#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.

In some settings, such as Ireland, contiguous Catholic and Protestant states are often not conducive to good relations or neighbourliness. In colonial and imperial southern Africa, formal inter-state arrangements took place at the expense of a third party - subjected African peoples.

Three Wise Monkeys explores some of the contradictions, silences and oversights, and working misunderstandings that arise when an emerging Anglophone, Protestant, industrial and urbanising state - South Africa - develops side by side with Mozambique - a Lusophone, Catholic, commercial, rural colony.

In three volumes, Charles van Onselen examines the intertwined relations between South Africa and Portugal's chronically weak east coast colony, as expressed through the migrant labour system, the tourist trade, the rise and fall of LM Radio and the extraordinary tale of the Lourenço Marques Lottery. These areas constituted zones of cross-cultural, transnational interaction that both states were reluctant to acknowledge formally, choosing instead to 'see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil' for much of the 20th century.

Three Wise Monkeys presents a startling new way of viewing the entangled, often hidden, economic, political and social dynamics that informed the rise of 20th-century South Africa, often at the expense of neighbouring Mozambique.

The volumes are:

• Volume 1: The Makings Of An African Economic Tragedy - Mozambique, circa 1500-1960
• Volume 2: Through The Turnstiles Of The Mind - White South Africans and the Freedoms Of Mozambique, circa 194-1975
• Volume 3: The Quest For Wealth Without Work - The Lourenco Marques Lottery, Protestant Panics and the South African White Working Classes , circa 1890-9165

“We thank you for the inspiration and strength

That you have given to Madiba,

Enabling him, over so many years, to draw out the best in others,

rousing us always, by word and example,

to seek the highest good for every child of this nation.”

So prayed Archbishop Thabo Makgoba with Nelson Mandela in his home in 2009 at the request of Graca Machel. This marked the start of an unusual relationship between southern Africa’s Anglican leader and Mandela in his quietening years. Join Makgoba in his journey towards faith, from his boyhood in Alex as the son of a ZCC pastor to Bishopscourt and praying with Mandela. He shares his feelings about his pastoral approach to the world icon, and how they influenced his thinking on ministering to church and nation in the current era. What did praying with those nearest and dearest to Mandela mean? What was his spirituality? In trying to answer these questions, Makgoba opens a window on South Africa’s spiritual make-up and life.

Saam met die sterwe van die ou Suid-Afrika het ook “Afrikaner Volkskapitalisme” gesneuwel, wat veral gekenmerk is deur die einde van die eens magtige Sanlam en sy eweknie in die Noorde, Volkskas, wat eers deel van Rembrandt en toe later deel van Barclays van Brittanje geword het. Hierdie twee organisasies het vir dekades die dinamo van Afrikaner-sake aan die gang gehou.

Terwyl Afrikaner-kapitalisme oor die laaste dekade of wat byna krampagtig gesoek het na nuwe suurstof om te kan oorleef, is daar stil-stil ’n nuwe grondslag gelê vir ’n nuwe geslag Afrikaner-kapitaliste. Nuwe mijardêrs is orals geskep deur aandele-pryse wat ten hemele gejaag is en in die proses het dit in die jongste tyd begin lyk of van hierdie bate-spirale op baie dun ys gebou is en dalk ook groot sarsies bedrog.

Hierdie boek bespreek die huidige ekonomiese klimaat op ‘n interessante en toeganklike manier.

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.

Discover Vice President-elect Kamala Harris's New York Times bestselling book about the core truths that unite us and the shared values that will see us into the future.

'A life story that genuinely entrances' Los Angeles Times

The daughter of immigrants and civil rights activists, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was raised in a California community that cared deeply about social justice. As she rose to prominence as a political leader, her experiences would become her guiding light as she grappled with an array of complex issues and learned to bring a voice to the voiceless.

Now, in The Truths We Hold, Harris reckons with the big challenges we face together. Drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values as we confront the great work of our day.

