The 1930s and 40s were tumultuous decades in South Africa’s history. The economy declined sharply in the wake of the Wall Street crash, giving rise to a huge number of poor whites and the growth of a militant and aggressive Afrikaner nationalism that often took its lead from the Nazis in Germany.

A Perfect Storm reveals how the right-wing’s malevolent message moved from the margins to the centre of political life; how antisemitism seeped into mainstream political life with real and lasting consequences. Milton Shain, South Africa’s leading scholar of modern Jewish history, brings into sharp relief the ‘Jewish Problem’, detailing the rise of influential organisations such as the Grey Shirts and the New Order, which fanned the flames of antisemitism. He devotes considerable attention to the Ossewa-Brandwag, which, by 1941, constituted the largest yet mobilisation of Afrikaners.

The National Party itself contributed to the climate of hostility to Jews. It was instrumental in ensuring that only few of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and elsewhere were permitted as immigrants. The National Party contributed to the prevailing climate of Jew-baiting. Indeed, some of its worst offenders were accorded high office after 1948 when the National Party came to power.

How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post–Cold War era—changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated.

This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises—from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers–but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that “traditional” authority enjoys in the late modern world.

Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.

As a child, Thabo Abram Molefe, along with his family, is impelled into the apartheid era tradition of rural to urban transition. Moving from a farm to a multi ethnic and vibrant township in the heart of Heidelberg, the birthplace of Eugene Terre’ Blanche’s AWB, proves to be both a challenge and an adventure as he works to evade the nickname that has followed him as a result: "maplazini", Sotho for a dumb country bumpkin.

Native Boy explores a young man’s complex relationship with identity and race, seen through the lens of township life. Moreover, it is about his journey to escape the socio economic trap of the apartheid regime to forever limit the black man to a life of hardship.

Sithole problematises the signifier X, as a marker of the dehumanization of the black subject. He argues that post-1994 South Africa retains the markers of its colonial past, and remains a territory of unfreedom for blacks. He offers a new imagination for a liberatory project through the idea of Azania as a site of true emancipation.

In Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Tendayi Sithole elaborates on the problematic signifier X, a marker of the dehumanization of the black subject, and presents the struggle for Azania as a liberatory project.

Sithole argues that post-1994 South Africa retains the markers of its colonial past and remains a territory of unfreedom for blacks. He shows how the colonial contract still stands, with the land question unresolved by the new constitutional dispensation. His thesis is that being and land are indissoluble, and the denial of the centrality of land restitution is a denial of the black being. Drawing on the Black Consciousness philosophy of Steve Biko, he critiques the manner in which Marx and Marxism evade the reality of antiblack racism and landlessness as drivers of colonial conquest and ongoing forms of oppression, and emphasises existential struggle of the black subject through Mabogo P More’s African philosophy.

Sithole foregrounds these iterations under the mark X, and shows how the black subject, as a dehumanized figure, must continue to radically insist on alternative forms of being in an antiblack world, and on Azania as the true form of liberation.

The African Lion, Dr Chika Onyeani, is back and roaring. The author of the phenomenally successful Capitalist N*gger, which has sold more than 100 000 copies in South Africa alone, offers a new collection of his speeches, articles and other writings over the last fifteen years.

In Roar Of The African Lion, Dr Onyeani’s unblinking gaze and plain speaking are directed at many of the burning issues of the day. He outlines his revolutionary Spider Web Doctrine – aimed at financial self-reliance and the upliftment of black communities – and attacks the parasitic leaders whose greed has robbed the people of Africa of opportunities for advancement and development since their liberation. He is equally scornful of the failures of the African elite to influence the direction of their countries, and has trenchant comments to make about racism, xenophobia and hypocrisy in Africa, America and elsewhere.

Dr Onyeani also tackles the persistence of slavery on the continent, the West’s ambivalent attitude to aid and debt relief, rampant corruption and the ‘whiteness’ of Barack Obama. Looking to the future, he cautions Africa to be wary of China’s embrace and to pursue its own solutions to African problems.

Here’s the Thing is a new collection of thought-provoking essays from Haji Mohamed Dawjee.

