This book reads like a war-time thriller.

We hear for the first time from internationalists who secretly worked for the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), in the struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule. They acted as couriers, provided safe houses in the neighbouring states and within South Africa, helped infiltrate combatants across borders, and smuggled tonnes of weapons into the country in the most creative of ways. Driven by a spirit of international solidarity, they were prepared to take huge risks and face danger which dogged them at every turn. At least three were captured and served long terms of imprisonment, while others were arrested and, following international pressure, deported. They reveal what motivated them as volunteers, not mercenaries, who gained nothing for their endeavours save for the self-esteem in serving a just cause.

Against such clandestine involvement, the book includes contributions from key role players in the international Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and its public mobilisation to isolate the apartheid regime. These include worldwide campaigns like Stop the Sports Tours, boycotting South African products, and black American solidarity.

The Cuban, East German and Russian contributions outline those countries’ support for the ANC and MK. The public, global AAM campaigns provide the dimension from which internationalists who secretly served MK emerged.

This is an invaluable historic resource, explaining in highly readable style the significance of international solidarity for today’s youth in challenging times.

A vivid story of the men and women who took a stand when sport mixed with politics.

In 1971, when the racially selected all-white Springbok rugby team toured Australia, it became a nation at war with itself. There was bloodshed as tens of thousands of anti-apartheid campaigners clashed with governments, police, and rugby fans - who were given free reign to assault protestors. Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency. Prime minister William McMahon called the Wallabies who refused to play 'national disgraces'. Barbed wire ringed the great rugby grounds to stop protestors invading the field.

Pitched Battle recreates what became of the most rancorous periods in modern Australian history - a time of courage, pain, faith, fanaticism, and political opportunism - which ultimately made heroes of the seven Wallabies who refused to play, played a key role in the later political careers of Peter Beattie, Meredith Burgmann, and Peter Hain, and ultimately led to the abandonment of apartheid.

Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa’s greatest political questions: if he had survived, what impact would he have had on the ANC government?

On the 30th anniversary of his murder by right-wing fanatics, this updated version of the best-selling Hani: A Life Too Short re-evaluates his legacy and traces his life from his childhood in rural Transkei to the crisis in the ANC camps in Angola in the 1980s and the heady dawn of South Africa’s freedom.

Drawing on interviews and the recollections of those who knew him, this vividly written book provides a detailed account of the life of a hero of South Africa’s liberation, a communist party leader and Umkhonto we Sizwe chief of staff who was both an intellectual and a fighter.

This is more than a book. This is a blazing voyage.

Growing up in apartheid-era Chatsworth, Kumi Naidoo tells how his mother’s suicide when he was just 15 years old acted as a catalyst for his journey into radical action against the apartheid regime. In this revelatory and intimate story, Kumi describes his political awakening, and his experiences as a young community organiser and underground ANC activist during the 1980s.

His grief and anger became fuel for his efforts to help liberate South Africa and to build a better world.

‘Highly readable and packed with fascinating historical detail, this is the compelling story of a ripsnorting South African cricketer whose career was smothered by the shameless colour prejudice of Cecil John Rhodes and his snobbish cronies. By turns formidable, sad, enlivening and enormously informative, this book pays Hendricks the honour that has long been his due.’  – Bill Nasson
 
William Henry ‘Krom’ Hendricks was the first sportsman to be formally barred from representing South Africa on the basis of race. Hailing from Cape Town’s Bo-Kaap, he played in 1892 for the South African Malay team against the touring English, who insisted that he was among the best fast bowlers in the world. This made his exclusion from South Africa’s tour of England in 1894 all the more unjust.
 
Ranged against Hendricks were virulent racism and a political alliance between arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, Afrikaner Bond leader J.H. Hofmeyr, and William Milton, who controlled cricket at the Cape through the Western Province Cricket Union.  Too Black to Wear Whites  documents Hendricks’s tireless struggle for recognition and the public controversies around his exclusion. The book shows how Hendricks was further sidelined as club teams made up of different races were prevented from playing against one another, saving white players the embarrassment of being shown up by the country’s best fast bowler.
 
Considering his importance in South African sports history, surprisingly little is known about Krom Hendricks. The story of his life is told here for the first time in a fascinating drama that describes the formation of a segregated South Africa through the career of an exceptional cricketer who dared to test the boundaries of the system.

