Crafted in his signature flair-for-detail and humorous writing style, veteran sports journalist Liam Del Carme takes rugby fans and Springbok supporters on the ride of a lifetime in this behind-the-scenes account, Winging It: On tour with the Boks. With more than 25 years’ experience as an insightful sports writer, Del Carme has travelled to six of the seven continents as part of the press corps who follow and write about the national rugby team in all its iterations at international level. His anecdotes will have you wide-eyed with wonderment and chuckling appreciatively at his talent for telling a funny story.

Winging It: On Tour With The Boks is an insider’s view of life on tour from one of South Africa’s most enduring sports writers, Liam Del Carme, while he follows the much-cherished national rugby team, the Springboks.

Del Carme takes the reader across continents and time zones as he shares the helter-skelter atmosphere of meeting looming writing deadlines while finding ways to maintain his sanity. The book explores the ebb and flow of touring with one of rugby’s iconic teams since 1996, including three Rugby World Cups, various Tri-Nations and Rugby Championships, as well as end-of-year tours, in destinations all over the world. He explores the characters, destinations and his travel companions while sharing his highs and lows of covering great rugby moments.

In the book, the reader gets to see the personal side of prominent sports personalities, including Nick Mallett, Harry Viljoen, Gcobani Bobo, Jake White, Eddie Jones, Joost van der Westhuizen, Clive Woodward, Peter de Villiers, Graham Henry, Jean de Villiers, Naas Botha, John Hart, Owen Nkumane, Chester Williams, Allister Coetzee, Heyneke Meyer, Rudolf Straeuli, Os du Randt and Dick Muir.

Poetic Inquiry for the Social and Human Sciences: Voices from the South and North enriches human and social science research by introducing new voices, insights, and epistemologies.

Poetic inquiry, or poetry as research, is a literary and performance arts-based approach. It combines the arts and humanities with scientific inquiry to enhance social research. By challenging conventional epistemological traditions that assert a detached stance of the known from the knower, poetic inquiry proposes a method of decolonising knowledge production. This book expands on ground-breaking work done in the Global North on transdisciplinary poetic inquiry scholarship by bringing it into conversation with knowledge from the Global South. It allows for South-North leadership and places unique scholarly contributions from the South at the centre of transnational discussions.

In exploring and advancing poetic inquiry in the Global South, part of the book’s decolonising agenda is to challenge and expand the definition of poetic inquiry and recognise the contributions from diverse traditions and social practices. The peer-reviewed chapters are written by new and established scholars in various knowledge fields worldwide. The chapters’ scholarly contributions are complemented by an original poetry sequence interwoven through the book. Critically, Voices and Silences shows how poetry can engender innovative research that addresses pressing social justice issues, such as inclusion and decolonisation.

Poetic Inquiry will interest researchers and academics who seek to advance social research by adopting new epistemologies and approaches that integrate the value of the Global South’s contributions and foster expanded South-North collaborations.

Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist's Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics and climate change must be faced.

From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before.

In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities. Globalization and technological change have concentrated wealth into a small number of booming metropolises, leaving many smaller cities and towns behind and feeding populist resentment. Yet even within seemingly thriving cities like London or San Francisco, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen and our retreat into online worlds tears away at our social fabric. Meanwhile, pandemics and climate change pose existential threats to our increasingly urban world.

Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin combine the lessons of history with a deep understanding of the challenges confronting our world today to show why cities are at a crossroads – and hold our destinies in the balance.

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation.

Max Hastings’s graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. Max Hastings deploys his accustomed blend of eye-witness interviews, archive documents and diaries, White House tape recordings, top-down analysis, first to paint word-portraits of the Cold War experiences of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev’s Russia and Kennedy’s America; then to describe the nail-biting Thirteen Days in which Armageddon beckoned.

Hastings began researching this book believing that he was exploring a past event from twentieth century history. He is as shocked as are millions of us around the world, to discover that the current attack of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first century immediacy. We may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers.

To contend with today’s threat, which Hastings fears will prove enduring, it is critical to understand how, sixty years ago, the world survived its last glimpse into the abyss. Only by fearing the worst, he argues, can our leaders hope to secure the survival of the planet.

