South Africa is a country rich in pathways, tracks and roads – both tar and gravel. It is also a country of wonderful stories, blessed with a varied, colourful and contested history.

For more than a year veteran journalist Luke Alfred walked South Africa’s roads through cities, countryside and everything in between.

Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step Out and Find South Africa tells the stories of some of the country’s most interesting and sometimes forgotten places.

The English naturalist William Burchell set off from Cape Town in June 1811 to explore the flora and fauna of the vast southern African interior. Over a four-year period, and travelling in a custom-built ox wagon, he amassed an astonishing 63 000 specimens of plants, bulbs, insects, reptiles and mammals – many not previously documented for science – as well as over 500 paintings and illustrations.

While the outbound trek is well described in Burchell’s famous Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, little has been published about the challenges and discoveries made on his return journey to Cape Town, from 1812–1815. This pioneering book traces the homeward leg of Burchell’s epic odyssey – through the arid northern Cape, the Great Karoo, the warravaged eastern Cape, and along the Eden-like southern Cape coast.

Drawing on primary and secondary sources, including Burchell’s letters, his handwritten records archived at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the detailed map he created to record his trek, the authors have crafted a thought-provoking and beautifully illustrated account that encompasses both the genius of the man and the natural history of the region that so intrigued him.

A fresh, nuanced look at an extraordinary woman and her lifelong fight for justice. Defying the constraints of her gender and class, Emily Hobhouse travelled across continents and spoke out against oppression. A passionate pacifist and a feminist, she opposed both the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War and World War One, leading to accusations of treason. Elsabe Brits travelled in her footsteps to bring to life a colourful story of war, heroism and passion, spanning three continents.

In die jare 1891 tot 1893 het ongeveer 770 persone Transvaal verlaat en na Angola en Duits-Suidwes-Afrika getrek om hulle heil daar te soek. Dit staan bekend as die “sesde” Dorslandtrek.

Sowat 45 De Jagers het in verskillende groepe aan hierdie epiese trek deelgeneem. Ná die sesde Dorslandtrek het hulle tussen Angola, Suidwes-Afrika, Suid-Afrika en selfs Kenia rondgeswerf en verdere avonture oor die hele Suider-Afrika beleef. Sommige De Jagers het in 1928 van Angola na Suidwes-Afrika getrek en hulle daar gevestig, terwyl ander eers in 1958 uit Angola gerepatrieer is.

Uit die beperkte beskikbare bronne is die verskillende trekroetes van die sesde Dorslandtrek gerekonstrueer en vir die eerste keer word ’n kaart van die verskillende trekroetes gepubliseer. ’n Geslagregister van bykans 1800 afstammelinge en aangetroude familielede van die De Jagers van die sesde Dorslandtrek en byna 500 foto’s vorm ’n omvattende beeld van hierdie familiegeskiedenis.

From 1952 to 1981, South Africa's apartheid government ran a school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art Of Life In South Africa is about the students, teachers, art, ideas, and politics that led to the school's founding, and which circulated during the years of its existence at a remote former mission station. It is a story of creativity, beauty, and community in twentieth-century South Africa.

Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, this book focuses instead on a small group's efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives through the ironic medium of an apartheid-era school.

Lushly illustrated with almost 100 images, this book gives us fully formed lives and remarkable insights into life under segregation and apartheid.

A true crime classic about Daisy de Melker in ragtime Joburg – a city of murder, mayhem and gold.

Ted Botha takes the reader into the underbelly of Johannesburg in the 1920s and 1930s as he traces the fascinating story of the mysterious Daisy de Melker, who was hanged for poisoning her son. Many also believed she poisoned two husbands for their life insurance money.

In the shadow of ever-growing mine dumps, she went about her business quietly and unnoticed – the most unlikely of killers. Even though people close to her kept dying, no one suspected a thing for twenty years. When someone finally spoke up, it led to one of South Africa’s most sensational trials.

De Melker’s story unfolds in tandem with those of colourful Johannesburg characters of the same period such as the Foster Gang, Herman Charles Bosman, the dashing conman Baron von Veltheim and a Bonny-and-Clyde-style couple, Dicky Mallalieu and Gwen Tolputt. Some cross paths with each other and also those of famous writers of era such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sarah Gertrude Millin.

Glossy is a story of more than a magazine. It is a story of passion and power, dizzying fortune and out-of-this-world fashion, of ingenuity and opportunism, frivolity and malice. This is the definitive story of Vogue.

Vogue magazine started, like so many great things do, in the spare room of someone's house. But unlike other such makeshift projects that flare up then fizzle away, Vogue burnt itself onto our cultural consciousness.

