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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
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.
This story of a middle-class white South African family unfolds between the years 1939 and 1964 - a transformative period in South Africa’s political landscape. It is told through the eyes and experiences of the younger son and his rite of passage into a country of racial segregation that gradually opens his eyes to the many injustices imposed upon the majority of the country’s population, coupled with a realization that his white privileges are sustained at the brutal expense of others.
Cassidy Hutchinson’s desk was mere steps from the most controversial president in recent American history. Now, she provides a riveting account of her extraordinary experiences as an idealistic young woman thrust into the middle of a national crisis, where she risked everything to tell the truth about some of the most powerful people in Washington. Ever since a childhood visit to Washington, DC, Cassidy Hutchinson aspired to serve her country in government. Raised in a working-class family with a military background, she was the first in her immediate family to graduate from college. Despite having no ties to Washington, Hutchinson landed a vital position at the center of the Trump White House. Her life took a dramatic turn on January 6th, 2021, when, at twenty-four, she found herself in one of the most extraordinary and unprecedented calamities in modern political history. Hutchinson was faced with a choice between loyalty to the Trump administration or loyalty to the country by revealing what she saw and heard in the attempt to overthrow a democratic election. She bravely came forward to become the pivotal witness in the House January 6 investigations, as her testimony transfixed and stunned the nation. In her memoir, Hutchinson reveals the struggle between the pressures she confronted to toe the party line and the demands of the oath she swore to defend American democracy. Enough reaches far beyond the typical insider political account. It’s the saga of a woman whose fierce determination helped her overcome childhood challenges to get her dream job, only to face a crisis of conscience—one that more senior White House aides tried to evade—and, in the process, find her voice and herself. This is a portrait of how the courage of one person can change the course of history.
South Africa’s democracy is often seen as a story of bright beginnings gone astray, a pattern said to be common to Africa. The negotiated settlement of 1994, it is claimed, ended racial domination and created the foundation for a prosperous democracy – but greedy politicians betrayed the promise of a new society. In Prisoners Of The Past, Steven Friedman astutely argues that this misreads the nature of contemporary South Africa. Building on the work of the economic historian Douglass North and the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani, Friedman shows that South African democracy’s difficulties are legacies of the pre-1994 past. The settlement which ushered in majority rule left intact core features of the apartheid economy and society. The economy continues to exclude millions from its benefits, while racial hierarchies have proved stubborn: apartheid is discredited, but the values of the pre-1948 colonial era, the period of British colonisation, still dominate. Thus South Africa’s democracy supports free elections, civil liberties and the rule of law, but also continues past patterns of exclusion and domination. Friedman reasons that this ‘path dependence’ is not, as is often claimed, the result of constitutional compromises in 1994 that left domination untouched. This bargain was flawed because it brought not too much compromise, but too little. Compromises extended political citizenship to all but there were no similar bargains on economic and cultural change. Using the work of the radical sociologist Harold Wolpe, Friedman shows that only negotiations on a new economy and society can free South Africans from the prison of the past.
What is your stake in the upcoming 2024 election in South Africa – the most crucial election since 1994? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome? As a businessperson, consumer, worker or farmer, you will be affected by the election results and the significant changes that are likely to appear in South Africa’s political economy. The 2024 election gives South Africans the opportunity to decide what the country and its political leadership will look like in the future. Tipping Point – Turmoil Or Reform? examines some critical questions about the country’s political and socioeconomic landscape today and whether the 2024 election outcome is likely to signal more gloom or will it rather pave the way for positive and enduring reforms. Edited by prominent economist Raymond Parsons, the book comprises pieces by some of South Africa’s leading intellectuals and thought leaders, all of whom have seriously considered South Africa’s post-election future. Among the major themes emerging from the different chapters, which will help to steer the national agenda in the months and years ahead, are: South Africa’s political prospects after 2024; the future role of coalition politics in South Africa; the dynamics between business and the economy; what South Africa’s geopolitical leanings mean for the country’s trade competitiveness; how to make local government work; need for greater community engagement and why doing business in South Africa is challenging. Tipping Point – Turmoil Or Reform? is as absorbing as it is frank, informing readers (and, importantly, voters) about the harsh reality of where South Africa is today but also offering them hope of a much better tomorrow – which will largely depend on the critical choices they make during this watershed election year for South Africa.