Filled with stories and insights that are contemplative, comedic and controversial, you will find a touching letter to her father, the honest truth about the pain in the arse that is parenting and ponderings about struggling with the vicissitudes of the modern world filled with cancel culture and the controversies of appreciating the wrong artists. There is also a serving of the many wise lessons the game of tennis has to offer as well as hilarious insights and observations on dustbins, yes dustbins, and ageing, that ring true.

Here’s the Thing is relatable, relevant, entertaining, soothingly self-deprecating and, at times, morally challenging.

Written by two award-winning reporters with unprecedented access, this is the only definitive biography of George Floyd.

The murder of George Floyd sparked a fiery summer of activism and unrest all over the world in 2020, with peaceful protests sometimes erupting into violent clashes. From Shetland to Sao Paolo, from Honolulu to Hobart, people marched under the Black Lives Matter banner, decrying Floyd's death and demanding an end to racial injustice. The movement has led corporations to redouble their efforts, universities to refocus on inclusion, and government officials to examine the causes of systemic inequality.

Drawing on The Washington Post's unrivalled archives, in-depth reporting and award-winning series on Floyd, His Name Is George Floyd is a definitive biography that dives deep into the myriad ways that structural racism shaped Floyd's life and death. Telling his personal story within the context of America's troubled race history, it features fresh and exclusive reporting as well as unparalleled access to Floyd's family and the people who were closest to the man whose name has become one of the most recognized on the planet.

By zooming in for an intimate portrait of this one, emblematic life, while also pulling back to profile the institutions that shaped it, the authors deliver a powerful exploration of institutional racism and of a public reckoning of unprecedented breadth and intensity.

'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' Angela Davis 'Fanon is our contemporary ... In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, Fanon showed us the internal theatre of racism' Deborah Levy Frantz Fanon's urgent, dynamic critique of the effects of racism on the psyche is a landmark study of the black experience in a white world. Drawing on his own life and his work as a psychoanalyst to explore how colonialism's subjects internalize its prejudices, eventually emulating the 'white masks' of their oppressors, it established Fanon as a revolutionary anti-colonialist thinker. 'So hard to put down ... a brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair' The New York Times Book Review

‘Miskien issit omdat poverty my define en nie die racial politics vannie land ie.’

Wit issie ’n colour nie is ’n versameling verhale oor grootword en die lewe in die buitewyke van die Kaapse Vlakte. Dit dek identiteit, rassepolitiek, sosio- ekonomiese kwessies en bruin kultuur, en bevraagteken die Suid-Afrika waarin ons ons bevind. Dit is gevul met galgehumor, rou eerlikheid en hartverskeurende vertellings van pogings om die lewe op die Vlakte te navigeer. Hierdie versameling is diep persoonlik en ’n ontstellend waar weergawe van die lewe aan die ander kant van die spoor, geskryf in Kaapse Afrikaans.

Drawing from several hundred first-person accounts, most of which are unpublished, Spear reshapes our understanding of Mandela by focusing on this intense but relatively neglected period of escalation in the movement against apartheid.

Landau’s book is not a biography, nor is it a history of a militia or an army; rather, it is a riveting story about ordinary civilians debating and acting together in extremis.

Contextualizing Mandela and MK’s activities amid anti-colonial change and Black Marxism in the early 1960s, Spear also speaks to today’s transnational anti-racism protests and worldwide struggles against oppression.

An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century.

This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality.

Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to middle-class status, by the 1950s it included all Black Christians—60 percent of the Black South African population. In turn, certain Black traditions and customs were central to the acceptance of sexual modernity, which gained traction because it included practices such as lobola, in which a bridegroom demonstrates his gratitude by transferring property to his bride’s family. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity.

In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system. Erlank draws from a wide range of sources, including popular Black literature and the Black press, African church and mission archives, and records of the South African law courts, which she argues have been underutilized in histories of South Africa. The book is sure to attract historians and other scholars interested in the history of African Christianity, African families, sexuality, and the social history of law, especially colonial law.

South Africa’s story is often presented as a triumph of new over old, but while formal apartheid was abolished decades ago, stark and distressing similarities persist.

Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh explores the edifice of systemic racial oppression — the new apartheid — that continues to thrive, despite or even because of our democratic system.

Journalist Lesley Mofokeng investigates the life of his remarkable grandfather, Mongangane Wilfred Mofokeng, a prominent Dutch Reformed Church evangelist, who built a thriving community out of the dust of the far Northwest.

