stout-Rostron is one of the leading practitioners in this field; the Founding President of the professional body Coaches and Mentors in South Africa (COMENSA); and a Founding Fellow at the Institute of Coaching at Harvard/McLean Medical School. Sunny is the author of six books, including Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the secrets of business coaching, and Business Coaching International: Transforming individuals and organisations.

How do you Mentor people? How do you Coach people? The Bottom-line Impact of Mentoring and Coaching Team Mentoring and Coaching Impact on Diversity Mentoring Formal, Structured Mentoring Programmes Perspectives of Mentor and Mentee Mentoring Flaws and How to Correct Them Coaching Selecting the Right Coach Coaching for Rapid Change Calculating the ROI Manager as Coach Teaching Managers to Coach A Coaching Model for Managers Some Coaching Models The authors include Dr Sunny Stout Rostron, Niel Steinmann, Marius Meyer, Dale Williams, Penny Abbott, Kathy Bennett, Natalie Witthuhn-Cunningham, Helen Minty, Prof David Clutterbuck

Written by thirty-five noted management and turnaround practitioners, consultants, and academics in South Africa, this book is based on the highly successful Wits Business School (WBS) program How to Manage a Turnaround and Corporate Renewal (MATCR). WBS was one of the first business schools in the world to introduce an executive education program in turnaround management. Many of the concepts and principles from the program can be applied to various non-business turnaround aspects of life. Therefore, the book is not only aimed at management practitioners, consultants, academics, and students, but also at staff experts, engineers, accountants, and lawyers in the private sector, municipality and trade union leaders, government, organizations linked to state structures, non-profit organizations, sporting clubs, and educational institutions.

It provides meaningful insights into the various processes of turnaround management and corporate renewal, including stages of a turnaround, rapid appraisal and detailed analysis, recovery plan development and implementation. Industry leaders evaluate aspects such as strategy, legal, the new business rescue legislation, finance, human resources, marketing, operations, stakeholder management as well as external and political factors. Tools and techniques that can be used to deal with many different turnaround challenges are explained in considerable detail, complemented by case studies written by people who have led successful turnarounds in South Africa.

Business ideas and practices are constantly changing, but no manager has the time to read all the business books and articles that come out in a year. In this book, Ian Mann does all the work for you, trawling through recent business publications and distilling the most important new insights and developments.

Topics include:

• outsourcing
• mechanisation
• obligations to stakeholders other than shareholders
• the strange world of banking
• leadership

This is the ideal book for people who want an easy way to keep up with the latest developments in business and management as these ideas are explained in a clear, comprehensible way, and presented in easily digestible chapters.

How do you grow your capital while still preserving it? And how do you use investment vehicles to contribute positively to your financial freedom and a comfortable retirement? The answer is simple: financial education is the precursor to good investment decision-making.

Invest Your Way To Wealth is the guide to financial literacy. From asset classes to forex markets, the time value of money, risky and risk-free assets, cap rates, property, debt, SMMEs and angel investors, Thobelani Maphumulo explains the financial terms and concepts ordinary South Africans need to know in order to become financially savvy quickly and, ultimately, to retire financially secure.

Easy to understand, practical and informative, Invest Your Way To Wealth is essential reading for fledgling investors who need a trustworthy and accessible guide to a range of investment options that will help preserve and grow their capital before they engage expensive experts. By using the knowledge and tools provided in this book, you, too, can watch your money grow.

Your indispensable guide to a stress-free retirement at an age of YOUR choice …

In this new edition of South Africa’s bestselling property book, Fast-forward Your Retirement through Property, Jason Lee provides up-to-date information on how to build a property portfolio that will allow you to take charge of your financial security for a stress-free retirement.

Retire Rich through Property takes readers through every step of the property process, but goes further by focusing on: finding the right deals for retirement purposes; how to negotiate and finance a property with retirement requirements in mind; and whether to hold on to or sell a property for financial gain.

With myriad insider tips from a property-investment expert, this book will allow the reader to push aside reliance on state- and employer-sponsored retirement benefits and work towards a secure retirement through property.