Being Black In The World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi’s first publications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change and renewed resistance to the brutality of apartheid rule and the emergence of Black Consciousness in the mid-1960s. Manganyi is one of South Africa’s most eminent intellectuals and an astute social and political observer. He has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race. In 2018 Manganyi’s memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist was awarded the prestigious ASSAf (The Academy of Science of South Africa) Humanities Book Award. Publication of Being-Black-in-the-World was delayed until the young Manganyi had left the country to study at Yale University. His publishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces would prohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, for being a ‘radical revolutionary’. The book found a limited public circulation in South Africa due to this censorship and original copies were hard to come by. This new edition is an invitation to a younger generation of citizens to engage with early decolonialising thought by an eminent South African intellectual. While the essays in this book are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regarding black subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality, the persistence of a racial (and racist) order and the possibilities of a renewed de-colonial project. Each of these short essays can be read as self-contained reflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. Manganyi is a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from making incisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to make sense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to black suffering. Ahead of its time, the ideas in this book are an exemplary demonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous de-colonial critique should entail. The re-publication of this classic text is enriched by the inclusion of a foreword and annotation by respected scholars Garth Stevens and Grahame Hayes respectively, and an afterword by public intellectual Njabulo S. Ndebele.
South Africa stands at the edge of a precipice. Almost thirty years after its first democratic election, poor policy and rampant corruption have left the country standing on the brink of becoming a failed state. In this thought-provoking book, Bronwyn Williams interviews a diverse group of public intellectuals, business leaders, and political mavericks to discuss tangible ways South Africa can rescue itself from itself. Through a series of illuminating conversations, a group of independent thinkers explore the root causes of South Africa’s problems and offer insightful – and radical – ways of how to solve them. From addressing land reform and economic development to rooting out corruption and overhauling political institutions, the conversations in this book come together as a roadmap towards a better South Africa that leaves no one behind. While the challenges facing the young democracy are immense, these experts provide hope and inspiration towards productive actions we can take together to build a brighter future. For anyone interested in understanding the complex issues facing South Africa today and how they can be addressed, Rescuing Our Republic is essential reading. It is a powerful reminder that the fate of a nation is not predetermined; that individuals, citizens and corporations still have powerful agency and that when that agency is directed towards the right ideas and actions, South Africa can still realise its full potential. LIST OF INTERVIEWEES:
South Africa is facing an extraordinary ‘polycrisis’. The dimensions of this crisis include an energy collapse; a failing rail network; weak education outcomes; an interrupted water supply; and the effects of decades of endemic corruption that have brought much of government to a halt. But the country also has incredible assets: a wealth of sought-after minerals; an enviable Constitution that protects rights and advocates social inclusion; an advanced financial and services sector; thriving agricultural and auto industries that compete with the best in the world; a prosecution service that is rapidly rebuilding; and, most of all, strong-willed people determined to make life better through hard work, entrepreneurship and hustling. The choice is stark: we either build on the positives and take the country forward or we will be overwhelmed by the negatives and end up as another Zimbabwe or Venezuela. We have the people, the policies and the resources. What is missing is the political will to make the difficult choices that will save South Africa from disaster. This book takes you on a journey that ends with one of three possible future scenarios: the Good, the Bad or the Ugly. Compiled by The Brenthurst Foundation and In Transformation Initiative, and workshopped with high-powered leaders in business and politics, the scenarios have stimulated intense public interest as the country grapples with its mounting problems. The good news is that there is a clear road towards a positive future. It will take courageous leadership and smart thinking to get there, but the ‘Good’ scenario is tantalisingly within grasp.
Seismic shifts in Zimbabwe's politics since the 2017 demise of Robert Mugabe have generated renewed interest in Ndabaningi Sithole, the first president of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). Tinashe Mushakavanhu brings this vanguard revolutionary back to center stage through a selection of his important political and literary works. The result is an important biographical mapping of Sithole's political and intellectual contributions to the liberation of Zimbabwe.
Asked about queer work in international relations, most IR scholars would almost certainly answer that queer studies is a non-issue for the subdiscipline - a topic beyond the scope and understanding of international politics. Yet queer work tackles problems that IR scholars themselves believe are central to their discipline: questions about political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and the national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, not to mention their implications for empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism. And since the introduction of queer work in the 1980s, IR scholars have used queer concepts like "performativity" or "crossing" in relation to important issues like sovereignty and security without acknowledging either their queer sources or their queer function. This agenda-setting book asks how "sexuality" and "queer" are constituted as domains of international political practice and mobilized so that they bear on questions of state and nation formation, war and peace, and international political economy. How are sovereignty and sexuality entangled in contemporary international politics? What understandings of sovereignty and sexuality inform contemporary theories and foreign policies on development, immigration, terrorism, human rights, and regional integration? How specifically is "the homosexual" figured in these theories and policies to support or contest traditional understandings of sovereignty? Queer International Relations puts international relations scholarship and transnational/global queer studies scholarship in conversation to address these questions and their implications for contemporary international politics.
