At a time of radical shifts in power across the globe, the sixth edition of An Introduction to Political Communication examines the role of the media in the political process. Brian McNair reflects on the role of communication in key events such as the referendum vote for the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, the rise of nationalist populism in Europe, and the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. He explores the use of communication as a weapon by Islamic State and other insurgent organisations, and by Putin's Russia in its dealings with the West, including the hacking of Democratic Party emails in 2016. McNair argues that an expanding globalised public sphere and digital media network have transformed political communication, allowing political actors, from politicians and pressure groups to trade unions and terrorist organisations, to bypass traditional, established media in communicating their messages. This sixth edition of McNair's classic text has been comprehensively revised and updated to include: the 2016 US presidential election and Donald Trump's rise to power; the UK's EU referendum of 2016, the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the 'snap' UK general election of June 2017; the growing role in political communication of the internet and social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and their destabilising impact on the management of political crises all over the world including the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH17 and the disappearance of MH370, the Tianjin disaster in China and the Russian intervention in Ukraine; Islamic State's global jihad, and the use of social media as an instrument of terror; the growing capacity of WikiLeaks and other online sources, such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, to challenge elite control of information.

Nonkululeko Gobodo made her mark in business as the first black female Chartered Accountant in South Africa, a great and rare feat for a black woman growing up in apartheid South Africa.

If she was told at 17 years old, while pregnant, that she would be a valiant voice of her generation, she would have laughed it off in disbelief. Nonkululeko’s career has always been about embodying black excellence, and in this book, she bares her own perspective on deep-seated issues of racism, prejudice against women, discrimination, and mental brokenness; themes that continue to taunt our minds today.

The book is a culmination of her passion to see black people and women awakened to their true selves. It is a reflective celebration of self, courage and the remarkable spirit of resilience that lies within us all.

The clarity in her voice comes through so well that it feels like she’s in the room with you, narrating her life story in an unhurried conversation. Her discerning view on the ego and one’s ability to be both wise and foolish, strong and weak, is meditative and inspiring. True to the book’s title, she comes into her own through her unordinary journey of trauma, healing and self-love that has awakened her to her true purpose.

Be inspired and motivated, get your copy today.

It's time to fight back.

Each day, more South Africans are targeted, labelled, and hounded out of society for expressing their opinions - ordinary opinions that just a few years ago were accepted as rational common sense. Have you been "cancelled" by an online mob that won't stop harassing you until you're fired from your job? Helen Zille almost was - but she survived by fighting back. In #StayWoke: Go Broke, the bestselling author and defining South African political figure explains why the woke Left constitutes a greater threat to South Africa's future than the populist Right does.

Now more than ever, liberals must strengthen their spines and fight for their values - or be eviscerated in the Culture Wars raging across the English-speaking world. If you're looking for an incisive, indispensable survival guide through this tumultuous period of South African history, then #StayWoke: Go Broke is for you.

In 1973 the trade union movement was both racially and regionally divided. It virtually excluded African workers, and in many cases unions were led by cautious and paternalistic leaders, long schooled in avoiding confrontation with either the state or employers. Then widespread strikes erupted in Durban where hundreds of thousands of workers downed tools in support of wage demands. It was a militant explosion unprecedented since the apartheid government had crushed and outlawed mass demonstrations against segregation and 'whites-only' rule. And it provided the impetus for the next decade and a half of trade union organisation, which succeeded in uniting workers on a largely non-racial basis, dominated by the slogan 'one industry one union'.

Maverick Insider is an anecdotal, insider's account of the transformation during this period in the textile, clothing and leather worker sectors. It focuses on the outlooks of leadership groups in different parts of that industry and their efforts to influence the nature of the amalgamation of six unions to form the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union (SACTWU), one of the three largest unions of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It traces the interaction between union leadership and both political parties and community organisations dedicated to making the country ungovernable, as well as those who were determined to stamp out such calls. It details struggles to unite workers across political divides in the same union organisation and to assert an independent working-class point of view in a period of growing African nationalism. It details the traumatic events on the road to the so-called peaceful miracle that created a rainbow nation but left 22 000 South Africans dead in the process.

