Solidarity Road tells the story of Jan Theron’s involvement in the Food and Canning Workers Union (FCWU) during apartheid South Africa. Part memoir, part history this fascinating tale will reveal what working conditions were like in the 1970’s. It outlines the very beginnings of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Theron states, ‘Solidarity in a trade union does not simply mean standing by your members, or by organised workers. It means solidarity with your class. At the time, in 1976, the working class was fragmented. Working for a trade union was part of a project to unite a fragmented class, and to give it a voice. This was the historical project to which a number of people from a certain intellectual background were drawn. This would be our contribution to the struggle: what we did to end apartheid. It was a struggle for democracy, but democracy did not just mean everyone getting to vote every so often in national elections. People also had to eat.

The most obvious way in which the working class was then fragmented was in terms of race. The Union put its commitment to solidarity into practice by uniting workers of different races in factories manufacturing food. To do so it had to overcome divisions among workers created by the ways in which government had structured employment, in terms of the law, which the bosses were able to exploit. Nowadays ‘bosses’ seems like a dated term, yet this is the term workers used to refer to the people for whom they actually worked. It is also no less important today than it was then to differentiate between those who control the factories and mines and those who operate at their behest.

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.

When Bridget Hilton-Barber got on a train to Grahamstown in 1982 to study journalism at Rhodes University, she had no idea of the brutal drama that would unfold.

A rebellious young woman, she became politically involved in anti-apartheid organisations and was caught up in the massive resistance and repression sweeping the Eastern Cape at the time. She ended up spending three months in detention without trial, and after her release discovered she had been betrayed by one of her best friends, Olivia Forsyth, who was a spy for the South African security police.

Thirty years later, a horrific flashback triggers Bridget’s journey back to the Eastern Cape to see if she can forgive her betrayer and finally let go of the extraordinary violence she encountered in the final days of apartheid. This is her powerful story.

A fresh, nuanced look at an extraordinary woman and her lifelong fight for justice. Defying the constraints of her gender and class, Emily Hobhouse travelled across continents and spoke out against oppression. A passionate pacifist and a feminist, she opposed both the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War and World War One, leading to accusations of treason. Elsabe Brits travelled in her footsteps to bring to life a colourful story of war, heroism and passion, spanning three continents.

From 1952 to 1981, South Africa's apartheid government ran a school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art Of Life In South Africa is about the students, teachers, art, ideas, and politics that led to the school's founding, and which circulated during the years of its existence at a remote former mission station. It is a story of creativity, beauty, and community in twentieth-century South Africa.

Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, this book focuses instead on a small group's efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives through the ironic medium of an apartheid-era school.

Lushly illustrated with almost 100 images, this book gives us fully formed lives and remarkable insights into life under segregation and apartheid.

As kampvegter vir vrouestemreg en in haar uitgesproke teenkanting teen onreg is Emily Hobhouse ’n ikoon wat vandag nog inspireer. Ontdek die onbekende sy van ’n verbasend moderne vrou in hierdie volkleur pragboek propvol foto’s, interessante dagboekinskrywings en briewe. So gee sy ’n genuanseerde, vars blik op ’n buitengewone vrou wat voortdurend in die spervuur was. Van kleintyd het Emily haar verset teen haar lot. Vir vroue was daar min geleenthede en sy moes boonop haar siek pa oppas. Tog raak sy wereldwyd betrokke by die stryd teen onreg en oorlog. In twee oorloe het sy duisende lewens gered, en tog is sy – ’n ware patriot – in haar eie land onbekend en alleen dood.

The first comprehensive investigation into the life of former operative Eugene de Kock. It includes innumerable hours of in-depth conversations with De Kock whilst in prison, is based on his diaries, prison writings and psychological reports.

Anemari Jansen was unexpectedly introduced to De Kock in 2011 at Pretoria Central. She was immediately fascinated by “the man with the soft voice and well-groomed hands”, well aware that those were the very hands that had murdered several people.

Jansen wanted to know how this intelligent, well-read individual could be the “monster” from the Vlakplaas death squad, the man the media dubbed Prime Evil. For the next three years she researched De Kock’s story intensely. She won his trust, paying him visits in prison ! Sunday after Sunday. She also had exclusive access to his family and friends, as well as old Koevoet and Vlakplaas colleagues.

Her quest for answers took her to all the corners of South Africa and changed her life irrevocably. Jansen, who has been apolitical for most of her life, was forced in this process to confront the horrors of apartheid and to reassess her own identity as an Afrikaner.