This easily accessible guide is a must-read for first-time property purchasers and experienced investors alike who are looking to fast-forward their retirement or to retire comfortably at their chosen age

Think Yourself Rich: A Step-by-Step Guide to Financial Independence is aimed at first-timeearners who want to put themselves on the right path to financial independence. It provides an easy-to-understand guide that explains in clear terms how to consciously choose and plan for a debt-free lifestyle and not only survive, but thrive, on the long-term journey towards financial freedom.

The book covers crucial issues about financial planning clearly and succinctly, including:

- Why it is important to get rid of all unnecessary debt as quickly as possible.

- When you should start saving or investing.

- How to plan for emergencies.

- How much and what kind of insurance you need.

- How much of your income you should save.

- How much of your income you should invest.

- Where, how and when you should invest.

Theoretical information about budgets, financial plans and investment (including all important terminology for various investment options) is interwoven with relevant reallife examples and scenarios that will inspire readers to set aside the time to design and write up a proper financial plan – and execute it. Each chapter builds on the previous one to help readers achieve their goals by sticking to their plans. This book will equip readers to take full control of their finances.

Everyone is on a journey of growth, from birth to death. The authors used their research data, to tap into the vital stages of this journey of growth from a psychological growth perspective. They linked the stages of psychological growth to self-leadership development. Additionally, they linked different stages of self-leadership development to different types and styles of leadership. For example, they found that authoritative leadership is linked to earlier stages of psychological growth, while inclusive leadership is linked to latter stages of psychological growth.

The Poetic Journey of Self-Leadership: Leadership Development along Stages of Psychological Growth is relevant to those interested in self-reflection (as it assists to assign oneself to a stage of psychological development), personal growth (as it anticipates processes to follow during one’s current stage of development), self-leadership development, as well as useful for leadership assessment by practitioners (by assigning leadership to stages of development). Additionally, from an academic perspective, the book is relevant to psychology, sociology and leadership students.

Contents include:

• Surviving: Abandonment versus overwhelment; Survival-stage leader
• Conforming: Internality versus externality; Conforming leader
• Differentiating: Social predestination; Differentiated leader
• Individuating: Guilt versus fear; Journey to individuation; Conquering complexes; Authenticity; Individuated leader
• Self-actualizing: Kintsugi; Traumas; Magical other; Self-actualised leader
• Integrating: Values; Heroes; Purpose; Integrated leader
• Serving: Servant leader

Books about leadership and poetry are mostly written from the perspective of leaders, but The Poetic Journey of Self-Leadership: Leadership Development along Stages of Psychological Growth, focuses on self-leadership development, and not the usual listing of heroic leader capabilities that must be strived for. The authors used self-reported poetry from diverse participants, and in their own voices as their main data collection source. The book presents a diversity of writing styles and topics, and makes it much wider in scope and richer than other books.

Ongoing disruptive innovation has become the key competitive edge in staying ahead of the game in the inimitable, compelling, memorable experience-based economy. The 21st century organisation will be an ideas/imagination business. Within this business, people have moved centre stage in being the only true value unlockers and wealth creators as the source of imagination, creativity, innovation, and invention.

Given people’s centrality to the continued viability of organisational performance and success in the present and future, knowing the state of their People Excellence is critical for every organisation. If there is on top of this criticality a global war for top talent, then ‘critical’ turns into mission-critical. It becomes the stark choice between either merely surviving because of a shortage of talent; or thriving because of creating the conditions under which people become the best they can, and want to, be. They flourish and thrive.

People excellence sits at the confluence of thriving employees, delighted stakeholders, and a viable organisation. When organisations become excellent at helping their people to flourish, they in turn unlock real, amazing value and create worthy, lasting results to the delight of stakeholders, ensuring the organisation’s viability. This is why knowing the state of an organisation’s people excellence, as well as becoming smarter at people excellence, has become mission-critical for every organisation.

The People Excellence Star offers you the opportunity to perform an integrated, strategic stress test of the overall people-worthiness of your organisation. You’ll be guided on how to apply the five critical dimensions of People Excellence: Identity, Capacity, Delivery, Outcomes, and Relationships – along with their 20 Excellence elements.