And it is the story of a team of people who set out to change the world and formed an unshakeable bond in the process.

Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.

Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.

That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection.

At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.

None of it went as planned.

While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.

That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.

Political theorist Steven Friedman addresses how and why the current language around anti-Semitism in Israel has been distorted and weaponised to serve the political objectives of the Israeli state. Friedman’s critique examines what this implies for the fight against racism in South Africa and India, and in other parts of the world.

Good Jew, Bad Jew is a critique by one of South Africa’s foremost political theorists of mainstream understandings of Jewishness. Steven Friedman offers a searing analysis of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in service of political objectives that support the Israeli state and global white supremacy. Looking specifically at the way in which language is used to shape identities, Friedman uses many examples to illustrate how anyone that opposes the interests and policies of the Israeli state is increasingly defined as anti-Semitic.

The use of anti-racist language to defend racial domination distorts not only the meaning of what it is to be Jewish, but sheds light on how all dogmatic nationalisms function. Friedman uses India and South Africa as examples, but the analysis applies across the world too.

This is a detailed, deeply researched and critical work that will appeal to both specialists and general readers looking for a considered view on how language shapes belief systems, and how the powerful forces of racism and nationalism – and their opponents – are being misrepresented.

An in-depth study of the assassination of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon at the hand of apartheid spy, Craig Williamson and explores how the lives of a group of white radicals intersected with and were impacted by the undercover security police and their operations both within and outside of South Africa.

On 28 June 1984 a parcel bomb sent by the apartheid security police exploded in an apartment building in Lubango, Angola, killing 36-year-old Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter Katryn. The Schoons were members of the revolutionary underground, exiled from South Africa and committed to both the African National Congress and to socialism. What many political activists had feared or suspected at the time was confirmed during the 1990s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the bomb targeting the Schoons was sent by Craig Williamson, an apartheid spy and high-ranking member of the South African security service.

Apartheid Spies and the Revolutionary Underground is the first book-length account of the assassination of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon. Jeanette Curtis Schoon and Craig Williamson first met in 1973 on the Wits University campus. Jeanette was a passionate student radical and part of a network of white radicals fighting apartheid. Williamson had successfully infiltrated the student movement and rose within its ranks. He held positions of trust, first within the National Union of South African Students and then, after pretending to ‘flee’ the country, as an office-bearer of the International Universities Exchange Fund in Sweden, which helped fund many South Africans in exile.

The book uncovers how the lives of a group of white radicals intersected with and were impacted by the undercover security police and their operations both within and outside of South Africa. Intensifying political oppression caused many young radicals to flee South Africa in 1976; many of them, like Jeanette and her partner Marius Schoon, joined the African National Congress in exile. Williamson and the Schoons’ paths, and those of their comrades, continued to cross he was a guest in their homes, a supplier of funds for their projects, a witness for the prosecution in political trials and, ultimately, the hand that directed targeted assassinations.

Williamson received amnesty for his role in the Schoons’ murder, among other crimes. For the friends and family of the Schoons – and for all those seeking social justice – this was an unacceptable outcome, and Williamson continues to walk a free man. This book attempts to show the limits of the TRC process to render healing from South Africa’s apartheid past. That justice has not been served to the Schoons remains a tragedy in this story of the struggle against apartheid.

George Bizos is one of a distinguished group of human rights lawyers who in the dark days of apartheid sought to uncover the state's role in eliminating its opponents.

Some, like Biko, Timol and Aggett, were arrested and died in detention, while others, like Matthew Goniwe, were abducted and killed. As counsel for the families of the deceased, George Bizos was centrally involved in many of the inquests following these high-profile deaths.

He is thus well placed to tell the story of the great courtroom dramas in which, with devastating skill, he and his colleagues pared away the tissue of lies protecting the security forces and the state functionaries—only to be rewarded with the invariable finding that there was 'no one to blame'.