Today, 128 years later, Vogue spans 22 countries, has an international print readership upwards of 12 million and nets over 67 million monthly online users. Uncontested market leader for a century, it is one of the most recognisable brands in the world and a multi-million dollar money-making machine. It is not just a fashion magazine, it is the establishment. But what - and more importantly who - made Vogue such an enduring success?

Glossy will answer this question and more by tracing the previously untold history of the magazine, from its inception as a New York gossip rag, to the sleek, corporate behemoth we know now. This will be a biography of Vogue in every sense of the word, taking the reader through three centuries, two world wars, plunging failures and blinding successes, as it charts the story of the magazine and those who ran it.

South Africa's Bomb kept the world guessing for years. Six-and-a- half nuclear bombs had been secretly built and destroyed, former South African President F.W. de Klerk announced in 1993. No other country has ever voluntarily destroyed its nuclear arsenal.

From 1975 Nic von Wielligh was involved in the production of nuclear weapons material, the dismantling of the nuclear weapons and the provision of evidence of South Africa's bona fides to the international community. The International Atomic Energy Agency declared South Africa's Initial Report to be the most comprehensive and professional that they had ever received. In this book the nuclear physicist and his daughter Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn tell the gripping story of the splitting of the atom and the power it releases. It is an account of ground-breaking research and the scientists responsible; it deals with uranium enrichment, the arms race and South Africa's secret programme.

The Bomb: South Africa's Nuclear Programme is a story of nuclear explosions, espionage, smuggling of nuclear materials and swords that became ploughshares.

The notorious city as you've never seen it before. This non-fiction title featuring original interviews gets to the heart and soul of this desert metropolis - as well as its seedy underbelly.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas - until now.

Whether you're a Vegas regular or have only heard the city's tales through whispers, this book will surprise and astound you . . . It's not just the five-star dining, or the casinos, or the clubs, or the crowds. It's the electrifying chemistry of America's most round-the-clock city.

In this dazzling 24-hour journey, James Patterson lifts the lid on America's notorious hub of gambling and excess. Fuelled by original interviews and in-depth reporting, What Really Happens in Vegas uncovers the vice, crime and entertainment that made Sin City an infamous desert mecca.

This is Vegas as you've never seen it before, filled with unbelievable stories from the people who make the city tick, simmer - and even explode.

The animals in this landmark book – elephants, hippos, okapi, lions, jackals, cows, sheep, horses, white ants, quagga, Nazi cattle, police dogs and baboons – are chosen strategically to highlight different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research are brought together in an astonishing book, one that takes animals seriously.

The possibility of our shared future pivots on a reckoning with our shared pasts. This pioneering work shows what human-animal history can do, not only to help us better understand our place in the world, but to make our world – however slightly – a better place.

Never have seven people been so hunted. By assassins. By journalists and lawyers in search of the truth and then TRC investigators wanting justice for the victims’ families.

In 1986, seven young men were shot and killed by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town. The nation was told they were a ‘terrorist’ MK cell. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial in 1987 and another inquest in 1989. Finally, the fact that Eugene de Kock’s Vlakplaas unit plotted and drove the operation was revealed at the Truth and Reconciliation ten years after the murders but Vlakplaas’s real agenda remained shrouded in mystery.

Hunting the Seven tells the story of the hunt for the truth of the Gugulethu Seven in cinematic style. It took a decade to get to the bottom of the killings.

Sifting through the evidence and original interviews with those involved, Roos-Muller reveals that it was Vlakplaas’s only operation in the Western Cape and an elaborate state-sanctioned snuff movie designed to keep the money rolling into the death squad’s slush fund.

The riveting new book on the momentous year, campaign, and election that shaped American history.

It’s January 2, 1960: the day that Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy declared his candidacy; and with this opening scene, Chris Wallace offers readers a front-row seat to history. From the challenge of primary battles in a nation that had never elected a Catholic president, to the intense machinations of the national conventions—where JFK chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate over the impassioned objections of his brother Bobby—this is a nonfiction political thriller filled with intrigue, cinematic action, and fresh reporting. Like with many popular histories, readers may be familiar with the story, but few will know the behind-the-scenes details, told here with gripping effect.

Featuring some of history’s most remarkable characters, page-turning action, and vivid details, Countdown 1960 follows a group of extraordinary politicians, civil rights leaders, Hollywood stars, labor bosses, and mobsters during a pivotal year in American history. The election of 1960 ushered in the modern era of presidential politics, with televised debates, private planes, and slick advertising. In fact, television played a massive role. More than 70 million Americans watched one or all four debates. The public turned to television to watch campaign rallies. And on the night of the election, the contest between Kennedy and Nixon was so close that Americans were glued to their televisions long after dawn to see who won.

The election of 1960 holds stunning parallels to our current political climate. There were—potentially valid—claims of voter fraud and a stolen election. There was also a presidential candidate faced with the decision of whether to contest the result or honor the peaceful transfer of power.