You’ll discover the best thought-leadership, latest research, and cutting-edge practices regarding People Excellence to help you unleash the synergistic fusion of lasting People Excellence within your own organisation through the appropriate interventions.

Emotional Intelligence is a complete guidebook to help you leverage your EQ for greater professional and personal success.

Research now shows that people with higher levels of emotional intelligence generally have:

• Greater job satisfaction
• A better chance of getting promoted
• A bigger salary
• A higher standard of living
• Fewer family conflicts
• A stronger immune system
• A lower chance of developing cardiovascular disorders, and
• A more fulfilled life!

Written especially for the South African workplace, this newly updated edition will show you to improve and develop your emotional intelligence by focusing on these aspects of EQ:

• Self-awareness
• Self- regard
• Assertiveness
• Empathy
• Interpersonal relations
• Problem- solving
• Impulse control
• Stress tolerance
• Flexibility
• Optimism
• And more!

Throughout the book, you will find practical tips, exercises, and case studies to help you develop your emotional intelligence. Now is your chance to open the door to a better life!

Annette Prins a senior counselling psychologist, involves herself with developing human capital. As CEO and co-owner of the company Talent and Wellness Management, she developed and presented an array of workshops in the people skills arena, for the corporate and tertiary sectors. She specialises in stress management, anxiety and mood disorders and trauma counselling.

Eugene van Niekerk has taught psychology at both under-graduate and post-graduate level. His academic background is also complimented by work as psychotherapist and corporate consultant. Eugene’s interests include, amongst others: emotional intelligence; mind-body medicine; mental health in an information society; how affective neuroscience is able to improve individual and organisational performance.

As consultant Annette Weyers has been part of the wellness industry for fifteen years. She was co-founder of the Centre for Talent and Wellness Management an organisation that offered professional services to develop human talent and promote wellness. Services to employees included support and interventions through counseling, coaching, inspirational talks and workshops. "

Ethics can: build trust; create pleasant, productive workplaces that are characterised by high levels of fairness, respect, accountability and responsibility; foster sound relationships with internal and external stakeholders; position the organisation as an employee of choice, attracting and retaining the best talent; boost the organisation’s reputation and brand equity; create a high degree of customer and investor confidence; can and should be a key differentiator that accords ethical organisations a unique source of competitive advantage. In short, ethics can make all the difference.

Ethics can build trust; create pleasant, productive workplaces that are characterised by high levels of fairness, respect, accountability and responsibility; foster sound relationships with internal and external stakeholders; position the organisation as an employee of choice, attracting and retaining the best talent; boost the organisation’s reputation and brand equity; create a high degree of customer and investor confidence; and it can and should be a key differentiator that accords ethical organisations a unique source of competitive advantage. In short, I believe that ethics can make all the difference. The book covers six themes: Understanding workplace ethics beyond just what is right and wrong. Does ethics make good business sense? Can you motivate an ethical business focus well enough? Establishing whose role is ethics, which explores the role of leadership, the social and ethics committee and HR. Managing workplace ethics, which outlines a comprehensive ethics management system and includes a detailed focus on topical workplace issues. The crucial tasks of measuring, monitoring and reporting on ethics and ethical performance. Ethical decisions and dilemmas, which examines how to make those really tough ethical decisions.

The book includes various practical exercises, checklists and guidelines, suggested workplace discussions, case studies and commentaries, and further reading.

South Africa's pioneer and foremost thinker and voice on Black Economic Advancement, Phinda Mzwakhe Madi, is back with a bang. His first book, Affirmative Action in Corporate South Africa, triggered the first wave of Affirmative Action programmes in the country. His follow up book, Black Economic Empowerment in the New South Africa, led to the formation of the BEE Commission and eventually the creation of the country's policy and codes of good practice. Now his third book in the trilogy, BEE 20 years later - The Baby and the Bathwater, evaluates progress so far and startles with its fresh perspective on the way forward.