The shocking, definitive account of the 2020 election and the first year of the Biden presidency by two New York Times reporters, exposing the deep fissures within both parties as the country approaches a political breaking point.

This is the authoritative account of an eighteen-month crisis in American democracy that will be seared into the country’s political memory for decades to come. With stunning, in-the-room detail, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns show how both our political parties confronted a series of national traumas, including the coronavirus pandemic, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and the political brinksmanship of President Biden’s first year in the White House.

From Donald Trump’s assault on the 2020 election and his ongoing campaign of vengeance against his fellow Republicans, to the behind-the-scenes story of Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate and his bitter struggles to unite the Democratic Party, this book exposes the degree to which the two-party system has been strained to the point of disintegration. More than at any time in recent history, the long-established traditions and institutions of American politics are under siege as a set of aging political leaders struggle to hold together a changing country.

Martin and Burns break news on most every page, drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before-seen documents and recordings from the highest levels of government. The book asks the vitally important (and disturbing) question: can American democracy, as we know it, ever work again?

Zapiro comes of age in this 21st annual.

Zuma once again takes centre stage for all the wrong reasons along with his cronies the Guptas and his nemesis Malema. It’s the year of the hashtag. #RhodesMustFall begat #FeesMustFall, also #Racism/#Sexism and #ZumaMustFall. With Nenegate and SARS wars, it’s the rand that’s really falling. Meanwhile, Pravin and Thuli fight the good fight.

Each cartoon is worth a thousand words and helps us make sense of our crazy, beautiful country where fact is indeed stranger than fiction.

The story of a ‘rogue unit’ operating within the South African Revenue Service (SARS) became entrenched in the public mind following a succession of sensational reports published by the Sunday Times in 2014. The unit, the reports claimed, had carried out a series of illegal spook operations: they had spied on President Jacob Zuma, run a brothel, illegally bought spyware and entered into unlawful tax settlements.

In a plot of Machiavellian proportions, head of the elite crime-busting unit Johann van Loggerenberg and many of SARS’s top management were forced to resign. Van Loggerenberg’s select team of investigators, with their impeccable track record of busting high-level financial fraudsters and nailing tax criminals, lost not only their careers but also their reputations. Now, in this extraordinary account, they finally get to put the record straight and the rumours to rest: there was no ‘rogue unit’. The public had been deceived, seemingly by powers conspiring to capture SARS for their own ends.

Shooting down the allegations he has faced one by one, Van Loggerenberg tells the story of what really happened inside SARS, revealing details of some of the unit’s actual investigations.

From the editor in chief of Variety and author of the New York Times bestseller "Ladies Who Punch", the never-fully-told, behind-the-scenes story of Donald Trump and The Apprentice, the long-running reality series that catapulted him to the White House.

Here for the first time is the definitive untold story of Donald Trump’s years as a reality TV star. Trump himself admits he might not have been president without The Apprentice. Now, just as he uncovered the chaos inside the daytime favorite The View in his bestselling "Ladies Who Punch", Ramin Setoodeh chronicles Trump’s dramatic tenure as New York’s ultimate boss in the boardroom, a mirage created by Survivor producer Mark Burnett and NBC boss Jeff Zucker.

With unprecedented access, including hours of interviews with Trump, his boardroom advisers George Ross and Carolyn Kepcher, Eric Trump, and some of the most memorable contestants, and writing with flair and authority, Setoodeh shares all the untold tales from this legendary show that has left its mark on popular culture, shaped the legend of its star, and ultimately changed American history.

Andrew Gimson, whose previous book Boris is the essential read on Johnson's earlier career, returns with a penetrating and entertaining new account of Boris Johnson's turbulent time as prime minister, from the highs of a landslide election victory to the lows of his car-crash resignation.