Revolt is a provocative challenge to the prevailing wisdom about the rise of nationalism and populism today. With a vibrant and informed voice, Nadav Eyal illustrates how modern globalization is unsustainable. He contends that the collapse of the current world order is not so much about the imbalance between technological advances and social progress, or the breakdown of liberal democracy, as it is about a passion to upend and destroy power structures that have become hollow, corrupt, or simply unresponsive to urgent needs. Eyal illuminates the forces both benign and malignant that have so rapidly transformed our economic, political, and cultural realities, shedding light not only on the globalized revolution that has come to define our time but also on the counterrevolution waged by those globalization has marginalized and exploited.

With a mixture of journalistic narrative, penetrating vignettes, and original analysis, Revolt shows that within the mainstream the left and right have much in common. Eyal shows how their stories feed our current state of unrest. More than just an analysis of the present, though, Revolt also takes a hard look at lessons from the past, from the Opium Wars in China to colonialist Haiti to the Marshall Plan. With these historical ties, Eyal shows that the roots of revolt have always been deep and strong. The current uprisings are no passing phenomenon—revolt is the new status quo.

This stirring collection of essays and talks by activist and former judge Albie Sachs is the culmination of more than 25 years of thought about constitution-making and non-racialism. Following the Constitutional Court's landmark Nkandla ruling in March 2016, it serves as a powerful reminder of the tenets of the Constitution, the rule of law and the continuous struggle to uphold democratic rights and freedoms. We, The People offers an intimate insider's view of South Africa's Constitution by a writer who has been deeply entrenched in its historical journey from the depths of apartheid right up to the politically contested present.

As a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, Sachs took part in the Defiance Campaign and went on to attend the Congress of the People in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955. Three decades later, shortly after the bomb attack in Maputo that cost him his arm and the sight in one eye, he was called on by the Constitutional Committee of the African National Congress to co-draft (with Kader Asmal) the first outline of a Bill of Rights for a new democratic South Africa. In 1994, he was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Constitutional Court, where he served as a judge until 2009. We, The People contains some of Sachs' most memorable public talks and writings, in which he takes us back to the broad-based popular foundations of the Constitution in the Freedom Charter. He picks up on Oliver Tambo's original vision of a non-racial future for South Africa, rather than one based on institutionalised power-sharing between the races. He explores the tension between perfectability and corruptibility, hope and mistrust, which lies at the centre of all constitutions.

Sachs discusses the enforcement of social and economic rights, and contemplates the building of the Constitutional Court in the heart of the Old Fort Prison as a mechanism for reconciling the past and the future. Subjective experience and objective analysis interact powerfully in a personalised narrative that reasserts the value of constitutionality not just for South Africans, but for people striving to advance human dignity, equality and freedom across the world today.

It is now over forty years since Steve Biko died in detention and the major Black Consciousness organizations were banned. Now forty years later, the face of black politics and indeed the whole balance of power in South Africa, has changed almost beyond recognition - and yet the memory of Biko and the imprint of Black Consciousness remain indelibly with us.

In this book a number of Biko’s colleagues and friends have come together to reassess the achievements of Biko and Black Consciousness, and to examine the rich legacy they have left us. In their chapters they reflect on the many ways in which the Black Consciousness Movement succeeded in transforming black minds and politics by freeing people to take their destiny into their own hands - encouraging them to press the very limits and redefine what had been accepted as the bounds of possibility.

Black Consciousness left a legacy of defiance in action and inspired a culture of fearlessness which was carried forward by the township youth in 1976 and sustained throughout the 1980s. For it is in South Africa’s township that there has been an awakening of the people, people who finally made the politicians move.

Jan Christiaan Smuts was ’n soldaat, staatsman, intellektueel en een van Suid-Afrika se grootste leiers. Tog word daar vandag min oor hom gepraat of geskryf, al beleef ons tans skynbaar ’n leierskapsvakuum.

In Jan Smuts: Afrikaner Sonder Grense voer Richard Steyn aan dat ons hierdie indrukwekkende kryger-staatsman se lewe en denke moet herbesoek, omdat daar soveel te leer is uit sy merkwaardige prestasies. Die hoogs leesbare verslag ondersoek onder meer Smuts se rol as politieke leier, as adviseur van wêreldleiers, sy spirituele en intellektuele lewe en sy verhoudings met vroue. Sy unieke bydraes op ʼn verskeidenheid ander terreine, insluitend botanie, bewaring en filosofie, word ook bespreek.

Jan Smuts: Afrikaner Sonder Grense skram egter nie weg van die paradoksale in Smuts nie. Hoewel hy een van die argitekte van die Verenigde Nasies en ʼn groot kampvegter vir menseregte was, kon hy nie so ver kom om die plaaslike swart meerderheid politieke regte te gun nie.

