The results of the 29 May 2024 elections caused a seismic shift in South Africa’s political landscape. For the first time in three decades of democracy, the ruling ANC did not emerge with a majority.

With a constitutional deadline of just fourteen days to elect a president, the nation held its breath. Would the ANC forge a so-called doomsday coalition with the EFF and Patriotic Alliance, or a centrist partnership with its nemesis, the DA? What role would smaller parties play, and how would Jacob Zuma’s disruptive MK party impact on the negotiations?

The Deal takes you behind the scenes of the negotiations that redefined a nation, providing exclusive interviews with party leaders, unique insights and stories, thoughtful analysis and vital context. From the exclusive Inanda Club to clandestine hotel basements and affluent private houses on Johannesburg’s Westcliff Ridge, negotiating teams met under immense pressure. Amidst volatile markets, a skittish currency and intense social media scrutiny, every decision was critical.

Witness the nail-biting moments as talks through bilaterals and back channels teetered on the brink of collapse, and discover the personality clashes, factionalism and deft political manoeuvring that ultimately led to the establishment of the Government of National Unity. The Deal is a compelling record of history.

On 23 August 2021, Babita Deokaran – a hardworking single mother and chief accountant at the Gauteng Department of Health – was shot down in a hail of bullets outside her home in Mondeor, Johannesburg. She had just dropped off her daughter at school. The izinkabi paid to kill her were caught, but the question remained: Who ordered her murder, and why?

Investigative journalist Jeff Wicks set out to find the answer. This quest would profoundly change – even endanger – his life, as he bravely followed the leads Babita had left behind. Leads that the Hawks, who were officially investigating her assassination, had failed to act on.

In The Shadow State Wicks uncovers an audacious web of crooked officials, criminal syndicates and ANC politicians, siphoning away billions meant for patients in Gauteng’s public hospitals. An explosive, fast-paced investigation into greed and state capture, this book is also a moving tribute to the courage of one woman who, when confronted by powerful wrongdoers, refused to keep quiet.

Between 1960 and 1989 in South Africa, more than 130 people were executed for crimes that had a political motive. Who were they, what did they do, and why did they do it?

While many people have heard of Solomon Mahlangu, John Harris or even Vuyisile Mini, the vast majority of executed activists remain very much unknown, even though they paid the ultimate price for their actions.

This book tells their stories, drawing on the author’s interviews with fellow activists, the families left behind, lawyers on both sides, judges who passed sentence, warders on death row, and even functionaries tasked with informing the condemned of their impending fate.

In the process, the book sheds light on forgotten aspects of South African history, such as the actions of the PAC/Poqo in the 1960s, which resulted in dozens of executions, and people who heeded the ANC’s call to make the country ungovernable in the 1980s and who were then disowned by the organisation. The book also makes startling revelations about miscarriages of justice, defence attorneys working against their clients, and, sadly, the post-apartheid state’s neglect of those who suffered as a result of political executions.

Since the Zuma presidency weakened crime intelligence, violent crime surged, with murder rates rising over 75%. South Africa faces severe femicide, and most murderers evade justice. Prisons fail by perpetuating crime; harsher sentences do not help.

Edwin Cameron, after visiting prisons, advocates for reform. Along with colleagues, he suggests abolishing minimum sentences, cash bail, and decriminalizing drug use to improve safety and justice.

For over three decades, the remarkable story of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Special Operations Unit has remained largely untold. Formed under the direct command of ANC president Oliver Tambo and senior ANC and SACP leader Joe Slovo, this elite unit executed some of the most daring and high-profile attacks against the apartheid state in the 1980s. From the spectacular 1980 Sasol bombings to the 1987 attack at the Wits Command, Special Ops was at the forefront of the armed struggle, targeting strategic economic and military sites with precision and determination.

In this groundbreaking book, the history of Special Ops is brought to life through the voices of its surviving participants. Based on interviews with 48 individuals, this oral history offers an intimate and comprehensive look at the unit's operations, challenges, and achievements. Also drawing from press reports, TRC records and official documents, the narrative provides a balanced assessment of the political context, role, and significance of Special Ops within the broader ANC-led national liberation struggle.