The book selects some past events and experiences, national and international, and wonders what lessons were missed, learnt, or are yet to be learnt from them.

Tragedies happen again and again because we fail to learn from the past. The past is rich with valuable lessons – rich pickings. The reader is taken back into the past in search of some of those lessons, many of which, regrettably, we failed – and continue failing – to learn. As we dig into the past for those rich pickings, there will be moments to laugh, cry or even weep; but that is exactly how lessons are learnt in life.

Other similar incidents learnt from, both abroad and at home, relate to the author’s own experiences in South Africa, including as a Judge who heard amnesty applications as a member of the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The book hopes to show that capacity for evil is not peculiar to any nation or race; it also discusses the dangers of tribalism.

The chapter ‘Beyond the Frontiers’ takes the reader into the rest of Africa. A lot is revealed, including divisions the author witnessed – while serving as an AU judge based in Tanzania – within the AU along the languages of, ironically, colonial masters; also referenced is the sorry state of human rights in Africa. Have we seized the opportunity to learn all the valuable lessons which that great teacher, ‘The Past’, offered?

The author leaves it to readers to make their own final judgement after reading the book as to whether, at the individual and collective levels, we have learnt those lessons and taken them to heart for the good of our individual and collective destiny.

With prose like jazz – thrilling, mysterious, playful – Oyama Mabandla excavates the values that created a steady flow of pioneering South Africans under impossible conditions.

Can these values, maligned in 1994, be recaptured and set South Africa on its best trajectory?

What happens when death becomes the ultimate marker of one’s commitment to one’s freedom? What happens when the opposite of freedom is not unfreedom but death, not slavery but mortality? How are we to think of the right to life when a political demand for dignity and honor might be more important than life itself?

Dying for Freedom explores these questions by drawing on archival evidence from South Africa to show how death and conflicting notions of sacrifice dominated the struggle for political equality in that country. This political investment in death as a marker of commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle encouraged a masculinist style of politics in which the fight for freedom was seen and understood by many activists as a struggle literally for manhood. This investment generated a notion of political sacrifice so absolute that anything less than death was rendered suspect. More importantly, it resulted in a hierarchy of death whereby some deaths were more important than others, and where some deaths could be mourned and others not.

This highly original account of the necropolitics of the liberation struggle will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to anyone interested in South Africa.

This close media study considers how, squeezed in the moral vice of past and present, Afrikaners look in a mirror that reflects only a beautiful people.

It is an image of upstanding, hard-working citizens. To hold on to that image requires blinkers, sleights of hand and contortion. Above all, it requires an inversion of the liberation narrative in which the wretched of South Africa are the historical oppressors, besieged in their language, their homes, their jobs.

They are the new `grievables', an identity that requires intricate moral manoeuvres, and elision as much of the past as of transformation.

What is it like to be born dirt-poor in South Africa? Clinton Chauke knows, having been raised alongside his two sisters in a remote village bordering the Kruger National Park and a squatter camp outside Pretoria. Clinton is a young village boy when awareness dawns of how poor his family really is: there’s no theft in the village because there’s absolutely nothing to steal. But fire destroys the family hut, and they decide to move back to the city. There he is forced to confront the rough-and-tumble of urban life as a ‘bumpkin’.

He is Venda, whereas most of his classmates speak Zulu or Tswana and he has to face their ridicule while trying to pick up two or more languages as fast as possible. With great self-awareness, Clinton negotiates the pitfalls and lifelines of a young life: crime and drugs, football, religion, friendship, school, circumcision and, ultimately, becoming a man. Throughout it all, he displays determination as well as a self-deprecating humour that will keep you turning the pages till the end.

Clinton’s story is one that will give you hope that even in a sea of poverty there are those that refuse to give up and, ultimately, succeed.

When Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance was discovered below the Antarctic ice in March 2022, 106 years after it sank, the world thrilled anew with one of the greatest survival stories of all time.

Acclaimed South African writer Darrel Bristow-Bovey has a deeply personal relationship with the story of Endurance and in this lyrical journey into past and present, into humanity and the natural world, above and below the Antarctic ice, he revisits the famous story wondering why it seems to mean more today than ever before.

Drawing on literature, natural history, personal memoir and the thrilling epics of polar adventure, this is a celebration of the human spirit. If this story tells us anything, it’s that in the face of self-inflicted natural disaster, we can still pull off a miracle or two. From the bottom of the Weddell sea, Endurance still whispers that not all is lost, and not forever.

Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi is one of South Africa’s most famous novels.

First published in 1930, it is the first full-length novel by a black South African writer, and is widely read and studied in South African schools, colleges and universities. It has been translated into a number of different languages. Written over 30 years before Chinua Achebe’s famous Things Fall Apart, Mhudi is a pioneering African novel too, anticipating many of the themes with which Achebe and other writers from the African continent were concerned.

