In 1978, the activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa.

For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism – a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey – the first since 1978 – restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonisation and postcolonial development.

The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma’s text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies and radical political thought.

Alex La Guma was a South African novelist, leader of the South African Coloured People's Organisation and a defendant in the Treason Trial, whose works helped characterise the movement against the apartheid era in South Africa.

Mosibudi Mangena has been a life-long member of the Black Consciousness Movement, which led to his incarceration on Robben Island from 1973–8. After his release, he went into exile in 1981, spending time in Botswana and Zimbabwe, before returning to South Africa in 1994.

Triumphs & Heartaches provides fascinating insight into Mangena’s varied life, including his time as the leader of AZAPO and his service in government as the deputy minister of Education and then the minister of Science and Technology.

Mangena provides an insider’s view of life in exile as a political refugee, followed by the hardships of repatriation and the hard-won successes of democracy. He reflects eloquently on the role of Black Consciousness and its potential place in the future of South Africa, and does not flinch from exploring the disappointments of the liberation struggle and the challenges that lie ahead for the country.

Johannesburg was - and is - the Frontier of Money. Within months of its founding, the mining camp was host to organised crime: the African ‘Regiment of the Hills’ and ‘Irish Brigade’ bandits. Bars, brothels, boarding houses and hotels oozed testosterone and violence, and the use of fists and guns was commonplace.

Beyond the chaos were clear signs of another struggle, one to maintain control, honour and order within the emerging male and mining dominated culture. In the underworld, the dictum of ‘honour among thieves’, as well as a hatred of informers, testified to attempts at self-regulation. A ‘real man’ did not take advantage of an opponent by employing underhand tactics. It had to be a ‘fair fight’ if a man was to be respected.

This was the world that ‘One-armed Jack’ McLoughlin - brigand, soldier, sailor, mercenary, burglar, highwayman and safe-cracker – entered in the early 1890s to become Johannesburg’s most infamous ‘Irish’ anti-hero and social bandit. McLoughlin’s infatuation with George Stevenson prompted him to recruit the young Englishman into his gang of safe-crackers but ‘Stevo’ was a man with a past and primed for personal and professional betrayal. It was a deadly mixture.

Honour could only be retrieved through a Showdown at the Red Lion.

Life is frequently about ‘turning up’ and Tony Leon was present at the making of history both big and small.

Being There is a frank and insightful collection of insider accounts from a life in politics. The centrepiece is Leon’s riveting diary of the GNU negotiations that went down to the wire following the 2024 elections. This is the first and only inside account of these talks.

He also casts his gimlet eye on the fault lines of the Middle East, shares ambassadorial adventures in Argentina, and outlines the perils of political party fundraising. Written in Leon’s vintage style – observant, witty, acerbic – he proves the maxim that much of success is simply about being there.

The Thabo Mbeki I Know is a collection that celebrates one of South Africa’s most exceptional thought leaders. The contributors include those who first got to know Thabo Mbeki as a young man, in South Africa and in exile, and those who encountered him as a statesman and worked alongside him as an African leader.

In The Thabo Mbeki I Know, these friends, comrades, statesmen, politicians and business associates provide insights that challenge the prevailing academic narrative and present fresh perspectives on the former president’s time in office and on his legacy – a vital undertaking as we approach a decade since an embattled Thabo Mbeki left office. Edited by Miranda Strydom and Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, The Thabo Mbeki I Know provides readers with an opportunity to reassess Thabo Mbeki’s contribution to post-apartheid South Africa – as both deputy president and president – to the African continent and diaspora – as a highly respected state leader – and to the international community as a whole.

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

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

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

For more than five decades Walter and Albertina Sisulu were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. As secretary-general of the ANC, Walter was sentenced to life imprisonment with Nelson Mandela in 1964 and spent 26 years in prison until his release in 1989. While her husband and his colleagues were in jail, Albertina played a crucial role in keeping the ANC alive underground, and in the 1980s was co-President of the United Democratic Front. Their story has been one of persecution, bitter struggle and painful separation. But it is also one of patience, hope and enduring love.

A moving journey of discovery into the unexplored continent that is often our families’ past. It can be read as a reconstruction of one’s own Jewish and at the same time European-South African roots, but through these micro-histories we arrive at the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust to the level of macro-history.