Attacking the Heart of Apartheid is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of the anti-apartheid struggle, the dynamics of armed resistance, and the power of collective action in the pursuit of justice and equality.

In this intimate memoir, Hannah Botsis chronicles life as a minister's daughter in post-apartheid South Africa.

Through the lens of her father's forty-year ministry at a Presbyterian church in Cape Town's northern suburbs, she explores faith, family, and racial privilege with unflinching honesty.

A meditation on grace and belonging, this story illuminates how communities navigate change while wrestling with their complicated histories.

This book is a journey of triumph and setback, of building something good in a world that doesn’t always welcome it. It’s about allies and adversaries, mentors and obstacles. Above all, it’s a story driven by social justice and the power of education to change lives and the resilience it takes to protect that power when it’s most at risk. A fascinating South African memoir that shares a story of hope and resilience.

At school, James Urdang was a troublemaking underachiever. Diagnosed with ADHD and Dyslexia at an early age, few could have imagined he’d go on to found Education Africa, an organisation that has helped educate thousands of young black South Africans.

Supported and mentored by Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela and Dr. Aggrey Klaaste − former Editor-in-Chief of The Sowetan – who became the organisation’s first chairman in 1992 − James, driven by determination and sheer audacity made his dream a reality. Until one day it all came crashing down as he faced a gruelling battle to save his NPO, Education Africa, from a hostile takeover by executives from a global financial institution.

A memoir by South African musician, journalist, filmmaker and author Roger Lucey, in which he describes building a house in the mountains of the Breede River Valley as a way of healing the darkness of his past and reclaiming his creativity.

Roger Lucey survived a covert security police campaign which destroyed his music career. He survived the drug addiction and disaffection which followed. He survived a decade and a half as a cameraman documenting the wars of Africa and Eastern Europe.

Survival was not enough though. Broken and despairing, he needed to find a way to reclaim his life and creativity.

This book describes the anguish of men battling with mental health issues and reflections from the people who treat them.

Marion Scher weaves together the stories of South African men who have confronted their mental health issues with the stories the doctors who treat them have to tell. It gives practical guidance on where men (and their friends and families) can turn for help in overcoming the ever-increasing scourge of mental illness in our society.

Marion Scher is a well-known SA mental health journalist and has done pro bono work for SADAG for over 30 years.

Across oceans and centuries, this sweeping narrative shuttles between the corridors of the Colonial Office in London, the contested streets of Durban, and the growing sway of Delhi. At its core are the untold struggles of Indian South Africans, communities who, in the shadow of empire, fought to resist the ever-present threat of repatriation.

From the marble halls of the British Raj and the machinations of Indian Agent-Generals to the solemn exodus of newly freed indentured labourers leaving Natal’s plantations, the story illuminates histories long obscured. It captures in haunting detail in family biographies, the rise of a merchant class, daring to outpace their colonial rivals, only to face relentless hostility for their audacity.

Drawing on fresh research, the book weaves together seismic events, the independence of India, the rise of South Africa’s National Party, and their ominous promise of mass expulsions, with the texture of everyday life. The 1960s bring upheaval as the Group Areas Act rips communities from their roots, yet out of this turmoil, new townships nurture a generation of educated children and professionals, forging hope in unexpected places. Rejecting easy narratives, the book delves into the messy, human spaces between accommodation and resistance, where principle and strategy, triumph and muddling through contest, as much as they coexist.

In its final chapters, the fall of apartheid offers a moment of transcendence. Yet it also asks: what does it mean, at last, to belong? Ultimately, this is a story about the price and promise of belonging. Through its unflinching gaze at struggle and survival, it becomes a book not just for Indian South Africans, but for anyone who has ever sought a place to call home.

Jan Smuts is revered by some as a national and international statesman, but he is condemned by others as an architect of segregation. In his new book, prize-winning author Bongani Ngqulunga examines Smuts’s political life in terms of how it affected black people.