In Boris Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at Number 10, Gimson sets out to discover how a man dismissed as a liar, charlatan and tasteless joke was able, despite being written off more frequently than any other British politician of the twenty-first century, to become prime minister. During his ascent, Johnson benefited from being regarded as a clown, for this meant his opponents failed to take him seriously, while his supporters delighted in his ability to shock and enrage the Establishment. He even changed the language of politics; a new word, ‘cakeism’, entered the English lexicon to describe his implausible but seductive claim during the Brexit negotiations that it was possible to have one’s cake and eat it.

In a series of brilliant vignettes, Gimson sheds light on the parts played by sex, greed, boredom and low seriousness in Johnson’s rise and fall, describes how Partygate fatally imperilled his prime ministership, and places him in a line of Tory adventurers stretching back to Benjamin Disraeli: disreputable figures who often blew themselves up, but who also could display an astonishing ability to connect with the British public.

What kind of a person is Johnson? What kind of a country would dream of making him its prime minister? And why did he fall? Nobody has got closer than Gimson to finding out the answers.

When Johan Booysen hears that the new Provincial Police Chief takes backhanders from a Durban businessman, he decides to give her the benefit of the doubt. But the evidence becomes impossible to ignore and he soon gets dragged down the corridors of power and politics into a web of intrigue, deceit and betrayal that, at times, he has trouble making sense of.

Only when he is arrested, handcuffed and tossed into a cell does Booysen realise just how ruthless those opposed to him are – an opposition he comes to call the ‘cabal’ – and whom he believes have more blood on their hands than the so-called Cato Manor Death Squad with which he is closely associated.

Blood On Their Hands traces Johan Booysen’s life and career – from patrolling the streets of Amanzimtoti in the 1970s to his rise in 2010 to major general and head of KZN’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation unit, the Hawks. But his tenure is short-lived. When Booysen decides to take on those so determined to be rid of him, each legal battle he wins is met by hostility and further efforts to shut him out of the of the criminal justice system. But capitulating is not in his DNA…

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.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward tells the revelatory, behind-the-scenes story of three wars—Ukraine, the Middle East and the struggle for the American Presidency.

War is an intimate and sweeping account of one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history. We see President Joe Biden and his top advisers in tense conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. We also see Donald Trump, conducting a shadow presidency and seeking to regain political power.

With unrivaled, inside-the-room reporting, Woodward shows President Biden’s approach to managing the war in Ukraine, the most significant land war in Europe since World War II, and his tortured path to contain the bloody Middle East conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas. Woodward reveals the extraordinary complexity and consequence of wartime back-channel diplomacy and decision-making to deter the use of nuclear weapons and a rapid slide into World War III.

The raw cage-fight of politics accelerates as Americans prepare to vote in 2024, starting between President Biden and Trump, and ending with the unexpected elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president.

War provides an unvarnished examination of the vice president as she tries to embrace the Biden legacy and policies while beginning to chart a path of her own as a presidential candidate.

Woodward’s reporting once again sets the standard for journalism at its most authoritative and illuminating.

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.

A Desire to Return to the Ruins looks at the contentious issues of land reform and restitution in post-apartheid South Africa. It tells the stories of communities engaged in a battle to regain land forcefully taken away from them and their forebears during the apartheid years.

The stories range from successful claims that have turned communities against one another, their long struggle against government’s bureaucracy and the political wrangling around the land issue.

A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at one of the world's biggest tech companies.

In 2019, a Chinese entity called Tencent overtook Facebook to become the world's fifthlargest company. It was a watershed moment, a wake-up call for those in the West accustomed to regarding the global tech industry through the prism of Silicon Valley: Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. Yet to many of the two billion-plus people who live just across the Pacific Ocean, it came as no surprise at all.

Tencent's ambition to be an essential part of digital daily life means it holds a dizzyingly diverse range of products - music, gaming, messaging, and film.

In this fascinating narrative - crammed with insider interviews, exclusive details about the company's culture - tech reported Lulu Chen tells the story of how Tencent is changing the world and asks what the consequences will be for us all.

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.