Some thirty-five years after its original publication, Year of Fire, Year of Ash still stands as one of the leading accounts of the 1976-77 Soweto Revolt, one of the most significant acts of resistance in the history of the anti-apartheid movement.

Authored by a South African activist and scholar who was intimately involved in the movement, the book provides an unparalleled insight into the origins and events of the uprising, from its antecedents in the early 1970s to its role in galvanizing the global struggle against apartheid. Crucially, the book overturned much of the conventional logic around the uprising, by showing that it was not simply a student protest, but a revolt by the wider black working class.

As South Africa experiences a new wave of popular revolt, and as new forms of black consciousness come to the fore in movements around the world, Hirson's book provides a timely reminder of the continued significance of the Soweto revolt to struggles against oppression today.

A NEW YORK TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, HISTORY TODAY AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR.

A searing, landmark study of the British Empire that lays bare its pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century.

Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Caroline Elkins reveals the dark heart of Britain's Empire: a racialised, systemised doctrine of unrelenting violence, which it used to secure and maintain its interests across the globe.

When Britain could no longer maintain control over that violence, it simply retreated - and sought to destroy the evidence. Legacy of Violence is a monumental achievement that explodes long-held myths and deserves the attention of anyone who seeks to understand empire's role in shaping the world today.

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country.

Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.

Long Walk To Freedom is his moving autobiography, in which he tells the extraordinary story of his life - an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph!

Democracy is being destroyed. This is a crisis that expresses itself in the rising authoritarianism visible in divisive and exclusionary politics, populist political parties and movements, increased distrust in fact-based information and news, and the withering accountability of state institutions. What is less obvious is that the sources of the democratic rot are integral to the systemic crisis generated by neoliberal capitalism, which assigns economic metrics to all aspects of life. In other words, the crisis of democracy is the political crisis of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last four decades, democracy has radically shifted to a market democracy in which all aspects of human, non-human and planetary life are commodified, with corporations becoming more powerful than states and their citizens.

Volume six of the Democratic Marxism series focuses on how decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded the global democratic project and how, in the process, authoritarian politics are gaining ground. Scholars and activists from the left focus on four country cases – India, Brazil, South Africa and the United States of America – in which the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled and highlighted the pre-existing crisis. They interrogate issues of politics, ecology, state security, media, access to information and political parties, and affirm the need to reclaim and re-build an expansive and inclusive democracy.

Destroying Democracy is an invaluable resource for the general public, activists, scholars and students who are interested in understanding the threats to democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the global global South and global North.

The Struggle Continues is a “searing, heartfelt, brutally honest account of the turbulent modern history of Zimbabwe” (Douglas Rogers author of The Last Resort).

This autobiographical political history since the 1950s deals with an era of great turbulence from the perspective a person who has been at the centre of the great Zimbabwean drama for over 30 years, David Coltart.

It is set to be the most authoritative book to date of the last sixty years of Zimbabwe’s history, described by the doyenne of Southern African journalists, Peta Thornycroft, as “a masterpiece”: from the obstinate racism of Ian Smith that provoked Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, to the civil war of the 1970s, the Gukurahundi genocide of the 1980s, the land invasions of the 2000s, Robert Mugabe’s Murambatsvina war on poor urban dwellers in 2005, and the struggles waged by the MDC in confronting a brutal regime.

When Chris Hani, leader of the South African Communist Party and heir apparent to Nelson Mandela, was brutally slain in his driveway in April 1993, he left a shocked and grieving South Africa on the precipice of civil war. But to 12-year-old Lindiwe, it was the love of her life, her daddy, who had been shockingly ripped from her life. In this intimate and brutally honest memoir, 36-year-old Lindiwe remembers the years she shared with her loving father, and the toll that his untimely death took on the Hani family. She lays family skeletons bare and brings to the fore her own downward spiral into cocaine and alcohol addiction, a desperate attempt to avoid the pain of his brutal parting.