The journey takes him from Joburg’s Marabi-soaked townships of the 1930s to his childhood home of Gelukspan near Lichtenburg and then to the rural Free State and the remote mountain kingdom of Lesotho. In what becomes a spiritual quest, he traces the inspirational footsteps of his ancestors and the legendary King Moshoeshoe.

In the process, Mofokeng proudly claims his heritage and also uncovers a long-lost chapter of South African history and the church of the apartheid regime.

A bold, urgent appeal from the acclaimed columnist and political commentator, addressing one of the most important issues of our time.

In Peter Beinart’s view, one story dominates Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of Jewish religious tradition and warps our understanding of Israel and Palestine. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history, and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, Beinart argues, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations, they must do nothing less than offer a new answer to the question: What does it mean to be a Jew?

Beinart imagines an alternate narrative, which would draw on other nations’ efforts at moral reconstruction and a different reading of Jewish tradition. A story in which Israeli Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, and in which Jewish and Palestinian safety are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. One that recognizes the danger of venerating states at the expense of human life.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is a provocative argument that will expand and inform one of the defining conversations of our time. It is a book that only Peter Beinart could write: a passionate yet measured work that brings together his personal experience, his commanding grasp of history, his keen understanding of political and moral dilemmas, and a clear vision for the future.

Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.

In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.

The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process.

Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

Surviving isn't enough: this is how you can thrive.

Over the past 15 years, anti-racist psychologist Guilaine Kinouani has contributed writing and run workshops on how racism affects both physical and mental health. Based on her findings, she has devised tried and tested psychological strategies. Her mission is to help thousands to find peace with this book.

Living While Black gives voice to the diverse experiences of Black people around the world and uses case studies and exclusive research to offer expert guidance on how to: set boundaries and process microaggressions; protect children from racism; navigate the dating world; identify and celebrate the wins.

Kinouani empowers Black readers to adopt self-care routines that improve day-to-day wellness to help them thrive not just survive and find hope - or even joy - in the face of adversity. This is also a vital resource for allies who wish to understand the impact of racism and how they can help.

White supremacy is on the rise in the world once again, often finding expression in acts of extreme violence by young white men.

Gavin Evans explores the roots of this ideology, traced back to the 19th century to Charles Darwin and Francis Galton’s race-based theories. He examines the spread of eugenics and the rise of Nazism and Apartheid.

Evans further investigates the 21st-century evolution of ‘Great Replacement’ ideas, their spread through alt-right forums, and their influence on young men with access to weapons. White Supremacy reveals the connections between mainstream and extremist ‘Replacement Theory’ and the ongoing promotion of race science by both far-right and establishment figures, highlighting the dangerous legacy of eugenics.

Hermann Giliomee, pre-eminent South African historian, dissects the forces that shaped the Afrikaners into an unusual ‘maverick African’ nation.

He analyses long-term forces like the powerful legal position of Afrikaner women, the expanding frontier, and the struggles about race inside the church, along with more recent political history.

The greatest gift we can give to our children, and the future South Africa, is our own healing.

South Africa may have moved beyond apartheid, but not beyond racial polarisation. Virtually every problem we face in this country is touched by our legacy of systemic racism and the psychological trauma it has caused to people of all races.

Racial healing is not a new, woke, talk shop. It is also not a ‘how-to guide’ for do-gooders. On the contrary, racial healing requires diverse people of all ages to embrace the unique and challenging complexity of racial diversity and to forge a human bridge between multiple opposing truths that can peacefully co-exist.

Only a sober admission of this complexity can help us to heal from the open, festering wound of ongoing racism which has left South Africa with the unenviable distinction of being the most unequal country in the world. A wound not necessarily unique to South Africa, but indeed also the reason behind the violent conflict seen around the world.

Ian Fuhr and co-author Nina de Klerk have created a powerful examination of the deep-rooted causes of continuing racial polarisation in South Africa and suggest a road map for the journey towards racial healing. The book is enhanced by influential collaborators who share their authentic and often emotive perspectives on racial healing.

The Human Bridge is an ambitious but achievable vision of the future. If people are willing to familiarise themselves with each other’s life experiences, own up to their own fears and racial biases, and engage in authentic dialogue, South Africans may once again become an example to the rest of the world.

