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.

Africa's leading producer of electricity, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd, is also a vertically integrated monopoly, owned by the South African state. This national champion was shaken in 2008, when it was obliged to introduce 'load shedding', or rolling blackouts, and again in late 2014. Trying to understand how and why one of the iconic pillars of South African state capitalism is now in distress, the authors of this book argue that the so-called electricity crisis is in fact a public monopoly crisis.

Moving beyond technical aspects, they explore the relationship between state power and Eskom before, during and after apartheid. From this perspective, they suggest that the current technical and financial troubles of this public utility are illustrative of the weakening of its technopolitical regime, of how national institutions have governed Eskom's technological development, and of the pursuit of political goals in the production of electrical power. Without a clear industrial strategy during the 2000s, Eskom became a powerful tool of Broad-Black Economic Empowerment as well as a neopatrimonial system which generates profits captured by the ruling party. As a result, crisis in Eskom shakes the whole political edifice. Inefficient and its finances increasingly under scrutiny, this state-owned enterprise's existence as a monopolistic public utility is regularly a subject of debate.

The authors discuss the ambivalent role of Eskom in the national energy transition policy and whether solutions point in the direction of de-integrating this public monopoly and allowing its current technopolitical regime to enter a planned or natural decline.

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.

Capture, massive deception and devastating human consequences still felt today… Legal journalist Dianne Hawker delves deep to retell the full Aurora story.

In October 2009, Aurora Empowerment Systems – a black-owned, politically connected business – made a bid to rescue the liquidated Pamodzi Gold mines.

Former President Jacob Zuma's nephew, Khulubuse Zuma, his lawyer Michael Hulley and former president Nelson Mandela’s grandson Zondwa Mandela, were listed as directors of Aurora. On paper the company looked almost too good to be true – promising to turn the mines into a new business that would offer stellar benefits to workers, while also expanding into Africa. Soon after the acquisition, the first cracks appeared. More than 5 000 workers and suppliers, who depended on their employment to keep themselves and their families alive, went unpaid. Over the next few years, Aurora-managed mines were stripped of assets, as illicit payments went to the families of the “connected”, while workers starved.

Despite a litany of evidence of Aurora’s dishonesty, to this day little has been done to bring the perpetrators to book.

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.

Tom Bower, Britain's leading investigative biographer, unpicks the tangled web surrounding the Sussexes and their relationship with the royal family.

From courtroom dramas to courtier politics, using extensive research, expert sourcing and interviews from insiders who have never spoken before, this book uncovers an astonishing story of love, betrayal, secrets and revenge.

Forgiveness Redefined is Candice Mama’s honest and healing story. It tells how she found ways to deal with the death of her father, Glenack Masilo Mama, and to forgive the notorious apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock, the man responsible for his brutal murder. We follow Candice’s journey of discovering how her father died, how this affected her and how she battled the demons of depression before the age of sixteen. But most importantly, we follow her journey towards beating the odds and rising above her heartbreaks.

Candice Mama is today still under the age of 30, but has been named as one of Vogue Paris’ most inspiring women alongside glittering names such as Michelle Obama. She has taken backstage selfies with music crooner Seal and travels all over the world to talk about her journey. This bubbly, inspiring young author tells how she shed some of the worst layers of grief and became an inspiration for others. We learn about her perplexing, unconventional childhood, her search for identity, and the beautiful bond she formed, posthumously, with a father she never had the opportunity to get to know in person. She also tells, in her own words, about the life-changing encounter between her family and her father’s killer.

Candice tenderly opens up about the result of the trauma of her father’s death on her entire family, and meeting her mother for the first time at the age of four. She tells about the confusing, yet fascinating, dynamics that later unfolded as she discovered pieces of herself, rediscovered relationships with her own family and came to forgiveness and understanding.

This book serves as inspiration for other young – and older – people to look at their own stories through different lenses. Candice’s experiences are not unique, and she offers healing thoughts to others who suffered similar trauma by sharing the details of her own story. Forgiveness Redefined is a touching, personal story by a young woman who learned too early about pain, loss and rejection – but who also learned how to overcome those burdens and live joyfully.

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.

In this multi-billion rand corruption memoir, former Bosasa C.O.O and whistleblower, Angelo Agrizzi rips open the can of worms, exposing two decades of untold greed, politicking, corruption, bribery and deep state capture.

Inside the Belly of The Beast is a detailed confession, exposing the intimate fraudulent workings of a company, under the cult-like leadership of Gavin Watson. Agrizzi is one of few people with a first-hand account of what really happened behind the closed doors of Bosasa.

Cops and Robbers: we think we know how to tell the good guys from the bad, but when it comes to Cape Town’s crime scene, things are anything but clear cut. Controlled by gangs, fuelled by drugs and policed by cops that, all too often, get caught on the wrong side of the action.

