A companion volume to the highly successful Field Guide to the Battlefields of South Africa, this features the pivotal sieges that characterised the Cape Frontier, Anglo-Zulu, Basotho and Anglo-Boer wars in one volume.

Accounts of 17 sieges over the last two centuries explore in detail the historical context in which they occurred, the day-to-day military actions that sustained the investments and the conditions both soldiers and civilians faced while defending their territory against a hostile force. The siege descriptions are animated by maps and a variety of information boxes and human-interest stories, gleaned from diaries, letters and eye-witness accounts, while longer features focus on the practical aspects of siege warfare, such as artillery, medicine, food, and the psychological effects of besiegement. The book also provides practical information for visitors who wish to explore these historical sites.

A fascinating read that will appeal to anyone interested in the volatile history of the country – armchair historians and travellers alike.

In 1993 South Africa state president F.W. de Klerk and African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ‘for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime’. Yet, while both deserved the plaudits they received for entering the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid, the four years of negotiations preceding the April 1994 elections, known as the transition era, were not ‘peaceful’: they were the bloodiest of the entire apartheid era, with an estimated 14,000 deaths attributed to politically related violence.

This book studies, for the first time, the conflicts between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party that took place in South Africa’s industrial heartland surrounding Johannesburg. Exploring these events through the perceptions and memories of combatants and non-combatants from war-torn areas, along with security force members, politicians and violence monitors, offers new possibilities for understanding South Africa’s turbulent transition.

Challenging the prevailing narrative which attributes the bulk of the violence to a joint state security force and IFP assault against ANC supporters, the author argues for a more expansive approach that incorporates the aggression of ANC militants, the intersection between criminal and political violence, and especially clashes between groups aligned with the ANC.

With its impressive tradition of left politics, South Africa was the hope of the world. At the heart of post-apartheid politics was a revolutionary nationalist ANC, the oldest Communist Party in Africa, the SACP, and one of the most militant labour union federations in the world, COSATU. Yet South Africa’s democracy-making project has gone horribly wrong.

This has been happening over three decades through deep globalisation and inordinate power given to business to prevail over everything. A criminalised market democracy, predicated on an unviable society of deepening inequality, climate disasters and eroding state capacity, is now moving further to the extreme right. These conjuncturally situated writings highlight the pushback against the neoliberal turn, Zumafication, emergent neofascism, the fraud of the National Democratic Revolution and the normalisation of the dangerous climate contradiction. This collection contributes to explaining the degeneration of national liberation politics and the polycrisis of post-apartheid democracy.

Globally and within South Africa, old left politics (revolutionary nationalist, Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist and social democratic) has failed. The world historical defeats of Soviet socialism, social democracy and revolutionary nationalism also became South African leftism defeats. These writings, grounded in a consistent transformative intellectual praxis and against the grain of defeat, affirm the necessity of left renewal. Its praxis-centred arguments document 27 years of working with grassroots forces and the global left to reconstruct the left imaginary beyond the traditional left binary of reform versus revolution.

The experimental epistemology at work in these writings provides critical decolonial resources for a new transformative leftism politics, informed by an ethics of care, while pointing to new horizons for further elaboration.

A landmark account of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, based on award-winning research, and recently discovered archival material.

In the 1930s, Germany was at a turning point, with many looking to the Nazi phenomenon as part of widespread resentment towards cosmopolitan liberal democracy and capitalism. This was a global situation that pushed Germany to embrace authoritarianism, nationalism and economic self-sufficiency, kick-starting a revolution founded on new media technologies, and the formidable political and self-promotional skills of its leader.

Based on award-winning research and recently discovered archival material, The Death Of Democracy is a panoramic new survey of one of the most important periods in modern history, and a book with a resounding message for the world today.

An asteroid the size of Table Mountain crashed into what was to become South Africa over 2 billion years ago, marking the spot. The country’s history since then has always been robust and full of energy. This book takes you in record time from that moment, when the earth’s richest gold reefs were shaped, to the advent of democracy in 1994, another event that stunned the world, and beyond. Along the way you will encounter some of the most ancient dinosaurs on record, the very first people on the planet, and the first cultures. You will see outsiders moving in to reshape history: hunters and gatherers, cultivators and herders, iron-workers from the north, and immigrants from Europe and Asia. They fought and made peace; they stumbled upon gold and diamonds; they rose to the heights of excellence and sank to the depths of oppression, until on one day they all queued as equals to elect a government. That is the story marked by dinosaurs, diamonds and democracy.

