The Detainees’ Parents Support Committee (DPSC) was started in 1981 in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was set up by the parents, spouses and families of activists who were detained and had no recourse to legal intervention. Many in this movement had not been politically involved.

Members of the DPSC stood on street corners with placards calling for the release of their children. They organised food, clothing and legal representation for detainees across the country, and they supported the detainees’ families. DPSC activists marched, petitioned, argued, wrote and protested for the release of all detainees. They made public the brutal operations of the security establishment.

The DPSC helped to draw international attention to the atrocities being perpetuated against children – some as young as nine – by the apartheid state. And the evidence amassed by the DPSC helped to lay some of the groundwork for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

The Knock On The Door tells the story of the DPSC and of how the anti-detention movement became part of the mass uprising that brought down apartheid. It is an inspiring account of ordinary people coming together to stand up against racism and the abuse of power.

Nothing in life is certain, except death and taxes – or so the expression goes. And over the past two decades South African criminals and tax dodgers have come to realise this truth the hard way.

Tax sleuth Johann van Loggerenberg was at the centre of many of SARS’ high-profile cases during his time there. As far as SARS is concerned all forms of income are subjected to tax, even if by ill-gotten means. Whether you are a drug dealer from Durban, one of the hitmen who shot Brett Kebble or soccer boss Irvin Khoza, you have to pay your dues!

Van Loggerenberg relates the riveting inside stories of the investigations into businessmen like Dave King, Billy Rautenbach, Barry Tannenbaum and his ponzi scheme, and others. Over the years he got to know all the scams and dirty tricks in the book and he explains these in plain language.

In these investigations the tax authority worked closely with the police, the NPA and the Directorate of Special Operations. However, after a few years SARS became the victim of its own success. In telling the stories of how tax evaders were caught, Van Loggerenberg also shows how the power struggle between different state departments and the phenomenon of state capture in recent years started crippling SARS.

Written in 1957, when North African independence movements were gaining momentum, The Colonizer and the Colonized studies the enduring legacy, political as much as psychological, of colonisation throughout the world.

Albert Memmi depicts colonialism as a disease of the European but crucially he demonstrates that colonialism destroys both the colonizer and the colonized, providing penetrating insights into colonial inheritance and resistance that remain as relevant today. One of the great works of twentieth-century political thought, The Colonizer and the Colonized speaks to experiences in the Global South as well as European countries such as Britain and France, who are still struggling with their imperial pasts. In revealing the mechanisms of colonial oppression, it also highlights the origins of all oppression of one group by another.

This edition includes introductions by two of the greatest writers of the twentieth-century: South African novelist and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Ton Vosloo’s remarkable career in the media spanned nearly 60 years in South Africa’s history. During this turbulent time, South Africa went through the transition from Afrikaner Nationalist rule to an ANC government. At the helm of the leading press group founded in 1913 to support nascent Afrikaner nationalism, Vosloo’s story is not just one of newspapers and politics but also one of singular business and commercial success as the Naspers Group evolved from a print group to an electronic company with significant investments across the world.

In 1983 Vosloo was appointed managing director of Naspers and set about vigorously transforming the group. On the ideological front, it was a fight to the death with the old Transvaal’s predominantly right-wing Perskor Group for the soul of the Afrikaner. On the commercial front, Vosloo established the pay television network M-Net. In 1992, Vosloo became chairman of Naspers with Koos Bekker succeeding him as CEO. The story of Naspers’ successes in investing in Chinese internet company Tencent and in establishing a footprint in 130 countries is a continuing one, but one begun under Vosloo’s stewardship.

In Across Boundaries, Vosloo gives his account of these momentous times with wry humour and a journalist’s deft pen.

ALSO AVAILABLE IN AFRIKAANS AS OOR GRENSE

Die geskiedenis van die eerste 59 jaar van die SAUK se bestaan; vanaf 1936 tot 1995. Die vertel ook die ontstaan van openbare uitsaai, die missie en doelwitte daarvan en waarom dit hersien moet word.