Twenty years after the introduction of BEE, Madi’s view is that the time for follow-up and reflection has come. Clear trends and lessons can now be discerned and learned from. He contends that there is an unfortunate narrative that is gaining currency in South Africa generally and the corporate world in particular, as well as numerous sections of civil society, that BEE has been nothing but a smoke and mirrors initiative towards oligarchy, hence his chosen title: BEE 20 years later - The Baby and The Bathwater.

He believes that, having been the first black author to have written on this subject, he has a unique view of the evolution of the process. As a black entrepreneur himself and a director of various top listed companies with a total combined turnover of more than R90bn, he not only has a conceptual and academic understanding of the subject matter, but also has an insider’s view and experience.

As the title suggests, there is now a tendency to want to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. His book argues that we need to make a very clear distinction between the bouncing baby and the (at times) dirty bathwater. The book analyses both the bouncing baby and the unfortunate dirt and grime that covers the bathwater. It makes a very frank, clinical and yet balanced argument on how this distinction needs to be made, as well as why and how we should all ensure that the baby both survives and thrives going forward, whilst getting rid of the ugly side of BEE - the dirty bathwater. But more importantly, he examines how to restore the credibility of this process so that it truly and genuinely moves away from just being seen as the enrichment of the few and lives true to its promise: the economic empowerment of the many.

Featuring conversations with prominent Entrepreneurs, Business People and Thought Leaders: Herman Mashaba; Peter Vundla; Richard Maponya; Gaby Magomola; Thami Mazwai; Leon Louw; Joe Hlongwane; Vusi Thembekwayo; Sandile Zungu; Koko Khumalo; Mandla Malinga; Themba Dlamini; Lawrence Mavundla; Khanyi Kweyama.

South Africans know how to make iconic ads.

Brands have influenced and borrowed from television, music, sports, comedy and youth culture in a way that has allowed communication across our diverse peoples. It also sometimes gets it horribly wrong.

A blend of memoir, criticism and cultural commentary that is fresh, contemporary and informed.

South Africa is under-capitalising on its rich ways of doing business. One such way, the focus of this book, is collaboration. The collaboration approach should be promoted to the same extent that the Japanese have entrenched and exported their 'small incremental improvement' Kaizen approach.

There are many such underexplored indigenous ways of doing business in Africa. Where improvement is required in relation to development and organisational performance, the need is not so much building new capacities as discovering and implementing more strategic and effective utilisation of existing indigenous ones. And there is no need to cringe when African culture is used to inform science.

This book uses history, interviews and documentary evidence from South Africa to weave together a story, arguments and lessons about collaboration.

Macrologistics is a strategic view of logistics as a production factor on national scales to support a shift towards sustainability. The book details logistics' evolution from a functional discipline to a value chain optimiser and, ultimately, an enabler of sustainability, including the evolution of metrics to support this shift. Macrologistics instrumentation involves striving towards the lowest total cost of ownership for national economies where, to improve decision-making, these costs should ultimately include the societal and ecological costs incurred due to logistics activities.

From Logistics Strategy To Macrologistics represents macrologistics research outputs for a number of developing economies, identifying distinctive macrologistics policy and infrastructure investments themes to address national logistics challenges in developing economies. The book culminates in a discussion on the potential future role of logistics to support the shift to a more sustainable society, where an acceptance of a degrowth paradigm might be required, and even advisable, for a more secure, fulfilling future. Logistics (and economics) scholars, researchers and practitioners should steer their work towards contributing to the development of an ecologically sustainable society, where resources and returns are shared widely, sustainably and equitably.

Canned lion hunting sprang to the world’s attention with the 2015 launch of the documentary, Blood Lions. This movie blew the cover off a brutal industry that has burgeoned in the last decade or so, operating largely under the radar of public concern.

In Cuddle Me Kill Me, veteran wildlife campaigner Richard Peirce reveals horrifying facts about the industry. He tells:

• The true story of two male lions rescued from breeding farms
• The exploitation and misery of these apex predators when they are bred in captivity
• How young cubs are removed from their mothers mere hours after birth
• How they are first used for petting by an adoring (and paying) public
• Their subsequent use for ‘walking with lions’ tourism
• And how, in the final stage of exploitation, they are served up in fenced enclosure for execution by canned hunters – or simply shot by breeders for the value of their carcass, a prized product in the East

Well researched by Peirce with the help of an undercover agent, and illustrated with photos taken along the way, this is a disturbing and passionate plea to end commercial captive lion breeding and the repurposing of wildlife to cater for human greed.