Egonne Roth’s work brilliantly illustrates the complex mechanism of intergenerational, communicative memory and cultural memory (described by Jan and Aleida Assmann, among others). On a feminist level, it is also a personal history of the daughter-father relationship, leading to a kind of purification, a catharsis.

The detective-like reconstruction of the multi-ethnic segments of the family’s history has as its backdrop the arduous completion of one’s own biography from scraps of documents, accounts of the now few witnesses, secrets, and traumas hidden for decades.

Shirley, Goodness & Mercy is a heart-warming, yet compellingly honest story about a young boy growing up in the coloured townships of Newclare, Coronationville and Riverlea during the apartheid era.

Despite Van Wyk’s later becoming involved in the struggle, this is not a book about racial politics. Instead, it is a delightful account of one boy’s special relationship with the relatives, friends and neighbours who made up his community, and of the important coping role laughter and humour played during the years he spent in bleak and dusty townships.

In Shirley, Goodness & Mercy Chris van Wyk – poet, novelist and short story writer – has created a truly remarkable work, at once both thought-provoking and vastly entertaining.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Southern Africa was a jumble of British colonies, Boer republics and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. Into this frontier world came the Reitz family, Afrikaner gentry from the Cape, who settled in Bloemfontein and played a key role in the building of the Orange Free State.

Frank Reitz, successively chief justice and modernising president of the young republic, went on to serve as State Secretary of the Transvaal Republic. In 1899, he stood shoulder to shoulder with President Paul Kruger to resist Britain’s war of conquest in Southern Africa. At the heart of this tale is the extraordinary life of Deneys Reitz, third son of Frank Reitz and Bianca Thesen. The young Reitz’s account of his adventures in the field during the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), published as Commando, became a classic of irregular warfare. After a period of exile in Madagascar, he went on become one of South Africa’s most distinguished lawyers, statesmen and soldiers. Martin Meredith interweaves Reitz’s experiences, taken from his unpublished notebooks, with the wider story of Britain’s brutal suppression of Boer resistance.

Concise and readable, Afrikaner Odyssey is a wide-ranging portrait of an aristocratic Afrikaner family whose achievements run like fine thread through these turbulent times, and whose presence is still marked on the South African landscape.

Joe Modise (1929-2001), a Sophiatown bus driver-turned freedom fighter, was a humble man who tended to avoid the limelight. A protege of the Mandela leadership in the 1950s mass struggle, he was one of the youngest among that decade’s Treason Trial, and was a senior commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) from its inception, facing danger and privation most of his adult life. Modise served with acclaim as democratic South Africa’s first Minister of Defence and won the loyalty of his former enemy when many thought the country could be plunged into civil war or held to ransom by old-order apartheid generals. The fact that Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo selected him for key positions over five decades of exacting struggle testifies to their sustained confidence in him. This fact alone belies the impression some might have that he was an amoral warlord. As a government minister, he led a modest lifestyle and did not die a wealthy man.

This book interlinks frank and engaging interviews with family and friends, comrades­ in-arms and former adversaries. Those who knew him reveal a warm human being and provide endearing insights into who Modise really was.

As a soldier, statesman and leader, he has left behind an astonishing legacy that deserves to be widely known.

A highly readable, dramatic story of a colourful South African journey in politics lasting over 50 years, from anti-apartheid protester to Right Honourable Lord, from Pretoria childhood to senior British Cabinet Minister.

A Pretoria Boy begins with the story of how Peter Hain’s journey came full circle when he used parliamentary privilege in 2017–18 to expose looting and money laundering, supplied with the ammunition by his ‘deep throat’ inside the Zuma State. In so doing, he put South Africa’s state capture and corruption on the front pages of the New York Times and Financial Times, which some suggest played a part in Zuma’s toppling. Going back to an anti-apartheid childhood in Pretoria in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there are vivid descriptions of his parents’ arrest, banning, harassment, helping an escaped political prisoner, the hanging of a close white family friend, and enforced exile to London in 1966 after the government prohibited his architect father from working.