There are two major types of battlefield terrain in South Africa: first the open plains and savannah lands of the Highveld, a land where cavalry rules supreme. The second type is the thornbush of the Eastern Cape, a setting more suited to skirmishing rather than set-piece battles. Then, in KwaZulu-Natal, the two terrains merge to create the country s most dramatic battlefield landscape and one of the largest military graveyards in the world where the fates of colonies, republics and kingdoms were decided.For more than two centuries, from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, conflict, in one form or another, swept across this countryside; its combatants as diverse, hardy and tenacious as the land and its resources that almost always was at the root of hostilities.In this groundbreaking book, author and specialist battlefields guide, Nicki von der Heyde, presents over 70 battles and skirmishes covering five wars that shaped the course of South African history from the Frontier Wars that started in 1779 to the Second-Anglo Boer War of 1899 1902, a bitter and costly confrontation triggered by the discovery of the world s richest gold fields on the Witwatersrand.Detailed accounts of the engagements, based on extensive research, are provided, with special attention given to the terrain, key phases and outcomes, and the combatants involved. Battle timelines succinctly set out the passage of each campaign, while international timelines catalogue concurrent events around the world.More than 400 original documentary and contemporary photographs and over 60 short features have been assembled to provide a rich, enthralling and haunting account of these momentous events. Detailed historical maps that include annotations have been created for 16 high-profile engagements, while 10 regional maps indicate the locations of the battle sites. Arranged in regional order, with concise directions to each battle site and GPS coordinates for main locations, the "Field Guide to South Africa s Battlefields" is not only indispensable for professional and amateur military historians, but is of great interest to general readers, too if only as a reminder of the devastating human cost of war and the value of exploring the past to make sense of the present.It is beautifully illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs and detailed battle and regional maps."

Drawing from several hundred first-person accounts, most of which are unpublished, Spear reshapes our understanding of Mandela by focusing on this intense but relatively neglected period of escalation in the movement against apartheid.

Landau’s book is not a biography, nor is it a history of a militia or an army; rather, it is a riveting story about ordinary civilians debating and acting together in extremis.

Contextualizing Mandela and MK’s activities amid anti-colonial change and Black Marxism in the early 1960s, Spear also speaks to today’s transnational anti-racism protests and worldwide struggles against oppression.

This detailed Handbook to the Iron Age covers the last 2,000 years in Southern Africa.

The first part of the book outlines essential topics such as settlement organization, stonewalled patterns, ritual residues, long-distance trade, and ancient mining. Part two presents a comprehensive culture-history sequence through ceramic analyses, showing distributions, stylistic types, and characteristic pieces. The final section reviews and updates the main debates about black prehistory, including migration vs. diffusion, the role of cattle, the origins of Mapungubwe, the rise and fall of Great Zimbabwe, as well as the archaeology of the Venda, the Sotho-Tswana, and the Nguni speakers.

Handbook to the Iron Age is an abundantly illustrated study that is accessible to a wide range of people interested in African prehistory.

Journalist Lesley Mofokeng investigates the life of his remarkable grandfather, Mongangane Wilfred Mofokeng, a prominent Dutch Reformed Church evangelist, who built a thriving community out of the dust of the far Northwest.

The journey takes him from Joburg’s Marabi-soaked townships of the 1930s to his childhood home of Gelukspan near Lichtenburg and then to the rural Free State and the remote mountain kingdom of Lesotho. In what becomes a spiritual quest, he traces the inspirational footsteps of his ancestors and the legendary King Moshoeshoe.

In the process, Mofokeng proudly claims his heritage and also uncovers a long-lost chapter of South African history and the church of the apartheid regime.

‘Miskien issit omdat poverty my define en nie die racial politics vannie land ie.’

Wit issie ’n colour nie is ’n versameling verhale oor grootword en die lewe in die buitewyke van die Kaapse Vlakte. Dit dek identiteit, rassepolitiek, sosio- ekonomiese kwessies en bruin kultuur, en bevraagteken die Suid-Afrika waarin ons ons bevind. Dit is gevul met galgehumor, rou eerlikheid en hartverskeurende vertellings van pogings om die lewe op die Vlakte te navigeer. Hierdie versameling is diep persoonlik en ’n ontstellend waar weergawe van die lewe aan die ander kant van die spoor, geskryf in Kaapse Afrikaans.

An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century.

This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality.

Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to middle-class status, by the 1950s it included all Black Christians—60 percent of the Black South African population. In turn, certain Black traditions and customs were central to the acceptance of sexual modernity, which gained traction because it included practices such as lobola, in which a bridegroom demonstrates his gratitude by transferring property to his bride’s family. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity.