The re-emergence of debates on the decolonisation of knowledge has revived interest in the National Question, which began over a century ago and remains unresolved. Tensions that were suppressed and hidden in the past are now being openly debated. Despite this, the goal of one united nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy remains elusive. This edited volume examines the way in which various strands of left thought have addressed the National Question, especially during the apartheid years, and goes on to discuss its relevance for South Africa today and in the future.

Instead of imposing a particular understanding of the National Question, the editors identified a number of political traditions and allowed contributors the freedom to define the question as they believed appropriate - in other words, to explain what they thought was the Unresolved National Question. This has resulted in a rich tapestry of interweaving perceptions.

The volume is structured in two parts. The first examines four foundational traditions - Marxism-Leninism (the Colonialism of a Special Type thesis); the Congress tradition; the Trotskyist tradition; and Africanism. The second part explores the various shifts in the debate from the 1960s onwards, and includes chapters on Afrikaner nationalism, ethnic issues, Black Consciousness, feminism, workerism and constitutionalism. The editors hope that by revisiting the debates not popularly known among the scholarly mainstream, this volume will become a catalyst for an enriched debate on our identity and our future.

On the night of 30 October 2002, eight bomb blasts tore through Soweto, leaving one woman dead and damaging vital infrastructure. The bombs were the work of a far-right white Afrikaner separatist group called the Boeremag, whose stated aim was to overthrow the ruling ANC government, rid the country of black people and reinstate a new Boer-administered republic. For months before the bombings, police had been investigating the terror group and had made several arrests. In December, after an intense cross-country manhunt, the perpetrators were finally caught. All in all, 23 men were arrested and charged with high treason after the police seized explosives, homemade pipe bombs, weapons and ammunition in arms caches hidden all over the country.

The trial began in May 2003 under tight security at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria. Over the next decade, in what became the longest and most expensive trial in the country’s history, details would emerge of a group driven by nationalism, racism, militancy and fear. The public would hear how a fanatical belief in the visions of a 19th-century Boer prophet named Siener van Rensburg culminated in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to assassinate former president Nelson Mandela and initiate a coup.

The High Treason Club is the story of the Boeremag, the investigation that brought them down and the subsequent trial, the first of its kind in democratic South Africa. Based on exclusive interviews, as well as thousands of pages of court transcripts and documentary evidence, this book elegantly unpacks a complex case and gives unprecedented insight into the various role-players and their motivations.

Die afgelope halfeeu het meer as 15 000 uitgawes van Beeld verskyn met derduisende stories in woord en beeld. Regdeur hierdie 50 jaar is ’n mantra in die redaksie: “Slaan die groot storie hard.” In Beeld 50 vertel dié geliefde koerant se joernaliste hoe hulle juis dit gedoen het deur die dekades en wat hulle steeds bybly van daardie ervaring. Die boek neem die leser op ’n reis deur van die grootste nuusgebeure sedert 1974 en weerspieël die geskakeerde leefwêreld van die Afrikaanse gemeenskap in die noorde van die land.

Beeld is die Suid-Afrikaanse dagblad wat al die meeste as die mooiste aangewys is, daarvan getuig die foto’s, voorblaaie, spotprente en grafika op dié blaaie. Tog is dit nie ’n beste-voetjie-voorsit-soort boek nie, want dis in die eerste plek joernaliste wie se stemme jy hier hoor. Op die ou end is die belangrikste element die leser.

Soos Pieter du Toit in 2014 as nuusredakteur gesê het: “Ons lojaliteit lê by die briefskrywer wat ons kapittel oor ’n onbesonne hoofberig, die intekenaar wat kla oor sy nat koerant op die grasperk en die leser wat dankie sê vir die nuwe Saterdag-Beeld.”

Bones and Bodies is a highly accessible account of the establishment of the scientific discipline of biological anthropology. Alan G Morris takes us back over the past century of anthropological discovery in South Africa and uncovers the stories of individual scientists and researchers who played a significant role in shaping perceptions of how peoples of southern Africa, both ancient and modern, came to be viewed and categorised both in the public imagination and the scientific literature.

Morris reveals how much of the earlier anthropological studies were tainted with the tarred brush of race science. He evaluates the works of famous anthropologists and archaeologists such as Raymond Dart, Thomas Dreyer, Matthew Drennan and Robert Broom, and demonstrates through a wide array of sources how they described their fossil discoveries through the prism of racist interpretation. Morris also shows how modern anthropology tried to rid itself of the stigma of these early racist accounts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald Singer and Phillip Tobias introduced modern methods into the discipline that disputed much of what the public believed about race and human evolution.