Huge sections of De Kock’s diaries and unpublished manuscript are included in the book. De Kock is blatantly honest, not just only about the Vlakplaas atrocities, but also about his experience in the Border War as a member of Koevoet. In this book he discloses the names of his superiors who gave him his orders, many of whom have escaped sanction.

The book not only illuminates the complexities of De Kock as person and the choices he had to make, but also exposes South Africa’s recent history in an open and sometimes shocking manner.

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.

Successful businessman, Mkhuseli Khusta Jack, overcame incredible odds after being evicted from his farm home at the age of 6 with his 8 siblings. Desperate for schooling, he walked for kilometres, slept in outbuildings, begged for an education and eventually enrolled at the age of 10. But the political climate was volatile and he quickly became involved in politics.

As an activist, he was arrested on several occasions, most notably during the 1980 school boycotts. He helped establish the PE Youth Congress, one of the many organisations that joined the UDF. Jack was instrumental in organising the consumer boycott campaign (EC). He was arrested, jailed and tortured for his role in the movement. Before Mandela’s release, Jack was amongst the political consultants during the democratic negotiations but decided to finally finish his studies and chose education above politics.

A story of sheer determination and triumph with commendations by Thabo Mbeki, Dali Mpofu and Kgalema Motlanthe.

The armed struggle waged by the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), was the longest sustained insurgency in South African history. This book offers the first full account of the rebellion in its entirety, from its early days in the 1950s to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South African president in 1994.

Vast in scope, this story traverses every corner of South Africa and extends throughout southern Africa, where MK’s largest campaigns and heaviest engagements occurred, as well as to the solidarity networks that the rebellion mobilised around the world. Drawing principally from previously unpublished writings and testimonies by the men and women who fought the armed struggle, this book recreates the drama, heroism and tragedy of their experiences. It tells the story of leaders like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Joe Slovo and Chris Hani, whose reputations were forged in the crucible of the armed struggle, but it is also a tale of martyrs such as Looksmart Ngudle, Ashley Kriel and Phila Ndwandwe, as well as of MK cadres such as Leonard Nkosi and Glory Sedibe, who would ultimately turn against the ANC and collaborate with the state in hunting down their former comrades.

Written in a fresh, immediate style, Umkhonto we Sizwe is an honest account of the armed struggle and a fascinating chronicle of events that changed South African history.

Op 'n dag skraap ek my moed bymekaar: 'Eugene, hoe voel dit om 'n ander mens dood te maak?' Sy gesigspiere trek onwillekeurig in afgryse. 'Die mens, die slagoffer, gee 'n reuk af,' se hy. 'Ek kan die reuk vandag steeds herroep. Dit walg my tot in my siel toe, daardie reuk van vrees wat deur daardie mens se sweetgaatjies en liggaamsvog na buite bars.' Die bloed van tientalle anti-apartheidaktiviste sit aan Eugene de Kock hande. Vir die meeste Suid-Afrikaners is hy die vergestalting van boosheid. Is daar enige menslikheid aan die man wat talle 'n monster noem en hoe het hy so geword? Anemari Jansen gaan soek na antwoorde in De Kock se streng grootwordjare, sy eerste blootstelling aan grutonele as jong polisieman aan die Oos-Rand en in die Grensoorlog waar hy as lid van Koevoet 'n jagter van mense geword het. Jansen het eksklusiewe toegang tot De Kock se familie, asook oud-Koevoet- en Vlakplaaskollegas gehad. Sy skets ’n prentjie van 'n hoogs intelligente, dog komplekse mens wat van kindsbeen af 'n buitestaander was. De Kock het ook sy dagboeke en ’n ongepubliseerde manuskrip aan haar beskikbaar gestel – hieruit haal sy groot dele direk aan. In sy eie woorde is hy skreiend eerlik – De Kock skram nie daarvan weg om van sy wandade in detail te beskryf of sy opdraggewers te identifiseer nie. Die boek skets nie net die era en omstandighede wat tot Vlakplaas gelei het nie, maar bied ook insae in De Kock se menslikheid.

The South African Truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) could do no more than make a contribution to political reconciliation and nation-building - requiring government, business, civil society and South Africans generally to take this process forward. Truth & Reconciliation In South Africa: 10 Years On provides a realistic assessment of what a TRC can reasonably accomplish and provides an audit of the response of government and other agencies to the unfinished business of the Commission.

