The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa’s leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume.

This compilation features critical essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J.M. Coetzee, as well as writings on gender politics, race, identity, visual art, sexuality and a wide range of other cultural and political topics. Also included are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb.

In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insight on her nation’s history, policies, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and diversity and pluralism are the declared enemies of right-wing populist movements, her essays speak powerfully to a wide range of international issues.

Writing a Wider War presents a dramatically new interpretation of the role of Boer women in the conflict and profoundly changes how we look at the making of Afrikaner nationalism. African experiences of the war are also examined, highlighting racial subjugation in the context of colonial war and black participation, and showcasing important new research by African historians. The collection includes a reassessment of British imperialism and probing essays on J. A. Hobson; the masculinist nature of life on commando among Boer soldiers; Anglo-Jewry; secularism; health and medicine; nursing, women, and disease in the concentration camps; and the rivalry between British politicians and generals. An examination of the importance of the South African War in contemporary British political economy, and the part played by imperial propaganda, rounds off a thoroughly groundbreaking reinterpretation of this formative event in South Africa's history.

On a freezing winter’s night, a few hours before dawn on 12 May 1969, security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Mandela and detained her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged eight and ten.

Rounded up in a group of other anti-apartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away. This was the start for Winnie Mandela of a 491-day period of detention and two trials.

Forty-one years after her release on 14 September 1970, Greta Soggot, the widow of David Soggot, one of Winnie Mandela’s advocates during the 1969/1970 trials, handed her a stack of papers that included a journal and notes that she had written in detention.

491 Days: Prisoner number 1323/69 shares with the world Winnie Mandela’s moving and compelling journal as well as some of the letters written between affected parties at the time. Readers gain insight into the brutality she experienced, her depths of despair as well as her resilience and defiance under extreme pressure.

This book was co-edited by Swati Dlamini and Sahm Venter with the support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Martina Dahlmanns, the daughter of parents who grew up in the shadow of post-war Germany, an adoptive mother of children who are black, and a member of a dialogue group of black and white women, urgently questions the very depths of what it means to be white in South Africa today. Her deeply personal memoir is unsettling because of what it reveals simultaneously about the enduring impact of inherited privilege and the repercussions of disadvantage

Her book is unsettling, precisely because of what it reveals simultaneously about the enduring impact of inherited privilege and the repercussions of disadvantage. But it is Dahlmanns’ dialogue with Tumi Jonas—whose own reflections appear in the last section of the book—that reveals so much of what’s possible, yet potentially destructive, in relationships between black and white South Africans today.

A Manifesto For Social Change is the third of a three-volume series that started seven years ago investigating the causes of our country’s – and the continent’s – development obstacles.

Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing (2009) set out to explain what role African elites played in creating and promoting their fellow Africans’ misery. Advocates for Change: How to Overcome Africa’s Challenges (2011) set out to show that there were short-term to medium-term solutions to many of Africa’s and South Africa’s problems, from agriculture to healthcare, if only the powers that be would take note. And now, more than 20 years after the advent of democracy, we have A Manifesto For Social Change: How To Save South Africa, the conclusion in the ‘trilogy’.

This book started its life as Gridlocked, but through the process of research undertaken by Moeletsi and Nobantu it has evolved into a different project, a manifesto that identifies some of South Africa’s key problems and what is required to change the country’s downward trajectory.

Our country is in turmoil: political corruption at the highest levels of government; criminals able to walk out of prison at their convenience and live lives of luxury; and power blackouts for 12 hours a day.

But we South Africans also know how to make things work.

This book is a wealth of simple, cost-effective ideas that could immediately improve our nation:

• Want to know how to revitalize tourism in SA? There’s a way, and it’s free!
• Transform our policing system without breaking the bank.
• Upgrade our education and healthcare without adding a cent to the budget.
• Implement a sustainable alternative to the basic income grant while boosting the economy.
• Resolve the land issue without resorting to expropriation.

No matter who you vote for, get your politicians to drive these ideas.

The Soweto Student Uprising of 1976 was a decisive moment in the struggle against apartheid. It marked the expansion of political activism to a new generation of young activists, but beyond that it inscribed the role that young people of subsequent generations could play in their country's future.