In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system. Erlank draws from a wide range of sources, including popular Black literature and the Black press, African church and mission archives, and records of the South African law courts, which she argues have been underutilized in histories of South Africa. The book is sure to attract historians and other scholars interested in the history of African Christianity, African families, sexuality, and the social history of law, especially colonial law.

This acclaimed book by Steven Pinker argues that, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less violent over millenia and decades. Can violence really have declined?

The images of conflict we see daily on our screens from around the world suggest this is an almost obscene claim to be making. Extraordinarily, however, Steven Pinker shows violence within and between societies - both murder and warfare - really has declined from prehistory to today. We are much less likely to die at someone else's hands than ever before. Even the horrific carnage of the last century, when compared to the dangers of pre-state societies, is part of this trend.

Debunking both the idea of the 'noble savage' and an over-simplistic Hobbesian notion of a 'nasty, brutish and short' life, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people.

This insightful portrait of Winston Churchill delves beyond well-known political moments, incorporating perspectives from various individuals who encountered him throughout his life.

From Bletchley Park codebreakers and Hollywood stars such as Charlie Chaplin, through writers as varied as H. G. Wells and P. G. Wodehouse, to the likes of Harold Wilson, Mahatma Gandhi and Queen Elizabeth II, these lesser-known interactions reveal glimpses of the man behind the legend.

We meet Churchill the exuberant schoolboy thug with an early mania for bull-dogs, and Churchill the elder statesman shedding a tear in the House of Commons smoking room. Other incidents include a young journalist rudely dismissing a call from Churchill as a prank, and a visiting Dwight D. Eisenhower dreaming of being strangled, only to awake entangled in Churchill’s borrowed nightshirt.

The book showcases the profound transformations during Churchill’s lifetime, which ran from Benjamin Disraeli’s premiership to the release of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Route 66’, and the shift from steam to atomic power. Examining controversial aspects of his legacy, this multifaceted portrait challenges preconceived notions, inviting readers to reconsider the complexities of Churchill.

Are the courts against the people of South Africa?

Since populist factions claim to be the people, judges confronting them do not just decide against the people; they are against the people.

The judiciary faces a barrage of attacks not just from the ruling ANC but from other political parties clamouring for power. There comes a predictable phase in the cycle of politics where this is most likely to occur. Why does it benefit political parties to deflect from their failure to deliver with calls for parliamentary sovereignty? Why do so many myths circulate about the nature of our courts and constitution?

Dan Mafora answers these questions and more in an inspired analysis. He takes us through the historical ideological clashes within the ANC that make judicial independence up for debate, how administrations since '94 have responded to judicial decisions and why this phenomenon is important to watch globally. He also examines how disinformation campaigns play a big role.

Noni Jabavu was the first black South African woman to publish books on her life. Her memoirs Drawn in Colour and The Ochre People have been compared to Zora Neale Hurston's work.

A cosmopolitan, free-spirited woman, she returned home in 1977 and wrote a weekly column in the Daily Dispatch. 

This book is a compilation of these cheeky, insightful and hilarious columns for a younger audience of empowered women. 

Jan Smuts grabbed the opportunity to realise his ambition of a Greater South Africa when the First World War ushered in a final scramble for Africa. He set his sights firmly northward upon the German colonies of South West Africa and East Africa.

Smuts’s abilities as a general have been much denigrated by his contemporaries and later historians, but he was no armchair soldier. He first learned his soldier’s craft under General Koos de la Rey and General Louis Botha during the South African War (1899−1902). He emerged from that conflict immersed in Boer manoeuvre doctrine.

After forming the Union Defence Force in 1912, Smuts played an integral part in the German South West African campaign in 1915. Placed in command of the Allied forces in East Africa in 1916, he led a mixed bag of South Africans and imperial troops against the legendary Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his Schutztruppen. His penchant for manoeuvre warfare and mounted infantry freed most of the vast German territory from Lettow-Vorbeck’s grip.

General Jan Smuts and his First World War in Africa provides a long-overdue reassessment of Smuts’s generalship and his role in furthering the strategic aims of South Africa and the British Empire during this era.

A book for finding purpose and strength in times of great despair, the international best-seller is still just as relevant today as when it was first published.