Die politieke element word bespreek: Watter soort stut was die SAUK vir apartheid? Watter rol het die SAUK gespeel as sleutelspeler in die transformasieproses? Daar word gekyk na politieke inmenging en aanstellings wat direk uit die Uitsaaiminister se staatsdepartement gemaak is. Ook ingespan is die SAUK se sleutelrol in geskiedkundige gebeure: Die vrylating van Nelson Mandela en die vryheidsverkiesing van 1994.

Die boek behoort nie net die wye publiek nie, maar ook akademici, historici en politici te interesseer.

What happens when a former liberation movement turned political party loses its dominance but survives because no opposition party is able to succeed it? The trends are established: South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) is in decline. Its hegemony has been weakened, its legitimacy diluted. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s appointment suspended the ANC’s electoral decline, but it also heightened internal organisational tensions between those who would deepen its corrupt and captured status, and those who would redeem it. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened its fragility, and the state’s inability to manage the socio-economic devastation has aggravated prior faultlines. These are the undeniable knowns of South African politics; what will evolve from this is less certain.

In her latest book Precarious Power Susan Booyen delves deep into this political terrain and its trajectory for South Africa’s future. She covers an expansive range of topics, from contradictory party politics and dissent that is veiled in order to retain electoral following, to populist policy-making and the use of soft law enforcement to ensure that angry citizens do not become further alienated. Booysen’s analysis reveals Ramaphosa to be a president who is weak and walking a tightrope between serving the needs of the organisation and those of the nation. While he rose to the challenge of being a national leader during the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis has highlighted existing inequalities in South Africa and discontent has grown. The ANC’s power has indeed become exceedingly precarious, and this seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

This incisive analysis of ANC power – as party, as government, as state – will appeal not only to political scientists but to all who take a keen interest in current affairs.

In 1993 South Africa state president F.W. de Klerk and African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ‘for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime’. Yet, while both deserved the plaudits they received for entering the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid, the four years of negotiations preceding the April 1994 elections, known as the transition era, were not ‘peaceful’: they were the bloodiest of the entire apartheid era, with an estimated 14,000 deaths attributed to politically related violence.

This book studies, for the first time, the conflicts between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party that took place in South Africa’s industrial heartland surrounding Johannesburg. Exploring these events through the perceptions and memories of combatants and non-combatants from war-torn areas, along with security force members, politicians and violence monitors, offers new possibilities for understanding South Africa’s turbulent transition.

Challenging the prevailing narrative which attributes the bulk of the violence to a joint state security force and IFP assault against ANC supporters, the author argues for a more expansive approach that incorporates the aggression of ANC militants, the intersection between criminal and political violence, and especially clashes between groups aligned with the ANC.

With its impressive tradition of left politics, South Africa was the hope of the world. At the heart of post-apartheid politics was a revolutionary nationalist ANC, the oldest Communist Party in Africa, the SACP, and one of the most militant labour union federations in the world, COSATU. Yet South Africa’s democracy-making project has gone horribly wrong.

This has been happening over three decades through deep globalisation and inordinate power given to business to prevail over everything. A criminalised market democracy, predicated on an unviable society of deepening inequality, climate disasters and eroding state capacity, is now moving further to the extreme right. These conjuncturally situated writings highlight the pushback against the neoliberal turn, Zumafication, emergent neofascism, the fraud of the National Democratic Revolution and the normalisation of the dangerous climate contradiction. This collection contributes to explaining the degeneration of national liberation politics and the polycrisis of post-apartheid democracy.

Globally and within South Africa, old left politics (revolutionary nationalist, Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist and social democratic) has failed. The world historical defeats of Soviet socialism, social democracy and revolutionary nationalism also became South African leftism defeats. These writings, grounded in a consistent transformative intellectual praxis and against the grain of defeat, affirm the necessity of left renewal. Its praxis-centred arguments document 27 years of working with grassroots forces and the global left to reconstruct the left imaginary beyond the traditional left binary of reform versus revolution.

The experimental epistemology at work in these writings provides critical decolonial resources for a new transformative leftism politics, informed by an ethics of care, while pointing to new horizons for further elaboration.