Since that momentous time, students have held a special place in the collective imaginary of South African history. Drawing on research and writing by leading scholars and prominent activists, Students Must Rise takes Soweto '76 as its pivot point, but looks at student and youth activism in South Africa more broadly by considering what happened before and beyond the Soweto moment. Early chapters assess the impact of the anti-pass campaigns of the 1950s, of political ideologies like Black Consciousness as well as of religion and culture in fostering political consciousness and organisation among youth and students in townships and rural areas. Later chapters explore the wide-reaching impact of June 16th itself for student organisation over the next two decades across the country. Two final chapters consider contemporary student-based political movements, including #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, and historically root these in the long and rich tradition of student activism in South Africa.

2016 marks the 40th anniversary of the 1976 June 16th uprisings. This book rethinks the conventional narrative of youth and student activism in South Africa by placing that most famous of moments - the 1976 students' uprising in Soweto - in a deeper historical and geographic context.

The Democratic Alliance won control of the uMngeni Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands after the local government elections in 2021. As the only DA-run municipality in KZN, uMngeni provides a template for how local government could work in a post-ANC South Africa.

Written by two leaders at the very heart of the project, Saving South Africa reveals the challenges, the triumphs and disasters the new administration has encountered along the way. It is an eye-opening exposé of how cadre deployment has helped to bring the country to its knees. It is a story of incompetent officials, political spies, gunwielding tenderpreneurs, petty theft and grand larceny.

And yet, as we follow the authors on their journey, there is always hope for a better future as the corrupt layers of local governance are gradually stripped away, revealing the responsive and caring civil service envisioned by the South African Constitution.

In rural South Africa today, there are signs that chieftaincies are resurging after having been disbanded in colonial times. Among these is the amaTshatshu of the Eastern Cape, which was dis-established in 1852 by the British, and recognised once more under the democratic ANC dispensation, in 2003.

Bawana, leader of the amaTshatshu, was the first Thembu chief to cross the Kei River, in the mid-1820s, to open up the northeastern frontier of the Cape Colony. His successors and followers fought the British in the frontier wars but were defeated. In tracing his history and that of his descendants this book explores the meaning of chieftainship in South Africa—at the time of colonial conquest, under apartheid’s Bantustans, and now, post apartheid. It illustrates not only the story of a beleaguered and dispossessed people but also the ways in which power is constructed. In addition, it is about gender and land, about belonging, identity and naming. The book unsettles accounts of chiefly authority, unpacks conflicts between royal families, municipalities and government departments, and explores the impasse created by these quarrels. It retrieves evidence that the colonial state sought to obliterate and draws the disempowered back into the process of making history.

The authors are both closely associated with the land and the people of the amaTshatshu. One is a historian, who grew up on their land, and the other is counsellor to the chief. As such, they bring their knowledge and respective skills to bear in this book. The collaboration of a black and a white author sets up a creative tension which animates the text and is a powerful element of the book.

The End Of Whiteness aims to reveal the pathological, paranoid and bizarre consequences that the looming end of apartheid had on white culture in South Africa, and overall to show that whiteness is a deeply problematic category that needs to be deconstructed and thoughtfully considered.

This book uses contemporary media material to investigate two symptoms of this late apartheid cultural hysteria that appeared throughout the contemporary media and in popular literature during the 1980s and 1990s, showing their relation to white anxieties about social change, the potential loss of privilege and the destabilisation of the country that were imagined to be an inevitable consequence of majority rule.

The ‘Satanic panic’ revolved around the apparent threat posed by a cult of white Satanists that was never proven to exist but was nonetheless repeatedly accused of conspiracy, murder, rape, drug-dealing, cannibalism and bestiality, and blamed for the imminent destruction of white Christian civilisation in South Africa.

During the same period an unusually high number of domestic murder-suicides occurred, with parents killing themselves and their children or other family members by gunshot, fire, poison, gas, even crossbows and drownings. This so-called epidemic of family murder was treated by police, press and social scientists as a plague that specifically affected white Afrikaans families. These double monsters, both fantastic and real, helped to disembowel the clarities of whiteness even as they were born out of threats to it. Deep within its self-regarding modernity and renegotiation of identity, contemporary white South Africa still wears those scars of cultural pathology.

South Africa has produced two leaders who achieved global recognition and renown in their respective eras: Jan Christiaan Smuts (Prime Minister, 1919-24 and 1939-48) and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (President, 1994-99). The former was much celebrated for playing a significant role in reconstructing international architecture after both world wars; the latter remains globally admired for his leading part in drawing South Africa back from racial war and becoming a democracy. As a result, both have attracted multiple biographies. Today, however, whereas Mandela remains a much-admired global icon, Smuts’ reputation is much diminished, with contemporary historians citing his racism and role in constructing the foundations of apartheid South Africa.

