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Books > Humanities > History
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.
Nomavenda Mathiane stumbled upon her grandmother’s story well over a century after the gruelling events of the Battle of Isandlwana that formed her life. Astounded to hear how her grandmother had survived the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War between the British and Zulu nations as a young girl, Mathiane spent hours with her elder sisters reconstructing the extraordinary life of their grandmother. The result is a sweeping epic of both personal and political battles. Eyes In The Night is a young Zulu woman’s story of drama, regret, guilt and, ultimately, triumph – set against the backdrop of a Zululand changed beyond recognition. A true story almost lost, but for a chance remark at a family gathering.
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.
National Book Club Conference ‘Book of the Year’ Award Winner! From her more than three hundred appearances for film and television, stage and cabaret, performing comedy or drama, as an unforgettable lead or a scene stealing supporting character, Jenifer Lewis has established herself as one of the most respected, admired, talented, and versatile entertainers working today. This “Mega Diva” and costar of the hit sitcom black-ish bares her soul in this touching and poignant—and at times side-splittingly hilarious—memoir of a Midwestern girl with a dream, whose journey took her from poverty to the big screen, and along the way earned her many accolades. With candor and warmth, Jenifer Lewis reveals the heart of a woman who lives life to the fullest. This multitalented “force of nature” landed her first Broadway role within eleven days of her graduation from college and later earned the title “Reigning Queen of High-Camp Cabaret.” In the audaciously honest voice that her fans adore, Jenifer describes her transition to Hollywood, with guest roles on hits like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Friends. Her movie Jackie’s Back! became a cult favorite, and as the “Mama” to characters portrayed by Whitney Houston, Tupac Shakur, Taraji P. Henson, and many more, Jenifer cemented her status as the “Mother of Black Hollywood.” When an undiagnosed mental illness stymies Jenifer’s career, culminating in a breakdown while filming The Temptations, her quest for wholeness becomes a harrowing and inspiring tale, including revelations of bipolar disorder and sex addiction. Written with no-holds-barred honesty and illustrated with more than forty color photographs, this gripping memoir is filled with insights gained through a unique life that offers a universal message: “Love yourself so that love will not be a stranger when it comes.”
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.
Ingrid Jonker, begaafde jong digter, loop op 19 Julie 1965 die see in by Drieankerbaai en verdrink. Sy laat haar familie en vriende agter met meer vrae as antwoorde. Gedurende die afgelope 50 jaar het sy ’n ikoon van die Afrikaanse en Suid- Afrikaanse letterkunde geword. In so ’n mate, dat haar lewe en veral haar dood soms haar werk en die belangrike bydrae wat sy tot die literêre beweging van die Sestigers gemaak het, oorskadu. Haar politieke sieninge, soos uitgedruk in haar poësie en haar passie en die droefheid van haar onstuimige liefdesverhoudings met onder andere Jack Cope en André P. Brink het al tot baie besprekings gelei. Sy het weer onder die publieke oog gekom toe oudpresident Nelson Mandela in sy inhuldigingsrede in 1994 in die Parlement een van haar gedigte aangehaal het. Hy het haar gedig: “Die Kind” voorgelees en gesê: “Sy was beide ’n digter en ’n Suid-Afrikaner.” Sedert haar dood is daar vele bespiegelings oor haar lewe en tragiese einde. Van dié vrae word beantwoord in hierdie eerste omvattende biografie. Petrovna Metelerkamp doen al jare navorsing oor Jonker. Sy neem die leser saam deur Ingrid se grootwordjare, digterslewe, liefdesverhoudings en die laaste paar jaar van haar lewe. Metelerkamp bring nuwe inligting aan die lig wat sy neem uit onbekende nuwe briewe en dagboekinskrywings, o.m. uit die dagboeke van Jack Cope. Talle nuwe onderhoude met mense wat Jonker geken het, word in die biografie opgeneem. Sy weerlê ook die beeld van Jonker as ’n ongebalanseerde kunstenaar wat haar houvas op die werklikheid verloor het in hierdie toeganklike biografie oor een van Suid-Afrika se aangrypendste kunstenaars.