Among the Cape Town cops who have consistently claimed that colleagues are trying to pin crimes on them are Major General Andre Lincoln (former head of a national police unit mandated by Nelson Mandela), Major General Jeremy Vearey (known as SA’s top gang buster) and Lieutenant Colonel Charl Kinnear (who was investigating some of the country's most brutal underworld crimes when he was assassinated in September 2020). Colleagues and suspects alike pointed to all three as colluding with criminals. Who is telling the truth?

Journalist Caryn Dolley has tracked this tangled trail, following the corruption breadcrumbs, sifting through court documents, laying fact upon fact and exposing the depths and breadth of systemic corruption that was set in place during apartheid and has only become more entrenched during the first decades of our democracy. She has traced the rot from cops to underworld to politicians and back, exposing duplicitous networks that have for decades ensnared South Africa in an expanding cycle of organised crime and cop claim crossfire. At the centre of this crisis is the mounting collateral: the victims of Cape Town’s manufactured killing fields.

To The Wolves tells the true life story of how South Africa’s underworld came to be, what continues to fuel it today and how the deception and lies go all the way to the top...

Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting ‘the human’ in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressions

The ‘human’ emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it allows for the social, political and economic elevation of those who are centred within its magic circle, and the degradation, marginalisation and immiseration of those excluded as the different and inferior Other, the less than human.

Speaking from Africa, a key site where the category of the human has been used throughout European modernity to control, exclude and deny equality of being, the contributors use decoloniality as a potent theoretical and philosophical tool, gesturing towards a liberated, pluriversal world where human difference will be recognised as a gift, not used to police the boundaries of the human. Here is a transdisciplinary critical exploration of a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and decolonial studies.

“We make a big mistake to consider Bain simply another foreign company that extracted economic rents. I believe its involvement in bringing South Africa to its knees through state capture was much more insidious.”

When Bain & Company partner Athol Williams reported his employer in October 2019 for withholding information on their complicity in state capture, he had no idea how far-reaching Bain’s collusion had been. Who would have suspected a prestigious global management consulting firm of misusing its business expertise and lending its reputation to the most profound attack on South Africa’s democracy?

Drawing on his testimony before the Zondo Commission, Williams here reveals the full extent of what Bain did not want the public to know. Not only did Bain withhold information and witnesses from the authorities; they also attempted to buy Williams’s silence and block his Zondo testimony.

Deep Collusion uncovers the inner workings of state capture design. Williams takes the reader into the evidence that reveals the after-hours, behind-closed-doors planning meetings that took place at Zuma’s residences – who was present and what was discussed. While this book exposes greed and corporate corruption and lifts the lid on foreign profiteering and the weakening of South Africa’s public institutions, it also highlights the lonely burden of the whistleblower and the great personal cost of telling the truth in the face of overwhelming pressure.

In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of women from poorer countries have braved treacherous journeys to richer countries to work as poorly paid domestic workers. In From servants to workers, Shireen Ally asks whether the low wages and poor working conditions so characteristic of migrant domestic work can truly be resolved by means of the extension of citizenship rights. Following South Africa's 'miraculous' transition to democracy, more than a million poor black women who had endured a despotic organization of paid domestic work under apartheid became the beneficiaries of one of the world's most impressive and extensive efforts to formalize and modernise paid domestic work through state regulation. Ally explores the political implications of paid domestic work as an intimate form of labour. From Servants to workers integrates sociological insights with the often-heartbreaking life histories of female domestic workers in South Africa and provides rich detail of the streets, homes, and churches of Johannesburg where these women work, live, and socialise.

Born in the old Transvaal town of Schweizer Reneke, Essop Pahad started on a path of political activism from his parents' flat in Becker Street, Ferreirastown, where an all-welcome policy prevailed and visionaries of the Congress alliance, such as Yusuf Dadoo, Walter Sisulu, O.R.Tambo, Nelson Mandela and Ahmed Kathrada were regular visitors. His parents instilled in the family strong anti-racist principles and a genuine concern for all human beings regardless of race, class or religion.

A graduate of the 'Congress School' in Johannesburg, Essop's growing commitment to social justice was nurtured by teachers who were among the struggle's most eminent leaders. An executive member of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress, Essop was banned in 1964 and went into exile in the UK where he was recruited into the South African Communist Party (SACP). In 1973 he studied at the Lenin Party School in Moscow and then worked in Prague representing the SACP on the editorial board of the World Marxist Review for a decade.

During this time he was sent by the ANC for military training with Umkhonto we Sizwe in Angola, which he was unable to complete as he contracted malaria. Essop returned to South Africa in 1990, where he played a central role in shaping our new democracy.