South African poet and political activist Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) wrote poetry of the most exquisite lyrical beauty and intense power. And through his various political activities, he played a uniquely significant role in mobilising and intensifying opposition to injustice and oppression - initially in South Africa, but later throughout the rest of the world as well. This book focuses on the life of Dennis Brutus in South Africa from his childhood until he went into exile on an exit permit in 1966. It is also an attempt to acknowledge Brutus' literary and political work and, in a sense, to reintroduce Brutus to South Africa. This book places his own voice at the centre of his life story. It is told primarily in his own words - through newspaper and journal articles, tape recordings, interviews, speeches, court records and correspondence. It draws extensively on archival material not yet available in the public domain, as well as on interviews with several people who interacted with Brutus during his early years in South Africa. In particular, it examines his participation in some of the most influential organisations of his time, including the Teachers' League of South Africa, the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department movement and the Coloured National Convention, the Co-ordinating Committee for International Recognition in Sport, the South African Sports Association and the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, which all campaigned against racism in South African sport. Brutus left behind an important legacy in literature involvement, in community affairs and politics in as well.
We live under minority rule. But who is the ruling minority? Most of us are getting screwed over. Our world is defined by inequality, insecurity, lack of community and information overload. As the world burns, mega-corporations are reporting record profits. How are they getting away with it? 'Minority rule' is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they'll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren't actually silencing the 'forgotten' working class, immigrants aren't eating your pets, trans-activists aren't corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn't crushing free speech. In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it's facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction - and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.
More than just a therapeutic technique, psychoanalysis as a school of thought has redefined our ideas on sexuality, the self, morality, family, and the nature of the mind for much of the twentieth century. At its broadest, Freud's thinking on civilization and social forces provides a context in which to consider the history of political struggle among individuals and societies. This volume explores a central paradox in the evolution of psychoanalytic thought and practice and the ways in which they were used. Why and how have some authoritarian regimes utilized psychoanalytic concepts of the self to envisage a new social and political order? How did psychoanalysis provide both theoretical and practical elements to legitimize resistance to those same regimes? How can a school of thought be co-opted so deftly by different groups for different political ends? Bringing together contributions from innovative scholars of history, politics, and psychoanalysis, this volume analyzes the various outcomes of this fascinating and influential theory's development under a wide spectrum of governments that restricted political and cultural freedoms from the 1930s to the present. The regimes analyzed range from Fascist Italy, Vichy France, and Spain and Hungary under Fascism and Communism; modern Latin American dictatorships, such as Brazil and Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s; and the influence of Hoover, McCarthy, and the larger Cold War on psychoanalysis in America. A fresh addition to an enormous body of scholarship, this will be required reading for academics interested in the relationship between politics and non-political systems of thoughts and beliefs, the transnational circulation of ideas, social movements, and the intellectual and social history of psychoanalysis.
This is the go-to guide for confused South Africans and all those seeking an informed, balanced and up-to-date analysis of South African politics and society in the Ramaphosa era. When Nelson Mandela emerged from decades in jail to preach reconciliation, South Africans appeared to many as a people reborn as the Rainbow Nation. Yet, a quarter of a century later, the country sank into bitter recriminations and rampant corruption under Jacob Zuma. Why did this happen, and how was hope betrayed? President Cyril Ramaphosa, hoping to heal these wounds, was re-elected in May 2019 with the ANC hoping to claw back support lost to the opposition in the Zuma era. This book analyses this election, shedding light on voters’ choices. With chapters on all the major issues at stake – from education to land redistribution – Understanding South Africa offers insights into Africa’s largest and most diversified economy, closely tied to its neighbours’ fortunes.
In 1973, a group of California lawyers formed a non-profit, public-interest legal foundation dedicated to defending conservative principles in court. Calling themselves the Pacific Legal Foundation, they declared war on the U.S. regulatory state-the sets of rules, legal precedents, and bureaucratic processes that govern the way Americans do business. Believing that the growing size and complexity of government regulations threatened U.S. economy and infringed on property rights, Pacific Legal Foundation began to file a series of lawsuits challenging the government's power to plan the use of private land or protect environmental qualities. By the end of the decade, they had been joined in this effort by spin-off legal foundations across the country. The Other Rights Revolution explains how a little-known collection of lawyers and politicians-with some help from angry property owners and bulldozer-driving Sagebrush Rebels-tried to bring liberal government to heel in the final decades of the twentieth century. Decker demonstrates how legal and constitutional battles over property rights, preservation, and the environment helped to shape the political ideas and policy agendas of modern conservatism. By uncovering the history-including the regionally distinctive experiences of the American West-behind the conservative mobilization in the courts, Decker offers a new interpretation of the Reagan-era right.
Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists first spoke of the United States becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In "American Fascists, " Chris Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, " challenges the Christian Right's religious legitimacy and argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society. Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the movement as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian tradition. He points to the hundreds of senators and members of Congress who have earned between 80 and 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement is burrowing deep inside the American government to subvert it. The movement's call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. The movement's yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the foundation for a new, frightening America. "American Fascists, " which includes interviews and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on conversion techniques, examines the movement's origins, its driving motivations and its dark ideological underpinnings. Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power. The Christian Right, like these early fascist movements, does not openly call for dictatorship, nor does it use physical violence to suppress opposition. In short, the movement is not yet revolutionary. But the ideological architecture of a Christian fascism is being cemented in place. The movement has roused its followers to a fever pitch of despair and fury. All it will take, Hedges writes, is one more national crisis on the order of September 11 for the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to destroy American democracy. The movement awaits a crisis. At that moment they will reveal themselves for what they truly are -- the American heirs to fascism. Hedges issues a potent, impassioned warning. We face an imminent threat. His book reminds us of the dangers liberal, democratic societies face when they tolerate the intolerant.
Glenn Beck, the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Reset, returns with his contemporary adaptation of The Federalist Papers with the inclusion of his own commentary and annotations to help readers interpret and understand the Constitution. Glenn Beck revisited Thomas Paine's famous pre-Revolutionary War call to action in his #1 New York Times bestseller Glenn Beck's Common Sense. Now he brings his historical acumen and political savvy to this fresh, new interpretation of The Federalist Papers, the 18th-century collection of political essays that defined and shaped our Constitution and laid bare the "original argument" between states' rights and big federal government-a debate as relevant and urgent today as it was at the birth of our nation. Adapting a selection of these essential essays-pseudonymously authored by the now well-documented triumvirate of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay-for a contemporary audience, Glenn Beck has had them reworked into "modern" English so as to be thoroughly accessible to anyone seeking a better understanding of the Founding Fathers' intent and meaning when laying the groundwork of our government. Beck provides his own illuminating commentary and annotations and, for a number of the essays, has brought together the viewpoints of both liberal and conservative historians and scholars, making this a fair and insightful perspective on the historical works that remain the primary source for interpreting Constitutional law and the rights of American citizens.
In 1982 aanvaar Nico Smith ’n beroep na die NG Kerk in Afrika se Mamelodi-gemeente. Hy en sy vrou laat hulle gemaklike lewe agter en gaan bly in Mamelodi. Hier leer Nico en Ellen rêrig die hart van Mamelodi se mense ken, en beleef swaarkry saam met hulle. Hulle leer wat dit beteken om swart te wees in Suid-Afrika onder apartheid. Hulle leer ’n ander God ken, nie die God van Nico se vaders nie, maar die God van die verworpenes en die verdruktes.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities. Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,”but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life 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.
“A brilliant biography that will transform your understanding of this young, charismatic leader” — Joseph Nhini, BooksLive, Sunday Times “Deeply thought-provoking” — Tyrone August, Cape Times “Makes a good job of weaving together a number of strands that make the totality of the powerful persona Biko became ... Sheds new light on more than just Biko” — Sam Mkokeli, Business Day Interest in the iconic Steve Biko has strongly revived, as the current generation of activists calls on his legacy and thoughts. Biko is cited and disputed particularly in the #RhodesMustFall and decolonisation movements. This comprehensive biography, shortlisted for the Alan Paton award, explores Biko's life, the people and ideas that shaped him, and his part in Black Consciousness and the struggle. Updated in an affordable new edition, Biko: A Biography presents a new generation with nuanced insights into the life and thought of a South African hero.
'In explaining the rise to power of Kim Yo Jong, Lee displays his deep knowledge and understanding of North Korea's extreme, ruthless and self-obsessed dynastic autocracy, the creators and rulers of a de-facto nuclear weapon state. Not a reassuring story'- Sir John Scarlett, former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) The Sister is a fascinating, authoritative account of the spectacular rise of Kim Yo Jong, de-facto deputy to her brother, Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, and the most powerful woman in North Korea. In 2022, in a particularly fiery speech, Kim Yo Jong threatened to nuke South Korea, reminding the world of the dangers posed by her state. But how did the youngest daughter of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, his ‘sweet princess’, become the ruthless chief propagandist, internal administrator and foreign policymaker for her brother’s totalitarian regime? The Sister, written by Sung-Yoon Lee, a scholar and specialist on North Korea, uncovers the truth about Kim Yo Jong, her close bond with Kim Jong Un and the lessons in manipulation they learned from their father. He also examines the iron grip the Kim dynasty has on their country, the grotesque deaths of family members deemed disloyal, and the signs that Kim Yo Jong has been positioned as her brother’s successor should he die while his own children are young. Readable and insightful, this book is an invaluable portrait of a woman who might yet hold the survival of her despotic dynasty in her hands. 'An incisive portrayal of North Korea's "princess", Kim Yo Jong, but also a chilling portrait of a family dynasty that has oppressed and exploited North Korea for generation after generation' - Max Boot, Washington Post columnist, author and senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations |
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