ELSIE is a riveting story told with gut-wrenching reality of a woman's courage set against a torrid period in South African and world history. Growing up in a small diamond-mining village near Pretoria, South Africa, her secure, sheltered environment is shaken with the return of the two men in her life from fighting in German East Africa during the first World War ...a changed shell-shocked boyfriend who commits suicide and an unemployed brother who becomes involved in illicit diamond dealing with dire consequences. Rather than indulge in self-pity she puts her strong pacifist feelings to work by volunteering as a nurse at a military field hospital in Belgium where she meets her husband to be and where exposure to the horrors and futility of industrial warfare changes her worldview and she joins with other women calling for universal suffrage. After the war she is thrown into further conflict when her husband is involved in the bloody confrontations of the 1922 miners' strike in South Africa and she opens a care centre for abused women and single pregnant mothers, giving them protection and hope of a better future.

WINNER OF THE 2017 MARTIN A. KLEIN PRIZE In his in-depth and compelling study of perhaps the most famous of Portuguese colonial massacres, Mustafah Dhada explores why the massacre took place, what Wiriyamu was like prior to the massacre, how events unfolded, how we came to know about it and what the impact of the massacre was, particularly for the Portuguese empire. Spanning the period from 1964 to 2013 and complete with a foreword from Peter Pringle, this chronologically arranged book covers the liberation war in Mozambique and uses fieldwork, interviews and archival sources to place the massacre firmly in its historical context. The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-2013 is an important text for anyone interested in the 20th-century history of Africa, European colonialism and the modern history of war.

Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked. Vanessa S. Oliveira traces how existing commercial networks adapted to changes in the Atlantic slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. Slave Trade and Abolition reveals how women known as donas (a term adapted from the title granted to noble and royal women in the Iberian Peninsula) were often important cultural brokers. Acting as intermediaries between foreign and local people, they held high socioeconomic status and even competed with the male merchants who controlled the trade. Oliveira provides rich evidence to explore the many ways this Luso-African community influenced its society. In doing so, she reveals an unexpectedly nuanced economy with regard to the dynamics of gender and authority.

Christiaan De Wet, commander of the Boer forces in the Anglo-Boer War, had the ability to lead his burghers, many of them individualists, with a strong hand, subjecting them to his stringent discipline. He was also a masterful strategist who could anticipate the moves of his opponents. But it was his ability to evade the British forces in what became known as the "First De Wet Hunt" that contributed significantly to his legendary status. Lord Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in South Africa, believed that the capture of De Wet would lead to the end of the Anglo-Boer War. When De Wet slipped over Slabberts Nek on July 15, 1900, breaking through Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Hunter's cordon and taking with him 2,000 Free Staters, including President Steyn and the government of the Orange Free State, Roberts organized a massive pursuit. From all sides British columns entered the chase. However, from July to August, 1900, De Wet, along with 2,500 men, managed to evade the elaborate net Lord Roberts had so carefully prepared to ensnare him. In so doing, the "Boer Pimpernel" ran rings around 50,000 British troops. Significantly, De Wet's successful evasion of the British ultimately led to the adoption of guerilla tactics by the Boers. This compelling story of a watershed event in the course of the war and the colorful personality of the man behind it is masterfully told, and brings an important personal dimension to the history of the Anglo-Boer War.

After 20 years of freedom in South Africa we have to ask ourselves difficult questions: are we willing to perpetuate a lie, search for facts or think wishfully? Freedom has been enabled by apartheid's end, but at the same time some of apartheid's key institutions and social relations are reproduced under the guise of 'democracy'. This collection of essays acknowledges the enormous expectations placed on the shoulders of the South African revolution to produce an alternative political regime in response to apartheid and global neo-liberalism. It does not lament the inability of South Africa's democracy to provide deeper freedoms, or suggest that since it hasn't this is some form of betrayal. Freedom is made possible and/or limited by local political choices, contemporary global conditions and the complexities of social change. This book explores the multiplicity of spaces within which the dynamics of social change unfold, and the complex ways in which power is produced and reproduced. In this way, it seeks to understand the often non-linear practices through which alternative possibilities emerge, the lengthy and often indirect ways in which new communities are imagined and new solidarities are built. In this sense, this book is not a collection of hope or despair. Nor is it a book that seeks to situate itself between these two poles. Instead it aims to read the present historically, critically and politically, and to offer insights into the ongoing, iterative and often messy struggles for freedom.

Over twenty years ago, Sven Lindqvist, one of the great pioneers of a new kind of experiential history writing, set out across Central Africa. Obsessed with a single line from Conrad's The Heart of Darkness - Kurtz's injunction to 'Exterminate All the Brutes' - he braided an account of his experiences with a profound historical investigation, revealing to the reader with immediacy and cauterizing force precisely what Europe's imperial powers had exacted on Africa's peoples over the course of the preceding two centuries. Shocking, humane, crackling with imaginative energies and moral purpose, Exterminate All the Brutes stands as an impassioned, timeless classic. It is essential reading for anybody ready to come to terms with the brutal, racist history on which Europe built its wealth.