While the nation continued to revere and honour her father’s legacy, for Lindiwe, being Chris Hani’s daughter became an increasingly heavy burden to bear.

"For as long as I can remember, I’d grown up feeling that I was the daughter of Chris Hani and that I was useless. My father was such a huge figure, such an icon to so many people, it felt like I could never be anything close to what he achieved – so why even try? Of course my addiction to booze and cocaine just made me feel my worthlessness even more".

In a stunning turnaround, she faces her demons, not just those that haunted her through her addiction, but, with the courage that comes with sobriety, she comes face to face with her father’s two killers – Janus Walus, still incarcerated, and Clive Derby Lewis, released in 2015 on medical parole. In a breathtaking twist of humanity, while searching for the truth behind her father’s assassination, Lindiwe Hani ultimately makes peace with herself and honours her father’s gigantic spirit.

A riveting, kaleidoscopic account of nine tumultuous days, as the assassination of Nelson Mandela’s protégé by a white supremacist threatens to derail South Africa’s democratic transition and plunge the nation into civil war.

Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela has been free for three years and is in power sharing talks with President FW de Klerk when a white supremacist shoots the Black leader’s popular young heir apparent, Chris Hani, in hopes of igniting an all-out war. Will he succeed in plunging South Africa into chaos, safeguarding apartheid for perhaps years to come?

In The Plot to Save South Africa, acclaimed South African journalist Justice Malala recounts the gripping story of the next nine days, as the government and Mandela’s ANC seek desperately to restore the peace and root out just how far up into the country’s leadership the far-right plot goes. Told from the points of view of over a dozen characters on all sides of the conflict, Malala offers an illuminating look at successful leadership in action and a terrifying reminder of just how close a country we think of today as a model for racial reconciliation came to civil war.

Contesting one’s place remains central to confronting the lingering impact of colonisation and apartheid, emerging as it does out of the intermingling of our environments, histories, languages and experiences. In this volume, architects, anthropologists, artists, urban planners, activists and historians examine the ways in which people are rethinking, repurposing and reusing colonial and apartheid architecture and infrastructure. They seek to engage with ways in which history, art and architecture practices contest and subvert these protracted conditions in terms of social justice, development, conservation, heritage, land reclamation and urban renewal.

The focus is on colonial environments in different parts of South Africa and Africa to understand the history of disputed places and responses of remembrance, communal consideration, revival and conflict. In recent years, public awareness of the physical and environmental reminders of this past has been sharpened by sporadic campaigns and ongoing disputes around land, gentrification, repatriation and heritage. Globally, there has been a wave of public outcry and contestation about the place of racist names and statues in public spaces, litigation over abandoned and toxic sites, with calls for removal and restitution as an integral part of decolonisation. And there has been recognition of the lived experiences, knowledge and activities through which people and communities build their heritage.

In this context, questions about the place of colonial and apartheid planning and architecture and their past acquire salience and urgency in the present.

Throughout the past 50 years, the courts have been a battleground for contesting political forces as more and more conflicts that were once fought in Parliament or in streets, or through strikes and media campaigns, find their way to the judiciary.

Certainly, the legal system was used by both the apartheid state and its opponents. But it is in the post-apartheid era, and in particular under the rule of President Jacob Zuma, that we have witnessed a dramatic increase in ‘lawfare’: the migration of politics to the courts.

The authors show through a series of case studies how just about every aspect of political life ends up in court: the arms deal, the demise of the Scorpions, the Cabinet reshuffle, the expulsion of the EFF from Parliament, the nuclear procurement process, the Cape Town mayor…

The death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela on 2 April this year unleashed a hailstorm of opinion. On one side, Winnie's legacy was under construction by the media and public in the shadow of her sanctified ex-husband, casting Winnie as history's loser.