In this controversial book, Roger Southall provides a re-evaluation of Smuts’ hugely contradictory career by proposing fascinating parallels with the life and political trajectory of Mandela. Both came to maturity as political leaders as freedom fighters – Smuts against the British and Mandela against the apartheid regime. Both played a pre-eminent in founding a new South Africa, the first made for whites at Union in 1910 and the second for all South Africans in 1994. Both aspired to be nation-builders, but while Smuts’ hoped-for South African nation was white, Mandela aspired to bring all of South Africa’s people together. Both came to stride on the international stage, albeit in very different ways and for various reasons.

Smuts’ career failed, and he was ejected from office. Mandela retired gracefully from office and continued to be lauded for his well-earned retirement, yet South Africa’s contemporary travails reveal his hopes and policies as unfulfilled. This book makes the case that we cannot fully understand Mandela without first understanding Smuts and how South Africa continues to struggle with the legacy he left behind.

Advocate Thuli Madonsela has achieved in her seven years as Public Protector what few accomplish in a lifetime; her legacy and contribution cannot be over-stated. In her final days in office she compiled the explosive State Capture report and, before that, the report on President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla residence. Praised and vilified in equal measures, Madonsela has frequently found herself at centre stage in the increasingly fractious South African political scene.

No Longer Whispering To Power is about Thuli Madonsela’s tenure as Public Protector, during which the whisper grew into a cry. It is the story of the South African people’s attempt to hold power to account through the Office of the Public Protector. More significantly, this important book stands as a record of the crucial work Madonsela has done, always acting without fear or favour.

Provides a comparative study of the complex governance challenges confronting city-regions in each of the BRICS countries. It traces how governance approaches emerge from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors, working in diverse contexts of political settlement and culture.

The scale and pace of urban change in the recent past has been disorienting. As individual cities evolve into complex urban agglomerations, scholars battle to find adequate vocabularies for contemporary urban processes while practitioners search for meaningful governance responses. Governing Complex City-Regions in the Twenty-first Century explores the ongoing evolution of metropolitan governance as diverse urban agents grapple with the dilemmas of collective action across multi-layered and fragmented institutions, in contexts where there are also manifold centres of influence and decision-making.

Whereas much of the existing literature is founded on the settled urban contexts of Western Europe and North America this book draws on the experiences of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The author shows that governance approaches are rarely designed but emerge, rather, from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors working within diverse contexts of political settlement and political culture. Intended for students, academics and professionals, the book does not offer packaged solutions or easy answers to the challenges of urban governance, but it does show the value of comparative study in inspiring new thought and perspectives, which could lead to improved governance practice within South African contexts.

African Accountability: What Works And What Doesn't focuses on political and social aspects to assess the current state of governance and accountability in Africa. Rather than choosing an Afro-optimistic or Afro-pessimistic approach, both of which have been prominent since the start of the 21st century, this book tries to adopt a balanced, Afro-realistic view, giving credit where it is due, while also pointing out deficient areas that need improvement.

This edited volume brings to the fore cutting edge analysis on the contemporary African governance and accountability landscape by focusing on both continental institutions (including the African Peer Review Mechanism, African Charter on Democracy Elections and Governance, and the African Union) well as domestic ones (parliaments, ombudsmen and electoral commissions).

Post-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a means of dragooning human beings into adapting to increasingly mechanized forms of life that stifle desire and creative endeavour. As a result, apartheid is incessantly repeated in the struggle to move beyond it.

In Undoing Apartheid, Premesh Lalu argues that only an aesthetic education can lead to a future beyond apartheid. To find ways to escape the vicious cycle, he traces the patterns created by three theatrical works by William Kentridge, Jane Taylor, and the Handspring Puppet Company – Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld, and Ubu and the Truth Commission – which coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid.

Through the analysis of these works, Lalu uncovers the roots of modern thinking about race and affirms the need to revitalize a post-apartheid reconciliation endowed with truth – if only to keep alive the rhyme of hope and history.

South Africa’s general election of 2024 saw the African National Congress losing its majority at the national level for the first time since the arrival of democracy in 1994. To maintain its rule, President Cyril Ramaphosa led his party into a Government of National Unity (GNU) centered around a hitherto unlikely coalition with the opposition Democratic Alliance. Election 2024, South Africa: Countdown to Coalition presents the first comprehensive analysis of this historic process.