In 2009, Canadian entrepreneur Mike Quinn packed his backpack and moved to Lusaka, Zambia on a mission to find African entrepreneurs building scalable, high-impact businesses. There he stumbled across two South African brothers who had founded a business to help unbanked smallholder farmers receive mobile payments in a market where cash was king. After convincing his retired parents to mortgage their house and lend him $100,000, Mike joined as a co-founder of Zoona and became CEO for nine of the next ten years.

With his partners, Mike built a network of more than 3,000 entrepreneur agents across Zambia and Malawi that enabled millions of unbanked consumers to send and receive $2.5-billion in money transfers and remittances. Headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa, Zoona raised over $35-million of venture investment and operated on the leading edge of Africa’s emerging fintech ecosystem.

Mike’s remarkable story gives a rare and honest glimpse into the workings of a pioneering African startup through the lens of a purpose-driven entrepreneur who went “all in”. Zoona faced tremendous adversity along the way: currency crises, investment round collapses, ruthless pushback from the major mobile network operators, and a continuous internal struggle to discover and execute a growth strategy that matched the company’s billion-dollar ambition.

It was by failing to win that Mike learned what entrepreneurship – specifically entrepreneurship in Africa – is all about, and it was what motivated him to double down and try again.

This book will let the reader into the world of migrant workers and how they have used their culture and heritage to reimagine and create a new socio-economic order through the production of cultural goods and services.

This is the story of Kwa Mai Mai; an economic trade zone that has captured the imagination of people who dared to dream. Kwa Mai Mai is the beginning of everything Johannesburg is meant to be, the City of Gold, a place where dreams deferred become true. The book tells a story of a people’s culture, wrapped in beautiful memories of life in villages left behind but collectively remembered by those who refuse to forget, lest they lose themselves in the concrete jungle that knows no mercy.

This is a story of how cultural memory, sacredly preserved and transported to new geographies, can serve both as cultural weapon that can be used to resist subjugation, while unleashing it as an economic weapon to turn those priceless traditions into tradeable commodities. The book narrates a story of how those who are the keepers of cultural memory can wield it as a weapon of survival and use its power to petition the entrepreneurial and creative spirits buried deep down in the souls of their true being.

The book raises an argument built on an assumption that if cultural memory can be stored and retrieved through artefacts, sites, ceremonies, myths and rituals, including texts, then Kwa Mai Mai assembles and converges these into one place and space of worship and celebration. This is a place where the hypervisibility of its bearers is always in a constant fight against being eclipsed by those who would rather pretend it did not exist – the City that created it.

The book combines both the author’s observation and interpretation gathered from ethnographic work of over four years, as well as the voices of those who reluctantly remained in this City when no other alternative presented itself, short of returning to the villages in absolute defeat.

Case studies of metropolitan cities in nine African countries – from Egypt in the north to three in West and Central Africa, two in East Africa and three in Southern Africa – make up the empirical foundation of this publication.

The interrelated themes addressed in these chapters – the national influence on urban development, the popular dynamics that shape urban development and the global currents on urban development – make up its framework. All authors and editors are African, as is the publisher. The only exception is Göran Therborn whose recent book, Cities of Power, served as motivation for this volume. Accordingly, the issue common to all case studies is the often conflictual powers that are exercised by national, global and popular forces in the development of these African cities.

Rather than locating the case studies in an exclusively African historical context, the focus is on the trajectories of the postcolonial city (with the important exception of Addis Ababa with a non-colonial history that has granted it a special place in African consciousness). These trajectories enable comparisons with those of postcolonial cities on other continents. This, in turn, highlights the fact that Africa – today, the least urbanised continent on an increasingly urbanised globe – is in the thick of processes of large-scale urban transformation, illustrated in diverse ways by the case studies that make up the foundation of this publication.