The winner of the 2017 Ernest Cole Award is Daylin Paul for his project, Broken Land. The project explores the other side of power. Set in Mpumalanga, home of 46% of South Africa's arable soil, it is also the area where nine power-burning coal stations are active. Paul's work explores the direct impact of fuel-burning coal stations on the local economy, population, farming community and, more broadly, climate change. As Paul says, "These power stations, while providing electricity for an energy-desperate South Africa, also have a devastating and lasting impact on the environment and the health of local people. Mining licences granted conditionally by the South African government are meant to safeguard the ecology and allow local people to benefit from the mineral wealth of the land. But it is clear that these conditions are not being followed and that the health and economic well-being of both the land and its people are being jeopardised. Vast tracts of fertile, arable land are being ripped up, the landscape scarred with the black pits of coal mines while coal-burning power stations are one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world." The polluting power stations not only contribute to global climate change but, through toxic sulphur effluents, also to the poisoning of scarce water supplies for a range of communities who are dependent on these for their survival. The area has in recent years also been hit by devastating droughts. The power dynamics in the area have in recent times been drawn into the national political arena. The former Glencore coal mines, taken over by Optimum Coal Holdings Limited, a conglomerate owned by the Gupta family, are embroiled in corruption and nepotism scandals that are affecting the very highest levels of the South African government. The aim of Paul's project as he says is "to look at both the macro issues like pollution, poverty and climate change while also personalising the experience of the local people who are on the front lines of this crisis and provide us with a glimpse of what the future could be like for the country and indeed the SADC region."

A landmark account of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, based on award-winning research, and recently discovered archival material.

In the 1930s, Germany was at a turning point, with many looking to the Nazi phenomenon as part of widespread resentment towards cosmopolitan liberal democracy and capitalism. This was a global situation that pushed Germany to embrace authoritarianism, nationalism and economic self-sufficiency, kick-starting a revolution founded on new media technologies, and the formidable political and self-promotional skills of its leader.

Based on award-winning research and recently discovered archival material, The Death Of Democracy is a panoramic new survey of one of the most important periods in modern history, and a book with a resounding message for the world today.

An asteroid the size of Table Mountain crashed into what was to become South Africa over 2 billion years ago, marking the spot. The country’s history since then has always been robust and full of energy. This book takes you in record time from that moment, when the earth’s richest gold reefs were shaped, to the advent of democracy in 1994, another event that stunned the world, and beyond. Along the way you will encounter some of the most ancient dinosaurs on record, the very first people on the planet, and the first cultures. You will see outsiders moving in to reshape history: hunters and gatherers, cultivators and herders, iron-workers from the north, and immigrants from Europe and Asia. They fought and made peace; they stumbled upon gold and diamonds; they rose to the heights of excellence and sank to the depths of oppression, until on one day they all queued as equals to elect a government. That is the story marked by dinosaurs, diamonds and democracy.

She knew she might lose her job as group treasurer, yet Cynthia Stimpel decided to blow the whistle anyway. She simply could not keep quiet about an irregular deal of R256 million at South African Airways on Dudu Myeni's watch. It was not an easy decision, but 'the right one'.

Cynthia was on a pilgrimage in France when she received word that a dodgy deal between BNP Capital and SAA was signed against her strict orders. She immediately sent a whistleblowing message to National Treasury and raised the alarm in an attempt to stop the deal. Although she succeeded in saving SAA millions she paid a high price for speaking the truth; She lost her job and her reputation. Yet her battle against Myeni and her fellow state capturers at the SAA was far from over. She still had to face Myeni in court and testify against her at the Zondo Commission.

This is a very personal state capture story that shows how one brave individual helped to stop the rot.

If you paid even a moment’s attention during high-school history lessons, you probably know that 1910 brought about the Union of South Africa, that the 1948 general election ushered in apartheid, and that the Rainbow Nation was born when Madiba triumphed in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. Spoilt Ballots dishes the dirt on these pivotal events in our history. But it also sheds light on a dozen lesser known contests, starting with the assassination of King Shaka in 1828 and ending with the anointing of President Cyril at Nasrec in 2017.