Internationally-renowned historian Hermann Giliomee has himself been intimately involved in the unfolding drama of South Africa’s history, as participant at the Dakar talks with the ANC, as outspoken commentator for the English press, and as leading thinker on the Afrikaners. Giliomee’s lucidity and original insights make this more than just his own story. It is also a gripping narrative, filled with anecdotes and revealing inner workings of the Afrikaner establishment.

It is often thought that Dulcie September, Anton Lubowski and Chris Hani were assassinated by apartheid forces simply because they were freedom fighters. But Evelyn Groenink’s painstaking research, conducted over the past 30 years, shows that they were much more than that: they also stood against arms traders and mafias that had invaded the liberation movements. It was their fight against corruption that cost them their lives.

One of the most explosive revelations in this book concerns the murder of Chris Hani. Groenink reveals how the police buried evidence and how the state’s “brave” star eyewitness in all likelihood hadn’t even been at the murder scene. Beside the fact that Hani is widely revered as the incorruptible fighter who is sorely missed, the mystery of the murder itself still fascinates South Africans too. Was there a wider conspiracy? This book says there was and it substantiates it meticulously, with evidence – inter alia – from the police docket itself.

With regard to the Dulcie September case, as Dulcie’s nephew says in an endorsement of the book, no one has done such thorough research. And certainly no one has, to date, revealed why exactly Dulcie had to die. Until this book, that is. At once murder mystery and personal journey of an investigative journalist, the book speaks to a yearning for the fight against corruption to be successful. Political mafia deals are, after all, still making victims in South Africa: Groenink refers to the Mbombela stadium murder of honest city councillor Jimmy Mohlala in 2010, and the mysterious disappearance in 2017 of South Africa’s “Mr Nuclear” Senti Thobejane.

Nevertheless – which would be important to the reader looking for light at the end of the tunnel – she also notes hope in the strong anti-corruption movement that is growing in South Africa today.

The traditional image of a political assassin is a lone wolf with a gun, aimed squarely at the head of those they wish to kill. But while there has been enormous speculation on what lay behind notorious individual political assassinations – from Gaius Julius Caesar to John F. Kennedy – the phenomenon itself has scarcely been examined as a special category of political violence, one not motivated by personal gain or vengeance.

Now, in Day of the Assassins, acclaimed historian Michael Burleigh explores the many facets of political assassination, explaining the role of historical precedent, why it is more frequent in certain types of society than others and asking if assassination can either bring about change, or prevent it, and whether, like a contagious disease, political murder can be catching. Focusing chiefly on the last century and a half, Burleigh takes readers to the Congo, India, Iran, Laos, Rwanda and South Africa and revisits notable assassinations in Europe, Russia, Israel and the United States.

Throughout, the assassins themselves are at the centre of the narrative, whether they were cool, well-trained professional killers, like the agents of the NKVD or the KGB, or men motivated by the politicization of their private miseries. Even some of those who were demonstrably mad had method in the madness and acted for comprehensible political motives.

Combining human drama, questions of political morality and the sheer randomness of events, Day of the Assassins is a riveting insight into the politics of violence.

The infamous Seriti Commission into the arms deal. The Glenister case following the disbanding of the Scorpions. Busting open the bread manufacturers’ cartel.

High drama; high stakes brought to South Africa courtesy of the Accountability Now NGO, and its founder Paul Hoffman.

Join him in his journey from jaded silk to corruption buster – a fly-on-the-wall account of courtroom battles, influential personalities, secrets and lies in the battle to speak truth to power.

#FeesMustFall, the student revolt that began in October 2015, was an uprising against lack of access to, and financial exclusion from, higher education in South Africa. More broadly, it radically questioned the socio-political dispensation resulting from the 1994 social pact between big business, the ruling elite and the liberation movement.

The 2015 revolt links to national and international youth struggles of the recent past and is informed by Black Consciousness politics and social movements of the international Left. Yet, its objectives are more complex than those of earlier struggles. The student movement has challenged the hierarchical, top-down leadership system of university management and it’s ‘double speak’ of professing to act in workers’ and students’ interests yet enforce a regressive system for control and governance. University managements, while one one level amenable to change, have also co-opted students into their ranks to create co-responsibility for the highly bureaucratised university financial aid that stand in the way of their social revolution.

This book maps the contours of student discontent a year after the start of the #FeesMustFall revolt. Student voices dissect coloniality, improper compromises by the founders of democratic South Africa, feminism, worker rights and meaningful education. In-depth assessments by prominent scholars reflect on the complexities of student activism, its impact on national and university governance, and offer provocative analyses of the power of the revolt.