A Life Committed is the memoir of a revolutionary whose diverse experiences with other progressive people and movements, local and international, enabled him to deepen his understanding of how to better face the challenges confronting South Africa, Africa and the world. The book is spiced with anecdotes from his impressive memory archive and lightened by his mischievous sense of humour. Profiles of his mentors and friends from liberation movements and workers' parties provide insight into the extent of the fierce integrity,compassion and humanity of the author.

The first definitive history of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and the IDF’s targeted killing programs, hailed by The New York Times as “an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject.”

The Talmud says: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel’s DNA. From the very beginning of its statehood in 1948, protecting the nation from harm has been the responsibility of its intelligence community and armed services, and there is one weapon in their vast arsenal that they have relied upon to thwart the most serious threats: Targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small, sometimes in response to attacks against the Israeli people and sometimes preemptively.

In this page-turning, eye-opening book, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman—praised by David Remnick as “arguably [Israel’s] best investigative reporter”—offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs: their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions.

Bergman has gained the exceedingly rare cooperation of many current and former members of the Israeli government, including Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as high-level figures in the country’s military and intelligence services: the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Mossad (the world’s most feared intelligence agency), Caesarea (a “Mossad within the Mossad” that carries out attacks on the highest-value targets), and the Shin Bet (an internal security service that implemented the largest targeted assassination campaign ever, in order to stop what had once appeared to be unstoppable: suicide terrorism).

Including never-before-reported, behind-the-curtain accounts of key operations, and based on hundreds of on-the-record interviews and thousands of files to which Bergman has gotten exclusive access over his decades of reporting, Rise and Kill First brings us deep into the heart of Israel’s most secret activities. Bergman traces, from statehood to the present, the gripping events and thorny ethical questions underlying Israel’s targeted killing campaign, which has shaped the Israeli nation, the Middle East, and the entire world.

The Misery Merchants is a hard-hitting exposé of G4S, the company running one of South Africa’s private prisons in Mangaung. Hopkins presents up-close encounters with the gangs who run the prisons, and a unique insight into the minds of the men on the torture squad, who doused inmates with water before electrocuting them, and in some cases, strapped down ‘unruly’ prisoners and forced anti-psychotic medicines into their systems.

In the Free State of Ace Magashule, both the gangs and the prison bosses competed to run Mangaung Prison, one of South Africa’s few private prisons. Torture and forced medication were the order of the day. Hopkins, a seasoned journalist, has interviewed over 100 prisoners and many prison warders in order to understand what makes this prison so dysfunctional. Her insights and revelations will astonish you.

This book follows several characters who were held in or worked at the prison. L. is a prison gang general and an advocate for prisoners’ rights. He smuggled information on assaults, injections and corruption out of the prison for the author. Dan is a prison guard and a shop steward for the union. He led the workforce during two strikes and paid for it with his job and union membership. Setlai is a Department of Correctional Services official who blew the whistle on the abuse at Mangaung Prison in 2009. His reports were ignored and he was punished for speaking out. He was criminally charged and moved to another DCS post. Shakes is a member of the Emergency Security Team (EST) also known as the Ninjas. He engaged in torture and abuse but now feels ‘what we did was wrong’.

G4S is the largest security company in the world, and has its claws deep in SA’s government and private companies. Drive down any street and you’ll find a G4S van collecting or delivering money.

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

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

In 1985, a group of white South African business leaders, led by Gavin Relly, the executive chairperson of Anglo American, travelled to a game lodge in Zambia to meet with the exiled ANC leadership under Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki. This visit set in motion a coordinated and well-resourced plan by big business to influence and direct political change in South Africa.

In The ANC Billionaires, top-selling author Pieter du Toit draws on first-hand accounts by major roleplayers about the contentious relationship between capital and the ANC before, during and after the country’s transition to democracy, and shows how the liberation organisation was completely unprepared to navigate the intersection between business and politics.

He also ties the rise of the new elite – including Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe and Saki Macozoma – to the ANC, a party of government and patronage.

Tim Marshall's global bestseller Prisoners of Geography showed how every nation's choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Since then, the geography hasn't changed. But the world has.

In this revelatory new book, Marshall explores ten regions that are set to shape global politics in a new age of great-power rivalry: Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Greece, Turkey, the Sahel, Ethiopia, Spain and Space. Find out why Europe's next refugee crisis is closer than it thinks as trouble brews in the Sahel; why the Middle East must look beyond oil and sand to secure its future; why the eastern Mediterranean is one of the most volatile flashpoints of the twenty-first century; and why the Earth's atmosphere is set to become the world's next battleground.

Delivered with Marshall's trademark wit and insight, this is a lucid and gripping exploration of the power of geography to shape humanity's past, present - and future.

Are farm killings political? Criminal? Is there really a white genocide under a black majority government?

Farm murders have occupied a central role in South Africa’s narratives for over 200 years. At the same time, the definition of a 'farmer' is highly contested. Media reports and activism groups typically acknowledge white farmers, frequently excluding the large number of people of colour.