Man's Search for Meaning is more relevant than ever, Viktor Frank's message provides hope even in the darkest of times. It has sold more than 16 million copies in fifty languages. A reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert was a man on a mission, whether as an academic, opposition politician, democratic facilitator or businessman. When he famously led a delegation of leading Afrikaners to Dakar in 1987 to meet the exiled ANC, many saw it as a breakthrough moment, while others felt he had been taken in. And yet his reputation – for honesty, integrity, wit and courage – still towers above many of his contemporaries.

An academic turned politician, Slabbert brought unusual intellectual rigour to Parliament, transforming the upstart Progressive Federal Party into a force that could challenge the National Party. Disillusioned by South African society, he resigned in 1986 to explore democratic alternatives. Sidelined during the democratic transition, he continued to pursue a broad range of initiatives aimed at building democracy, empowering black South Africans and transforming the economy.

Grundlingh offers insights into this most unlikely politician, providing new perspectives on a figure who even today remains an enigma.

A true-life scientific adventure story, this thrilling book takes the reader deep into South African caves to discover fossil remains that compel a monumental reframing of the human family tree.

In the summer of 2022, Lee Berger lost 50 pounds in order to wriggle though impossibly small openings in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa—spaces where his team has been unearthing the remains of Homo naledi, a proto-human likely to have coexisted with Homo sapiens some 250,000 years ago. The lead researcher on the site, still Berger had never made his way into the dark, cramped, dangerous underground spaces where many of the naledi fossils had been found. Now he was ready to do so.

Once inside the cave, Berger made shocking new discoveries that expand our understanding of this early hominid—discoveries that stand to alter our fundamental understanding of what makes us human. So what does it all mean?

Join Berger on the adventure of a lifetime as he explores the Rising Star cave system and begins the complicated process of explaining these extraordinary finds—finds that force a rethinking of human evolution, and discoveries that Berger calls “the Rosetta stone of the human mind.”

An instant Number One New York Times bestseller, Humans of New York began in the summer of 2010, when photographer Brandon Stanton set out on an ambitious project: to single-handedly create a photographic census of New York City. Armed with his camera, he began crisscrossing the city, covering thousands of miles on foot, all in his attempt to capture ordinary New Yorkers in the most extraordinary of moments. The result of these efforts was "Humans of New York," a vibrant blog in which he featured his photos alongside quotes and anecdotes.

The blog has steadily grown, now boasting nearly a million devoted followers. Humans of New York is the book inspired by the blog. With four hundred colour photos, including exclusive portraits and all-new stories, and a distinctive vellum jacket, Humans of New York is a stunning collection of images that will appeal not just to those who have been drawn in by the outsized personalities of New York, but to anyone interested in the breathtaking scope of humanity it displays.

Heartfelt and moving, Humans of New York is a celebration of individuality and a tribute to the spirit of a city.

For the first time, Spying and the Crown uncovers the remarkable relationship between the Royal Family and the intelligence community, from the reign of Queen Victoria to the death of Princess Diana.

In an enthralling narrative, Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac show how the British secret services grew out of persistent attempts to assassinate Victoria and then operated on a private and informal basis, drawing on close personal relationships between senior spies, the aristocracy, and the monarchy.

Based on original research and new evidence, Spying and the Crown presents the British monarchy in an entirely new light and reveals how far their majesties still call the shots in a hidden world.

Previously published as The Secret Royals.

In The Great Pretenders: Race and Class under ANC Rule, veteran political analyst Ebrahim Harvey delivers a stinging critique of the ANC. This must-read analysis reveals the complete failure of the ANC to roll back the race and class divide.

Harvey argues that a series of events – including HIV/AIDS denialism, the Marikana shootings, the Nkandla funding scandal, mass student protests, the Esidemeni tragedy, systemic corruption and state capture – are rooted in policy choices made by the ANC during negotiations and in power. This book is not just an evisceration of the ANC, however, as Harvey is able, through many interviews and patient delving into the past and present, to provide an indispensable guide to the future.

The Great Pretenders is fierce, passionate and provocative. It is certain to provoke those in power, stirring debate on not only the pernicious issue of race relations in South Africa, but on how to create the shared society promised us.

This is the story of Comrade September, a member of the ANC and its military wing, MK, who was abducted from his hideout in Swaziland by an apartheid death squad in August 1986 and taken across the border to South Africa, where his interrogation and torture began. It was not long before September began telling his captors about his comrades in the ANC. By talking under torture, September underwent changes that marked him for the rest of his life: from resister to collaborator, insurgent to counter-insurgent, revolutionary to counter-revolutionary and, to his former comrades, hero to traitor.