Their love story was one of the greatest of our times.

Ruth Williams was a middle-class Londoner who loved ballroom dancing and ice skating when she met Seretse Khama. He was chief designate of the most powerful tribe in Bechuanaland, today Botswana, on the borders of apartheid South Africa. Their union sparked outrage, fear and anger. Ruth’s father barred her from their family home, she was hounded by the global media and shunned by white people in Seretse’s village of Serowe. The couple was humiliated, tricked and eventually exiled to England. But, despite all these tribulations, their love triumphed over the politics and prejudice of the time.

This is the story Ruth Khama told well-known journalist and author Sue Grant-Marshall ‒ the story of an extraordinary woman, who had the courage of her convictions in marrying the man she loved and accepting his country and people as her own.

From former MK soldier Sandi Sijake comes a unique and revelatory memoir of the incredible and largely untold story of the beginnings of uMkhonto weSizwe and the early Pan-African and Soviet efforts to arm and train the new freedom army.

From Sudan to Egypt, from Tanganyika to Tashkent, Sijake’s extraordinary recall takes the reader on a gripping journey and a moving reflection on his burning desire to fight for freedom. Equally absorbing Sijake’s account of his time on Robben Island, the personalities from the different liberation groups, early moves towards negotiations and an account of daily life on the Island.

Born in 1945 in the Eastern Cape, Sandi Sijake joined the ANC in 1959 and left for exile in 1963. Captured in 1972, Sijake was sentenced in 1973 to 15 years and sent to Robben Island. Released in 1988, Sijake joined the SANDF in 1995, and in 2009 he was elected president of the ANC Veteran’s League.

Dit is die verhaal van ’n vrou wat haar familie in ’n terreuraanval verloor. Dit vertel van ’n gelowige wat in gehoorsaamheid leef, net sodat die mat onder haar uitgeruk kan word. Die boek sal die leser aanmoedig om die werklike koste van ons geloof te bereken, na te dink oor die karakter van God en ons identiteit as Sy kinders. Hannelie se verhaal is ’n merkwaardige getuienis van ’n lewe in geloof en die krag van vergifnis.

In this fresh and highly readable collection of South African biographical essays, a distinguished group of authors illuminates the lives of eleven colourful, complex men and women whose personal experiences throw fascinating light on the times in which they lived.

The individuals whose stories are told here are very different in time, in place and in work and at play, but are united by an abundantly rich humanity and the myriad ways in which they navigated their existence through the uneven terrain of South Africa's distant and more recent past. Including colonial administrators, activists, educationists, sportsmen, a poet, a painter and a pilot, Illuminating Lives is a wide-ranging and moving book that provides readers with striking and unexpected insights into our history.

Here are some intriguing South African lives well worth knowing about.

Once an enemy of the apartheid police, Andrew Brown has worked as a police reservist for almost twenty years. In this book he takes the reader on patrol with him – into the ganglands of the Cape Flats, the townships of Masiphumelele and Nyanga, and the high-walled Southern Suburbs.

Good Cop, Bad Cop is a personal account of the perilous and often conflicting work of a SAPS officer. Brown describes being shot at, arresting suspects in a drug bust, chasing down leads in a homicide investigation and keeping the peace during the UCT student protests. Brown illustrates how difficult the job of the police is, and how easy it is to react with undue force. Yet he argues passionately that the role of the police is to be a service to communities and not a force to suppress social discontent.

Gripping and thought-provoking, this is a fascinating insight into the social fabric of current South Africa.

After state capture, South Africa is f*cked and not in a good place. The system is down so how do we reboot?

We aren’t the first country to find itself in a difficult spot so we can ask ourselves why have some countries been successful and others not so much? How can South Africa pick itself up to become a thriving state? Roy Havemann answers these questions in this engaging, accessible book and argues that right now we need to focus on six basics: Eskom, Education, the Environment, Exports, Equality and Ethics.

It’s time to stop raking over the coals of who is to blame for our problems and focus on the future, looking at how other countries have overcome challenges similar to ours and how we can practically implement a set of policies that will get South Africa back on track.

The apartheid security juggernaut met its Battle of Stalingrad in the townships of Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage in 1985 and 1986. This is the blazing story of how the people’s resistance – in the church, in the civic structures, underground – fought that war.

Up until these insurrections, the brutal force of the apartheid state successfully crushed all attempts at revolt. Yet in the townships of Port Elizabeth, where they threw everything they had at the uprisings, the people stood and fought, and fought and stood.