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?
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Becoming by Michelle Obama. In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America - the first African-American to serve in that role - she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations - and whose story inspires us to do the same.
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.
On a freezing winter’s night, a few hours before dawn on 12 May 1969, security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Mandela and detained her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged eight and ten. Rounded up in a group of other anti-apartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away. This was the start for Winnie Mandela of a 491-day period of detention and two trials. Forty-one years after her release on 14 September 1970, Greta Soggot, the widow of David Soggot, one of Winnie Mandela’s advocates during the 1969/1970 trials, handed her a stack of papers that included a journal and notes that she had written in detention. 491 Days: Prisoner number 1323/69 shares with the world Winnie Mandela’s moving and compelling journal as well as some of the letters written between affected parties at the time. Readers gain insight into the brutality she experienced, her depths of despair as well as her resilience and defiance under extreme pressure. This book was co-edited by Swati Dlamini and Sahm Venter with the support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human in the perfect read for these unprecedented times. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us. In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going. ‘I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species’ Bill Gates ‘Interesting and provocative… It gives you a sense of how briefly we’ve been on this Earth’ Barack Obama
Can racism and intimacy co-exist? Can love and friendship form and flourish across South Africa’s imposed colour lines? Who better to engage on the subject of hazardous liaisons than the students with whom Jonathan Jansen served over seven years as Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State. The context is the University campus in Bloemfontein, the City of Roses, the Mississippi of South Africa. Rural, agricultural, insular, religious and conservative, this is not a place for breaking out. But over the years, Jansen observed shifts in campus life and noticed more and more openly interracial friendships and couples, and he began having conversations with these students with burning questions in mind. Ten interracial couples tell their stories of love and friendship in their own words, with no social theories imposed on their meanings, but instead a focus on how these students experience the world of interracial relationships, and how flawed, outdated laws and customs set limits on human relationships, and the long shadow they cast on learning, living and loving on university campuses to this day.
Over the last decades, we have seen more than three dozen new infectious diseases appear, some of which could kill millions of people with one or two unlucky gene mutations or one or two unfavourable environmental changes. The risks of pandemics only increase as the human population grows; therefore to direct our future we should examine our past. Howard Phillips provides the first look into the history of epidemics in South Africa, probing lethal episodes which significantly shaped this society over three centuries. Focusing on devastating diseases such as smallpox, bubonic plague, Spanish influenza, polio and HIV/Aids, Plague, Pox and Pandemics probes their origin, their catastrophic course and their consequences in both the short and long term. Their impact ranges from the demographic to the political, the social, the economic, the spiritual, the psychological and the cultural. As each of these epidemics occurred at crucial moments in the country's history - early in European colonisation, in the midst of the mineral revolution, during the South African War and World War I, as industrialisation was getting under way, and within the eras of apartheid and post-apartheid - the book also examines how these processes affected and were affected by the five epidemics, thereby adding important dimensions to an understanding of each. To those who read this book, South African history will not look the same again.
For seventy years, Queen Elizabeth has ruled over an institution and a family. She has been constant in her desire to provide a steady presence and to be a trustworthy steward of the British people and the Commonwealth. In the face of her uncle's abdication, in the uncertainty of the Blitz, and in the tentative exposure of her family and private life to the public via the press, Elizabeth has become synonymous with the crown. But times change. Recent years have brought grief and turmoil to the House of Windsor, and even as England prepares to celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, there are calls for a changing of the guard. In The New Royals, journalist Katie Nicholl provides a nuanced look at Elizabeth's remarkable and unrivalled reign, with new stories from Palace courtiers and aides, documentarians, and family members. She examines Charles and Camilla's decades in waiting and beyond-where "The Firm" is headed as William and Kate present the modern faces of an ancient institution. In the wake of Harry and Meghan leaving the Royal Family and Andrew's spectacular fall from grace, the royal family must reckon with its history, the light and the dark, in order to chart a course for Britain beyond its Queen and to show that it is an institution capable of leadership in an ever changing modern world. |
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