Spoilt Ballots is as much about the people who voted in some of our most decisive elections as it is about those who didn’t get to make their mark. It explains why a black man in the Cape had more political rights in 1854 than at any other point in the ensuing 140 years and how the enfranchisement of women in 1930 was actually a step back for democracy.

The book will leave you wondering if Oom Paul Kruger’s seriously dicey win in the 1893 ZAR election might have paved the way for the Boer War and whether ‘Slim Jannie’ Smuts really was that slim after all. It shows how the Nats managed to get millions of English-speakers to vote for apartheid and why the Groot Krokodil’s attempt to co-opt coloureds and Indians into the system backfired spectacularly.

Entertaining and impeccably researched, Spoilt Ballots lifts the lid on 200 years of electoral dysfunction in our beloved and benighted nation.

The re-emergence of debates on the decolonisation of knowledge has revived interest in the National Question, which began over a century ago and remains unresolved. Tensions that were suppressed and hidden in the past are now being openly debated. Despite this, the goal of one united nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy remains elusive. This edited volume examines the way in which various strands of left thought have addressed the National Question, especially during the apartheid years, and goes on to discuss its relevance for South Africa today and in the future.

Instead of imposing a particular understanding of the National Question, the editors identified a number of political traditions and allowed contributors the freedom to define the question as they believed appropriate - in other words, to explain what they thought was the Unresolved National Question. This has resulted in a rich tapestry of interweaving perceptions.

The volume is structured in two parts. The first examines four foundational traditions - Marxism-Leninism (the Colonialism of a Special Type thesis); the Congress tradition; the Trotskyist tradition; and Africanism. The second part explores the various shifts in the debate from the 1960s onwards, and includes chapters on Afrikaner nationalism, ethnic issues, Black Consciousness, feminism, workerism and constitutionalism. The editors hope that by revisiting the debates not popularly known among the scholarly mainstream, this volume will become a catalyst for an enriched debate on our identity and our future.

The remarkable, and often touching, friendship between Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts is a rich study in contrasts.

In youth they occupied very different worlds: Churchill, the rambunctious and thrusting young aristocrat; Smuts, the ascetic, philosophical Cape farm boy who would go on to Cambridge. Brought together first as enemies in the Anglo-Boer War, and later as allies in the First World War, the men forged a friendship which spanned the first half of the twentieth century and endured until Smuts’s death in 1950. Richard Steyn, author of Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, examines this close friendship through two world wars and the intervening years, drawing on a maze of archival and secondary sources including letters, telegrams and the voluminous books written about both men.

This is a fascinating account of two remarkable men in war and peace: one the leader of the Empire, the other the leader of a small fractious member of that Empire who nevertheless rose to global prominence.

Herman Mashaba rose from humble beginnings to become one of South Africa’s wealthiest and best-known entrepreneurs, as well as Mayor of Johannesburg.

His remarkable story begins in a small village in Gauteng, where we meet the cocky youngster who refused to settle for a future that offered nothing. Forced to drop out of university, the determined young man fought to establish the first black-owned haircare company in South Africa. Mashaba struggled every day of his life – against apartheid, with its demeaning laws, and against his competitors to grab market share for his business. In the process, Mashaba learnt lessons that few business schools teach today.

This is a story of survival, and of determination in adversity. It is also a love story between Herman and Connie, his wife of 35 years, who embarked on this journey together. Mashaba shows the importance of having a vision, daring to dream it, and then making it happen. This inspiring book will leave you with the question: “If he did it, why can’t I?”

At the opening of South Africa's first democratic parliament in 1994, newly elected president Nelson Mandela issued a clarion call to an unlikely group: white Afrikaans women, who during apartheid occupied the ambivalent position of being both oppressor and oppressed. He conjured the memory of poet Ingrid Jonker as `both an Afrikaner and an African' who `instructs that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child'. More than two decades later, the question is: how have white Afrikaans-speaking women responded to the liberating possibilities of constitutional democracy?

With Afrikaner nationalism in disrepair, and official apartheid in demise, have they re-imagined themselves in opposition to colonial ideas of race, gender, sexuality and class?