He considers the impact of Smuts’s role in the treaty ending the Anglo-Boer War and the National Convention that created the Union of South Africa. He follows Smuts’s actions as a minister under Louis Botha, as prime minister from 1919 to 1924 and again from 1939 to 1948, and his relationship with Barry Hertzog’s National Party, first in opposition and then in a fused South African Party. Ngqulunga concentrates on the events and policies that affected black people directly, and he presents the views of people such as Sol Plaatje, Alfred Xuma, John Dube, D.D.T. Jabavu and Z.K. Matthews – and, later on, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. He shows how Smuts evolved in his views, eventually coming to recognise that segregation had failed. But the reforms he introduced in the 1940s were too little, too late, and were swept away by the National Party and its policy of apartheid.

Giving a balanced view that is both respectful and critical, Under Smuts’s Rule is a vital addition to the literature on Smuts and to South African history.

A road trip to Namibia unfolds across these pages, but when? Yesterday, years ago, or never at all? Barbara Adair refuses to say, creating something between memoir and fever dream.

This is no ordinary travel narrative. Language shifts without warning: playful one moment, brutal the next. The text overflows with names of rivers, flowers, trees, places, and people, then suddenly confronts the cruel realities of history and contemporary life. Nothing stays still long enough for comfort.

Here is freedom captured in words: wind, mythology, politics, life and death all tumbling together. Questions emerge about technology, mechanics, the vacuous nature of our existence. The reader can never settle into complacency.

Mark Kannemeyer's eerie illustrations enhance or deliberately undermine the text, offering visual refuge from the relentless verbal energy.

Non-linear, indulgent, challenging: this book demonstrates how language can be bent into new shapes, how stories can become something more than mere storytelling. Fun, sad, and occasionally repellent. Often all at once.

In this captivating collection of essays, Tinyiko Maluleke invites his readers on a journey that begins with his eventful boyhood in Soweto and his life-changing sojourn in Limpopo. His reflections on the roles of his mother, maternal grandmother and aunts in his upbringing will melt many hearts. In a deep sense of the word, this is a ‘feminist’ book with large sections profiling and promoting the contribution of women in national development.

Included in this memoir is the story of Maluleke’s journey through academia, his rise through the ranks, and the many lessons he learnt along the way. All the while, Maluleke presents his story as a microcosm of the human story of all South Africans, challenging his readers to rethink the history of the country, villages, townships and their own selves.

Maluleke does not pull any punches in the essays where he provides analysis of critical issues facing the country. Deploying solid scholarship, to undergird a variety of literary genres and writing strategies, Maluleke’s book is also a compendium of and an ode to the moments, places and people – celebrated and ordinary – who have shaped and continue to shape his outlook. His profiling of a few fellow university leaders is particularly riveting.

Faces and Phases of Resilience will make you think, laugh, yell and cry. In a way, this book is not merely an individual memoir, it is the memoir of a country, a memoir of a historical epoch and a memoir of a people – it is an invitation to the tragedy, the beauty and the hope that define South Africa.

The book ends, forty-nine chapters later, with a heart-rending essay on the bane of xenophobia, foretelling the death of Maluleke, chillingly titled, ‘The Day I Die’.

We Two from Heaven is a singular memoir, a four-part fugue on the tricks and traps of memory, a shuffling of the cards of time. Episodes from the early life of writer James Whyle are interwoven with the letters of his father from the Western Front during the First World War. Their formative experiences – war, conscription, injury, desertion – flash by, juxtaposed, as if in counterpoint.

How do we know who we are? Upending the reader’s expectations of a memoir, Whyle then explores the violence and madness of apartheid society as the narrator passes through boarding school and university and takes his first steps to become a writer. Raw and rhythmic, lyrical and caustic, this is an unsparing, formally inventive dissection of human vanities and illusions.

At the end of history, on the shores of a blue bay, the voices of the past can be heard as we await the arrival of the barbarians – or the baboons, whoever comes first.

The Chaos Precinct presents a compelling, brave – at times, lyrical – narrative of how migrant Ethiopians have shaped a trading post in Johannesburg’s inner city.

On maps it is defined as the eastern edge of the original administrative area of Johannesburg. Those of us who have encountered the area of the city centre roughly bounded by Plein, Troye, Pritchard and von Brandis Streets have coined various names for it. The Ethiopian Quarter, Little Ethiopia and Little Addis are phrases we exchange in animated conversations about this unique entrepreneurial explosion. This exoticises a booming makeshift shopping hub that emerged without any formal planning intention or support. Municipal officials speak informally of the area as the ‘Chaos Precinct’. But the traders in the area call it by the hallmark road – Jeppe. For them it is a place of opportunity and fevered trade – in which the annual revenue generated is twice that of Africa’s wealthiest shopping mall. Jeppe is a dynamic, exuberant nerve centre that fosters entrepreneurship.