It tells of how, at aged 19, Hain organised and led militant anti-Springbok demonstrations in exile in London in 1969–1970, for which he was denounced by the South African media as ‘Public Enemy Number One’. It is about how he narrowly escaped jail after a South African government-financed prosecution landed him in the Old Bailey in 1972 for conspiracy to disrupt those all-white South African sports tours and, then in 1975, how he was framed for a bank theft committed by an apartheid security agent. His return to South Africa came first on a secret mission in December 1989, then as a parliamentary observer during the 1994 elections.

The book ends with his perspective on the country’s future.

As a young journalist, roped into court reporting to cover Jacob Zuma’s 2006 rape trial, Karyn Maughan could not have known that she would be reporting on Zuma’s legal woes for the next two decades – and would herself become his target. Disarmingly honest and deeply personal, this book takes a razor-sharp look at how powerful men use attacks on individuals who try to hold them accountable, as well as on the media and the courts, to undermine democracy.

Adriaan Basson says: 'Brave and brilliant. Jacob Zuma found his match in Karyn Maughan.'

Parcel of Death recounts the little-told life story of Onkgopotse Abram Tiro, the first South African freedom fighter the apartheid regime pursued beyond the country’s borders to assassinate with a parcel bomb.

On 29 April 1972, Tiro made one of the most consequential revolutionary addresses in South African history. Dubbed the Turfloop Testimony, Tiro’s anti-apartheid speech saw him and many of his fellow student activists expelled, igniting a series of strikes in tertiary institutions across the country. By the time he went into exile in Botswana, Tiro was president of the Southern African Student Movement (SASM), permanent organiser of the South African Student Organisation (SASO) and a leading Black Consciousness proponent, hailed by many as the ‘godfather’ of the June 1976 uprisings.

Parcel of Death uses extensive and exclusive interviews to highlight significant influences and periods in Tiro’s life, including the lessons learned from his rural upbringing in Dinokana, Zeerust, the time he spent working on a manganese mine, his role as a teacher and the impact of his faith in shaping his outlook. It is a compelling portrait of Tiro’s story and its lasting significance in South Africa’s history.

‘A biography of Onkgopotse Tiro, who was at once a catalyst and an active change agent in the South African struggle for freedom, is long overdue. For generations to come, this book will be a source of valuable information and inspiration.’ – MOSIBUDI MANGENA

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’.

You may have read GG Alcock’s books about the kasi economy; now follow his journey to the dynamic world of KasiNomics and learn about the tribal forces that shaped him.

Born White Zulu Bred is the story of a white child and his brother raised in poverty in a Zulu community in rural South Africa during the apartheid era. His extraordinary parents, Creina and Neil Alcock, gave up lives of comfort and privilege to live and work among the destitute people of Msinga, whose material and social well-being became their mission. But more than that, this is a story about life in South Africa today which, through GG’s unique perspective, explores the huge diversity of the country’s people – from tribal Zulu warriors to sophisticated urban black township entrepreneurs. A journey from the arid wastes of Msinga into the thriving informal economies of urban townships.

GG’s view is that we do not live in a black and white world but in a world of contrast and diversity, one which he wants South Africans, and a world audience, to see for what it is without descending into racial and historical clichés. He takes us through the mazes of township marketplaces, shacks and crowded streets to reveal the proud and dignified world of township entrepreneurs who are transforming South Africa’s economy. This is the world that he moves in today as a successful businessman, still walking those spaces and celebrating the vibrant informal economies that are taking part in the KasiNomic Revolution.

GG’s story is about being truly African, even as a white person, and it draws on the adventures, the cultural challenges, the informal spaces and the future possibilities of South Africa.

This is a memoir about the life of an extraordinary South African poet, educator, and activist that tells a lesser-known social history of people, families, communities and places.

Poli Poli is intentional in grounding Masekela’s experiences in a social history of the country over generations. Masekela uses her life story to illustrate the features and characteristics that typified life in particular places, like Kwa-Guqa in the 1940s, Johannesburg, Alexandra Township, and Inanda Seminary School (for Coloured girls) in Mpumalanga.

This memoir is filled with intimate details about the growing pains of a childhood inhibited by strict beliefs and systems, first-hand experiences of struggle and sacrifice, violence and other forms of inhumanity and the deep scars they etch, while also telling the story of the author’s life-giving relationship with her siblings. Poli Poli is a remarkable history that speaks to issues of then and now – belonging, African identity, women’s rights, and femininity, and is written in the lyricism and transporting detail of one of the country’s greatest wordsmiths.