Msimang - who in the last few years has reflected extensively on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela - stood on the side of a younger generation, particularly of black women, who sought to reclaim Ma Winnie's identity as an extraordinary woman and fierce political activist. Examining that early impulse, Msimang has written a succinct, razor-sharp book. It is a primer for young feminists, popular culture enthusiasts and those interested in the politics of memory, reconciliation and justice, and a book that is as much about a woman as it is about the country she left behind.

The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela is an astute examination of one of South Africa's most controversial political figures. It charts the rise and fall - and rise, again - of a woman who not only battled the apartheid regime, but the patriarchal character of the society that moulded her. In telling Ma Winnie's story, Sisonke Msimang demonstrates the vital link between reclaiming the lives of one complex woman, and activism aimed at restoring the dignity of all women.

The 1930s and 40s were tumultuous decades in South Africa’s history. The economy declined sharply in the wake of the Wall Street crash, giving rise to a huge number of poor whites and the growth of a militant and aggressive Afrikaner nationalism that often took its lead from the Nazis in Germany.

A Perfect Storm reveals how the right-wing’s malevolent message moved from the margins to the centre of political life; how antisemitism seeped into mainstream political life with real and lasting consequences. Milton Shain, South Africa’s leading scholar of modern Jewish history, brings into sharp relief the ‘Jewish Problem’, detailing the rise of influential organisations such as the Grey Shirts and the New Order, which fanned the flames of antisemitism. He devotes considerable attention to the Ossewa-Brandwag, which, by 1941, constituted the largest yet mobilisation of Afrikaners.

The National Party itself contributed to the climate of hostility to Jews. It was instrumental in ensuring that only few of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and elsewhere were permitted as immigrants. The National Party contributed to the prevailing climate of Jew-baiting. Indeed, some of its worst offenders were accorded high office after 1948 when the National Party came to power.

On the 14th October, 2020, Angelo Agrizzi, one of South Africa's foremost whistleblowers, leaves home at 6am to attend a routine bail court hearing at the Palm Ridge Magistrate Court. After being informed to first meet at the Brackendowns Police Station, he finds himself locked up in a military tank, under special forces guard, accompanied to court by a massive convoy of blue light brigades. He is told that this is for his own "protection".

Agrizzi is at first unperturbed – he's far more excited at the prospect that his explosive Bosasa tell-all memoir, Inside The Belly of the Beast will be going to print by lunch time. In a sinister turn of events, the court denies him bail on the unfounded basis that he poses a flight risk. Agrizzi is ferried off to notorious Sun City, Johannesburg Central Prison. On hearing the judgement broadcast across the media, his publishing house inexplicably pulls the book. And so as the wheels of (in)justice start turning, the printing press grinds to a halt. That night, alone in his filthy prison cell, now in the very clutches of those he exposed at Zondo, an attempt is made on Agrizzi's life.

Surviving The Beast exposes the highest echelons of power's involvement in dirty tricks, corruption, boardroom assassinations, lies, deceit and cover-ups. There are murders and the swopping of bodies. It is also a compelling memoir of one man's victory over death.

In this sequel to his bestseller, Inside the Belly of the Beast - The Real Bosasa Story, Agrizzi's new book explores, in bone-chilling detail, the failings of the Commission of State Capture and why so many big fish still swim free. Substantiated by irrefutable proof, medical records and key witness statements, Surviving The Beast uncovers what really happens to those who expose the powerful and corrupted.

In order to look to the future, we must first understand the past. On 2 November 2016, then Public Protector Thuli Madonsela ordered a Commission of Inquiry into State Capture. Chaired by Judge Raymond Zondo, the commission began proceedings on 21 August 2018. After three years of staggering testimonies, the breadth and depth of how South Africa was captured has been laid bare for a traumatised nation to comprehend.

Days Of Zondo is the definitive guide to what was formally exposed during the commission; with players ranging from the Gupta family to former president Jacob Zuma, Gupta lieutenant Salim Essa, Ace Magashule, former NPA boss Shaun Abrahams, Brian Molefe, Bosasa's Angelo Agrizzi, numerous ministers and associates, business leaders and corporate entities. This tangled web of corruption and criminality is unravelled by award-winning journalist Ferial Haffajee as she leads the threader through Zondo's biggest moments and the most shocking admissions, and makes sense of the commission's findings.