Mhudi has had a complicated history. Critics have been divided in their views, and there was a delay of ten years between the time Plaatje wrote the book and when it was published. A century on from when it was written, the time is now right to both celebrate its composition and to assess its meanings and legacy.

In this book, a distinguished cast of contributors explore the circumstances in which Mhudi was both written and published, what the critics have made of it, why it remains so relevant today. Chapters look at the eponymous feminist heroine of the novel and what she symbolizes, the role of history and oral tradition, the contentious question of language, the linguistic and stylistic choices that Plaatje made. In keeping with Mhudi’s capacity to inspire, this book also includes a poem and short story, specially written in order to pay tribute to both the book and its author.

Bush Brothers is not about special forces or heroic, secret missions. Instead, it is an intimate look at the daily life of ordinary soldiers – and the unbreakable bonds they formed under fire.

This is the story of thousands of infantry men who were deployed in the SADF, on or across the Border.

Colourful characters and wild partying are interspersed with the life-and-death choices troops were forced to make as they sacrificed life and limb, not so much for their country, but for each other.

On October 7, Israeli territory around the Erez border of Gaza Strip was invaded by Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, killing over 1,000 people. In response to this, the people of Gaza have been subjected to nearly eight months of wholesale genocide. Over 36,000 civilians have been killed, an estimated million made homeless and displaced, tens of thousands injured, and an entire population traumatised. Never in living history has such an atrocity been perpetrated in plain sight of the world’s leaders and mainstream media, who have all managed to give it their complete backing. Images and video clips of hourly horrors and tragedies have spread around the world, combatted by fake news propagated not by dark conspiratorial corners on the web, but by corporate media outlets and politicians.

Baseless Israeli propaganda and deliberately-biased framing has been fed to journalists and repeated, without question, on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and in the mouths of TV pundits and politicians.

One of the few voices of Gaza to make it out into Western media has been that of writer Atef Abu Saif, whose edited diary entries have been occasionally serialised in The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde and elsewhere. Here, the complete, unedited diaries show the journey of a man who arrived in Gaza just a few days before October 7 as a government minister and ended the period, like most other Palestinians, living in a tent in a refugee camp.

Too much of South Africa’s history has been lost and suppressed, leaving a void for many South Africans. Sylvia Vollenhoven brings together her life and that of a long-ago ancestor, Kabbo, a respected Khoisan storyteller.

She writes of her experience as being “too black” for her coloured schoolmates, working as one of the early female journalists in the misogynistic environment of the 70s, and of the constant impact on her life of her background – including her ancestors.

Provides a comparative study of the complex governance challenges confronting city-regions in each of the BRICS countries. It traces how governance approaches emerge from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors, working in diverse contexts of political settlement and culture.

The scale and pace of urban change in the recent past has been disorienting. As individual cities evolve into complex urban agglomerations, scholars battle to find adequate vocabularies for contemporary urban processes while practitioners search for meaningful governance responses. Governing Complex City-Regions in the Twenty-first Century explores the ongoing evolution of metropolitan governance as diverse urban agents grapple with the dilemmas of collective action across multi-layered and fragmented institutions, in contexts where there are also manifold centres of influence and decision-making.

Whereas much of the existing literature is founded on the settled urban contexts of Western Europe and North America this book draws on the experiences of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The author shows that governance approaches are rarely designed but emerge, rather, from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors working within diverse contexts of political settlement and political culture. Intended for students, academics and professionals, the book does not offer packaged solutions or easy answers to the challenges of urban governance, but it does show the value of comparative study in inspiring new thought and perspectives, which could lead to improved governance practice within South African contexts.

Our Poisoned Land is Jacques Pauwʼs sequel to the bestselling The Presidentʼs Keepers. A publishing phenomenon and South Africaʼs fastest-selling book ever, The Presidentʼs Keepers fearlessly exposed former president Jacob Zumaʼs darkest secrets. Our Poisoned Land is as riveting and explosive as its predecessor.

When he took office in 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed new heads for law-enforcement agencies and formed the Investigating Directorate within the National Prosecuting Authority to bring fraudsters and looters to book. Yet, five years on, crime has spiked, most of the looters still walk free and the law-enforcement agencies are in shambles. What went wrong?

Once again, Jacques Pauw delves deep to find answers. Among his shocking findings are top police officers that had a hand in state capture still ensconced in the Hawks and police Crime Intelligence; a cabal of state-capture prosecutors within the NPA; a police minister cavorting with a convicted drug smuggler; and South Africa’s “own Guptas” living in the lap of luxury after the case against them “disappeared”.

In his compelling narrative style, Pauw picks up where he left off in The Presidentʼs Keepers to expose the shadows, deceit and debauchery of Zumaʼs cronies.