Norman McFarlane was just out of high school when he was conscripted for national service and sent to Angola.

Like so many other ordinary troopies, he was thrown into the horror, deprivation and banality of war. He recounts his loss of innocence in Angola, the subsequent ‘camps’ and his journey towards confronting his post-traumatic stress disorder.

Told with disarming honesty and humour, he gives voice to a generation of white South African men forced into a grisly, life-defining experience.

One of the most celebrated political leaders of our time, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

During his years in prison, Nelson grew ever more in love with an idealised version of his wife, courting her in his letters as if they were young lovers frozen in time. But Winnie, every bit his political equal, found herself increasingly estranged from her jailed husband’s politics. Behind his back, she was trying to orchestrate an armed seizure of power, a path he feared would lead to an endless war.

Jonny Steinberg tells the tale of this unique marriage – its longings, its obsessions, its deceits – making South African history a page-turning political biography. Winnie and Nelson is a modern epic in which trauma doesn’t affect just the couple at its centre, but an entire nation.

It is also a Shakespearean drama in which bonds of love and commitment mingle with timeless questions of revolution, such as whether to seek retribution or a negotiated peace. Steinberg reveals, with power and tender emotional insight, how far these forever-entwined leaders would go for each other and where they drew the line. For in the end, both knew theirs was not simply a marriage, but a struggle to define anti-apartheid policy itself.

'It is through that choice of taking a resistance road, the one less travelled, that I got to experience a liberated life.'

Patric Tariq Mellet took his first steps on this road at the tender age of 8 and by 13, he engaged in his first consequential and difficult political act. He organised a fast in his high school to protest the killing of anti-apartheid cleric, Imam Abdullah Haron in detention. The match had been lit. Arbitrarily classified as 'white' despite his heritage and family, he was ordered to join the armed forces. He refused as he could not take up arms against his own people. Instead he heeded the call of OR Tambo and joined resistance as an MK in exile.

Mellet's autobiography demonstrates a spirit of innate and unbridled resistance, in small and major ways, that liberated Cleaner's Boy from an unpromising and tragic early life to a life of influence driven by a deep understanding of identity. A freedom fighter, a mystic and always a firebrand.

Dr Franklin Sonn is a struggle icon, diplomat, educationalist and business leader.

He was born in the Vosburg district of Victoria West. As a civil rights campaigner, he was arrested for leading a protest march in 1989. He later served as rector of the (Cape) Peninsula Technikon and as head of the Cape Teachers' Professional Association. He was a good friend and confidant of Nelson Mandela.

In 1995, Madiba asked him to be South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, USA. Sonn celebrated his 85th birthday on 11 October 2024.

Die eiesoortige vriendskap tussen Winston Churchill en Jan Smuts is ’n studie in kontraste. In hul jeug het hulle uiteenlopende wêrelde bewoon: Churchill was die weerbarstige en energieke jong aristokraat; Smuts die asketiese, filosofiese Kaapse plaasseun, wat later aan Cambridge sou gaan studeer. Daar sou hy die eerste student word wat albei dele van die finale regskursus in dieselfde jaar neem en al twee met onderskeiding slaag.

Nadat hulle in die Anglo-Boereoorlog eers as vyande, en later in die Eerste Wêreldoorlog as bondgenote byeengebring is, het die mans ’n vriendskap gesmee wat oor die eerste helfte van die twintigste eeu gestrek het en tot Smuts se dood in 1950 voortgeduur het. Richard Steyn, die skrywer van Jan Smuts: Afrikaner sonder grense, bestudeer dié hegte vriendskap deur twee wêreldoorloë aan die hand van ’n magdom argiefstukke, briewe, telegramme en die omvangryke boeke wat oor albei mans geskryf is.

Dit is ’n fassinerende verhaal oor twee besonderse individue in oorlog en vrede – die een die leier van ’n groot ryk, die ander die leier van ’n klein, weerspannige lid van daardie ryk.