This title features an edited transcript of a public symposium chaired by Tim Modise with participation from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Yasmin Sooka and several participants in the TRC's victim hearings. It also contains articles by leading researchers, activists and government officials tasked with implementing the TRC recommendations.

It examines the complexities of translation and interpretation of personal testimonies in TRC sessions. It also reflects on the role of media, art and cultural exponents who grappled with South Africa's past.

Albertina Sisulu is revered by South Africans as the true mother of the nation. A survivor of the golden age of the African National Congress, whose life with the second most important figure in the ANC exemplified the underpinning role of women in the struggle against apartheid.

In 1944 she was the sole woman at the inaugural meeting of the radical offshoot of the ANC, the Youth League, with Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Anton Lembede in the vanguard. Her final years were spent in an unpretentious house in the former white Johannesburg suburb of Linden. A friend said of her, "she treated everybody alike. But her main concern was the welfare of our women and children." This abridged account of Sisulu’s overflowing life provides a fresh understanding of an iconic figure of South African history.

This new abridged memoir is written by Sindiwe Magona, one of South Africa’s most prolific authors, and Elinor Sisulu, writer, activist and daughter-in-law of Albertina.

This sequel to Jennifer Friedman’s enchanting first memoir picks up where Queen of the Free State leaves off: as the rebellious young Jennifer is packed off to boarding school in Cape Town.

Told with humour and pathos, the theme of displacement – of the outsider – is explored further as we follow Jennifer’s journey into adulthood, becoming a wife and mother, living in Johannesburg and Israel, emigration, and leave-takings in Australia. Once again a strong sense of love, loyalty and place prevails, especially on her trips home to her beloved Free State. Expect stories about train journeys, windmills and floods, dead bodies on deck chairs, certifiably crazy home-help, babies, secrets and redemption, a Jewish British Bulldog and the Messiah’s favourite place.

'A scrupulous piece of reporting, necessary, timely and very sobering' John Le Carre A Sunday Times Best Book of 2018 Agent. Prisoner. Target. Who is Sergei Skripal? 4 March 2018, Salisbury, England. A man and his daughter are found slumped on a bench, poisoned by the deadly nerve agent Novichok. He was a Russian national that became a MI6 spy. Russia are publicly accused of carrying out the attack by the British government, sparking a diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West. Then two innocent people find a discarded perfume bottle used in the attack and one of them, Dawn Sturgess, tragically dies. It is now a murder investigation. How exactly did we get here? Based on interviews with Sergei before his poisoning, Mark Urban explains the most shocking espionage incident in a decade. Describing precisely how an otherwise loyal Russian intelligence officer was turned into an agent by MI6, how Skripal was betrayed so that he found himself in a Siberian prison, and why, years later, was he was targeted for assassination.

From Protest to Challenge Volume 4: Political Profiles, 1882–1990, in Jacana’s second edition of the six volumes of From Protest to Challenge, profiles over six hundred individual activists who played important political roles during the century before the abolition of apartheid in 1990. Among those included are John Dube, Clements Kadalie, Albert Luthuli, Steve Biko, Beyers Naude and Joe Slovo, as well as Ellen Kuzwayo, Jay Naidoo, Robert McBride, P.K. Leballo and Patricia de Lille. These books are a wonderful resource for future generations of scholars. The publication of the Vol. 4 completes the series.

In die vroee 1990’s is Suid-Afrika op ’n mespunt. Nelson Mandela is vry, maar ’n vreedsame politieke oorgang lyk byna onmoontlik.Te midde van dreigende geweld kom die NP-regering teen die ANC te staan by Kodesa. As hoof van die Nasionale Intelligensiediens (NI) is Niel Barnard sentraal tot die onstuimige proses. Hy onthul ook hoe vertrouensbande tussen die ANC en NI gesmee is tydens geheime ontmoetings in Europese hotelkamers, en skryf oor sy wedervaringe in Moskou saam met die Russiese KGB.

The outsider on the inside. The one who watches and listens. Growing up Jewish in a small Free State town in the 1950s and ’60s, Jennifer Friedman moves between child and adult, black and white, as Verwoerd’s grand apartheid divides SA. There are midnight escapes, stolen loot, banned comics, hideous encounters with bras, terrifying policemen, albino messengers and Pa’s beatings. Told with humour and pathos, Friedman’s memoir brings to life a strong sense of place, love, rebellion and betrayal.