It outlines the extensive social and economic crisis that preceded the election; provides detailed analyses of the election campaigns of the political parties; highlights the dramatic rise Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe Party; places the GNU against the recent experiences of coalition formation at provincial and local level; offers comprehensive summaries of voter participation and both the national and provincial results; and discusses prospects for the GNU’s survival and its possible long-term consequences.

Written in a highly accessible style, Election 2024, South Africa is an indispensable resource for all those wanting to understand South Africa’s contemporary politics.

When Amin Cajee left South Africa to join the liberation struggle he believed he had volunteered to serve a democratic movement dedicated to bringing down an oppressive and racist regime. Instead, he writes, in this powerful and courageous memoir, "I found myself serving a movement that was relentless in exercising power and riddled with corruption".

Fordsburg Fighter traces an extraordinary physical journey – from home in South Africa, to training in Czechoslovakia and the ANC’s Kongwa camp in Tanzania to England. The book is both a significant contribution to opening up the hidden history of exile, and a documentation of Cajee’s emotional odyssey from idealism to disillusionment.

In his introduction to the book, Paul Joseph, ex-treason trialist, South African Communist Party member and MK recruiter, writes: ”What happened to them and to the others in that chaotic and confused time is both sad and tragic. But his honestly told story is essential for us to have a fuller picture of our history, if only to ensure, perhaps, that future generations will learn from our mistakes.’

Our Poisoned Land is Jacques Pauwʼs sequel to the bestselling The Presidentʼs Keepers. A publishing phenomenon and South Africaʼs fastest-selling book ever, The Presidentʼs Keepers fearlessly exposed former president Jacob Zumaʼs darkest secrets. Our Poisoned Land is as riveting and explosive as its predecessor.

When he took office in 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed new heads for law-enforcement agencies and formed the Investigating Directorate within the National Prosecuting Authority to bring fraudsters and looters to book. Yet, five years on, crime has spiked, most of the looters still walk free and the law-enforcement agencies are in shambles. What went wrong?

Once again, Jacques Pauw delves deep to find answers. Among his shocking findings are top police officers that had a hand in state capture still ensconced in the Hawks and police Crime Intelligence; a cabal of state-capture prosecutors within the NPA; a police minister cavorting with a convicted drug smuggler; and South Africa’s “own Guptas” living in the lap of luxury after the case against them “disappeared”.

In his compelling narrative style, Pauw picks up where he left off in The Presidentʼs Keepers to expose the shadows, deceit and debauchery of Zumaʼs cronies.

A tribute to her father, Makaziwe Mandela shares the most definitive portrait of Nelson Mandela to date, revealing the man behind the anti-apartheid movement that changed the world.

One of Time magazine’s Most Important People of the Twentieth Century, Nelson Mandela continues to be a symbol of equality and justice: a Nobel Prize winner, South Africa’s first Black president, and an unrelenting leader in the movement to dismantle racial inequality. Written by his daughter, her story uncovers the family man behind the international peacemaker persona.

This volume presents an extraordinary assembly of historic biography and imagery alongside never-before-published family stories and personal photographs, Nelson Mandela’s letters to friends and family, journal entries written during his incarceration, and a unique collection of rarely seen charcoal drawings and paintings he began at 83 years old. Chapters chronicle Mandela’s childhood growing up in Mvezo, his time in Johannesburg as leader of the African National Congress, the importance of his familial relationships, decades of imprisonment, and his role as president and philanthropist. An enthralling read illustrated by powerful historic imagery, this tome delves into the life of the man that continues to galvanize so many.

In April 2017, Pravin Gordan addressed a packed audience in St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. It was a week after President Jacob Zuma had fired him as Finance Minister, a move that signalled South Africa had been well and truly captured. Gordhan urged the crowd not to give up hope and to ‘join the dots’ in understanding what was taking place. At this moment he became a moral authority to many, someone who could fight the corruption.

Seasoned journalists Jonathan Ancer and Chris Whitfield take a magnifying glass to someone at the centre of South Africa’s most tumultuous period and try to understand the man behind the public image. They go back to Durban in 1949 when Gordhan was born, tracing the significant events and influences that shaped his life and prompted him to become involved in politics as a pharmacy student at the University of Durban-Westville. Ancer and Whitfield have interviewed close former activists to build a picture of his time in the underground and the role he played in the struggle including his detention and torture. It was during this time he worked closely with Zuma, the man who would, on the back of a bogus intelligence report, fire him as finance minister.