Riordan, a human rights activist during the years of high apartheid, draws a line connecting the story of Thozamile Botha, the Zwide and KwaZakhele Residents’ Associations and the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Association (PEBCO) of 1979, the subsequent demise of PEBCO, and the February 1990 unbanning of the ANC and the movement at large.

What had happened in the intervening ten years to effect this once unimaginable change? Apartheid’s Stalingrad tells us what had happened.

Priscilla Jana is a legendary figure in South African revolutionary politics. As an Indian woman who had experienced racial oppression first-hand, she decided to use her degree in law to fight for the rights of her fellow people and do all she could to bring down the Apartheid state - who saw her as a very real threat. At one time she represented every single political prisoner on Robben Island, including both the late Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie. Priscilla spent her days in court, fighting human rights case after human rights case, but it was at night when her real work was done. As part of an underground cell, she fought tirelessly to bring down the hated government. This activism, however, came at a price. One of South Africa's infamous 'banned persons', for five years Priscilla was unable to take part in any political activities, enter any place where a large number of people were gathered, and had her movements severely restricted. Worse, her own home was attacked with petrol bombs on multiple occasions. Undeterred, Priscilla Jana continued her work, even adopting the baby daughter of a client imprisoned on Robben Island, bringing here up, educating her, and providing a loving home. Finally, upon Mandela's release and the political revolution of her beloved country, Priscilla's work was rewarded, as she was elected as a member of South Africa's first democratic parliament. Later, she was to become an ambassador to both The Netherlands and Ireland. Now retired and living in Cape Town, Priscilla still works and waits for her most fervent desire: the true healing and unification of South Africa.

“There were three other people present, or five, depending on whom one chooses to include. Five, let’s say, the men divided from the women according to the timeworn tradition… The ceremony lasted precisely thirty minutes, as had been agreed on well in advance, not a second longer. One of the people present announced the end in a voice as blunt as it was relieved.”

What kind of bar mitzvah lasts no more than thirty minutes? Which five people could have been in attendance, and where could such a ceremony –– if there really was a ceremony –– have taken place under these circumstances? This book has echoes of a detective trail and as Denis Hirson gradually reveals the answers, he explores the wider ancestral and political strands of his story.

We are reminded of what the world might have looked like to a thirteen-year-old boy in the Johannesburg of the 1960s. This perspective is, thanks to his daughter, set against that same boy’s adult understanding of what had happened. This is a breathtaking account of the author being confronted by his own past.

In January 2003, Paul O’Sullivan, then a board member at Airports Company South Africa, opened a criminal docket against Jackie Selebi, South Africa’s chief of police and global head of Interpol, after discovering that Selebi was on the payroll of notorious drug trafficker Glenn Agliotti. In 2010, Selebi was convicted of corruption and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Released on medical parole, he died at home in 2015 without spending a day in prison.

In May 2012, O’Sullivan uncovered false stories published by the Sunday Times alluding to so-called Zimbabwe renditions. The stories were used to fire good cops, gain control of the police, and capture the South African criminal justice system. In October 2012, O’Sullivan opened a criminal docket against Crime Intelligence boss Richard Mdluli and National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) bosses, Lawrence Mrwebi and Nomgcobo Jiba. Jiba was later fired from the NPA, and both Mrwebi and Mdluli were suspended from their positions. Mdluli went on to be convicted of unrelated offences and was sent to prison.

By early 2016, O’Sullivan’s corruption-busting charity Forensics for Justice had opened no fewer than fifty criminal dockets relating to the underworld capture of the criminal justice system and state-owned companies like South African Airways, the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, Eskom and Transnet.

This is the story of how a corrupt police and prosecution service tried desperately to stop O’Sullivan from exposing the dark underbelly of South Africa – and how they ultimately failed. It is the story of a man who, against all odds and at immense personal cost, refused to give up on his quest to turn the tide against corruption. While many of these criminals still walk freely among us today, they will all be held accountable for what they have done – O’Sullivan will make sure of that.

In November 1993, ANC activist and development worker Clare Stewart’s body was found in a shallow ditch in rural KwaZulu-Natal as the province sat on the brink of civil war. Amid the ensuing chaos and euphoria of South Africa’s ‘new dawn’, the details of Clare's killing would stay hidden beneath the surface.

This gripping, moving account of Clare’s life and the mystery surrounding her death touches on the fragility of memory, family loss, apartheid’s evils, and the fault lines in our democracy.