Fortunes are made, loved ones back home are supported and commodities flow across Southern Africa – particularly fast fashion. Local and cross border traders arrive on buses and taxis to buy shoes, t-shirts, dresses, underwear, jeans, suits, wallets, belts, nail clippers and cosmetics. Though situated on the dry Highveld, Jeppe is an entrepôt which bears a close resemblance to major port cities.

Moving to Mars may sound like science fiction but the truth is that today, scant decades since our first space missions, humanity is on the verge of becoming multiplanetary. SpaceX is building a Starship transport system; China successfully demonstrated crop growth on the Moon; and, in a space mining milestone, Japan's recent asteroid missions have returned samples to Earth.

Adriana Marais has dedicated her life to preparing for extraplanetary settlement, considering not just the scientific and technological possibilities but also the ethical responsibilities of our species as we explore new frontiers. In 2019, she launched the Proudly Human: Off-World Project, a series of extreme habitation experiments investigating the capabilities necessary for life beyond our home planet.

In this extraordinary era of rapid technological development, Marais explores the scientific and ethical questions that stands at the heart of scientific endeavour: How did we get here - and where are we going next?

In what will surely become a classic of South African non-fiction, Led by Shepherds begins with twelve-year-old Jeffrey Rakabe leaving his village to attend an initiation ceremony, believing it to be the key to his manhood. But the weeks-long rite of passage in the mountains is a far cry from the adventure he’d imagined.

Years later, as a student, Rakabe discovers the nurturing world of books and thrives within the hush of the Johannesburg Public Library.

The presence of caring women in his life, from his concerned mother and supportive partner to a librarian who feeds his intellectual curiosity with a steady supply of literature, spur Rakabe to investigate the possible links between the koma ritual, awash with misogynistic language, and gender-based violence in SA.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Led by Shepherds is a moving, vital and controversial book and Jeffrey Rakabe a brave voice for a new generation.

In the heart of a village untouched by the world’s chaos, five-year-old Popina took solace in the simple joys of childhood – climbing mango trees, chasing baby baboons, and exploring the fields. But her innocence was shattered in an instant when a group of strangers invaded the village, bringing with them a terror that a young girl could never have imagined.
 
The Smallest Ones  is a harrowing and powerful account of survival and resilience in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo in the early 2000s. Popina, her family and friends were captured by rebel soldiers and were subjected to torture and rape. After several years of captivity, Popina and her older sister managed to escape, and began an epic journey all the way to South Africa. But even there, their nightmare was not over.
 
Written with raw emotion and unflinching honesty,  The Smallest Ones  takes readers on a journey through the darkest corners of human experience, yet it is also a testament to the enduring power of hope and the will to survive. This is not just a story of tragedy, but a poignant exploration of the human spirit’s capacity to endure and overcome.
 
After eventually finding refuge in a children’s home in Despatch in the Eastern Cape, Popina started building the life she dreamt of as a child. Having had no schooling, she now found herself in a classroom and held a pen for the first time. And so began her journey to education and freedom.

The Nightwatchman: Representing Black Men in Colonial South Africa brings into focus African men in colonial uniforms as a subject of portraiture. While colonial governments coopted and conscripted Africans into military and policing services, it was after the Zulu defeat of the English in the battle of Isandlwana that a genre of photography developed around images of the ‘Zulu warrior’ and ‘Zulu policeman’.

In this illustrated book, Hlonipha Mokoena extends the literature on colonial ethnographic photography by creating a narrative of nightwatchman portraiture from the rich archive of images. Although the origins of this genre lay in the representation of ‘Fingoes’ (amaMfengu) during the frontier wars, she argues that the spectacle of the Zulu male body was inaugurated aft er the last Zulu king, Cetshwayo, was photographed as a posing subject.