With infographics and timelines that give a bird's-eye view of the key findings from the commission's report, including how much money was spent, how much was lost and where it could have helped us improve the quality of life for ordinary South African citizens. It also includes commentary from Ismail Momoniat, deputy director-general at the National Treasury, and Ivor Chipkin, a leading scholar of government and public policy in South Africa and internationally.

Land In South Africa examines how land and agrarian reform impacts nation building, citizenship, and identity formation. The publication draws attention to the limitations of reducing land to a commodity, and how this approach perpetuates social conflict and inequality in land reform policy implementation.

The book posits an alternative policy paradigm, which discusses contested meanings of land and their relation to nation formation. It brings to the fore citizen stakeholder perspectives from former labour tenants, citizens residing in communally owned land, women subsistence farmers, peasant movements and land reform civil society groups.

The chapters investigate the diverse and contested meanings of land to elevate how South Africans perceive land justice and reform, while also including several international case studies. The publication argues that land power relations and policy debates are constitutive components of nation building. And, importantly, that land shapes essential pillars in nation formation such as citizenship, political identity, heritage, a sense of belonging and social disparities.

The issue of land rights is an ongoing and complex topic of debate for South Africans. Rights to Land comes at a time when land redistribution by government is underway. This book seeks to understand the issues around land rights and distribution of land in South Africa and proposes that new policies and processes should be developed and adopted. It further provides an analysis of what went so wrong, and warns that a new phase of restitution may ignite conflicting ethnic claims and facilitate elite capture of land and rural resources.

While there are no quick fixes, the first phase of restitution should be completed and the policy then curtailed. The book argues that land ownership and administration is important to rural democracy and that this should not be placed under the control of traditionalist intermediaries. Land restitution, initiated in 1994, was an important response to the injustices of the apartheid era. But it was intended as a limited and short-term process – initially to be completed in five years.

It may continue for decades, creating uncertainty and undermining investment into agriculture.

An award-winning historian and journalist tells the very human story of apartheid's afterlife, tracing the fates of South African insurgents, collaborators, and the security police through the tale of the clandestine photo album used to target apartheid's enemies. From the 1960s until the early 1990s, the South African security police and counterinsurgency units collected over 7,000 photographs of apartheid's enemies.

The political rogue's gallery was known as the "terrorist album," copies of which were distributed covertly to police stations throughout the country. Many who appeared in the album were targeted for surveillance. Sometimes the security police tried to turn them; sometimes the goal was elimination. All of the albums were ordered destroyed when apartheid's violent collapse began. But three copies survived the memory purge.

With full access to one of these surviving albums, award-winning South African historian and journalist, Jacob Dlamini investigates the story behind these images: their origins, how they were used, and the lives they changed. Extensive interviews with former targets and their family members testify to the brutal and often careless work of the police. Although the police certainly hunted down resisters, the terrorist album also contains mug shots of bystanders and even regime supporters.

Their inclusion is a stark reminder that apartheid's guardians were not the efficient, if morally compromised, law enforcers of legend but rather blundering agents of racial panic. With particular attentiveness to the afterlife of apartheid, Dlamini uncovers the stories of former insurgents disenchanted with today?s South Africa, former collaborators seeking forgiveness, and former security police reinventing themselves as South Africa's newest export: "security consultants" serving as mercenaries for Western nations and multinational corporations.

The Terrorist Album is a brilliant evocation of apartheid's tragic caprice, ultimate failure, and grim legacy.

South Africa’s story is often presented as a triumph of new over old, but while formal apartheid was abolished decades ago, stark and distressing similarities persist.

Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh explores the edifice of systemic racial oppression — the new apartheid — that continues to thrive, despite or even because of our democratic system.