WITH ESSAYS FROM: Bonang Mohale; Carin Dean; Jonathan Jansen; Leon Wessels; Loretta Feris; Lukhanyo Calata; Max du Preez; Mbali Baduza; Padhma Moodley; Roelf Meyer and Sylvester Chauke.

In The Eight Zulu Kings, well-respected and widely published historian John Laband examines the reigns of the eight Zulu kings from 1816 to the present.

Starting with King Shaka, the renowned founder of the Zulu kingdom, he charts the lives of the kings Dingane, Mpande, Cetshwayo, Dinuzulu, Solomon and Cyprian, to today’s King Goodwill Zwelithini whose role is little more than ceremonial.

In the course of this investigation Laband places the Zulu monarchy in the context of African kingship and tracks and analyses the trajectory of the Zulu kings from independent and powerful pre-colonial African rulers to largely powerless traditionalist figures in post-apartheid South Africa.

100 Best Jewish Recipes allows you to create modern feasts packed with old-school deli charm. This exciting new compilation of dishes from Evelyn Rose's classic canon showcases the delicious diversity of Jewish cooking. Find inspiration for no-fuss, flavoursome classics, from the kitchens of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to the Middle East and beyond. There are mouth-watering ideas for small plates and soups, mains and desserts, as well as bakes and breads. You'll also discover the best dishes to prepare for every major festival, alongside advice on how to make everyday recipes suitable for the kosher kitchen. For everything from perfect pickles to great gefilte fish, and brilliant bagels to meltingly tender cholent, this is the ultimate contemporary guide to the best Jewish food.

Musical Minorities is the first English-language monograph on the performing arts of an ethnic minority in Vietnam. Living primarily in the northern mountains, the Hmong have strategically maintained their cultural distance from foreign invaders and encroaching state agencies for almost two centuries. They use cultural heritage as a means of maintaining a resilient community identity, one which is malleable to their everyday needs and to negotiations among themselves and with others in the vicinity. Case studies of revolutionary songs, countercultural rock, traditional vocal and instrumental styles, tourist shows, animist and Christian rituals, and light pop from the diaspora illustrate the diversity of their creative outputs. This groundbreaking study reveals how performing arts shape understandings of ethnicity and nationality in contemporary Vietnam. Based on three years of fieldwork, Lonan O Briain traces the circulation of organized sounds that contribute to the adaptive capacities of this diverse social group. In an original investigation of the sonic materialization of social identity, the book outlines the full multiplicity of Hmong music-making through a fascinating account of music, minorities, and the state in a post-socialist context.

With his bestseller, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates established himself as a unique voice in his generation of American authors; a brilliant writer and thinker in the tradition of James Baldwin.

In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, he explores the urgent question of how our stories – our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking – both expose and distort our realities. Travelling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell – as well as the ones we don’t – work to shape us.

The first of the book’s three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa – a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology – visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world – and our own souls – and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

Contemporary scholarly and popular debate over the legacy of racial integration in the United States rests between two positions that are typically seen as irreconcilable. On one side are those who argue that we must pursue racial integration because it is an essential component of racial justice. On the other are those who question the ideal of integration and suggest that its pursuit may damage the very population it was originally intended to liberate. In An Impossible Dream? Sharon A. Stanley shows that much of this apparent disagreement stems from different understandings of the very meaning of integration. In response, she offers a new model of racial integration in the United States that takes seriously the concerns of longstanding skeptics, including black power activists and black nationalists. Stanley reformulates integration to de-emphasize spatial mixing for its own sake and calls instead for an internal, psychic transformation on the part of white Americans and a radical redistribution of power. The goal of her vision is not simply to mix black and white bodies in the same spaces and institutions, but to dismantle white supremacy and create a genuine multiracial democracy. At the same time, however, she argues that achieving this model of integration in the contemporary United States would be extraordinarily challenging, due to the poisonous legacy of Jim Crow and the hidden, self-reinforcing nature of white privilege today. Pursuing integration against a background of persistent racial injustice might well exacerbate black suffering without any guarantee of achieving racial justice or a worthwhile form of integration. Given this challenge, pessimism toward integration is a defensible position. But while the future of integration remains uncertain, its pursuit can neither be prescribed as a moral obligation nor rejected as intrinsically indefensible. In An Impossible Dream? Stanley dissects this vexing moral and political quandary.