While much research has focussed on the African man employed in emasculating labour or as a functionary of settler power, this book shift s debates about how the body moves in history. Placed in uniform, the male subject becomes aestheticised and admired. Mokoena
focuses on the sartorial selection processes and co-optation of colonial aesthetic culture that constructed the idea of the Nonqgqayi or nightwatchman as a fully formed photographic presence. The beauty captured in these images upends conceptions of colonial photography as a tool of oppression.

In its focus on the figure of the black and brown fi ghting man, The Nightwatchman offers an innovative work on the history of portraiture and dress in colonial South Africa. Incorporating insights from African history, art history, anthropology and critical theory, it offers new insights about the use of men of colour in colonial warfare and new avenues for the interpretation of visual representations of the black male figure.

Part memoir, part global history, part historical sociology, part meditation on the ways in which inherited trauma shapes individual lives, Darker Shade of Pale is a poignant story about the life of Deborah Posel’s paternal grandfather. Like the majority of the Jewish immigrants who came to South Africa from the eastern European lands that made up the Pale of Settlement, he was not a remarkable man. His life was not particularly exceptional.

But, as Posel shows so brilliantly and with much empathy in this stunning book, he and the thousands like him also belong to the historical record. By giving sympathetic account of her grandfather’s otherwise unremarkable life, Posel not only challenges the myth of Jewish exceptionalism that is so key to the historiography of Jewish Studies in South Africa, she also debunks one of the basic pillars of anti-Semitism.

— Jacob Dlamini, Associate Professor, Department of History, Princeton University Darker Shade of Pale traces early twentieth century Jewish migration from the Russian Empire to colonial South Africa through one man’s life. Blending personal memoir and historical inquiry, Deborah Posel reveals the hidden costs of uprooting—dislocation, ambition, shame—and the shame of failure in a settler colony.
A sweeping story with intimate roots, Darker Shade of Pale traces a little-known chapter in the history of global migration: the journey of families at the turn of the twentieth century from the Jewish territories of the Russian Empire, called The Pale of Settlement, to the far-flung British colony of South Africa.

At the heart of this book by acclaimed South African sociologist, Deborah Posel, is the story of her grandfather, Maurice Posel. An ordinary man whose struggles and disappointments mirror those of countless others, this book challenges the common narrative of Jewish immigrant success in South Africa. Darker Shade of Pale brings into focus the traumas of dislocation along with the pressures to succeed and the shame of failure. Through one man’s unfulfilled hopes, we discover what was given and what was taken as immigrants sought to build new lives in a strange land.

From the shtetl’s rigid traditions to the racial hierarchies of the British Empire, Posel explores how migrants navigated social orders. She reveals how Jewish preoccupations with status and success travelled from shtetl to colony, and the psychological costs incurred; the ironies of this journeying for literate, working women from the shtetl; the version of whiteness that South Africa assigned to Jews from Eastern Europe and the various ways in which they interacted with Black people; the unexpected economic routes they chose as well as the prejudicial punches that Jewish immigrants had to take – from both the British and the already-assimilated English-speaking Jewish community in South Africa.

Lyrical, probing and unflinching, Darker Shade of Pale is a powerful reminder that the migrant’s story is never simple and always singular.

Making a Life: Young Men on Johannesburg’s Urban Margins explores the dynamic everyday life-making strategies of young men in Zandspruit, a sprawling informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In many ways, Zandspruit typifies the precariousness of life in South Africa, where two-thirds of young people lack waged employment. However, rather than seeing Zandspruit as dumping ground, Hannah J. Dawson calls for an integrated understanding of the complex linkages between people’s lives and livelihoods, and the multifaceted sociopolitical landscape of urban settlements.

Based on 14 months of ethnographic research, Dawson investigates how social belonging, identity and economic realities intertwine in informal settlements like Zandspruit. This approach not only challenges conventional approaches to studying work; it also questions the increasingly prevalent perspective that romanticises the adaptive survival strategies of the urban poor. By exploring the intricate connections between those with and without waged employment, the author shows how young men manage complex social, political and economic conditions.

Making a Life offers insights into issues such as urban work, citizenship, un(der) employment and inequality in South Africa. At the same time, it contributes to a global understanding of how young people – men especially – manage economic uncertainty.