In an age in which the authority of experts and empirical science is increasingly being questioned, this book shows the battle facing modern anthropology to acknowledge its racial past but also how its study of human variation remains an important field of enquiry at institutions of higher learning.

Eight-year-old Teko Modise didn’t mean to compete with his father, it was just that he was a soccer natural and everyone could see it. His father, in a fit of childlike jealously, kicked him out of the house, and when Teko tried to come back he kicked him out again. So little Teko made a plan. Every day he attended school as normal, and at night he slept out on the streets with other homeless children. This book is the true story of his rise to fame, to becoming ‘the General’, one of the best footballers South Africa has produced, and will allow readers to understand the story behind ‘the Curse’.

At the peak of his career the world seemed filled with Teko. His face was on every major billboard, TV advert and magazine cover in the country. Little boys from suburbs to townships everywhere were lining up at barbershops asking for The Teko haircut. With a house in Sandton and driving an Aston Martin, Modise was about to make history in the upcoming Soccer World Cup of 2010. He had gone beyond being football royalty, he became a super star. The tabloids have called him an abusive lover, a cheating ex-husband, a neglectful father and an alcoholic egotistical footballer. But beyond these headlines is a story about a boy who played his way out of poverty on talent alone.

Be inspired by this story of a young man with a resilient spirit who kept moving forward chasing his dreams, who not only survived, but made it, and made it big. The Teko Modise story is proof that anything is possible.

The remarkable, and often touching, friendship between Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts is a rich study in contrasts.

In youth they occupied very different worlds: Churchill, the rambunctious and thrusting young aristocrat; Smuts, the ascetic, philosophical Cape farm boy who would go on to Cambridge. Brought together first as enemies in the Anglo-Boer War, and later as allies in the First World War, the men forged a friendship which spanned the first half of the twentieth century and endured until Smuts’s death in 1950. Richard Steyn, author of Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, examines this close friendship through two world wars and the intervening years, drawing on a maze of archival and secondary sources including letters, telegrams and the voluminous books written about both men.

This is a fascinating account of two remarkable men in war and peace: one the leader of the Empire, the other the leader of a small fractious member of that Empire who nevertheless rose to global prominence.

For most people, their 60s is a time to slow down and smell the roses. Not for Alvin and Jean Witten, however. Instead, they went to Mozambique to search for churches.

In relentless heat, by car and by motorbike, on foot, and bicycle, they delved into every corner of this vast country, negotiating swollen rivers and broken bridges, roads that could hardly be called roads, hair-raising overnight accommodations, meals that were hard to stomach, bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence, in order to hunt down and officially count the 1 300+ congregations known to exist there.

For five years they gave up their closeness to family, friends and creature comforts in pursuit of this mission, experiencing joy and pain, learning things about themselves along the way, and forging lifelong bonds.

Op 3 Oktober 1987 het Charlie-eskadron – die ystervuis van 61 Gemeganiseerde Bataljongroep – die kritieke geveg tussen die Suid-Afrikaanse Weermag en die Angolese magte op die Lombarivier in die suide van Angola gelei. Dié boek plaas die leser in die midde van die jong dienspligtiges wat na die Grensoorlog weggevoer is om hierdie geveg te gaan voer.

Langs die Lomba het hulle te staan gekom teen ’n Angolese mag met ’n getalsoorwig en beter wapentuig. Boonop was die terrein so dig bebos dat hul sig en beweging aansienlik ingeperk is. Die SAW se taktiese doktrine het duidelik gestel dat tenks teen tenks aangewend moes word. Tog moes die dienspligtiges die Angolese tenks aanvat in pantservoertuie met minder kragtige kanonne en dun pantser wat nie veel meer as gewone geweervuur kon afweer nie. Steeds is 47 Brigade van die Angolese magte amper uitgewis tydens die geveg aan die Lomba.

Scholtz se beskrywing van hierdie David-teen-Goliath-geveg neem die leser na die hart van die aksie. Danksy onderhoude met veterane en dagboekinskrywings dra hierdie eerlike, intense hervertelling die volle drama van die geveg oor. Dit is ook ’n diep menslike verhaal oor hoe individue reageer in die aangesig van die dood en hoe die oorlog hulle nooit uit sy kloue gelaat het nie, selfs nadat hulle teruggekeer het.

Anger, hurt, loss, rejection … these feelings are familiar to the families who, in the early 1970s, were forced from their homes in Harfield Village in Cape Town’s southern suburbs. Siona O’Connell brings their stories to light. She examines the lost ways of life, the sense of home and belonging.