Watter soort mens was dr. H.F. Verwoerd, die sesde premier van die Unie van Suid-Afrika en grondlegger van die huidige Republiek? Die bydraers tot hierdie boek skryf op onderhoudende wyse oor hoe hulle hom onthou, wat hulle saam met hom beleef het en oor hulle opvatting van sy politieke oogmerke. Die persoonlike aard van die bydraes verleen ’n dimensie aan die boek wat in objektiewe geskiedskrywing ontbreek. Verwoerd tree te voorskyn as vriend, gesinsman, volksman, raadsman en leier. Hierdie bundel verskyn die eerste keer in 2001 by geleentheid van die 100ste herdenking van dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd se geboortedag, 8 September 1901. Die bygewerkte weergawe in 2016 bevat nuwe bydraes deur onder andere Elise Verwoerd, Cas Bakkes en Albert Hertzog.

Justice Mahomed was a philosopher of law whose insights and analysis brought about refinements in the law that enlarged the scope of freedom and dignity during apartheid. He spent his life in the service of law to establish justice, contributing to laying the foundation for human rights. As a fearless advocate he challenged immoral and repressive legislation and executive action, developing the common law, especially in the areas of administrative and public law. As a judge, he was at the forefront of a radical and visionary constitutional transformation.

Mahomed’s vision of a human rights culture pre-dated our transition to democracy. We are constantly reminded of his deep love for and understanding of the law, his unmatched oratory, his passion and his unwavering commitment to human rights.

The book comprises four sections:

• Section one consists of a commentary, preceded by a foreword by President Cyril Ramaphosa;
• Section two consists of perspectives of Mahomed by colleagues, friends and family;
• Section three is a selection of his speeches that deal with a range of issues from philosophy to a Bill of Rights;
• Section four identifies some of his illuminating judgments.

Leon and his twin Norman were born in August 1929, the youngest of four children born to Mary and Mark Levy, immigrants from Lithuania. His father died when Leon was six; to heroic degree, his mother carried the family – financially, practically and emotionally – in her widowhood. Leon was an intensely bookish boy but left school aged sixteen to help makes ends meet through a series of jobs. Deeply affected by the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust, Leon was radicalised in the Hashomer Hatza’ir, a left-wing Zionist youth movement. He was seventeen when he joined the Communist Party and became a committed young activist.

In 1953, at the age of twenty-four, Leon became a full-time trade unionist. ‘It was a defining moment in my life story,’ he writes. ‘It gave practical form to my political beliefs; it also determined the shape and scope of my life. It transpired that I would spend the next six decades and more working in trade unions, industrial relations and mediation.’

A comrade in the trade union movement nicknamed Leon, TsabaTsaba – which means “here, there and everywhere”. Anyone who reads Leon’s account of his years as a full-time unionist will agree that the soubriquet was well earned. (Alongside trade union work, Leon was also committed to the remarkable Discussion Club, which he co-founded and ran throughout the 1950s; he was also secretary of the South African Peace Council from 1951 to 1961.) In the mid-1950s, he was part of a small group of progressive trade unionists who pushed for the formation of the first non-racial trade union federation in South Africa. These aspirations were realised in March 1955 with the launch of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). Later that year Leon was elected president and remained in that position for nine years. SACTU linked day-to-day concerns of workers with support for national liberation and the abolition of apartheid and was one of the five organisations which formed the Congress Alliance. As SACTU leader, Leon served on the committee that directed the activities of the Alliance; he was present at Kliptown when the Freedom Charter was adopted – and as SACTU president was one of the five original signatories of the Freedom Charter.

Political activism of this order came at a high price. Leon Levy was served with banning orders and arrested several times; he was Accused No 4 of the 156 people arrested and charged with treason, and from November 1958 was one of the final 30 (and with Helen Joseph one of only two whites) who faced charges until the trial was finally dismissed in March 1961. He was detained for five months during the 1960 State of Emergency. In May 1963 he was the first person to be detained under the notorious General Laws Amendment Act, known as the 90-day Act. Unable to continue his work he chose to go into exile in the United Kingdom. There, he studied politics, economics and industrial relations at Oxford – and then applied what he had learned in a series of positions in industrial relations. After 1994, he was determined to make the skills and knowledge that he had acquired available to a democratic South Africa – and he and his wife Lorna returned to the country of their birth in 1997. In a remarkable final phase of his career, Leon took office shortly after his 70th birthday as a full-time commissioner for the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration – and spent the next 19 years in this capacity.