Eugene de Kock, commanding officer of apartheid death squads, is currently serving 212 years in prison for crimes against humanity. He was denied amnesty, while many of his former comrades in murder walk free. As this title opens, in an act of multilayered symbolism and extraordinary psychological courage, Gobodo-Madikizela enters Pretoria's maximum security prison to meet the man many know as "Prime Evil." What follows is a journey into what it means to be human.

The world wanted South Africa’s true, liberated history – and the writing of it – to begin in 1994, but deep contradictions have quickly bubbled to the surface, revealing a society gripped in turmoil.

The results of all this have been, of course, paradoxical: a series of elections since 1994 seemed to confirm the ANC’s hold, both popular and legitimate, on power. Yet, simultaneously, South Africa has found itself with one of the world’s highest rates of protest and dissent, expressed both in the work-place and on township streets, in universities and technicons, clinics and central city squares. 16 August 2014 saw the lives of nearly three dozen platinum mineworkers end prematurely and violently. The premeditated “Marikana Massacre” demonstrated to the world how little Nelson Mandela’s ANC had changed South Africa’s core power relations, notwithstanding the dramatic, heroic victory over racist rule in 1994.

South Africa: The Present as History traces South African history from early days through the long European conquest and into two decades of democracy. The current socio-economic paradox – one that finds inequality, unemployment and poverty worsening since 1994 – reflect Mandela’s early 1990s concessions, choices which reduced the pursuit of genuine socio-economic and political transformation to the mere realisation of what can best be termed ‘low-intensity democracy’.

Analysing tensions exemplified by Marikana, the authors consider potential futures for an increasingly volatile society. Genuine liberatory possibilities could continue to be vanquished – but that is not the only possible results of today’s turmoil.

From the self-described 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet', these soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger are filled with darkness and light. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The war in Chechnya left us with some of the most harrowing images in recent times: a modern European city bombed to ruins while its citizens cowered in bunkers; mass graves; mothers combing the hills for their missing sons.

The product of investigative and on-the-scene reporting by two established journalists, Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal's captivating book recounts the story of the Chechens' violent struggle for independece, and the Kremlin politics that precipitated it. Exploring Chechnya's complex and bloody history, the work is also a portrait of Russia's failed attempt to make the transition to a democratic society.

"A harrowing glimpse into the destabilization caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the troubled road to independence and democracy faced by its non-Russian members."
"--Kirkus Reviews"

WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON 'Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece...The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation. '[The Gulag Archipelago] helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph

On the day Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate authorities, General Braxton Bragg reacted to a newspaper report that might have revealed the position of gun emplacements by placing the correspondent, a Southern loyalist, under arrest. Thus the Confederate army's first detention of a citizen occurred before President Lincoln had even called out troops to suppress the rebellion. During the civil war that followed, not a day would pass when Confederate military prisons did not contain political prisoners.

Based on the discovery of records of over four thousand of these prisoners, Mark E. Neely Jr.'s new book undermines the common understanding that Jefferson Davis and the Confederates were scrupulous in their respect for constitutional rights while Lincoln and the Unionists regularly violated the rights of dissenters. Neely reveals for the first time the extent of repression of Unionists and other civilians in the Confederacy, and uncovers and marshals convincing evidence that Southerners were as ready as their Northern counterparts to give up civil liberties in response to the real or imagined threats of wartime.

From the onset of hostilities, the exploits of drunken recruits prompted communities from Selma to Lynchburg to beg the Richmond government to impose martial law. Southern citizens resigned themselves to a passport system for domestic travel similar to the system of passes imposed on enslaved and free blacks before the war. These restrictive measures made commerce difficult and constrained religious activity. As one Virginian complained, "This struggle was begun in defence of Constitutional Liberty which we could not get in the United States." The Davis administration countered that the passport system was essential to prevent desertion from the army, and most Southerners accepted the passports as a necessary inconvenience, ignoring the irony that the necessities of national mobilization had changed their government from a states'-rights confederacy to a powerful, centralized authority.

After the war the records of men imprisoned by this authority were lost through a combination of happenstance and deliberate obfuscation. Their discovery and subtle interpretation by a Pulitzer Prize&emdash;winning historian explodes one of the remaining myths of Lost Cause historiography, revealing Jefferson Davis as a calculated manipulator of the symbols of liberty.