“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 Rule Of Law, Glynnis Breytenbach reflects back on her career as a prosecutor, including specific cases she has tried, and on her life to provide a fascinating commentary on the importance of the independence of judicial institutions and the precariousness of this independence.

Her current challenges are directly linked to how outspoken she is and how she continues to campaign fiercely for the rule of law in this country.

The ANC has ruled South Africa for three decades during which time the country has gone from the promise of the Rainbow Nation to disfunction and despair. In The Super Cadres, bestselling author Pieter du Toit examines this legacy from the early halcyon days through to the disappointment of the Ramaphosa presidency.

Du Toit asks key questions before coming to a critical observation and a damning conclusion:

• What was the state of the ANC when it took power?
• Was ANC failure inevitable? Did they inherit a country so stricken by apartheid that success was impossible?
• When did the first signs of misrule and corruption occur?
• How did each of the presidencies perform, from Mandela to Ramaphosa? What role did each play in the road to failure?
• What was President Cyril Ramaphosa doing to stop state capture while he was deputy president?

Du Toit concludes that at the very centre of ANC – and thus state - failure is ‘cadre deployment’ which the ANC adopted as official party policy under President Thabo Mbeki. He shows how, over time, the appointment of cadres at every level of government inevitably led to the (con)fusion of party and state, the spread of incompetence, and the dire corruption that ate into every part of the country once Jacob Zuma took over.

An urgent and passionately argued call to action, The Unaccountables skilfully profiles the large corporations and private individuals who are all implicated in economic crime but have never been held to account. This book will anger many, who will now be able to put names and faces to those behind some of South Africa’s biggest corruption scandals, from apartheid to state capture.

Crucially, The Unaccountables focuses on 38 profiles detailing evidence of impunity and suggesting actions in each instance that could ensure accountability. Remember, South Africa is a wealthy country. The 2022 Africa Wealth Report estimates total private wealth in South Africa to be over $651 billion, more than R10 trillion. South Africa is home to more than twice as many high-net-worth individuals than any other African country. But these acts of violence, for that is what they are, by powerful individuals and corporations have driven millions into poverty.

In The Unaccountables, we meet them all, apartheid and war profiteers, the state capture profiteers, those who have profited from welfare, we meet the bankers and their banks who got away with laundering and profiteering, the auditors, complicit in economic crimes and, unsurprisingly, the bad cops. This book is led by research, data and years of investigation and, as such, is the most persuasive book to have been written about corruption in South Africa.

One of the editors, Hennie van Vuuren, is the author of the runaway international bestseller, Apartheid Guns and Money.

We have a lot to be positive about in South Africa. With all our problems, it’s easy to feel bleak. But hold those thoughts, because Legends might be just the tonic you need to drive off the gloom. This book tells the stories of a dozen remarkable people – some well known, others largely forgotten – who changed Mzansi for the better.

Most South Africans are proud of Nelson Mandela – and rightly so. His life was truly astounding, but he’s by no means the only person who should inspire us. There’s King Moshoeshoe, whose humanity and diplomatic strategies put him head and shoulders above his contemporaries, both European and African. And John Fairbairn, who brought non-racial democracy to the Cape in 1854. Olive Schreiner was a bestselling international author who fought racism, corruption and chauvinism. And Gandhi spent twenty years here inventing a system of protest that would bring an empire to its knees.

Legends also celebrates Eugène Marais’s startling contributions to literature and natural history (despite a lifelong morphine addiction); Sol Plaatje’s wit, intelligence and tenacity in the face of racial zealots; Cissie Gool’s lifetime fighting for justice and exposing bigots; and Sailor Malan’s battles against fascists in the skies of Europe and on the streets of South Africa. And then there’s Miriam Makeba, who began her life in prison and ended it as an international singing sensation; Steve Biko, who shifted the minds of an entire generation; and Thuli Madonsela (the book’s only living legend), who gracefully felled the most powerful man in the land.

Engagingly written and meticulously researched, Legends reminds South Africans that we have a helluva lot to be proud of.