The book will examine why Gordhan has been dragged into major controversies like the rogue unit saga, the intelligence report and other smears against him. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s right-hand man has made many enemies: public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, Julius Malema and Ace Magashule to name a few.

Joining the Dots is an in-depth and satisfying read about a man who has been at the centre of South African public life.

The Zondo Commission of Inquiry was one of the most important political developments in modern South African history. The commission sat for years, hearing the evidence of 300 witnesses and gathering a vast quantity of documents.

The result is a damning and sometimes searing account of the state take over: how the Gupta family found willing acolytes in the state, and set about systematically looting the country and destroying institutions of democracy. There is little doubt that understanding South Africa’s political history, its current malaise and its political future requires an understanding of the commission’s work. The commission’s final findings, however, run to over 5 000 pages. Reading all of this material is a daunting and overwhelming task for even the most dedicated citizen.

Zondo at your Fingertips solves this problem. In straightforward and accessible language, author Paul Holden sets out the work of the commission, its findings and recommendations. Holden is well placed to do so: he gave evidence before the Zondo Commission over multiple days, tracing the ways in which the Gupta family captured and looted.

Zondo at your Fingertips summarises concisely each volume of the commission’s final findings, and communicates the commission’s sometimes complex legal discussions clearly and candidly.

But Holden does not just summarise: he also evaluates the commission’s findings, highlighting the good, the bad and the ugly of it’s work. In so doing, he points to stones left unturned, leads that must be followed and warnings to heed.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, Nelson Mandela’s preferred successor, faces new problems and new choices since he won his own electoral mandate in May 2019.

In the next five years, South Africa will be changed radically by the climate crisis, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, economic stagnation and political unrest among some of its southern African neighbours, and the rising African influence of Russia and China while the West is distracted by the insurgent populism of US President Donald Trump and Brexit.

South Africa’s social landscape is disfigured by poverty, inequality and mass unemployment. Poverty in South Africa: Past and Present argues that it is impossible to think coherently or constructively about poverty, and the challenge it poses, without a clear understanding of its origins, its long-term development, and it’s changing character over time. This historical overview seeks to show how poverty in the past has shaped poverty in the present. Colin Bundy traces the lasting scars left on the face of South African poverty by colonial dispossession, coerced labour and segregation; and by a capitalist system distinctive for its reliance on cheap, right-less black labour. While the exclusion of the poor occurs in very many countries, in South Africa it has a distinctive extra dimension. Here, poverty has been profoundly racialised by law, by social practice, and by prejudice. He shows that the ‘solution’ to the ‘poor white question’ in the 1920s and ’30s had profound and lasting implications for black poverty. After an analysis of urban and rural poverty prior to 1948, he describes the impact of apartheid policies and social engineering on poverty. Over four decades, apartheid reshaped the geography and demography of poverty. This pocket history concludes with two chapters that assess the policies and thinking of the ANC government in its responses to poverty. One describes the remarkable story of the social security programme developed by the ANC in government since 1994, and finds that cash transfers – pensions and grants – have been the most effective mechanism of redistribution used by the ANC, even though the party remains edgy and anxious about a ‘culture of entitlement’. A final chapter reviews the distribution and dimensions of contemporary poverty, inequality and unemployment, and considers available policy options – and their shortcomings.

In 1994, Nelson Mandela powered the ANC to victory in South Africa’s first democratic election. Thirty years later, the ANC is fighting to escape political liquidation.

How did we get here and who will rule South Africa next?

In this gripping and fast-paced account of the state of the nation, 30 years after South Africa became a democracy, award-winning journalists Adriaan Basson and Qaanitah Hunter forensically track the demise of the ANC, from Mandela to Ramaphosa, and the rise of a new political class that will determine the next phase of South Africa’s democracy.

Drawing on years of reporting from the front line, Basson and Hunter highlight how corruption and greed subsumed a liberation movement by turning a party of freedom fighters into one of villains. They track the ANC’s involvement in corruption and underhand dealings, from the arms deal to state capture to the dollars-in-the-sofa Phala Phala scandal.

A close examination of Cyril Ramaphosa’s first term in office shows how his bold promises to turn around the ANC’s fortunes amounted to little. The book reveals previously unpublished material detailing Ramaphosa’s failures of governance and inability to address the party’s decline.

Basson and Hunter map out the likely scenarios for a coalition government after the 2024 election and what it will mean for the country if politicians such as John Steenhuisen, Julius Malema or Herman Mashaba gain access to the Union Buildings.

​Who Will Rule South Africa? is a must-read for everyone who cares about the country’s future.