David Brown’s images show what life was like in Harfield before the removals, and his images are echoed by recent photos of the same former residents.

At the opening of South Africa's first democratic parliament in 1994, newly elected president Nelson Mandela issued a clarion call to an unlikely group: white Afrikaans women, who during apartheid occupied the ambivalent position of being both oppressor and oppressed. He conjured the memory of poet Ingrid Jonker as `both an Afrikaner and an African' who `instructs that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child'. More than two decades later, the question is: how have white Afrikaans-speaking women responded to the liberating possibilities of constitutional democracy?

With Afrikaner nationalism in disrepair, and official apartheid in demise, have they re-imagined themselves in opposition to colonial ideas of race, gender, sexuality and class?

Sitting Pretty explores this postapartheid identity through the concepts of ordentlikheid, as an ethnic form of respectability, and the volksmoeder, or mother of the nation, as enduring icon. Issues of intersectionality, space, emotion and masculinity are also investigated.

An outrageous miscellany of lies, myths, untruths, fibs and fabrications that tell the woeful history of South Africa. Aimed at offending and entertaining everyone in equal measure, this will have South Africans sniggering and spluttering into their cornflakes. It will also pique their curiosity.

The lies come thick and fast, like a burst sewerage pipe. Way, way back the Europeans ‘discovered’ southern Africa and found a land that was largely uninhabited. Um, no. On the other hand, Africa was a paradise before the settlers pulled in. Not quite!

Back in the darkest of ages (the 1970s), citizens were told that there were Satanic messages if you played Beatles songs backwards. During the civil war in Angola, there were no South African troops in that country. National icon Hansie Cronje was a paragon of virtue and integrity … until he wasn’t. President Nelson Mandela told us that we, as a nation, were ‘special’.

Turns out we aren’t.

Tales of Two Countries is Ray Dearlove’s third book. He takes the reader through his childhood in apartheid-era South Africa and the turbulent years before Nelson Mandela assumed the presidency in 1994.

Living in Australia for more than thirty years brought its own share of interesting people, events and opportunities. There are many stories about the raw challenges of moving countries. It has some very moving and some very humorous moments, all told in Ray’s discerning and direct style.

Forewords by Tony Park, Jean-Claude van Damme and Andrian Gardner.

It is September 1987. The Angolan Army – with the support of Cuban troops and Soviet advisors – has built up a massive force on the Lomba River near Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola. Their goal? To capture Jamba, the headquarters of the rebel group Unita, supported by the South African Defence Force (SADF) in the so-called Border War.

In the battles that followed, and shortly thereafter centred around the small town of Cuito Cuanavale, 3 000 SADF soldiers and 8 000 Unita fighters were up against a much bigger Angolan and Cuban force of over 50 000 men.

Thousands of soldiers died in the vicious fighting that is described in vivid detail in this book. Bridgland pieced together this account through scores of interviews with SADF men who were on the front line. This dramatic retelling takes the reader to the heart of the action.

Without much fanfare Ahmed Kathrada worked alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other giants in the struggle to end racial discrimination in South Africa. He faced house arrest and many court trials related to his activism until, finally, a trial for sabotage saw him sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Mandela and six others.

Conversations with a Gentle Soul has its origins in a series of discussions between Kathrada and Sahm Venter about his opinions, encounters and experiences. Throughout his life, Kathrada has refused to hang on to negative emotions such as hatred and bitterness. Instead, he radiates contentment and the openness of a man at peace with himself. His wisdom is packaged within layers of optimism, mischievousness and humour, and he provides insights that are of value to all South Africans.

When John Kgoana Nkadimeng travelled from Sekhukhuneland to the Witwatersrand in 1944, he was one of thousands of migrants seeking work in town. But his encounters with racial injustice and contact with activists drew him down a very different path, one which was dedicated to the struggle.

Mokgomana tells the story of Nkadimeng, from his origins in the rural village of Manganeng, in an area with a long history of resistance to colonial rule, through his growing involvement in trade unions, the Communist Party and the ANC. He spearheaded rural opposition to Bantu Authorities, helped take new MK recruits out of the country, and played a crucial role in re-establishing the ANC underground after the state smashed resistance networks. In 1976 he fled South Africa for the perilous terrain of building MK organisations in Swaziland and Mozambique. In 1982 he settled in Lusaka and played a pivotal part in the leadership of the ANC, Communist Party and SACTU during that decisive decade.