Sitting Pretty explores this postapartheid identity through the concepts of ordentlikheid, as an ethnic form of respectability, and the volksmoeder, or mother of the nation, as enduring icon. Issues of intersectionality, space, emotion and masculinity are also investigated.

Anger, hurt, loss, rejection … these feelings are familiar to the families who, in the early 1970s, were forced from their homes in Harfield Village in Cape Town’s southern suburbs. Siona O’Connell brings their stories to light. She examines the lost ways of life, the sense of home and belonging.

David Brown’s images show what life was like in Harfield before the removals, and his images are echoed by recent photos of the same former residents.

In October 2015, the Gupta brothers offered Mcebisi Jonas the position of minister of finance in exchange for R600 million. Then deputy minister of finance, Jonas turned down the bribe and a period of deep introspection followed for him. How did we reach this point, and what did the future hold for South Africa’s democracy and the economy?

In After Dawn, Mcebisi Jonas analyses the crisis at the heart of our current system, which places politics at the centre of policymaking and implementation at the expense of growth. In this important and authoritative book, Jonas first unpacks and analyses the current badlands of the South African economic and political landscape. In the second half, Jonas proposes a series of workable and practical solutions for transitioning South Africa into a growing, job-creating country including:

• Putting inclusive growth at the centre of economic policy;
• rapidly expanding new technological capacities and knowledge to transition to a twenty-first-century economy;
• expanding human capabilities at scale;
• path-changing trade-offs to catalyse the next phase of South Africa’s development;
• nurturing a corruption-free, high-performance state built on meritocracy and innovation; and
• changing the nature of politics.

Time is of the essence and the window of opportunity is narrowing for all South Africans to work together towards the South Africa we all imagined was possible in 1994.

It is well known that the African National Congress was formed in 1912 and is considered the oldest political organisation on the African continent. What is often not widely known is that the person who founded it was one Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a thirty-year-old black South African from Inanda outside the city of Durban.

What is remarkable about Seme’s achievement in founding the ANC is not only that he succeeded where most had failed at forging black political unity. It is also the speed at which he did it. He had just returned to South Africa from the United Kingdom and the United States of America, where he had been a student since he was a teenager. In slightly over a year the founding conference of the ANC was convened and he was at its helm as the main organiser.

Seme also established a national newspaper, became one of the pioneering black lawyers in South Africa, bought land from white farmers for black settlement right at the time when opposition to it was gaining momentum, became a sought-after adviser and confidant to African royalty, and was considered a leading visionary for black economic empowerment. And yet, when he became president general of the ANC in the 1930s, he brought it to its knees through sheer ineptitude and an authoritarian style of leadership. On more than one occasion he was found guilty for breaching the law, which partly led to him being struck off the roll of attorneys.

This book discusses in detail Seme’s extraordinary life, from his humble beginnings at Inanda Mission to his triumphs and disappointments across the continents, in his public and private life. When Seme died in 1951 he was bankrupt and his political standing had suffered greatly. And yet he was praised as one of the greatest South Africans ever to have lived. For all this, he has largely been forgotten. This biography brings the remarkable life of this extraordinary South African back to public consciousness.

How to Steal a City is an insider account of this intervention, which lays bare how the administration was entirely captured and bled dry by a criminal syndicate, how factional politics within the ruling party abetted that corruption, and how a comprehensive clean-up was eventually conducted.

It is written as a gripping real-life thriller, taking the reader deeper and deeper into the rotten heart of the city. As a former senior government official and local government “fixer”, Crispian Olver was no stranger to dealing with dodgy politicians and broken organisations. Yet what he found was graft that went far beyond the dodgy contracts, blatant conflicts of interest and garden-variety kickbacks he had seen before. It had evolved into a web far more sophisticated and deep rooted than he had ever imagined, involving mazes of shell companies, assassinations, criminal syndicates, and compromised local politicians. The metro was effectively controlled by a criminal network, closely allied to a dominant local ANC faction. What he found was complete state capture—a microcosm of what has been happening in South Africa’s national government.