The book is about these changes and about the larger, neglected story of betrayal and collaboration in the struggle against apartheid. It seeks to understand why September made the choices he did - collaborating with his captors, turning against the ANC, and then hunting down his comrades - without excusing those choices. It looks beyond the black and-white that still dominates South Africa's political canvas, to examine the grey zones in which South Africans - combatants and non-combatants - lived.

As the book demonstrates, September's acts of betrayal form but one layer in a sedimentation of betrayals in which September himself was betrayed by the Swazi police for sure and may, in fact, have been sold out to the Swazis and the South African security police by his own comrades in the ANC. This, then, is not a morality tale in which the lines between heroes and villains are clearly drawn.

The book does not claim that the competing sides in the fight against apartheid were moral equivalents. It seeks to contribute to scholarly attempts to elaborate a denser, richer and more nuanced account of South Africa's modern political history. It does so by examining the history of political violence in South Africa; by looking at the workings of an apartheid death squad in an attempt to understand how the apartheid bureaucracy worked; and, more importantly, by studying the social, moral and political universe in which apartheid collaborators like September lived and worked.

This is not a biography - a cradle-to-grave account of September's life - even though it does, where necessary, look at his life. September was not the first resister-turned-collaborator. But he was also no ordinary collaborator. That is why his story deserves telling.

This rich and absorbing biography of Can Themba, iconic Drum-era journalist and writer, is the definitive history of a larger-than-life man who died too young. Siphiwo Mahala’s intensive and often fresh research features unprecedented archival access and interviews with Themba’s surviving colleagues and family.

Mahala’s biography takes a critical historical approach to Themba’s life and writing, giving a picture of the whole man, from his early beginnings in Marabastad to his sombre end in exile in Swaziland. The better-known elements of his life – his political views, passion for teaching and mentoring, and family life – are woven together with an examination of his literary influences and the impact of his own writing (especially his famous short story ‘The Suit’) on modern African writers in turn. Mahala, a master storyteller, deftly follows the threads of Themba’s dynamic life, showcasing his intellectual acumen, scholarly aptitude and wit, along with his flaws, contradictions and heartbreaks, against a backdrop of the sparkle and pathos of Sophiatown of the 1950s.

Can Themba’s successes and failures as well as his triumphs and tribulations reverberate on the pages of this long-awaited biography. The result is an authoritative and entertaining account of an often misunderstood figure in South Africa’s literary canon.

This book explores South Africa’s tumultuous history from the aftermath of the Second Anglo-Boer War to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on never-before-published documentary evidence – including diaries, letters, eyewitness testimony and diplomatic reports – the book follows the South African people through the battles, elections, repression, resistance, strikes, massacres, economic crashes and health crises that have shaped the nation’s character.

Tracking South Africa’s path from colony to Union and from apartheid to democracy, History of South Africa documents the influence of key figures including Pixley Seme, Jan Smuts, Lilian Ngoyi, H.F. Verwoerd, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, P.W. Botha and Jacob Zuma. The book also gives detailed accounts of definitive events such as the 1922 Rand Revolt, the Defiance Campaign, Sharpeville, the Soweto uprising and the Marikana massacre. Looking beyond the country’s borders, it unpacks military conflicts such as the World Wars, the armed struggle and the Border War. The book explores the transition to democracy and traces the phases of ANC rule, from the Rainbow Nation to transformation to state capture. It examines the divisive and unifying role of sport, the ups and downs of the economy, and the impact of pandemics from the Spanish flu to AIDS and COVID-19.

As South Africa faces a crisis as severe as any in its history, the book shows that these challenges are neither unprecedented nor insurmountable, and that there are principles to be found in history that may lead us safely into the future.

At a watershed meeting in 2000 the ANC committed itself to "the new cadre" project. A project with the aim to recruit and develop ANC members who are dedicated, selfless people with integrity. Yet twenty years later the ANC is consumed by corrupt cadres with the party clearly losing the battle against corruption and state capture.

How did this happen, and what exactly went wrong?

Political analyst Mpumelelo Mkhabela tells a fascinating story starting with Mandela, the Scorpions and Tony Yengeni all the way to Zuma and the Guptas to explain how we got here.