Mokgomana represents a new focus on an under-acknowledged leader and offers fresh perspectives on over four decades of struggle history. It is also the story of the family which supported him, enduring harassment and separation, and their own splintered trajectories through exile and homecoming.

In 1977, RW Johnson’s best-selling How Long Will South Africa Survive? provided a controversial and highly original analysis of the survival prospects of apartheid. Now, after more than twenty years of ANC rule, he believes the situation has become so critical that the question must be posed again.

‘The big question about ANC rule’, he writes, ‘is whether African nationalism would be able to cope with the challenges of running a modern industrial economy. Twenty years of ANC rule have shown conclusively that the party is hopelessly ill-equipped for this task. Indeed, everything suggests that South Africa under the ANC is fast slipping backward and that even the survival of South Africa as a unitary state cannot be taken for granted. The fundamental reason why the question of regime change has to be posed is that it is now clear that South Africa can either choose to have an ANC government or it can have a modern industrial economy. It cannot have both.’

Johnson’s analysis is strikingly original and cogently argued. He has for several decades now been the senior international commentator on South African affairs, known for his lucid analysis and complete lack of deference towards the conventional wisdom.

At once intimate and analytical, Mandla J. Radebe has written a powerful and information-packed biography of one of the signal leaders of the 16 June 1976 generation.

The Lost Prince of the ANC is the first comprehensive enquiry into Mzala’s story, tracing his life from birth to his untimely death in 1991, at the age of 35, just after his return to South Africa. Radebe’s richly researched biography, is the story too, of the radical tradition of the liberation movement, which flourished during its underground days.

This revelatory biography of a critical thinker who had much to offer the post-apartheid South Africa, does more than fill a gap in our history: its insights open a door for the reader to imagine politics and society anew.

With the flair for narrative and the meticulous research that readers have come to expect, in The Diamond Queen Andrew Marr turns his attention to the monarch, chronicling the Queen’s pivotal role at the centre of the state, which is largely hidden from the public gaze, and making a strong case for the institution itself.

Arranged thematically, rather than chronologically, Marr dissects the Queen’s political relationships, crucially those with her Prime Ministers; he examines her role as Head of the Commonwealth, and her deep commitment to that Commonwealth of nations; he looks at the drastic changes in the media since her accession in 1952 and how the monarchy has had to change and adapt as a result. Under her watchful eye, it has been thoroughly modernized but what does the future hold for the House of Windsor?

This edition, fully revised and updated, features a new introduction and a new chapter that sets out to answer that crucial question. In it, Marr covers the Queen’s reign from the Diamond Jubilee to the run-up to the Platinum Jubilee in 2022, taking in the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles’s plans for the future of the monarchy and examines what Elizabeth II’s lasting legacy might be.

It was in 1972 when the seemingly ordinary Craig Williamson registered at Wits University and joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Williamson was elected NUSAS’s vice president and in January 1977, when his career in student politics came to an abrupt end, he fled the country and from Europe continued his anti-apartheid ‘work’. But Williamson was not the activist his friends and comrades thought he was. In January 1980, Captain Williamson was unmasked as a South African spy.

Williamson returned to South Africa and during the turbulent 1980s worked for the foreign section of the South African Police’s notorious Security Branch and South Africa’s ‘super-spy’ transformed into a parcel-bomb assassin.

Through a series of interviews with the many people Williamson interacted with while he was undercover and after his secret identity was eventually exposed, Jonathan Ancer details Williamson’s double life, the stories of a generation of courageous activists, and the book eventually culminates with Ancer interviewing South Africa’s ‘super-spy’ face-to-face. It deals with crucial issues of justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, betrayal and the consequences of apartheid that South Africans are still grappling with.

John Kane-Berman is uniquely qualified to look back over the enormous political and social changes that have taken place in his lifetime in this fractious country. In his career as student leader, Rhodes Scholar, newspaperman, independent columnist, speech maker, commentator, and Chief Executive, for thirty years, of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Kane-Berman has been at the coal face of political change in South Africa.

The breadth and depth of ideas and events covered here are striking: the disintegration of apartheid, the chaos of the ‘people’s war’ and its contribution to the broader societal breakdown we see today, the liberal slide-away, the authoritarian ANC with its racial ideology and revolutionary goals, to mention only a few. Kane-Berman’s willingness to confront received wisdom is thoroughly refreshing, and he is forthright about the threats to freedom, democracy, and growth in contemporary South Africa, many of which he identified even before the ANC came to power.

Writing, debate, and reasoned argument have been Kane-Berman’s stock in trade and his clarity of vision and personal insight have created a memoir of rare candour and absorbing interest.