But there was a personal price to pay. Intense political pressure and threats to his personal safety took a toll on his mental and physical health. He had to have a full-time bodyguard, and never maintained a regular routine. He eventually lost much of his political cover. Olver ultimately had to flee the city as the forces stacked against him started to wreak their revenge.

This is his story.

When John Kgoana Nkadimeng travelled from Sekhukhuneland to the Witwatersrand in 1944, he was one of thousands of migrants seeking work in town. But his encounters with racial injustice and contact with activists drew him down a very different path, one which was dedicated to the struggle.

Mokgomana tells the story of Nkadimeng, from his origins in the rural village of Manganeng, in an area with a long history of resistance to colonial rule, through his growing involvement in trade unions, the Communist Party and the ANC. He spearheaded rural opposition to Bantu Authorities, helped take new MK recruits out of the country, and played a crucial role in re-establishing the ANC underground after the state smashed resistance networks. In 1976 he fled South Africa for the perilous terrain of building MK organisations in Swaziland and Mozambique. In 1982 he settled in Lusaka and played a pivotal part in the leadership of the ANC, Communist Party and SACTU during that decisive decade.

Mokgomana represents a new focus on an under-acknowledged leader and offers fresh perspectives on over four decades of struggle history. It is also the story of the family which supported him, enduring harassment and separation, and their own splintered trajectories through exile and homecoming.

In 1977, RW Johnson’s best-selling How Long Will South Africa Survive? provided a controversial and highly original analysis of the survival prospects of apartheid. Now, after more than twenty years of ANC rule, he believes the situation has become so critical that the question must be posed again.

‘The big question about ANC rule’, he writes, ‘is whether African nationalism would be able to cope with the challenges of running a modern industrial economy. Twenty years of ANC rule have shown conclusively that the party is hopelessly ill-equipped for this task. Indeed, everything suggests that South Africa under the ANC is fast slipping backward and that even the survival of South Africa as a unitary state cannot be taken for granted. The fundamental reason why the question of regime change has to be posed is that it is now clear that South Africa can either choose to have an ANC government or it can have a modern industrial economy. It cannot have both.’

Johnson’s analysis is strikingly original and cogently argued. He has for several decades now been the senior international commentator on South African affairs, known for his lucid analysis and complete lack of deference towards the conventional wisdom.

Includes a post-October 7 2023 introduction to the South African edition.

Israel’s military industrial complex uses the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world to despots and democracies. For more than 50 years, occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an “enemy” population, the Palestinians.

It’s here that they have perfected the architecture of control. Israel had been an arms exporter to apartheid South Africa until its collapse in 1994. It supplied surveillance technology to India, self-described as the world’s biggest democracy but in fact increasingly an ethnocentric dictatorship favouring the Hindu ascendancy and modelling India’s role in Kashmir and elsewhere on Israel’s role in Palestine. In the 2016-2020 period, Israel was the world’s eighth largest exporter of arms.

Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers this largely hidden world in a global investigation with secret documents, revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting. This book’s in-depth analysis shows, for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality, and maps how Israel became a global leader in spying technology and defence hardware that fuels the globe’s most brutal conflicts.

It was in 1972 when the seemingly ordinary Craig Williamson registered at Wits University and joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Williamson was elected NUSAS’s vice president and in January 1977, when his career in student politics came to an abrupt end, he fled the country and from Europe continued his anti-apartheid ‘work’. But Williamson was not the activist his friends and comrades thought he was. In January 1980, Captain Williamson was unmasked as a South African spy.

Williamson returned to South Africa and during the turbulent 1980s worked for the foreign section of the South African Police’s notorious Security Branch and South Africa’s ‘super-spy’ transformed into a parcel-bomb assassin.

Through a series of interviews with the many people Williamson interacted with while he was undercover and after his secret identity was eventually exposed, Jonathan Ancer details Williamson’s double life, the stories of a generation of courageous activists, and the book eventually culminates with Ancer interviewing South Africa’s ‘super-spy’ face-to-face. It deals with crucial issues of justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, betrayal and the consequences of apartheid that South Africans are still grappling with.